Social Networking Small Business1043
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A guide to understanding how to utilize social networks to promote a small business
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Social Networking Small Business1043
- 1. How you can harness the power of social media to infuse local interest in your business Jill Dudley Business Development and Marketing Specialist Visionworks Marketing & Communications Market Smart.
- 7. Use your blog to run ideas past loyal readers before you launch them Use social media to recruit a team of beta testers Use social media to ask direct questions Market Smart.
- 10. Market Smart.
- 18. Market Smart. Connect with Visionworks to learn how you can continually adapt your marketing to improve your bottom line. visionworksmc www.visionworks.com Visionworks Marketing & Communications www.linkedin.com/in/jilldudley Visionworks Marketing & Communications
Editor's Notes
- Blogs hold tremendous power that every small business needs to utilize. Blogs bring traffic Yes, people still read blogs. You're reading one right now, so there is no reason to think someone won't want read yours. It's just a matter of having something valuable to say. There are two primary ways people will come to read your blog. The first is via search engines. If you're writing about your business's topic, you need to be sure you're doing keyword research. Find out what people are searching for that's related to your industry. Then use those keywords in your blog posts. The more you write using keyword phrases the more opportunity you'll have to bring in targeted traffic to your blog via search engines. The second way people read your blog is through RSS readers. These are people who already found your blog, like your content and want to make sure they don't miss a thing. Each blog post is imported into their feed reader which shows them all the new posts from your blog as well as other blogs they are subscribed to. From the RSS feed you can drive these readers into your site, whether it be your blog or your main business content areas. Blogs promote your knowledge Blog posts are a great way to share your knowledge. In any industry those that are viewed as the most knowledgeable tend to be the most trusted. Whether you are in a competitive field or a shallow one, you can make yourself--and your business--stand out by promoting your in depth knowledge of your topic. Sharing little known tips, tricks, strategies, helpful tidbits, detailed instructions and tutorials all lend to your own credibility. Put enough of those together and you have your own e-book, or a library of e-books . Blogs help people Not an egomaniac? Fine, don't think about blogging as a way to promote yourself or your knowledge. Just think of it as a way to help people. Because while you're promoting your knowledge you're also giving people valuable information that helps them in life, business or whatever. Your tips and tutorials are providing valuable information to people who otherwise may not have known. You are making people's lives better by giving them an education. Blogs build links The more helpful your blog posts are the more likely they'll be passed on or linked to. Twitter is great for passing around URLs. One good blog post can get a lot of distance through the social media platforms. As your resources get noticed you'll start to build links. People will link to you in their blogs or websites or pass your information on via Facebook or twitter to other who may link to it. You'll find your posts accessible from industry related websites and sometimes even direct competitors. People love sharing information and on the web, information is shared with links. Blogs create customer and brand loyalty The more you blog, and the more helpful your blog is, the more customer and brand loyalty you'll be creating. Not every blog post is designed to get customers, nor should it be. But the more people who come to read your valuable information, the more likely they'll be to become your customers when they need what you have. But until your readers become your customers, you're building up your brand. Brand recognition is extremely important as it plays toward perceptions... which are also passed along. Brand loyalty builds word of mouth, which in turn, builds more customers Blogs increase sales Building customers means one thing... you are increasing sales. Yes, your blog will have a lower conversion rate than your main areas of the site, but again, it's primary function isn't to directly build sales. But in the long run, that's exactly what will happen. The more links you get, and the more your blog posts are passed around and/or read, the larger your reach becomes. As your reach grows, your sales grow. There is no doubt that blogs are a lot of work. It takes time to decide what to write and then put your information together in a compelling way. In my next post I'll discuss ways that the small business can manage it's blogging schedule in order to maintain a healthy blog while not ignoring their business. If you haven't started blogging for your business you need to start. If fact, if you're not blogging or twittering I'd say start twittering and work your way to blogging. If you are blogging, start twittering and promote your blog! But you need to get to blogging. A blog can be set up in a matter of hours and ready for your first blog post. Start building your audience today.
- Discoverable – Marketing content is consumed on our time and with our permission. We go looking for it when we want it, and we expect to find it. Whether it be discovered as a blog post via Google search, a video via YouTube or through an archive of indexed Tweets — we want the content we are looking for, when we are looking for it. This means the best kinds of marketing content need to be crawlable by Google (and the others), properly tagged, and optimized for search engines. Interactive – The web is now truly multi-dimensional. Marketing content that allows no interaction, falls flat. We want to tell you what we think about your products, services, articles, videos, audio, etc. It gives us the ability to steer the conversation — and we like that. This means your content should allow ratings, comments or other forms of feedback. Shareable – We expect that your marketing content will be shareable. If we like it we want to pass it around to our network so that they can interact with it. This is how we connect with each other online, by sharing content. This means your content should be capable of easily sharing through the major social networking sites as well as any niche sites your market is using. Appropriate forms of content should be embeddable as well on other web properties.
- Certainly today, all of these tools and mediums can be made to be discoverable, interactive and shareable — but I wanted to point out that each tool and (in some cases medium) has inherent strengths and weaknesses in this model. For instance, a static web page on a site can be shareable but it is certainly not a strength of a static page. A Facebook profile update is very shareable. However, that Facebook profile update is not inherently discoverable by search engines — creating a weakness for that tool.
- The Internet has made this a viable strategy because the ability to publish content and broadcast it is FREE using the many tools we have available to us.
- Blogs hold tremendous power that every small business needs to utilize. Blogs bring traffic Yes, people still read blogs. You're reading one right now, so there is no reason to think someone won't want read yours. It's just a matter of having something valuable to say. There are two primary ways people will come to read your blog. The first is via search engines. If you're writing about your business's topic, you need to be sure you're doing keyword research. Find out what people are searching for that's related to your industry. Then use those keywords in your blog posts. The more you write using keyword phrases the more opportunity you'll have to bring in targeted traffic to your blog via search engines. The second way people read your blog is through RSS readers. These are people who already found your blog, like your content and want to make sure they don't miss a thing. Each blog post is imported into their feed reader which shows them all the new posts from your blog as well as other blogs they are subscribed to. From the RSS feed you can drive these readers into your site, whether it be your blog or your main business content areas. Blogs promote your knowledge Blog posts are a great way to share your knowledge. In any industry those that are viewed as the most knowledgeable tend to be the most trusted. Whether you are in a competitive field or a shallow one, you can make yourself--and your business--stand out by promoting your in depth knowledge of your topic. Sharing little known tips, tricks, strategies, helpful tidbits, detailed instructions and tutorials all lend to your own credibility. Put enough of those together and you have your own e-book, or a library of e-books . Blogs help people Not an egomaniac? Fine, don't think about blogging as a way to promote yourself or your knowledge. Just think of it as a way to help people. Because while you're promoting your knowledge you're also giving people valuable information that helps them in life, business or whatever. Your tips and tutorials are providing valuable information to people who otherwise may not have known. You are making people's lives better by giving them an education. Blogs build links The more helpful your blog posts are the more likely they'll be passed on or linked to. Twitter is great for passing around URLs. One good blog post can get a lot of distance through the social media platforms. As your resources get noticed you'll start to build links. People will link to you in their blogs or websites or pass your information on via Facebook or twitter to other who may link to it. You'll find your posts accessible from industry related websites and sometimes even direct competitors. People love sharing information and on the web, information is shared with links. Blogs create customer and brand loyalty The more you blog, and the more helpful your blog is, the more customer and brand loyalty you'll be creating. Not every blog post is designed to get customers, nor should it be. But the more people who come to read your valuable information, the more likely they'll be to become your customers when they need what you have. But until your readers become your customers, you're building up your brand. Brand recognition is extremely important as it plays toward perceptions... which are also passed along. Brand loyalty builds word of mouth, which in turn, builds more customers Blogs increase sales Building customers means one thing... you are increasing sales. Yes, your blog will have a lower conversion rate than your main areas of the site, but again, it's primary function isn't to directly build sales. But in the long run, that's exactly what will happen. The more links you get, and the more your blog posts are passed around and/or read, the larger your reach becomes. As your reach grows, your sales grow. There is no doubt that blogs are a lot of work. It takes time to decide what to write and then put your information together in a compelling way. In my next post I'll discuss ways that the small business can manage it's blogging schedule in order to maintain a healthy blog while not ignoring their business. If you haven't started blogging for your business you need to start. If fact, if you're not blogging or twittering I'd say start twittering and work your way to blogging. If you are blogging, start twittering and promote your blog! But you need to get to blogging. A blog can be set up in a matter of hours and ready for your first blog post. Start building your audience today.