by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 12, 2014 | Guest Blogger, Social Media
The way a brand manages its online presence on Social Media is critical. If the brand is managed poorly, they experience no growth and a decline in business. In comparison, if a brand is managed successfully, success follows with their audience going global about how great and unique the brand is. Resulting in increased sales and likeability. Below, are 8 tips for Social Media Success.
- Create a personal and memorable experience. Interact with your audience daily to ensure they know you acknowledge them. Surprise with a simple, “Thank You” and “How is your day going?” Respond to all negative and positive feedback publicly, well and quickly. Show them you care and value them when they reach out to you.
- Be ready with an answer to a question and solution to a problem. Do this by coming up with possible questions that may be asked or possible problems that may arise.
- Let your audience know they are your brand by asking what they want to see and their opinion. Then listen, respond and deliver. After all, a brand with no audience results in no brand and no growth.
- Work together as a team internally. Collaborate, hear all ideas and assign each person a task accordingly. Always have a back up person trained to handle online management in Social Media in case others are sick or an emergency arises.
- Make your online presence FUN. Let your audience know you are relaxed and inviting. Tweet and post humor, offer contests. Great aspect to have to show that you are friendly and ready to take the brand to relationship building.
- Plan ahead for the week. Have a backup strategy in place. Do this by creating a weekly agenda to help the brand stay on task and moving forward. It is important to always think ahead and be ready.
- Create content that educates and defines the brand as a valuable resource and engages. Create tips, share how to articles and ask questions to get your community involved. Keep it relevant, to the point, make it fun and never confuse!
- Being consistent on social media is the key to building loyalty and relationships. The more you show up, engage and create value on a daily basis the more others look forward to engaging with and trusting you. Being consistent also includes having a consistent brand message and voice across all social profiles which represents who you are, what you do and how you’re portrayed to the world.
Social Media success has many aspects and how well you adapt to each one will determine how your business performs. Time invested acknowledging, working together internally, educating and being consistent is a sure way to build relationships and see Social Media Success.
Guest Post by:
Jason Houck::Jason manages small businesses on social media and teaches engagement. He blogs at WeighYourMind.com and is a partner at Micro Media Marketing.
Connect with Jason
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by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Feb 11, 2014 | Small Business, Social Media
Mining your infinite online follower audience is a low-cost way to propel your small-business brand into the global digital world. Establishing your brand with social media allows you to cultivate relationships as well as strengthen existing ones. Your social media efforts can lead to brand recognition, credibility, brand advocates, increased web traffic, search rankings and word-of-mouth marketing. Social Media’s B2B Value: Building Relationships.
With 73 percent of U.S. internet users turning to social networking sites and 53 percent of American adults carrying a smart phone, businesses that don’t employ social network marketing may find themselves losing out to the competition.
According to a survey by VerticalResponse:
- More than two-thirds of small business owners are spending more time on social media than a year ago
- 43 percent of respondents said they spend six or more hours per week on social media activities for their businesses.
- They are posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Plus and blogs.
You probably invested a great deal of time, effort and thought in building your website, writing content and developing your social channels with the purpose to showcase your products and services. You want to solve your audience’s needs and greatest pain points but if no one follows your brand, or can’t easily find you where THEY want to, then you will only be talking to yourself.
Social media is conversational and value added – allow it to flow as a two way conversation with visible methods of connecting with you and your brand.
Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’
Only the echoes of my mind
People stopping staring
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes
Social Media Visibility: How accessible are you?
- Do you make it easy for your community to connect and engage with you?
- Is your page easy to navigate?
- Can people find your contact page?
- Are your social share buttons easily found?
- Do you visibly display all your other social channels?
Many of the projects I work on for my clients revolve around the numerous aspects associated with social media marketing and management. I was recently asked to review an extensive list of blog posts for data mining, pull out tweetable content and create a spreadsheet with some other detailed information.
One of the things I discovered was that many of the sites did NOT list their Twitter handle, anywhere, unless I Googled their company or personal name to find it. It was a necessary component for this project.
This was a little disheartening, even more time consuming. If you have an online presence, you should be straightforwardly displaying your social channels for your audience. They want to engage with you. They want to share your content and give credit but if they have to dig and search, you may be the one missing out on some free advertising and mentions with trackback links to your site. It is all part of the synergistic marriage and magic of social media.
Don’t make it a laborious chore to find and connect with you. Social media and your channels represent your largest piece of marketing real estate to build relationships. Invest your time or that of a virtual assistant to perform a social media review of your sites. It will prove to be an asset in creating a cohesive customer experience.
In a Market Probe International survey about small to medium sized businesses by Twitter they found:
- 74 percent of people who follow small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) follow to get updates on future products
- 47 percent of people who follow brands are more likely to visit the company’s website
- 70 percent of SMB followers retweet because they like the SMB’s content
- There is a 30 percent lift in recommendations of an SMB after following or interacting with them on Twitter
Maximize your platforms with your branding, cross promote, make connecting with you a simple single click of a button. Social is a 24/7/365 endeavor and while you may be offline, your global customers and network are busy searching, reading, sharing and engaging.
“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it?” Erik Qualman
Streamline the process with your consumers, making participation, connecting and networking a no brainer. Know and understand your followers, what they want, who they are and where they “reside.”
“Over time social media has spawned into a global institution, allowing whole communities, businesses and individuals to engage with each other. Simply put social media is the superlative form of interaction available today.” Susan Dolan
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 30, 2014 | Social Media
Social media has grown to be the inbound marketing tool and connector for businesses and individual users alike. It is a global tool to stay in touch, meet, greet, communicate, network and market. Looking at all of the social predictions for 2014 is a strong indicator of things to come as well as viewing the exponential growth experienced over the decades.
The statistics show that traditional media has taken a backseat to social media marketing and it will continue to explode, changing the way you do business and interact with your customers. Your consumers are online searching for information, longing to be educated, looking for solutions and sharing their brand experiences. You need to be online, listening and responding. If you don’t, your competition will.
- Facebook has over 1.19 active billion users per month
- 72% of online adults use social networking sites
- 9 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month
- 74% of Smartphone users use their phone for real-time location specific information
- Twitter adds 300 users per day
- 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals
- 43% of all marketers found a customer via LinkedIn and 52% of all marketers have found a customer via Facebook
1. Relationships
Social media isn’t just tweeting and posting! Keep that in mind.
It is an extension of your brand, your mission and your values. It is meant to support your company, reinforcing your reputation, products, service and commitment to your customers. Build relationships in and around your social channels, showcasing your desire to serve your audience. These relationships are the foundation of your brand’s reputation, success and bottom-line. Build the trust and see the return.
Nurture and cultivate your audience with real conversations and engagement, offering value and rich content. Don’t just push URLs and self-promote; get involved. Share. Ask questions.
While disseminating information is helpful, people buy from people and they want to get to know you. Humanize your brand and be personable. These relationships that you build will lead to increased brand advocacy. Make the time!!
Your relationships may not just be client based but colleagues, co-collaborators, business partners, vendors or friends. Enrich one another
2. Brand Advocates
Creating an online brand experience for your consumer is an opportunity to engage and interact on a more personal level than traditional forms of old age media. You are speaking WITH instead of AT them. These relationships can evolve into strong brand advocates to share your message, service and products. This word of mouth advertising and shouting from rooftops (social channels) is the greatest form of marketing your brand can hope for. Each consumer is connected and has a voice – they will share their testimonials and experiences with the world, so it is your job to make it a positive one. Pay attention to them, understand their pain points and give them viable solutions.
3. Global Communities
One of the greatest opportunities of social media marketing is to create your community, your network all over the world, not just in your backyard or down the street. You can interact with customers all over the world without ever needing to leave your office. You couldn’t get this from a newspaper and you don’t have to wait to respond to an editorial comment on page 15 of the paper (if you happen to catch it). Social is immediate and interactive. You are of course monitoring your brand and industry via alerts and other key search channels. Right?
It is this responsive communication that keeps the customers engaged and coming back for more. You build trust, authority and loyalty which again translates to generating brand advocates.
There are little to no geographical boundaries when it comes to socially marketing online. Your bandwidth far exceeds local advertising giving you the opportunity to reach and engage with millions of people across the open seas. Personally, I marvel at my connections and know that without social media, I never would have had the great fortune to connect with so many incredible clients and colleagues.
Relationships, brand advocates and global communities are of course just part of the short list of why we love social media. As you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It has become an integral part of our business and lifestyles; whether good or bad, it is here to stay.
- Embrace it.
- Understand it.
- Invest in it.
What are your top 3 reasons for using social media?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 23, 2014 | Content Marketing, Entrepreneur, Social Media
2014 Buzzword? Not in the least. Just do a search. Google shared about 1,010,000,000 results (1.21 seconds). Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels. The Content Marketing Institute said:
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is sharing without selling but eventually, you do experience lead conversion because you have been feeding your audience rich, educational and valuable content. You are the person or company they turn to! Since most have turned away from traditional forms of media, elicit a response from your online audience, similar to Pavlov’s dogs. Don’t focus on what you have to say; understand what your target market wants to read. Convey your passion for their needed solutions and service, don’t just try and push a widget. Everyone has widgets.
What makes you different? Better? Worth the investment?
“The single most significant trend is the continued emergence of content marketing as a standalone discipline. Content, in all its shapes and forms, is core to everything we do as marketers.” Econsultancy.
Content marketing is NOT just for your website! It is daily curation and sharing of content within your social media network. Quality content. A little cotton candy fluff only starves the bears.
“Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means making a commitment of time and discipline to the process.” – Nancy Duarte
- Make your content newsworthy and enriching
- Attract and retain attention!
- Curate from a variety of sources
- Follow industry leaders
- Sign up for the RSS feeds
- READ everything before you curate
- Engage with your favorite bloggers
- Ask questions
- Monitor trending CM hashtags
- Use social media tools to follow and find conversations
- Save and digest the content
- WRITE!!
Content Marketing Considerations:
- Goals
- Strategy
- Editorial calendar
- Content
- An understanding of your buyer personas
- Where does your audience hang out
- What are their greatest pain points?
- What drives them to purchase?
- What are they searching for?
- Appeal to their logical mind as well as their emotions
- Write for them. To them….. not the search engines.
- Find the best distribution channels
- Cross promote or vary content
- Track and measure engagement, conversation and results
In a recent study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute their results demonstrated that 93% B2B organizations now use content-based tactics for their marketing promotions and 73% specified they now produce more content than the previous year.
Custom content is 92% more effective than traditional TV advertising at increasing awareness and 168% more powerful at driving purchase preference.
If you need a little more convincing about the value and necessity of content marketing, take a bite from the menu and these are just the appetizers.
Top 6 Content Marketing Trends To Watch Out This 2014 (Infographic)
12 Most Innovative Ways to Create Content That Gets Shared
Top 10 Ways a Content Calendar will Improve Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
30 Steps for Getting Started with Content Marketing – Smarter Shift
25 Top Content Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Use
The 3 Ways to Succeed at Content Marketing When Everybody in the World is Doing Content Marketing
Content Curation Tools: 21 Criteria To Select And Evaluate Your Ideal One
2014 Content Marketing Trends and Tactics
7 Metrics To Accurately Measure Your Content Marketing
What will be your first step in implementing your content marketing plan?
Send us an email from our contact page if you would like a little help organizing and facilitating your plan for CM success.
“Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” – Jon Buscall
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 15, 2014 | Organization, Small Business, Social Media
You know the intrinsic value and sheer magnitude of having an online presence and creating a community but what do you do with it?
How do you do it?
Do you have a method to your madness or are you the willy nilly type posting, commenting and further acting like a crazed JuMpInG bEaN?
Slow down a bit and take stock of your social platforms, goals and each individual audience.
And don’t just go over it in your head. WRITE it down.
Whether you engage on one social channel or 10, you should have an idea of what you are doing and why.
Know where YOUR audience is.
“Social media is a smart selling tool only if your clients and prospects are using social media.” Colleen Francis
Don’t spread yourself too thin or your quality of content and engagement will suffer. THIS will hurt your brand image and reputation. You are here to build. To construct your digital universe and connections not to destroy them with a wrecking ball.
Time and patience is an absolute must. Don’t expect to have people clamoring all over you because you pushed out a few posts. Sure, you may feel pride and accomplishment but, your online networking is about developing relationships and brand awareness.
Real, honest relationships with a foundation of engagement, not self-promotion. Your consistency and frequency of remarkable content will cultivate you as an authority; a thought leader in your field.
To put it simply, be the person you would like to meet and do business with. What attracts you to others? What entices you to listen and pay attention? Emulate that.
If you’re not sure where to begin, check out this infographic from TopDog Social Media in 25+ Tasks For Your Social Media Strategy There are some very basic tasks that you should be working on every day in each of your social networks. This image displays the bare minimum.
While these three platforms represent just a small nibble of your full dining experience, never stop reading and educating yourself. The climate, dynamics, algorithms and “rules” are always changing.
Research the staggering statistics on social media growth, the B2B and B2C environment, the money spent on social media teams to ensure companies are involved, listening, engaged and troubleshooting, be amazed with the tremendous increase in content marketing and curation. This is where it is at and if you are not disseminating and curating, you may get lost in the vast amount of digital noise. You could become just another fly on the wall. Don’t get swatted. Get educated.
Here’s a little food for thought to motivate and inspire your online activity.
What You Absolutely Need To Know About Content Marketing
10 Awesome Infographics to Guide your Marketing Plan for 2014
Get better social media results in 2014: 3 strategies that will up your game
Social Media Audit: How to use tools to audit social media
The 3 Essential Elements of Any Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
Is Solution Selling Dead? The 2014 Content Marketing Imperative
Understand your social media goals and carefully plan your strategy, writing for your audience and their needs to create a tight and authentic community of brand ambassadors, colleagues, friends and customers.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 7, 2014 | Blogging, Productivity, Social Media
Find me! Find me!
We all hope that our SEO knowledge and efforts can help us rank a little higher on Google. You certainly don’t have to be a superhero to boost your pages and your posts but you need a little bit of know how. A few tips to help get your blog seen, read, and shared.
Inbound marketing and alleged best practices are changing all of the time. It can prove challenging to stay up to date, never mind modifying everything you do on a daily basis. Read, learn and understand the basics. Never stop educating yourself. Employ and test different tips and tools. Find what works for you and your audience. Stay social!!! Engage and share.
“This type of person thinks that they need to know everything and never implement anything that they learn. If you want to succeed you must take action now and start learning from your failures. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn, what it means is that you need to implement what you learn and see what works best for you and your market.” Garret Peirson – searchenginejournal.com
Writing rich and valuable content is to serve and engage your audience; to solve their biggest pain points and enrich their brain matter. Think about the reasons you are drawn to particular posts, bloggers or other newsworthy sites. Write the blog posts that capture and maintain your audience.
“The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?” Aaron Wall
Google rewards remarkable content, the customer experience and social engagement. Google’s mission is to retrieve data that is relevant and useful to the user’s search query based upon their algorithm and several other factors related to SEO, relevance, popularity, quality and content.
“Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.” Rebecca Lieb
What satiates your appetite for knowledge?
You probably have some favorite “go to” sites and authors of your own but when you are searching for more data or need to answer a question, how do you retrieve the information?
KISS Your SEO
- When you start your post, consider: What is the core challenge or problem your article will help your audience to solve?
- Understand your consumers and what motivates them.
- You use a string of words versus just one key phrase.
- How does your audience search?
- What means the most to them?
- Your goal is to optimize your post with longtail keywords and phrases that would be a deeper representation of what your ideal buyer persona is looking for.
- Communicate without selling. Tell your story, offering solutions. Tweaking the ache for answers and information.
- Your content and keywords should serve your audience and their topics of interest NOT the search engines.
- Internal links within your site help to increase your rankings and direct readers to your other posts and pages, further enriching their experience.
- Make sure your metadata, including your image descriptions include your keywords.
- Updating existing content WordPress content also tells the search engines that your content is still relevant and current.
- Leverage your Google+ profile for better return on posts. Don’t forget the hashtags too.
According MOZ, here is the basic beginner checklist for SEO keywords in your blog post:
- At least once in the main title (H1).
- At least in one or two headings.
- At least 3 times in the body of the article.
- At least once in “bold” and “italics”.
- At least once in the “Alt” of a picture (below we’ll show you how to do it and why).
- Once in the URL.
- At least once in the Meta description.
Your KISS SEO strategy is just one simple step toward moving your blog post up the ranks in the search engines and gaining social merit. Remember to add social share buttons on each post, share it in your communities, syndicate it on various social channels and sites, ping each time you post, comment on other blog posts, engage your audience and most of all:
BE social. Don’t DO social.
