Why does my business need a blog?

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate ego and more about empathy with customers. A blog is a way for you to show your expertise in your subject matter and help customers find what they need. A blog will give prospective customers a level of comfort in doing business with you. Blogging also helps you get found in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. When someone searches for your product or service, your blog may show up as a separate listing as well as your web site.

Social Media and Trade Shows

One of the major benefits of a Facebook fan page is that you can post video footage from events or trade shows. Shoot some video footage with your Flip camera or iPhone of your booth and staff during a trade show and post it while the event is still under way. It will give your fans a chance to catch a glimpse of your location at the show and introduce them to the sales team.

A Social Media Golden Rule

Take the opportunity to help someone, without offering a sales pitch. With social media, you earn the right to promote by being helpful first. Reach out to people, direct them to resources, and establish a good relationship.

Target Customer Profile

One of the goals of social media monitoring is to gain a better understanding of the potential target audiences in your social sphere, where they are and what interests them. Monitoring will also help benchmark important metrics for social media objectives. Each month, Sprocket Social Media under the Monthly Campaign targets and identifies audiences that are interacting with your social media. We will create a "Target Customer Profile" for your business based on information that we discover in the Social Media Business Evaluation and monthly reporting. This target could be based on location, interests, affiliations, etc. This information will be used to create posts, contests, and email campaigns.

Do Real Estate Agents Need Social Media?

Lately, I have been talking to some Real Estate agents about social media. Their objection with social media is TIME. There is no doubt that social media and Facebook take up a great deal of time. It can even consume you. But it is so important that you tell everyone that you come in contact with that you are in real estate. Word of Mouth advertising is an agents best friend. The first place that most buyers go to look for real estate is the internet. They may look at Realtor.com, a web site or even Facebook. Did you know that search engines like Google and Yahoo are listing Facebook pages in their results? Print media is only good in certain situations. No one reads the newspaper, they read the internet. No one looks at real estate magazines; they look at Realtor.com or a real estate web site and the internet. No one sends a letter to a friend anymore; they send them an email or a Facebook message. It is real important that today’s real estate agents are up with the times and have a good web presence. 

Should an agent use their personal Facebook page or a Fan Page? I think that it is important to have both but keep them separate. None of your Facebook friends want to see a sales pitch or real estate facts every day. They want to hear about what is going on in your life, but also love to see pictures of new listings and happy buyers. The Fan Page is a good supplement to your personal page. You must have a FAN Page that is appealing and graphic rich. There are many applications available for real estate agents for Facebook. Invite your friends on your personal page to become a FAN of your FAN Page. When a friend goes to buy a house or hears about someone buying or selling, you want them to remember your last posting about that great property that your buyer was so happy about. Facebook can greatly increase your web presence. Before the internet we would get new customers through Word of Mouth or referrals. We are still doing the same thing, but with Social Media.

What is RSS?

RSS

Literally, this stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed allows the content from regularly updated websites (like blogs or podcasts) to be aggregated and posted to one website (often called a "reader") or mobile device. Choosing to follow an RSS feed is often referred to as "subscribing" to it. You can also have an RSS feed directly to your Facebook Page! 

You Can't Ignore Twitter Either!

67%

of Twitter users are more likely to buy from the brands they follow. (source: HubSpot)

Bing Taps Facebook Data for Fight With Google

Microsoft is hoping that its alliance with Facebook will get more people to choose Bing over Google.

Starting late Monday, Bing users will see search results that are influenced in part by what their Facebook friends liked or share on the social networking site. While Google has also tried to offer “social” inputs into its search results, Microsoft said that its partnership with Facebook would allow it to go further than its rival.

SEO 101 Tips

Here is a list of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips to keep in mind:

·         You shouldn’t have 100 keywords stuffed into your keyword section of each page of your site. There should be no more than 5-7 keywords in this space strategic to the material on that web page.

·         Your web pages should not have more links than content. This is going to cause a horrible user experience and could even cause a penalty if really abused.

·         Directory submissions can generate nice link power when you are listed in strategic niche directories surrounding your area of business. Purchasing a directory submission package promising 1,000 links is not strategic and oftentimes abused.

·         Article marketing is all about positioning yourself as an expert in your field by writing a few key pieces of literature. This is a great way to help SEO and to become a recognized expert in your field on your Social Media sites.

·         f you are a plumbing company and you are seeking out links on a florist directory you have the concept of one way link building all wrong. It is all about creating targeted one way links from either news or niche sources. Completely irrelevant links such as this could actually hurt your search engine optimization efforts.

·         Yes, content is important but that doesn’t mean that your local dentist practice in Gainesville, GA needs 2,000 pages of content so that you can dominate the search results. This is an old school approach that really doesn’t work.

Like sprockets turning and working together, SEO works well when you have several strategies working together.

Defining Goals

“Defining goals” sounds almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, you’d be surprised at how often businesses fail to pinpoint goals for their social media efforts. The allure of Twitter and Facebook promotions is strong. It’s tempting to look around at the competitive landscape and imitate the actions of others without fully understanding what’s at stake. By defining exactly what you hope to gain from your promotion, you can better design the promotion itself to achieve these goals. Do you want to gain followers or “Likes?” Design your promotion to provide incentives for doing so. Reward your 1,000th follower with a lavish gift bag, free consultation, or complimentary meal. Encourage retweets and shares to further spread the word. Do you want to drive sales on your ecommerce site? Offer small, one-time discounts or free shipping offers to anyone who follows or “Likes” your brand and shares your campaign. Do you want to garner more newsletter subscribers? Give users the chance to sign up to your mailing list when you give them their coupon or promo code. Facebook and Twitter both have enormous potential to spread promotions at viral rates. It’s up to you to craft your campaign to take full advantage of this fact.

Understanding What Your Audience Needs

A core element of social media revolves around conversation. Online conversation follows the same patterns as “offline” conversations — it requires both talking and listening. If brands are always talking, they’re not listening, and if they’re not listening, they won’t understand the audience’s needs. By monitoring online conversations about your brand, industry, product or related services, you can strengthen your service offering, product development, customer service and a variety of other core business functions.

Constant Contact is the way to go!

A recent independent study by the Aberdeen Group has found that Constant Contact customers achieve 36% higher open rates, 60% higher click-through rates, and 29% more revenue than customers who use other email service providers. Sprocket Social Media is a Constant Contact Business Partner.

Facebook Photo Tagging & Brand Pages

Today Facebook rolled out a feature that could have big implications for brand pages. Facebook users will now be able to tag brand pages in their photos. This can represent a new avenue for brand pages as users can now associate your brand with their images thus further driving discoverability of your page and generating additional impressions. From a brand perspective it will be interesting to see what strategic changes are made to encourage brand tagging in user photos. It will also be interesting to watch how users respond to more images showing up in their newsfeeds. This is however big news for brands looking to acquire new users as this is a key feature that can now be leveraged on behalf of the brand page. NOTE: Users can tag your brand whether they have LIked it or not.

Fewer calls-to-action see higher engagement

Oreo is employing simple messaging and one-click action on their Facebook page. The eye scans and acts. Once the user posts, there is again a simple, clean action to encourage engagement with the wall. This is similar to the Geico example in which all the brand does is ask for the visitor's ZIP code and pull the user into the quoting funnel. In both cases, there is a big button telling the user what to do, and clicking the button captures a little data and then engages for more. Don’t overwhelm your visitor with asking for too much information or calls-to-action. If you follow this simple rule you will start to see higher engagement with your audience.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Ways to Find People to Follow on Twitter

Click “Who to Follow”: When you log in to Twitter, there’s a link at the top of the page that says “Who to Follow.” Twitter gives suggestions based on those you currently follow, as well as way to import your contact list(s) to see if any of them have Twitter accounts. If you’re new to Twitter, the latter option is a great way to build a list of people to follow right out of the gate.

Raise Your Marketing Results Through the Roof!

Video is a fresh, dynamic, and increasingly essential way for you to reach your customers.

• Visitors who view online product videos are 95% likelier to buy than visitors who do not view the videos.
(Internet Retailer, April 2010)
• Video increases the likelihood of a front-page Google search result by 53x with proper page optimization.
(Forrester, January 2010)
• A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research.
(Forrester, January 2009)

Is your business taking advantage of video on your Facebook page, Blog, YouTube channel or Web Site?

Oh, social media is not right for my business!

How do you know? Have you taken the time to really explore the space to see what is going on? What if it is quiet and all of a sudden one day a potential client or customer does happen to search for what you offer? Are you willing to not be visible? The reality of social media is that it is right for every business. It truly does not matter how obscure or niche your product or service might be, there is an audience in the social space for you, you just have to draw them out of the woodwork. Look at it like a giant networking event; you just don’t know who or what you will bump into.

Social Media Marketing is just a fad!

False! The reality is that everything in life is a fad and some fads just last longer than others. Stonewashed jeans were a fad, big puffy hair was a fad…social media is an era. If social media lasts 10 years are you going to say “I told you so” or are you going to regret that you missed out on a potentially large business building effort for the last ten years? Don’t let denial get the best of you because social media is an entirely new communication effort. Much like the newspaper and the magazine, social media is aimed at bringing a new method of communication into the business game. Kicking it to the curb because you think that it won’t last long is not really an option.

Two important points to remember about Facebook Search:

It is impossible to predict: you never know what your friends or just

random users will see for any given search query. Facebook search is

likely to heavily rely on connections: how “close” the user is to each

page  - how many of their friends Like it or even how many Friends of

Friends Like it.

 It relies on exact match: Change your search term just a bit to see

completely different search results: for example, [blogging] versus

[bloggers]

Facebook Search

What it does: Facebook internal search helps users find content; Google and Bing also rank Facebook Pages. Why it  matters: Pages that are well defined and optimized will get higher rankings both within Facebook and on the major search engines. Sprocket Social Media uses Facebook page applications to enhance and SEO the site.