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

 

It is not what Ace does for you, it is about what you stand to gain via delegation.

by | Jan 3, 2012 | Delegation, Time Management

Many of the daily business tasks that consume your time can be effectively outsourced, enabling you to focus on what is important, rather than on what needs to be done.

  • Think about what you would do with an additional 4 hours per week, or 16 hours per month?
  • How would you invest that time in your organization?
  • What administrative details do you really need to be doing, or not doing?
  • Are you caught up in back-end details that should be delegated?

A simple exercise to discover what you can delegate to your virtual assistant is to keep a daily log of your tasks and projects’, noting how much time was spent on each, even being mindful of the interruptions. Each of these facets helps you to see how your time is spent.

Looking back to the log, do you see items that should have taken you 15 – 30 minutes but may have take longer due to unforeseen distractions, or because you had to “figure out” how to complete the task? Keeping track for a few days or a week will help you to see where and how your time is being spent.

  • Upon review of your time sheet, think about what you should have delegated.
  • Did you spend unnecessary hours performing more admin tasks?
  • Were there other more vital business details that were overlooked or passed over because you were doing busy work, or trying to figure out how to complete the task?

How do you want or need to invest your time in your company? Delegating is a proven tool to increase your productivity, time management and effectiveness. Many important administrative tasks can be outsourcing to a professional Virtual Assistant who already has the knowledge or skill to be able to complete your tasks efficiently, without interruption and in a much timelier manner than you may be able to. With your projects being successfully executed and completed, you will gain valuable hours in your day to work ON your business rather than IN it. Why not start today?