Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

When it comes to using social media marketing to build your business, the worst action is no action, and your biggest problem is being invisible, not being talked about negatively. As long as you're part of the conversation on the social Web, you can hear what's being said about you social media marketingand massage negative perceptions about your business. But if no one is talking about you, you have no chance for growth. That means you need to get involved on the social Web social media marketing strategy as soon as possible, not only to capitalize on the opportunities that it presents to your business, but also to develop and protect your reputation. It's a good idea to start with a plan that has goals and an social media marketing plan organizing framework to keep you on track. If you start down a path on the social Web and hate what you're doing, you can change things around. Just as you change networking and conversational social media marketing companies approaches in person, you can do so on the social Web. The only differences are that on the social Web, you're talking through your keyboard, and your potential audience is much, much larger. What do you want to get out of your social Web participation? Why are you social media marketing services doing it? Are you trying to generate direct sales? Are you trying to offer a form of customer service? Do you want to build relationships with customers and boost loyalty? Your answers to these questions social media marketing university greatly affect the type of content you publish and the activities you participate in on the social Web. Who is going to create your content? Who is going to maintain your social media accounts? Who is going what is social media marketing to respond to questions and be the face of your business online? Do you have the technical ability in-house to join the online conversation? If not, are you willing to learn? Can you or someone who works with you write well? You need social media marketing jobs to be sure you have the necessary people in place to execute a social media marketing plan before you start. Where does your target audience spend time online? What kind of content social media and marketing and conversations do the audience members get most vocal about? What kind of information do they want from you? What do they dislike? Remember, you're not just pub¬lishing social media marketing agency marketing messages on the social Web. You need to find out what your audience wants and needs, so you can provide the kind of content they find useful and interesting. However, social media marketing company you also need to be personable, so they actually want to interact with you. Once you know where your audience spends time and what kind of content audience members want, take the time to give them more of that kindsocial media marketing plan template of content. Don't give up. You need to continually offer your audience amazing content, which also comes in the form of conversations, in order to build a loyal fol¬lowing of people who trust you as a source thatsocial media marketing world can meet their needs and expectations. All of your efforts at social media marketing should feed off each other. Cross-promote your efforts social media marketing tips both online and offline, and make sure your social media and traditional marketing efforts work together seamlessly. Allocate specific times during your day to devote to social media marketing. For example, social media marketing tools spend five minutes on Twitter before you check your e-mail each day and another five minutes before you leave work each day. When you create a schedule, it's easier to stick to it and make sure you don't skip marketing social mediayour social media marketing activities each day. Always spend at least 80 percent of your time on social media activities that are not self-promotional and no more than 20 percent of your time on self-promotional benefits of social media marketing activities. It can be easy to get caught up in the numbers, but don't become a slave to followers and subscribers. It's better to have 1,000 highly engaged, using social media for marketing loyal followers than 10,000 followers who sign up to follow you but then never acknowledge you again. You must let your audience take control of the online conversation and make it their own so they develop an emotional attachment to you, your brand, and your business. Remember, social media marketing strategies on the social Web, apathy or invisibility is a bigger problem than negativity. The company behind the Internet's most social media marketing manager popular search engine confirmed this week that small- and medium-sized business pages and profiles will be a major factor on Google+, but not now. At present, there is no specific timeframe on when the company marketing with social media will start offering business profiles, according to a Google spokeswoman. "Unfortunately," she said, "Google+ is not quite ready for businesses. But we're working quickly to provide a way for social media marketing softwarecompanies to engage with their customers." That said, Google did offer some solace to owners: Companies can now apply to become part of Google's test phase for its business pages. Check out Google's online how to use social media for marketing application. And while businesses aren't currently prohibited from joining, Google+ isn't designed for such use just yet. Furthermore, persistent beta party crashers will just have to recreate their business profile once companies are allowed in. Google won't be able to transfer those profiles over. So for now at least, businesses social media marketing coursesowners should sit back and let the platform evolve. There's Circles, which enables Google+ members to sort their parents from their frat brothers, or business associates from surfing buddies. It takes everyone out of a “Friends-style" category, social media marketing b2b allowing you to be more specific in targeting the audience you want to hear your message. Then there's Sparks, which brings to your screen articles and videos and contacts about things that interest you — things like rock climbing social media marketing for small business or surfing or stamp collecting. This is also a social option that enables you to link up with others who share your interests. With Hangouts, you get on-screen gatherings with a few close friends or business contacts that can take on the appearance of sitting around a bar or meeting room. Just some face-to-face conversation that's really social media marketing job description convenient because you didn't have to drive anywhere to participate. Going mobile on Google+ might offer smartphone users a lot of options, including adding an immediate location to every post, or instantly sending photos to friends or marketing and social media an online album. And then there's Huddle, which adds instant group messaging to your smartphone. Oh, and by the way, Google+ shouldn't be confused with Google +1. Google +1 is an experimental feature that enables those with a Google Profile to offer a personal endorsement of a product or service that they've tried themselves. It's shorthand for "Check this out" or "Trust me, this is cool." Google+ is a full-on social networking utility.

How Social Media is Changing Business

You may or may not work in a cube farm, but chances are you live in a silo. That's geek speak for the parts of our businesses and personal lives that are walled off from one another, intentionally or not--the marketing department exists social media marketing salary in a separate silo from the product development team, which is isolated from the executive floor. Clients and their valuable opinions are walled off within customer service. We've become great at collecting information. But when social media marketing statistics it comes to sharing, the walls are still pretty thick. Whatever you think about the current iteration of social media--whether you consider it a time suck, a marketing fad or the second coming--it's impossible to top social media marketing companies deny that it has begun breaking down the silos for businesses that have adopted it. Social media allows companies and their clients to communicate directly and frequently, social media marketing training forming strong relationships and even allowing them to collaborate on projects. Businesses adopt social applications and see it topple walls within traditional management structures. Up until now, social media has been optional for businesses. But Charlene Li, social media marketing classes one of the world's leading thinkers on social media and co-founder of the Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm in San Mateo, Calif., predicts that companies that do not get on the social media bandwagon soon--within three to five years--will not survive. It's not an overstatement social media marketing news to say social media is transforming every aspect of business. We aren't talking about a moldy Facebook page updated once a month or sporadic tweets. The change is nothing less than the brink of a new social media ecosystem: one where every corner of an organization social media marketing network is in continuous collaboration and where customers are instantly part of that conversation. In many ways, it's the destiny of the digital age. Tim Berners-Lee, the MIT professor who created the World Wide marketing through social media Web at CERN laboratory in Switzerland in 1990, always believed the Internet would be more about connecting people and less about housing data. "The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for social media marketing certification a social effect--to help people work together--and not as a technical toy," he wrote in his 1999 memoir, Weaving the Web. It is only recently--with Web 2.0 and its more cautious, social media marketing consultant business-minded cousin Enterprise 2.0--that Berners-Lee's vision of the web as a social, collaborative medium is shaping. As usual when it comes to technology, business is running a couple of years behind the culture at large. Facebook has been around long enough to enter the dictionary as a verb and inspir e a Hollywood film, social media marketing ideas but the business appetite for social media is just warming up. According to a University of Maryland Smith School of Business poll, in 2009 the percentage of small businesses using social media doubled to 24 percent from 12 percent. It's likely that social media marketing packages the number will double again for 2010. Peter Kim, North American managing director for Dachis Group in Austin, Texas, which helps businesses design their social business strategy, says the coming year is when businesses will truly begin to harness the potential of social applications. "These technologies are beyond the initial hype stage," he says. "We've had social media marketing proposal everyone from Fortune 100 companies all the way to small and medium businesses calling us. We started to see an uptick last December as companies began pulling out of the recession. Now as they're budgeting their social initiatives for 2011, it has the potential to be twice as big." Already, there have been social media marketing homeruns, social media marketing for dummies like the viral videos for Old Spice body wash. Or the Naked Pizza franchise, which derives 20 percent of its sales from tweeting. Or Blendtec's "Will It Blend?" comic videos, showing a "scientist" destroying everything from iPads to BlackBerrys in the company's high-powered blenders, which have pushed social media marketing definition sales up 700 percent. Or Burger King, whose Subservient Chicken and Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application have made the fast-food chain a social media gold standard. For the most part, that's all slick marketing. We have yet to really see how social media will reshape business--but we are starting to get glimpses of that future. Adam Kidron, social media marketing firm for example, says his Manhattan burger joint, 4food, would not exist without social media. The health-conscious eatery, which opened in September, is based on customization: The center of the burger is popped out like a doughnut hole and customers choose from a variety social media marketing firms of "scoops" to plug the divot (from cheddar grits to veggie sushi). "Consumers are increasingly sophisticated and have very diverse palates," says Kidron, who plans to open 11 more stores in the New York area before expanding throughout the northeast. "We asked ourselves was there a way of creating a better product that was more customizable to social media marketing books the consumer's taste? Once we'd gone down that path, all the social media aspects came in. If a consumer creates a new product, it has to be saved in a database. It has to have a new name. Then we have to figure out how to social media in marketing sell it to other consumers. Really, social media is part of the fundamentals of the product." In fact, Kidron and his team have a cradle-to-grave social media strategy for the 4food burger. After customers design a sandwich on one of the iPads placed around the restaurant or on their home computers, they then name small business social media marketing their burger and save it in 4food's custom point-of-service database. If they liked the burger, they can post their creation directly to Twitter or Facebook. If they really like their burger, they can create a YouTube commercial, which will display on a 240-square-foot video wall in the store, along with Twitter feeds and other social media marketing plan sample social data. If another customer buys their Hawaiian Gorgonzola Explosion or Edamame Stuffed Tsunami, the creator gets a 25-cent credit in their 4food account. 4food's concept may seem gimmicky, until you consider Burger King's "Have marketing on social media it your way" promise to customers, allowing them to customize a burger from a limited list of tomato, lettuce and condiments. Social media technology has helped 4food cater to a range of tastes that would be social media marketing campaign unfathomable in a traditional restaurant. "The idea that social media is some kind of fad is ridiculous," Kidron says. "It's how we communicate. New companies will have social media in their DNA. Some will do it badly, some will not be quite right, and some will change the way things are done. The most important thing is to make social media marketing degree sure that social media has a unique purpose and is not just an adjunct or gimmick." Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the major arteries of the social media world, but there are few options for customizing or managing the massive applications. Literally hundreds of developers have stepped in to help users optimize and social media marketing los angeles keep tabs on their social media investment. Here are some of our favorite tools for transforming your social network from a frustrating black box to an open book. This social media dashboard lets you coordinate and keep track of company-wide tweets, monitor mentions of your brand or company on almost any social networking platform social media marketing strategy template and even reports the results of your efforts in real time. HootSuite is free, but HootSuite Pro, which lets you manage unlimited accounts, costs $5.99 per month. This tool allows you to create a social network within your business. Employees can social media marketing resume collaborate on wikis, create polls, monitor status updates and collaborate and comment on social documents. CubeTree is free, though an enterprise service allows 1GB of storage per user and costs $5 per month. This stand-alone application coordinates a team of tweeters writing on one corporate account. Essential for companies that want to speak with social media marketing campaigns a unified voice through a single Twitter handle or companies that want 24/7 social media engagement. Free. This application allows businesses to post customer feedback and ideas on their websites. Other visitors are then allowed to vote the comments and ideas up or down, and site managers are able to reply directly to customer problems. Basic package is free. Building a new social media marketing service enterprise from the ground up using social media is much simpler than retrofitting it into a long-established business culture. "I think what will happen, as companies get increasingly social, structural stuff will have social media marketing conference to change. Older companies' silos haven't changed for a long time," says Maggie Fox, CEO and founder of Social Media Group in Toronto, a full-service social media agency, which has led some of the world's largest businesses into the social media world. "At the C-level management, they have to plan and understand how it will reshape their business effective social media marketing and change their management efforts." Surprisingly, some of the largest businesses in the world have been quick to adopt social media. After a miserable 2005 and 2006, when bloggers coined the term "Dell Hell" in regard to quality-control issues and videos of self-immolating laptops made the rounds on YouTube, Dell computers began to reach out to consumers on the web. After initially causing how to start a social media marketing business an Internet uproar by saying that Dell did not respond to bloggers, the company reversed course. It began its Direct2Dell blog, which gave a human voice to the company, and it even sent out technicians to solve the problems of the most irate bloggers. Dell now is a model of customer engagement. It closely monitors discussions how to social media marketing on technology forums and LinkedIn and steps into the conversation to answer questions. Its IdeaStorm website has generated more than 420 customer ideas that have been implemented. Developers of their Dell Mini notebook even fielded design ideas from interested consumers through IdeaStorm and a dedicated Twitter account. Starbucks has earned kudos social media marketing 2014 for a similar program. The MyStarbucks-Idea blog connects 50 representatives from around the company with consumers who submit suggestions for improvements. The reps review the ideas, and the best make it into the store, like the Venti-sized travel mug and reusable rubber cup sleeve. Starbucks tries to keep a unified voice and has only one official Twitter account, best social media marketing which it uses to answer questions from 1 million followers in real time. One reason social media has permeated these companies is that employees, and not necessarily IT departments, are powering the agenda. "Social media is driven primarily by a Gen Y tech perspective--if employees don't find tools to do their jobs at work, marketing by social mediathey'll bring them in from the outside," Fox says. "IT needs to be more nimble and learn to leverage that behavior." German business software company SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world, followed that bottom-up approach with great success. Its SAP Community Network, which has more than 2 million members, is one of the corporate world's most robust and has been operating since 2003. More than 5,000 members, including customers, partners and outside developers, blog on the network, creating a huge database of feedback for the company.

How Fast-Growing Companies Use Social-Media Marketing

Social Media isn't just for teenagers and techies anymore. Adults have long used social media sties like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But the number of adult Internet users who now claim they use those and other social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008, according to a new report released late last week. For business owners who already use social media to market social media marketing trends their brand or engage with customers, this data isn't all that surprising. But for those who may have been on the fence about using social media or who only use the sites occasionally, social media marketing new york this news may drive you to rethink that strategy. At the very least, if your existing communications plan is more than two years old, you might want to drag it out, dust it off and revise your outdated information. More adults use social networking sites. A whopping 65 percent of online adults regularly sign on to Facebook, LinkedIn, social media marketing pdf Twitter and other social networking sites, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That figure is up from last year’s 61 percent and way up from the 28 percent of such users recorded just three years ago in a similar study. More adults use the sites daily. Forty-three percent social marketing media of online adults said they access social networking sites on a daily basis, up from 38 percent just one year ago and 13 percent in 2008, says the Pew survey. Only email (61 percent) and search engines (59 percent) are used more frequently on a typical social media for marketing day than sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Older adults use social media in greater number. According to the Pew survey, 51 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds and 33 percent of those 65 and older now use social media sites. While young adults still rule the roost in terms of social media activity, use of social sites by those 65 and older social media marketing course has grown 150 percent since April of 2009. Usage among those aged 50 to 64 has more than doubled. Women use social media more than men. The latest Pew survey also shows that social media use remains highest among women and adults under 30 years of age. Women between the ages of 18 and 29 top the list as the most frequent users of social media sites. Further, b2b social media marketing women use social networking sites more than men, with almost seven in 10 women online using them today compared with six in 10 online men. And 48 percent of those women are daily users, while only 38 percent of men sign on daily. Gender and age are the biggest determinates of social media usage. As far social media marketing plans as other demographics are concerned, the report shows little difference in the use of social media based on race or ethnicity, household income, level of education, or whether the respondent lives in the city or the suburbs. Older adults make up social media marketing podcast the fastest-growing segment of users. Those over the age of 50 are using social media in ever greater numbers these days. So if your marketing plan doesn’t take that shift into consideration, then you might just want to revise it. Because if you’re still kowtowing to computer kids, your company’s marketing strategy may be as dated as a rotary telephone. When you think back on it, real estate social media marketing the advent of social media hit the marketing world like hot sauce on an empty stomach. All of a sudden businesses with an appetite for "what's next" rushed to set up Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to connect with as many customers as possible. Waylaid somewhere along the way, social media marketing blogs however, were the fundamentals of public relations, marketing, corporate communications and sales -- giving way to erroneous assumptions about how businesses should manage their social marketing. Many small businesses equate the number of "likes" or "followers" on branded social-media platforms to success, not realizing social media marketing chicago that it's the quality of those likes and followers that is important. More people signing up to view your message doesn't necessarily equate an increase in sales or even a bump in long-term or sustainable brand recognition. Just because it's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace or some other newfangled online or mobile-powered platform, the message still carries social media brand marketing more weight than the medium. It's always been about the message. It's not about the platform or the technology. The technology is just a tool, and just because younger people were the first to use Twitter and Facebook, don't think for a moment that older employees can't effectively use them just as well. No, they don't. Here's my advice when you run across someone positioning cost of social media marketing himself or herself as a "social media guru" or expert. Run for the exit. Everybody working in this field is practicing on the job training. Just because they've written a book like I have or spoken in public about the do's and don'ts of social media, doesn't mean they know your business and how to conceptualize and manage campaigns that hit upon your business-related goals. No, define social media marketing it isn't. Media is media. At one point or another, newspapers, radio, television and the Internet were considered new forms of media and now they're labeled as "traditional" media. So "new" media doesn't mean that only "experts" or young hotshots can successfully operate your social-media team. That's hogwash. Nothing replaces knowledge of the basics of marketing, combined with knowledge of your social media marketing plan pdf business-related goals and the need for authenticity and transparency in your socially laden communications. Nobody knows your business like the people who work inside your building. You can certainly work with an agency to set up and implement your social media-related efforts or to propose social media marketing best practices ideas for contests and the like. But when it comes to communicating your messages on a daily basis, your people are in the best position to keep your community of customers and prospects up to date and informed about what really matters to them.