Recently I discovered an expert, Don Crowther, whose specialty is social media and how to make money for your business by using social media marketing.
Two Types of Social Media
First he explained about two types of social media:
Social media that makes you money
Social media that only makes you friends
He continued explaining some of the social media statistics, as well as the different types of social media users and how to attract them.
Keeping a clear division between the social media you use just for friendships and what you do to build business relationships to make money is absolutely critical.
Making money from social media requires a much more strategic approach which he explains very well in his videos. This goes way beyond just setting up a business page in Facebook. This is about what type of content to produce and where to put it. He also covers when and how to ask for money, when and how to give content and when and how to be personal.
Your social media efforts need to add value. Your social media engagement must portray you as an expert in your business and a trusted source of information.
The big lesson I received from watching the video was that the quality of your posts on social media platforms directly relates to the quality of your audience and that will create a following of people more likely to buy from you.
For a powerful social media tool that provides guidelines to identifying your social media marketinggoals and objectives, shares tactics for sharing content on top social media tools, strategies for monitoring and measuring and time estimates, download the free social media strategy template!
Social Media adoption by U.S. small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year. If you are a small businessowner or service professional this is a must read. These are the results from a study that was done by University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business by conducting a telephone survey of 500 small businessowners in December 2009.
How Small Business is using Social Media
Small businesses are increasingly investing in social media applications including blogs, Facebook® and LinkedIn® profiles.
Small businessowner, Dr. Alan Glazier, CEO and founder of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care, was forced to consider alternative options to keep his business visible during the tough economic conditions last year.
He said: “With a very small investment in social media marketing, I was able to generate new business opportunities. Our Google® ranking is consistently number one for many of the phrases people use to search for eye doctors in and around my city and our new visitors to the site have increased. My blog has been picked up by different news sources and led to media interviews. I am now recognized as a thought leader in social networking within my profession and lastly but most importantly, my marketing budget has been reduced by more than 80%.”
Social Media popular sites
Facebook and LinkedIn were the most popular social media sites. In fact, 45% of surveyed respondents even believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.
Another interesting notion is that small business owners now believe social media can help them on the lead generation front, and that is the primary motivating factor for engaging in these new customer service channels. So while half of surveyed respondents found the time it takes to use social media sites more daunting than expected, 61% are still putting in the hours and making active efforts to identify new customers.
Clearly social media has become a valuable tool for small businesses. While we expect more small businesses to use Twitter as a customer service channel in the year ahead, as it stands, Facebook and LinkedIn have become the predominant platforms for small business owners.
Social Media sources and usage
As the graphic below details, the small business owners who are using social media are primarily engaging in social media through company pages (75%) and status updates (69%) on Facebook or LinkedIn. What’s especially intriguing is that a much smaller percentage of respondents — just 16% — are using Twitter.
Conclusion
Social media has become a valuable tool for small businesses. Small business owners mainly use social media to identify and attract new customers. As validated by this Small Business Success Index, social media can be the best friend for small business owners who constantly seek new ways to maximize productivity while keeping costs low.
If you are a small business owner interested in finding out how your business can start using social media marketing, use our Social Media Starter Project kit to become social media active and to maintain your online presence for return on investment within a few months.
About Robert H. Smith School of Business:
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. A detailed copy of the report can be found at www.growsmartbusiness.com
In order to get faster results from an investment in Social Media Marketing you need to measure your Social Networking efforts in terms of Return On Investment (ROI).
Five proven ways to increase your ROI are:
Have a Business Strategy to increase exposure in support of your products and services and to create new business.
Establish presence in your marketplace and reinforce your credibility.
Expand your reach and create buzz for events you’re hosting.
Nurture relationships and create strategic partnerships.
Properly maintain your presence and be an industry leader.
What ROI categories do you use?
Once you have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place in support of your Business Strategy, the following ROI categories can be used to measure return on investment to create branded online community:
Customer Communities:
Increase in customer acquisition
Increase in customer retention
Reduction in customer service costs
Increase in page rank and general site traffic due to additional content on a community
Improved product and service allocation based on real time customer feedback and customer driven innovation
Internal Communities (Employees):
Increase in productivity due to
General knowledge sharing
Identification of subject matter experts to shorten ramp up
Virtual team environments for distributed teams
Increase in employee retention. People like meeting other employees, face to face and virtually. This produces a more enriching work environment.
Decreased hiring costs. It’s easier to hire from within. Finding good candidates through internal social networks can provide even more information (both profile based and content creation based) about internal candidates.
This is an extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.
If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.
The rapid emergence of social networking over the past five years is nothing short of a phenomenon. Social networking and blogs are now more popular than e-mail. “Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience.” According to John Burbank, Nielsen Online’s CEO.
Social Media is part of Web 2.0. With Web 2.0 the potential exists to create an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and business collaborate, communicate and share. It is viral by nature.
A growing number of news publishers have adapted their strategies from simply having websites to participating in social media through active use of sites like Twitter to drive awareness and conversation around their brands and offerings. CNN and the New York Times have some of the largest following on Twitter. Source: Nielsen Report
According to Michael Stelzner who published the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the people most likely to use Social Media Marketing, are aged between 30 and 39 years. Certainly, for people new to Social Media, there are many questions that come to mind. These questions are asked by Entrepreneurs, Business Owners/Executives of any size company and Service Professionals.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing can be defined as an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. It’s the online conversation among customers, investors, employees, fans and critics. The power is shifting from corporations to individuals and communities.
This is the new model that is part of Web 2.0 where people use the Web’s potential for creating an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and businesses can collaborate and communicate in new and simpler ways.
The Social Media model enables a number of things:
informing
persuading
involving
demonstrating
reminding
Above all, Social Media Marketing is free! All it takes, is a time commitment and using Social Media tools according to a predefined strategy. In this day and age it makes sense to use Social Media to promote your business.
To find answers on the 10 most asked questions, read this special report to understand how marketers are using Social Media to grow and promote their businesses.
Since I discovered social media in 2008, I went on a mission to learn how to use it, what it can do for my business, how to use it to drive traffic, which tools to use to automate it, how to connect with others and so on. As most of you know, social media is a powerful tool for increasing the traffic to your blog, and there are many different social media tips. Here I have selected five of the best tips that have worked for me so far.
1. Befriend power users
Power users are the users that exert the most influence on social media sites. These users regularly submit content that gets popular and they have many people that follow them. Check out the popular content in your niche and see who is submitting them. You’ll often find a select group of people who submit the bulk of the popular content.
Some ways to become friends with these power users are to vote for their stuff, send them interesting links, link to their site if they have one, leave comments on their blogs, interview them. Once you’re developed a relationship with them, you can send them your best material or products and ask them to submit it if they like it.
2. Create more comprehensive content
One of the things I have discovered through my own research is that the typical social media users have a great appetite for learning. For this reason the content that does well in social media is pretty comprehensive and often educational. The content is longer than your average post and it covers a subject with depth.
Therefore, it is worthwhile to creating longer posts filled with much value as you will do better on social media sites as a result. Now each of your blog posts doesn’t have to be 1,500 words, but try to regularly publish longer, in-depth posts that stand out and add value.
3. Add images and video to your best content
Another thing that works well, is adding multimedia to content. This is another thing I noticed about viral content. Much of this content is highlighted by images and video. It only takes a little bit of time to go to flickr.com and google images to find relevant images that will improve your content.
Video seems to be the next big thing in blogging. More and more people are making web video a part of their routine. Therefore, if you have any video skills, use them! Also, the cost and learning barrier for producing videos has come down with discount equipment, software, and training courses. I’m definitely planning to add video to my sites soon to test how well it works.
4. Try niche social media sites
Instead of just focusing on the big general subject sites like Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot of opportunity in niche social media sites. Here’s a great list of niche type of sites. These sites won’t send as much traffic as the big general subject social sites, but the quality of their traffic is often much higher. You’ll get a higher percentage of repeat visitors, a lower bounce rate, and more time spent on your site because of the more targeted traffic.
5. Use social media widgets at the end of each post
Widgets are a great way to encourage your visitors to submit your content to social media sites. Visitors may like a post but without the prompting of a submission button, they won’t think to submit your content. I use ‘Share This’ at the end of each post to encourage readers to share content.
PS: Please feel free to add your own tips to this list as the whole point of social networking is to share, participate and learn from one another!
For the Top 10 questions that will answer how and why Social Media marketing will grow your business, read this FREE REPORT.
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