Posts Tagged ‘social media marketing’

Posted on July 20, 2010 - by Kwame

10 Ways to Generate Leads With Social Media

How many leads do you generate every month with social media? If you’re not getting enough leads, today is your lucky day.

After reading this article, you’ll have 10 ideas you can use to increase your website traffic and leads. You may already know some of the ideas but trust me; there will be some you don’t know. So make sure to read through all the ideas and let me know if you’re already using any.

Let’s begin.

1. Create a digital product, write guest posts and offer your product for free in your byline. The product could be an eBook, infographic, themes or any other digital product. Make sure you have your website links in the document. You can also encourage people to share it and put a link back to your site. Tip: A little bird told me that Infographics spread like wildfire .

2. Search Twitter for discussions related to your niche. If there are any questions, answer them with an @ reply and provide a link back to your blog post or any relevant page on your site. This tip doesn’t necessarily grow your traffic but it sure will give you quality leads if done right.

3. Turn your blog posts into slide presentations and upload them to slideshare and scribd. Put your website and social media profile URLs in there so people who view your slides can pay you a visit. This is a cool way of repurposing your blog posts and regaining some value back.

4. Plan a series of Videos and use Tubemogul to post them to the various video sites. Make the videos as interesting as possible. By interesting, I mean enlightening, funny, … something people will remember. At the end of each video, ask people to go to your site and sign up for your newsletter in order to receive new video alerts and other updates from you.

5. Answer relevant questions on Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, Yedda and Answers.com. Ask people to Google “your business name or any keyword you rank #1 for” and click on the first result. You can post your website URL straight away but do that less often so you’re not seen as a spammy contributor to these sites. One more thing, answer the latest, freshest questions if you want to see any relevant increase in traffic.

6. Post short useful articles on forum sites relevant to your niche and leave a link back to your site.

7. Create an eBook. Take a sample out and make a PDF out of it. Share it on Lulu and Docstoc. At the beginning and end of the sample, provide a link to a page where people can put in their email addresses to receive the full book/report. Encourage people to share it with their friends and colleagues.

8. If you want to rank high for any keyword or phrase, make that phrase your anchor text in your guest post bylines. For example, say you want to rank high for the key phrase, “brand communication”, you use that as your anchor text and put your website link there. The higher the PR of the blog you are posting on, the better your chances of ranking higher. Do this consistently for all guest posts you write and use the same key phrase until you are on page 1 of Google’s search. I am on page 2 of Google right now for the key phrase, “brand communication” and I only used that as my anchor text in just one guest post. When I use it again on a top PR (page rank) blog, I will rank even higher. Try it for yourself. By the way, this is a neat trick I learnt from Brian Clark’s “How to Create Compelling Content That Ranks Well in Search Engines”. Download a copy on this page: SEO Copywriting Made Simple.

9. Answer Questions on LinkedIn. Connect with other professionals. Ask your past customers for recommendations. Jason Falls wrote an article on how to make LinkedIn answers part of your routine so head towards his blog to read about it.

10. Run a survey on your blog, Twitter and Facebook and share the results with other people. Explain the methodology and findings of your survey and publish the results in PDF format and share it on your site and other sites. Send a message @ everybody who participated in the survey on Twitter with a link to the results. You can also contact bloggers in your niche and ask them to share your findings. Tamar Weinberg shows you how to pitch superstar bloggers here: How to Get an Influencer’s Attention.

Phew! That was a short ride . Okay, seriously, you should apply these tips. You don’t have to implement all at once. Bookmark this page, start with 2 or 3 strategies and come back later to try out the other ones. Some may work for you and some may not.

Remember, social media is a lead generation tool and newsletters are your lead collection and sales tools so have your newsletter signup boxes ready to collect email addresses. Prepare some bait for the stubborn ones .

What strategy do you use to build more leads, links and traffic?

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Posted on July 12, 2010 - by Kwame

5 Misconceptions That Confuses Businesses About Social Media

Do you really understand social media? Understanding social media is not a difficult thing at all. However, some businesses still can’t figure it out. They can’t figure it out because misconceptions are spread all over the internet concerning social media.

Getting more involved in social media now is better than waiting until later because it will get to a time that it will seem more confusing and even more difficult for businesses.

If you hold any of the beliefs below, do away with it and jump on board before you miss the train.

• Misconception #1: Blogging is a tool: Blogging is a business strategy, not a tool. A blog is rather the tool used for blogging. A blog also helps you integrate your other strategies like social media marketing by linking to other strategy enhancing tools like social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. Yes, social media marketing too is strategy. All the strategies you use in your blogging and social media strategies are just sub-strategies of blogging and social media which are your main strategies for success in achieving this or that.

• Misconception #2: Social Media is about numbers: Is it of essence to build 40,000 Twitter followers and 20,000 Facebook fans who don’t buy from you? Social media is about relationship building and influence. Sorry, but having a large number of followers doesn’t mean you are influential. One-to-one relationships build influence. Good relationships later lead on to influence. If you have 200 Twitter followers who listen and engage with you, you stand a better chance to get a sale from them than from 40,000 people who don’t send you @ messages about anything of your business’ interest. It’s best to follow the people you want to talk or listen to (a.k.a. your target audience) than follow just anybody.

• Misconception #3: Automation Means Using Tools: No, measurement rather means using tools. Automation means your fans and followers will do your work for you. They will be your evangelists and will recruit more fans and followers for you. The number one quality required here is patience. If you rely on tools to build your fans and followers, you will most likely recruit web robots who also want you to buy something from them. Would you rather waste time gathering status update spectators or you want to utilize your time to build a more targeted following?

• Misconception #4: Be present everywhere: So you’ve been told to have a Twitter profile, a Facebook fan page, a Youtube channel, a LinkedIn group, Digg profile, etc. Well, are your customers gathered there? Do you have the resources to manage your business on every social media and networking site? Before you put your business on any social networking site, be sure of what you want to achieve with that profile; customer service, more leads or maybe sales. After setting your goal, stick to it. If at any point you find any trouble getting the results you want, perform a social media audit.

• Misconception #5: There is no ROI: If you are not getting any ROI, then you are either doing something wrong or you’re not measuring things right. Dell has been able to make over $6.5 million on Twitter alone. Avaya also made a $250,000 sale using Twitter. Small businesses are also using Twitter to bring in some ROI using social media. To make social media marketing work for you, you need to communicate your intentions well with your followers. Dell’s @delloutlet clearly tells everyone they will be selling. We all know what an outlet means. If all you are going to do with one of your Twitter accounts is to just give discount coupons, tell your customers about it. So anybody who follows you knows you’ll be tweeting coupons from time to time. Secondly, ROI is not just about money or profits. If your aim is to get leads or newsletter subscriptions, your ROI will be the number of leads you collect. Then your ROI on those leads will be the number of leads you convert to sales. Social media can be a channel for both lead collection and direct selling. You need to communicate it well. Plan your campaign well. Remember, the most important thing in marketing is communication so don’t forget to plan about what you want to communicate to your followers.

Now that we have gotten these wrong ideas taken care of, where are you headed to with your social media marketing campaign? In your experience, what other misconceptions have you found?

Posted on May 27, 2010 - by Kwame

Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

The honey bee is a social insect. By studying honey bees, humans have been able to solve problems in electronics and science in general. I know it is unbelievable but it is actually a fact. Some people have even asked us (humans) to use honey bees as a standard model for our social lives. Read this wiki if you need confirmation: Bee Colony Optimization.

What can the honey bee teach us when it comes to social media? Well, they can teach us a lot. In fact, a honey bee’s social life could be likened to that of a good social media marketer.

Before we delve into this topic more, let’s look at the picture below: It explains how honey bees communicate: Now let’s explain the picture.

There are certain worker bees whose primary work is to forage for food. They focus on gathering nectar and pollen.

If a foraging honey bee finds a source of high quality nectar and pollen, it returns to the hive to communicate it to other worker bees in the hive.

They perform a dance to communicate the location of the food to other worker bees. After performing the dance, a swarm of bees fly to the food source.

Honey bees are master communicators and they are very good at bringing a “buzz” to an orchard or source of food for them.

Now, let’s replace the honey bee’s story with our own human story in terms of bringing buzz to our business. Do you already see where this is going?

So let’s think of the honey bee as a regular internet surfer who has a social profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media site. Regular internet surfers visit many websites and blogs a day looking for different kinds of information.

They normally like to share websites with their friends but one thing is that, they normally share websites that offer a lot of quality information or has a lot of goodies.

So in order for you to grab a web surfer’s attention, first you will need a good website design (flower petals?).

Now they land on your page and start ‘foraging’ for information. Now, your content will be the pollen and the offer or value your website promises will be the nectar.

If the web surfer finds your design to be cool, your content (or pollen) to be awesome and your offer (or nectar) to be excellent, they will be tempted to share your sweet stuff with their friends in the hive (ie, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, et cetera) so that they too can come and enjoy the value you provide.

When their friends also land on your site and find it useful, they might also share it with their friends and that may lead to a lot of buzz (if they were honey bees, you’ll here a “buzzzzzzz” from their wings ) for your business and it will also lead to pollination (profits). This graphic below makes it easier to understand:

The differences between our social web lives and a bee’s social web life are:

1. Everyone of us forage for information on the web and then we share it. With bees, there are specific workers who do the foraging.
2. When we are in the position of people in stage number 4, we may do what’s stated in stage 2 or choose to share our own findings starting at stage 1.

I know some of you are saying, “ point number 3, we are humans and they are insects.” Well, that’s not the point we want to make .

Clarifications:

Your products need to be worthy to be shared to other members of the ‘hive’. You can establish a presence in the hive yourself and let the ‘worker bees’ do all the talking and recruiting for you.

You don’t need to hard sell to them inside the hive because if they become your fan or follower, they already know your value and are going to do the selling for you. Remember that they may have seen many other fine petals but came to you because your pollen and nectar (content and offer) was more valuable.

Inside the hive, you need to continue to produce blooming petals and provide nectar and pollen regularly.

When you dull out, there will be no use for you inside the hive and the people who follow you will start unfollowing you.

So how do you continue to bloom? Just make it easy for people to spread the word about your business by interacting with them.

• When it is Christmas, wish them a Merry Christmas,
• When there is a discount sale on your website, tell them there is a sale on your website.
• Create a Facebook fans only or Twitter followers only offer and let them have it.
• Give them ideas on how to use your product.
• Don’t spam. Spam is annoying and it makes you look desperate.
• Share your business’ life or activities with them like “we are removing ginger from our ingredients, do you think this is cool?”, “we made a donation to Oxfam. Buying from us made this possible”, “Which of our products do you want to see more of?”

Again, interact, don’t sell. Get their ideas, use it and they will feel attached to your business.

Coca Cola does an excellent job with their Facebook fan page. They once shared a status showing fans the best temperature to drink a coke.

How do you interact with your customers inside and outside the hives?

If you loved this article, share it with your friends, family and work colleagues. Thanks.

Posted on May 19, 2010 - by Kwame

Is Social Media for Your Business?

There has been a lot of debate as to whether social media is for any and every business on the face of the planet. You hear people say, “social media is helping businesses everywhere”. Yet you hear other people say it’s not working for their business.

I asked Tamar Weinberg and Scott Monty, both social media experts to help me answer the big question: “Is social media for every business” and this is what they had to say:

Tamar Weinberg: “Business as a rule is “social” — so social media is for all businesses. Granted, it will be easier for some businesses to succeed versus others, but everyone can make their mark.”

Scott Monty: “Any business that has customers that want to communicate that way.”  By “that way”, Scott means, “by social media”.

I agree with both experts.

You see, business has always been “social” in some way even way before social media sites popped up. Business has always involved people interaction.

Think about the days (way before the social media web) when people had to make a sales presentation, collect suggestions from customers using a suggestion box, promote competitions through TV, radio, the print media, et cetera, all without the help of the internet.

These activities all involved some “social” interaction. Businesses had some sort of society around their brands.

So what has social media marketing changed? I think it hasn’t changed anything. In fact, it has added something to the already “social” business. Social media has added the “personal” interaction that brands and their “societies” were lacking.

Social media is about personal interactions with your business’ old society and likely new ones who may be recruited by your old society through referrals. Social media is a way of having fun, sharing useful product tips and building friendships with your business’ society or audience.

Some businesses make the mistake of hard selling their products to their social media audience. This is a wrong move because social media is not about hard selling. Your audience is already being bombarded with banner ads, TV ads, radio ads and print ads from you and other businesses so using your Facebook fan page or company Twitter account to run more ads will be boring and less effective.

I guess you may be asking what the worth of social media is for you. Well, what I can say is that, social media is a means of increasing your society’s population through referrals from fans and followers. Your existing clients and customers do all the selling for you. Besides, their friends trust them more than they trust you so you need not force anyone.

Some people say social media is a waste of time and resources. I don’t really think so. It will be a waste of time if all you are trying to do is to get more followers and fans on your own. What you should do is to allow your existing audience to do all the ‘reproduction’ for you without you interfering.

You can entice them with coupons. You can say something like this, “Many people out there want to join our fan page. Let’s make it happen. 30% discount on all orders for a week if we are able to reach 500 fans in the next 2 weeks.”

Send it as a message to your newsletter subscribers, post it on your business blog and post it as a status update on both Facebook and Twitter and watch the fans roll in. You can use other ‘baits’ instead of coupons. Get creative with it. Play with ideas.

As Scott said, you will have to make sure you want to communicate or interact with your customers on the social web. However, since it’s a two-way affair, you will also need to make sure that your customers qualify for social interactions.

For example, if you have a law firm, social media will not benefit you that much. Just think about it. There are some businesses that just can’t produce massive results on the social web. If your customers or better, your business don’t qualify to interact with its customers online, it will only be a waste of time and resources to try and get something massive from social media.

People who own these types of businesses often benefit by creating and maintaining a regular profile or as a single expert instead of creating a fan page for their business.

Do you think social media for business is worth it? I will love to know your thoughts and experiences in the comments box below.