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 | Dec 26, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Time Management
What impedes your productivity? For many, it can be outside distractions or lack of dedicated focus. Here is a quick exercise to help you learn where you may need to improve.
When you find your mind straying or you wander off task, make a hash mark # on a piece of paper, noting what you were supposed to be doing and how much time you allowed yourself OFF task. At the end of the day, review how many times you were distracted and how many hours you squandered on non-core activities.
What did you fully accomplish or complete? Any work that is not advancing you toward your professional or life goals should not be counted as “work.” These activities account for many wasted hours during your day. Much of the busyness that usurps your time may give you a sense of productivity, but being busy does not mean you are being productive or effectively contributing to your life’s work.
Part of being effective during your work hours is the discipline to spend time on what is truly important even if other things try to steer you off course. During your review of the hash marks, where did you spend most of your time? If you end the day with several half finished projects or other important activities that merely were pushed to the back burner because Facebook, text messages, Twitter or other more “fun” interactions, you may want to re-evaluate your focus and productivity levels.
Efficiency is learning about your awareness to, acceptance of and ability to determine your real work, the actual tasks and projects that propel you forward versus time suckers, bad habits, procrastination or other low payoff activities that take you away from your personal and professional aspirations. It is a continual building process and without a strong sturdy foundation, you may find yourself with a few cracks, leading to disaster, lost time or missed opportunities.
How will you commit to improving your productivity and limiting your distractions?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 2, 2012 | Life Thoughts, Small Business
Smart entrepreneurs plan because they recognize that it will increase their probabilities for achievement. Important issues are less likely to fall through the cracks with formal outlines, processes and action steps. It’s a valuable tool that can make a substantial difference in the success or failure of a business or personal dreams.
Business development is about creating your dream of self-employment and spinning it into reality. A business plan is the document you produce when you take have an idea for a marketable endeavor and work through all the dynamics that will have an influence on the startup, operation, and management of the business.
Formulating your plan will help reduce time-wasting indecision and increase the likelihood of success. Without knowing where you’re going, it’s not really possible to plan, or make inroads toward goal achievement. Take a moment and look around, thinking about all of the things in your present environment, from the chair you sit on, the pen you use, the computer, your car or even the food you eat; they all began with a plan, a blueprint.
Dumb Little Man: ”A mansion will not come out as grand and as breathtaking as it is unless there’s a good plan behind its construction. Same goes with the great and amazing things you want to obtain in your life. Plan, and plan well. Make sure your plan is feasible, doable, and effective. Also, it pays to think and plot an alternative plan or a plan B, in case your initial plan does not work.”
Managing our own lives and businesses is hard enough but without written goals and action steps, we are just going through the motions, yearning for success and growth. It is important to visualize what we want and expect. It is from this starting point that enables us to map out our plan to facilitate action and forward movement.
There are many options to formulating your plan of action, from spreadsheets, mindmaps, flowcharts or just a word document, but whichever tool you choose should be one you will faithfully utilize and implement otherwise, it will be an exercise in futility and there aren’t enough hours in the day to justify wasted time, energy or effort. Your plan can outline all of your goals, action steps, timelines and a To Do list to help drive your dreams to the finish line. c into a reality but instituting a thought out functional strategy will.
How will you launch your inspirations from a concept to a tangible outcome?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Nov 12, 2012 | Guest Blogger
For those of you who don’t know me, I own a tiny Canadian food manufacturing company. We make all natural and organic as well as fair trade certified food products for general consumption, specializing in Fresh Pepper Sauces.
So, when Suzie asked for something that would be useful information for business people to improve their business skills, etc. I thought, what better way to improve one’s business than to improve their lives. So, I sat down to write such an article.
Here’s what I wrote…
How to Increase your Bottom Line and in so doing Rescue the Economy by Changing your Eating Habits
A loud refrain during the latest Presidential election was all about creating jobs in order to help the economy. Both sides trumpeted how it was going to happen. But nobody really presented a solution that seemed workable at the John Q Public level.
As an outsider looking in, it seems pretty obvious to me that the easiest way to fix the economy is to improve the productivity of those employers who are already feeding the economy, lower their bottom lines and they’ll quite naturally invest further in their company feeding the coming economic boom.
Follow my train of thinking here.
75% of business owners are single proprietorships. That means that you as a single business owner, really are the economy. The better your business does, the better you do.
So, how do you do better?
Well, for starters, if you aren’t already there, get healthy. And I don’t mean go out there and start an exercise regime, although, exercise is a very valuable part of it, I mean start eating right.
According to the most naturally holistic meal programs going, the best thing you can do for your body is to eat the best quality food you can afford. That means, eliminating all chemicals whose traces may be left in your food and eating a balanced meal, eliminating GMO ingredients and irradiation by eating foods you’ve grown yourself or which are monitored such as organic certified food in balanced meals.
What’s a balanced meal? well, according to Livestrong.com Five servings of fruits and vegetables, 2 proteins and 50% of what you eat should be carbohydrates. Ideally you’d want to turn as many of your red meat dishes a week into another protein; fish, chicken, pork, eggs, cheese, beans, nuts, etc. So you’d take a bowl/plate about the size of what you’d eat. 50% of should be rice or pasta or bread. 1/4 of it should be fruits and vegetables and 1/4 of it should be proteins.
Figuring out how much to eat is going to depend on each person, if you really want to go to the extreme, you can hire a dietician to help you create a specific diet or you can go all loosey goosey and just eat when hungry, as I do.
Avoid fat, high fructose corn syrup and salt, and eat chilli peppers; as hot as you can stand.
Why chilli peppers? Well, in 2000, the University of Laval published findings that 200 calories were burned per day through the simple practice of ingesting chili peppers. These studies have since been replicated by an American University and a Japanese one. Eating chillies lowers your caloric load. Seems a no-brainer to me.
However you do it, know, that the healthier you eat, the less you will weigh. And personally eliminating the obesity epidemic will go a long way to contributing to your financial bottom line.
Here’s how.
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| Peppermaster Hummus Dip |
It is a proven fact that the more overweight, or obese a person, the less productive they are and the more medical intervention they require. The numbers of chronic diseases increase with excess weight; Type II Diabetes, heart disease, cancers, and other problems. Interestingly, obesity has also been implicated in creating a higher risk for accident in the workplace. All of these things combine to create a financially detrimental atmosphere. Insurance premiums are higher, direct health costs are higher since chronic conditions tend to cost the patient not their insurance plans and overall productivity is lower through lower output as well as higher use of sick leave. So, it behooves the small business owner to get healthier and improve their bottom line.
Interestingly, though, you can actually improve your bottom line by instigating a company-wide health and diet plan, as a business expense. Since the larger your workforce, the higher your insurance premiums — and I mean that in the size of the waistlines. You can shrink your waistlines and shrink your insurance premiums. You can also lower the direct costs related to the health problems as well; because as you get healthier, you require fewer prescriptions or direct health care costs.
So you see, if you get healthier, lose a little weight, the whole economy benefits.
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Tina Brooks, VP Marketing, co-owner Brooks Pepperfire Foods
Tina is a retired Financial Advisor, currently working in sales and marketing with her husband and Peppermaster, Greg Brooks. When not working with their food manufacturing company, Tina runs a successful private Tarot reading practice from a tiny specialty food shop in Rigaud, Quebec, Canada.
You can find Tina posting as @Pepperfire on Twitter and on Facebook.
