by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 17, 2013 | Small Business, Social Media
Listening in on the digital chatter is essential to your social media success and company expansion. You need to know about your industry, brand, competitors and trending topics but where do you start? There are hundreds of tools to help you to listen more, engage on a deeper level, troubleshoot, follow trends that influence your business, identify prospects, increase your ROI and to develop your network, all enabling you to grow your business and manage your online reputation as a thought leader.
Creating your online brand and reputation requires active listening, not just pushing content. The variety of platforms is exhaustive so choose a few, set up keyword alerts and monitor the content and voice in your stream. Test drive some of the FREE tools listed below to begin listening and analyzing your social media marketing efforts.
Develop your goals and strategy with a few tips in “Social Media Monitoring: Horton Hears a Whos”
Here is a great infographic about social media monitoring tools. If you scroll to the bottom of the image, you will see many of the ones mentioned in this post.
FREE Social Media Monitoring Tools
Bottlenose Real-time social intelligence engine searching social media with up to the minute news
Engag.io Monitor and engage in your online conversations on one platform. “Your Inbox for Online Conversations and Relationships.”
FollowerWonk Find, analyze and optimize your Twitter following
Google Alerts Receive email alerts based upon your keywords
Google Reader Harvest relevant content, RSS feeds, blog posts and websites
Guzzle Topic based news aggregator monitoring hundreds of feeds
Monitter Twitter real time keyword search
Social Mention Monitors 100 + social media sites bringing you all social media results relevant to your search query (keywords)
Topsy Search and analyze the social web
Twazzup Real time Twitter search engine
TweetLevel Keyword search, analyze and engage: Identify top Twitter influencers, real time keyword and hashtag insight, company buzz
Twtrland Visualizes social footprints; use keywords, hashtags @ name
Twubs Search industry and trending hashtags
Uvrx Social search using keywords, hashtags, names, brands
WhosTalking Social Media search tool, combining data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways
Your turn: what are some of your favorite tools or suggestions?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 11, 2013 | Small Business, Social Media
In today’s ever competitive business climate, social media is not a passing fad or simply a source of amusement for the younger generations. It represents an essential platform as part of your marketing mix. Consumer buyer behavior now reflects their consistent quest for up to the minute information about your company’s products and services. People buy from people and customers prefer the immediacy of the web, the data they can search, the recommendations they find and a community for their voice. You need to not only have an online presence but to be actively listening to your prospects, colleagues, partners, competition and clients.
A recent survey by Deloitte revealed that 60% of consumers are going online more often to locate the best products and services and their decisions are greatly influenced by the tools, information and service they find when they visit websites or perform a search. Brand loyalty and reputation are still based on the quality of the customer experience.
Social media is a vital component to your business, marketing, sales and customer service strategies.
Some companies fear creating a social media presence because they believe that if they do, they may provide their audience with a platform to complain or otherwise post negative feedback. Whether you create your community or not, the “talk” is still out there and if you are not listening, then you are missing the opportunity to troubleshoot and amend any potential detrimental comments about your organization.
Whether you are B2B or B2C, your social media presence should represent a strong role in your marketing and online energies. Your message must reach your audience where THEY reside, not where you think they are. Whether you choose to blog, send an e-newsletter or generate dialog via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram or Google+, you need to discover where your client “hangs out” and greet them on their territory. Remember, you will need to utilize more than one neighborhood to reach your target markets.
“You don’t have to tweet, or Facebook, or even blog. But choosing not to embrace social media, even minimally, is choosing to be invisible.” Cindy Kraft
Take a look at these staggering social media statistics:
- 1 million websites have been integrated with Facebook (Huffington Post)
- 80% of users like to connect with brands on Facebook (Huffington Post)
- 1 billion registered Facebook users (Huffington Post)
- 200 million registered LinkedIn users (Huffington Post)
- Since the founding of Twitter, there have been 163 billion tweets (Huffington Post)
- 56% of customer tweets to brands are being ignored
- 625,000 people join Google+ everyday
- The +1 button is clicked 5 million times per day
- Websites utilizing the +1 button increase page traffic by 350%
- 80% of people prefer to get coupons, promos, and discounts from brands in social media (HubSpot)
- 43% of all online consumers are social media fans or followers. (Harp Social)
- 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form (Aberdeen)
- B2B businesses experience a 61% success rate in customer acquisition using LinkedIn.(HubSpot)
- 91% of experienced social marketers see improved website traffic due to social media campaigns and 79% are generating more quality leads (The Social Skinny)
- 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy brands that they follow (iModerate Research Technologies)
- YouTube has Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
- Marketers spend an average of 4-6 hours a week on social media (Social Media Examiner)
- 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter, and 20% have closed deals (Mindjumpers)
- Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3 times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in their history. (RJMetrics)
Social media is constantly evolving due to the mobile, social nature needs and wants of your consumer. They are more informed, apt to search for company details online, voice their opinions within their communities and forums, and make buying decisions based upon this data, as well as their network’s feedback.
Social Media Start-up: a few things to consider
- Where is your audience?
- What are their pain points?
- Listen to the chatter
- Create a strategy
- Generate a content calendar
- Post consistent relevant and valuable content
- Respond to comments
- Use keywords in your content
- Create alerts based upon your company, personal name, industry
- Who and where is your competition?
- Measure and track metrics
Investing time and effort in social media can be a very overwhelming mission, but I can assure you that it is well worth it. Once I discovered social media, my business converted to 100% virtual and all of my business growth comes from social networking, referrals and word of mouth. From a client perspective, I receive many phone calls per month with clients sharing their online successes, from speaking engagements, new connections, networking opportunities, guest appearances, increased sales and web traffic to new partnerships and other corporate achievements.
What are YOU waiting for? The time is NOW!
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 1, 2013 | Guest Blogger, Life Thoughts, Organization
Your parents are requiring more and more time as they age. You’re working on having a new sort of relationship with your adult children. Your vacation is coming up and you haven’t quite figured out how to manage your business and still relax while away. Your business is at a key stage and you want to spend more time in it.
You’re overwhelmed by all of this change. You know it, but you don’t know what to do about it.
Your First Two Steps
1. Rearrange your time and your work:
What do YOU want from the time you’re spending with parents/adult children? What do THEY want? These might be different, so think about this first.
How much time per week or month do your parents need? What percentage of your work time is this? Are there other ways to arrange their time to make it more convenient for you? Is there work you can take with you while you’re waiting on appointments? (Be careful of working too much while you’re with them; it’s also very nice to have this time together, so balance this carefully.) Are you possibly doing too much; it’s worth looking at it.
Get the idea here? Use this approach for your parents as well as for your adult children and the new relationship you want to have with them. Look at your time differently, and look at your work tasks differently. Reorganize to fit a new time commitment; don’t try to use the old ways to fit the new commitments you’ve made.
2. Forget about the future for awhile.
Too much future thinking is overwhelming. And with these life changes happening, the overwhelm quotient is going to be higher.
The key question here is: What’s important to you now? That’s “now” versus “not now.” That’s the only decision, for now. That’s what to fill your calendar with.
Your vacation is in three weeks. Block time in the next few days to review the status of each project and client, even if this has to be done on personal time, because this helps you get away on vacation with a calmer mind.
Identify which steps/tasks have to be completed before vacation. Not completed projects, but steps or stages of the project. Don’t use vacation as a deadline to force yourself to complete more than is really necessary, just because it’s an easy deadline.
This is the “I can’t leave for vacation unless these are done” tasks. These are the truly important priorities. To keep the focus, mark these in some way that’s clear and obvious when you review your daily goals.
Block working sessions right on your calendar, so you know for sure that you’ve protect time for these priorities. Once this is done, step back for a minute; are you overcommitting at all? Is it possible? Remember that crises happen, so plan buffer time for people coming at you at the last minute, clients not realizing right away how long you’ll be gone and needing something before you’re out, and so forth. The puzzle of your time must have white space.
Changes interrupt our lives. Change is change, whether it’s a welcomed change or one foist upon you. Accept that things are changing; that’s a key first step. And then reorganize to work through it.
Guest Post Courtesy of
Sue West
Certified Organizer Coach®
Certified Professional Organizer®
In Chronic Disorganization
ADHD Specialist
Do you have enough time for you? Enough time for what’s becoming more important to you? Sue’s clients do and because she’s an organizing coach, her approach is practical.
Her specialties are organizing through change, ADHD and time management. Her clients have called her: insightful, wise, inspiring, filled with hope, gentle yet productive. Sue works privately, by phone or in person and is also the author of Organize for A Fresh Start: Embrace Your Next Chapter in Life, a book about reorganizing your stuff, your home and your time to move onto your next chapter in life. Get to know Sue by signing up for her blog, visiting her on Facebook, or signing up for her newsletter.
