Social Media – It’s Here to Stay

by | Apr 29, 2012 | Social Media

Social media meets the fundamental need to be heard, to be noticed, to be known and to be validated.

Social Media (SM) is not a trendy marketing tool but rather a key facet in your viral efforts to drive business to your website, enhance company recognition, build your brand, create market segments, meet your clients and prospective client needs for information and customer service, join communities, disseminate news, press releases, product launches, improve customer service, troubleshoot issues and listen to the chatter about your company.

It is hard to believe that Social Media is only 7 years old. Facebook started in 2004. Blogging did too. Twitter was born a few years later in 2006 and LinkedIn, the business networking site began in 2009. It’s unbelievable that something has impacted the marketing world with such a force in such a short period of time.

Social media has evolved from a powerful communication avenue to a key marketing channel. It offers a platform for clients, colleagues or prospects to discover you when they’re looking for reviews, comparing pricing, or researching offers. It is paramount for you and your company to maintain a presence, ensuring the opportunities for listening, effective online communications and increased visibility. It is essential that companies create and utilize a variety of social media platforms to cross promote, market and enhance their organization. Each channel offers an individual as well as combined opportunity for company-wide growth and expansion.

How do I Measure my results?

The ROI on SM is multi-faceted: it is a return on influence and before you have influence, you need visibility. You have the opportunity to increase followers, create deeper meaningful connections, develop relations with industry colleagues and associates, increase web traffic, RTs, “likes,” shares, +1s, and discussions about your company or brand and all this eventually translates into dollars. The list below applies to ALL social networking platforms.

  • Return on engagement — the duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
  • Return on participation — the metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of, social objects.
  • Return on involvement — similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tying metrics and potential return of each.
  • Return on attention — In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it and as such measure the responses activities that we engender.
  • Return on trust — A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.[1]

How much time should I expect to spend each day/ week to get best results?

You could easily spend a few minutes or a few hours per day engaging followers, creating relationships, and searching for content to share and building your brand. You have to be patient. Times builds results.

25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012

The Internet Advantage

  • Over 2 billion people use the Internet on a daily basis – this is about 30% of the world’s population, reaching more people, in more demographics than any other marketing tool.
  • This represents a 480% increase in 2011 alone
  • Over 245 million people or over 80% of Americans, use at least one social network.
  • Creating a social media strategy is simple and inexpensive. You can easily integrate it into your existing marketing plan.

Videos:

Social Media Revolution Socialnomics 2011

What Is The Business Value of Social Media? – Advice from @Hubspot

 


[1] ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media  http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/176801

 

Virtual Assistants Defined

by | Jan 19, 2012 | Delegation

As an entrepreneur, your success depends upon your capability to commit your time to what you do best, applying the concept of leverage – getting more done with less time, effort, and resources. Entrepreneurs and small business owners alike characteristically have a difficult time delegating to others. We are all control freaks, compulsively detail oriented and so emotionally invested into what we are trying to accomplish, that we do not permit others to assist us with some of the work.

Partnering with a virtual assistant helps you to increase your productivity, reduce your overhead costs, increase your bottom-line, allow you more time to focus ON your business rather than IN it and enhance your time management. These are just a few of the benefits you will gain through delegation to your VA. It is not merely WHAT we do for you, but what you stand to gain with your new found hours.

According to Wikipedia: “A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant)[1] is an entrepreneur who provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients from a home office. Because virtual assistants are independent contractors rather than employees, clients are not responsible for any employee-related taxes, insurance or benefits. Clients also avoid the logistical problem of providing extra office space, equipment or supplies. With a full range of options to choose from, clients can customize their remote receptionist service to meet their exact needs.

Virtual assistants utilize today’s technology to deliver their services and communicate with clients by working remotely. A virtual assistant’s core practice consists of administrative or clerical tasks. However, many virtual assistants offer additional specialties that fall under various other categories, such as marketing, website development or maintenance, creative and technical services, etc. In addition, many VA’s have target niches, and those include real estate, coaching, and writers to name a few prominent ones.”

According to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers: “Outsourcing is growing fast and delivering results. More people than ever are outsourcing with no indication that growth with slow.”

Delegation is a low cost, high pay off solution to your daily business needs. If you outsourced just 4 hours per week, you would have 16 more hour per month to focus on your “core genius:” what only YOU can do for your company, for your clients. How would you put those 16 hours to use?

“Outsourcing is a tectonic, structural change in the marketplace that will significantly change the competitive outlines of companies. It is the mainstream of the global business ecosystem. It’s here today and will continue to expand and touch our lives, both as providers and consumers, in many ways.” Sachdev Ramakrishna, VP Strategic Marketing, Mphasis (an EDS Company)

Ace Concierge is YOUR delegation partner. We help you in the daily operation and management of your company with our virtual administrative services, enabling you to spend your valuable time on income generating activities.