Small Business Marketing Blog

My Top Inbound Marketing Articles on Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is now an important factor in SEO. Will it be more important than SEO, will Facebook take over Google as the king of searches? 

The technology behind social media is evolving quickly and all I can say is it's a full time job keeping up. To make your life a little easier Im going to provide quick list of top articles Ive found on a hot topic - SMO and the social media giant, Facebook and how they're changing search.

This article; How To Use Social Media to Rank on Google is a good read and gives some good examples and links to tools to help you understand how to use social media for your SEO.

What Facebook's Announcements mean for SmallBiz
At the recent Facebook developer conference, the social media giant announced a number of major changes to their platform that will affect the way developers create applications and the way users interact with them. The most important change for small business owners to be aware of, however, is the launch of the Facebook for Web Sites platform and specifically, the new social plugins. No matter where you're at with Facebook or technology, as a business owner or marketer you owe it to yourself to read this article and know what is available out there.

Why is Social Media Keyword Search Becoming More Important for a Small Business? I like  this article because it shares why we should be using social media to search for the keywords our target audience is using.  The answers are right there for us, our prospects are all over the internet and social media - it's just a matter of knowing where to look.

Facebooks Universal Like Button Added to Over 50000 Sites and GrowingThis is a must read for anyone wanting to stay up to date with social media, SEO and SMO. This article explains how SEO is now evolving, from "links" to "likes" and highlights the early adoption to Facebook's "like" plugin just announced last week.

How do you use social media in your business? What are your thoughts on Social media optimization (SMO) replacing SEO?

If  you need help developing your social media content and communication strategies or with the technology please click on the "marketing consultation" button and submit the form.

 

 

Does Social Media Confusion Have You Paralyzed? Want Solutions?

If you're a busy business person who is interested in learning how social media can help your business but you're overwhelmed by the whole social media thing. Where to start and what to do... then this article is for YOU!

 

Here are six things you need to do:

1. Make the decision to start.
2. Put aside 1 hour per week.
3. Keep it simple!
4. Don't lose site of your business objectives.
5. Focus on just 1 or 2 social sites.
6. Be Patient!

Your objective when starting with social media should be to:

1. Build your network based on your target audience and your industry thought leaders.
2. Build a rapport with your target audience and to position yourself, and or your company as a trustworthy, thought leader.

NB: Forget selling or promotions at this point, you'll push people away. You may see results initially but it's a short term strategy with short term results.

Because the majority of people have a  Linked In account I chose this site as the first social media site to concentrate on when starting with social media.

Linked In

• If you haven't already set up a profile go to www.linkedin.com and follow the prompts to set up your account.
• Search for groups that represent your target audience and industry, and join them. Engage in this group and comment in discussions and answer questions - don't promote yourself or your company. Your insightful, intelligent and helpful answers and comments will do that for you.
• Search for your keywords in Answers, and answer any questions you can. Remember to avoid the sales and focus on offering professional advice that is of value.

Here's a couple of articles on how to use Linked In for business.

4 Minutes To Optimize Your Linked In Profile for SEO

Linked In For Lead Generation

The other two social media activities I would recommend - in order:

1. Blogging
2. Twitter

Did this article help? Do you have any questions regarding social media for business?

Inbound Marketing Is About...

 

... the customer! Not YOU, not your company, not your brand, not your product nor your service.

It's about marketing to your prospects when they want to hear from you, how they want to hear from you and what they want to know.

It's about building relationships.

It's about listening their needs.

It's about giving your prospects an option to receive your emails and status updates.

It's about having a web presence when and where your prospects search online.

It's about offering information that is of value to your prospects.

It's about making the conversion process clear, painless and quick.

It's not about emailing your social media connections to push your product or service to, with relentless monotony.  If you want to use your social media connections for marketing take the time to find out what they need, and offer valuable information sparingly. You'll get a better result!

And as for search engine rank don't try and take any short cuts with promises of front page rankings. This isn't sustainable marketing for long term success. Take the time to do the research on your market and competitors, and identify the ‘right' keywords for your business.  Integrate search engine optimization (seo) into your marketing mix so that you start to rank organically for your keywords. This is a long term strategy that generates better quality leads and is extremely cost effective as there is no additional expense involved in paying for your search rank.

In my opinion, Inbound Marketing  isn't a numbers game... its about quality and relevance.

What do you think?

Social Media #FTW09: Feeds The Hungry

Two days before the event I learnt Social Media FTW ‘09 was sold out, completely full with 225 delegates and a waiting list. Wow! I was impressed I had no idea so many people in Maine were so hungry to learn about social media. I was pleased I had decided to go, I was curious to meet all these people who also have in interest in Social Media.

In just half a day #ftw09 covered topics for the beginner wanting to learn more about Twitter, Facebook and Blogging for Business to Mike Lewis' session on Social Media ROI. This was extremely popular and obviously is one of the biggest challenges for organizations using (or considering) adding social media to their marketing mix.

The value I saw was the diversity in presentations and speakers, choosing which one to attend was difficult as all seemed valuable, fortunately all presentations were recorded so as a delegate I will get to view the ones I missed. Overall the conference was a success, just checking out the Twitter stream of comments is proof to that.

It really is the speakers who make an event. How well they know their topic and how well they engage with the audience. CostVidaFred made a session about podcasting interesting, entertaining and valuable by engaging with the audience and sharing his own experience.  My congratulations to Rich Brooks at Flyte for attracting outstanding presenters, who are obviously passionate and knowledgeable about social media, Im sure that was no easy task. And thank you to all those who took time out of their busy schedules to present and share their knowledge at #ftw09.  

Im wondering though, did #ftw09 feed the hungry, or increase our appetite.  After all social media is continuing to grow and evolve and with it so does our hunger to stay up to date. Im definitely looking forward to Social Media FTW 2010.

Twitter: An Effective Inbound Marketing Tactic For Business

This article has been written specifically for business owners and professionals who want to understand the value of Twitter and how to use it for business.

There are lot of articles and blogs online about how to get started with Twitter so I'm going to skip over the ‘how to' side of Twitter and focus more on sharing my experience with Twitter as a business owner and marketer.

Personally, I find Twitter a great business tool. I use it solely for business to network in my industry, local community, and for education. Being limited to just 140 characters makes it an efficient tool to stay up to date with:

• Industry news and events
• Local community news and events
• Building business relationships

And achieving business goals such as:

• Establishing yourself as an industry thought leader
• Driving traffic to your website
• Promoting an event, free offer or special discount
• Customer service
• Public Relations

Choosing who to follow: this is important!

I am careful about who I follow,  I don't necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Initially I use to follow everyone back who followed me but I found I was getting random Tweets from people I didn't know about their cat or what they were eating for lunch - this really serves as no interest or value to me (but it may to you).  So now I choose carefully, I follow thought leaders in my industry so I can stay up to date with what's happening in my industry. I also follow local Twitterers who are in my industry so I can stay up to date with local events and networking opportunities. Other topics of interest for me are the news, so I follow our local news plus CNN for national and global updates.

The key is to not get too caught up in it and have Twitter take over all your time. I use TweetDeck which I usually have on most the day and just check from time to time.  However, if I have a project with a deadline and don't want to get distracted I won't use TweetDeck and I'll just check in, in the morning and afternoon. It's okay to not be consumed with it all the time.

Here a few sites to find good people to follow:

http://twitter.grader.com/

http://search.twitter.com/

http://www.twitr.org/

 

How to get followers who are valuable to you: this too is very important!

It's also important to build a strong follower base that will represent value to your business by way of customers or building business partnerships.

List yourself on www.twitr.org in relevant categories. Post your Twitter username everywhere possible, email address, website, online articles.  Make it easy for people to follow you by posting your Twitter name on your email address, on your website, on all your articles, and on your status updates on your social media sites. Let everyone know in your network that you're now on Twitter. This topic really could be another article on its own.

What to Tweet

Like all marketing, start with a plan. Think about the purpose of your Twittering and the followers you have and want to attract.

Tweet about information that is of value to your audience. For some high profile personalities their followers like to know what they had for breakfast, or some other trivial personal matter.  I'm not interested in knowing this information about anyone else and I'm sure my followers aren't interested in that level of insight into my personal life. The key is to know who is following you and why and to Tweet about what is of interest and value to them. I keep my Tweets focused on adding value to business owners and marketers.  I regularly Tweet about interesting articles I'm reading,  including my own blog articles, upcoming events and I'll often retweet other interesting posts. However, I must say I have been known to Tweet about the RedSox on several occasions, and soon no doubt will be supporting the Patriots once the Football season gets underway.  But surely that's of interest to most, isn't it?

There are so many facets of Twitter that are valuable to business owners and professionals that I'll cover in later articles. Let me know specifically what you'd like to know about Twitter and what you'd like me to cover in more detail.

Oh.. and don't forget to follow me: Stacie Chalmers Inbound Marketing Solutions

Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Are Key To Your Future Success

The business results you have today are based on what you did in the past. Consequently, what you do today to market your business, will impact your business tomorrow. So the question is... 

Are your marketing efforts today setting you up for future success?

The best way to build a viable business for the future is to start implementing referral based marketing strategies today.  A lead generated from a happy customer is ‘hot', and the easiest of all leads to qualify and close.

How does social media marketing help to build a referral based business?

It takes time to build a network on the internet, fans on Facebook, members on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter.  Your market reach is their market reach.

Let's say you had 100 connections spread between the three major social media sites, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and each one of your connections had 100 connections (which is conservative) you now have a reach of 10,000 people.  Think about traditional marketing methods and how much time and money it would take to reach 10,000 people via referral methods.

To market today for tomorrow's success, start building a quality network of fans, members and followers that represent your target audience, engage and add value on a regular basis. Who knows how many connections you'll have in your network within 12 months.

Six obvious (that often get forgotten) tips to a happy customer:

1. Provide outstanding service from the very beginning, from the first point of contact with your company.

2. Make it clear what you are providing and what they can expect from your product or service.

3. Make sure you deliver on what you say you will.

4. Under promise and over deliver.

5. Follow up and make sure they are happy. Do they have any post purchase issues or problems.

6. Maintain regular contact with your current customers and make sure you're adding value every time you connect with them.

How to use Social Media Marketing to empower your happy customers to spread the word:

Facebook and LinkedIn:

1. Create a forum on these sites for your customers to interact with each other.

2. Encourage fans and members to post questions for you to answer.

3. Provide added value, extra tips and advice on discussion boards.

4. Provide links to these groups from your website, blog and other content so prospects can interact with current customers.

Twitter:

5. Personally interact with your customers and build rapport.

6. Post special offers and discounts.

7. Post links to informative and interesting articles or content that would be valuable to your customers.

If you would like FREE advice on how to market your business in web2.0 world subscribe to my blog Inbound Marketing Solutions for Small Business.

How do you use social media to interact with your customers/prospects? What are the results?

How Small Business Can Benefit From Social Media Marketing

As a small business owner I get excited about the opportunity Social Media provides as marketing tool to better understand my audience.  I am surprised when I talk to other business owners who are reluctant to learn more about the benefits of social media for their business. One stand out benefit is the low to no cost of social media, giving small business the chance to compete on a level playing field with larger companies with deeper pockets.  My goal in writing this blog is to help small business owners understand the benefit social media can bring to their business and how to get value out of your online communities.

Thanks to Hubspot I was fortunate enough to sit in on some of the classes being taught at the FREE online course for Inbound Marketing by Inbound Marketing University #IMU.  The session on Social Media and Building Communities by Chris Brogan at New Marketing Labs was extremely valuable as he shared his insights on how to succeed with social media.

The takeaway for me was the benefit of social media marketing for small business: Social media provides a FREE platform for small business owners to get to know their audience at a personal level and better understand their needs and values. Previously, this level of consumer insight, for many small business owners was not possible due to the high cost of market research. Today there is a level playing field giving small business owners the same level of consumer knowledge as large corporations.  Another benefit to small business is the ability to build a high level of trust and rapport with their audience and compete with reputable consumer and corporate brand names that have been around for decades.

The key to achieving the most value out of social media for your business is how you interact with your audience.

Chris Brogan brought up a very important value to remember when building online communities, it's all about your audience!  Think about your audience and what their needs are and don't promote your product. To most marketers this is nothing new, however for many small business owners when it comes to marketing your own business this very important lesson is lost.  This may be because your business is a lot more personal, it is you, compared to being an employee working for a larger firm. However, nothing changes with your audience and so the mindset of a marketer whether it's for a product or service, small or large firm, is to communicate with your audience in their value system.

A great way to get started is to join groups on Facebook and LinkedIn that represent your target audience. If you have enough contacts of your own, you may like to start your own Facebook business page, group or LinkedIn group.  Whether you decide to create your own group or join one, here are some valuable insights I got from Chris Brogan's session that should help you with building successful online relationships with your audience.

1. Location: Take the time to find out where your audience is and join them there.

2. It's all about them: They're not interested in your company or your goals, people will connect with people they get value from. So take the time to get to know your audience online. Ask questions, engage, interact and find out what their goals are.

3. Be humble: Be grateful for your connections and followers and take the time to communicate with them without pushing your own agenda. Think of yourself as a participant not the owner.

4. Listen and acknowledge: Listening is a key point but the second step to this, which is just as important, is taking action. Let your audience know you hear them, even if you don't agree.

5. Give! Give! Give!: Encourage your audience to succeed by giving them what they need or desire. Not what you want to give them. Answer questions and offer free advice.

6. ROI of Social Media: Taking the time to build strong relationships and networks helps with; referrals, credibility, reputation, awareness, lead generation, customer awareness, research and development.

Did this bog post help you understand the value social media can bring to your small business? Does it help with understanding how to approach social media and what your goals should be? Welcome your feedback and comments.

How Social Media Marketing Will Help You Survive The Recession

The business world is no different from the wild, in the wild it's all about survival! Those that survive are strong, fit or clever. The clever species adapt (evolve, change) to their surroundings to survive.  In order for small business to survive the recession they must be clever. They must be prepared to adapt and evolve to their surroundings, the change in market conditions and the changing consumer.

This may include a change in your business model, marketing, product or service.

The utilization of social media marketing is one of the key strategies that will be the difference in determining which small businesses survive and which ones don't.  Below are some of my reasons why:

1. The use of social media is growing every day, this is where your audience will be in the future.

2. It allows you to listen to your customers and prospects, to know what they are saying about your company, brand, industry or competitors.

3. It allows you to engage with your customers and prospects to build rapport and reputation.

4. It will give you insight, reputation and confidence to adapt your product/service to meet your changing customer's needs.

5. Discover a new audience that you weren't marketing to and expand your market.

6. Educate yourself and stay up to date with the latest developments and trends for your industry.

7. It is a cost effective marketing tool that does everything from market research to promotion.

Before you start using social media, it is important to review your business goals and choose the relevant social media sites that are best suited to your business.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of social media for small business visit the social media marketing page or review how our Inbound Marketing Services to get you started with an effective social media plan.