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Jump start your smb using social media
The document provides an overview of how small businesses can use social media. It discusses why social media works for small businesses, how to create a social media strategy by listening first, developing objectives and identifying target audiences. It also provides examples of developing a strategic plan for Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The document emphasizes creating a plan before launching social media efforts and allocating at least 5 hours per week to implementation. It concludes with guidelines for social media use and taking questions.
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Jump start your smb using social media
- 1. Jump Start YourSmall Business Using Social Media
- 2. Our discussion today: • Why social media works for small businesses • How to listen first before launching your campaign • How to create a social media strategy • What elements make up a successful campaign Does your business currently have social media included in your 2013 plan? a. Yes b. Not yet, but planning to c. No plans in 2013
- 3. Presented by • BrendaArndt Social Media Manager - Deluxe Brenda has 12+years in small business and corporate eMarketing. Facebook.com/deluxecorp @deluxecorp
- 4. Social Media –Why the Buzz?
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- 6. Will Social MediaWork For You? • People buy from you for your expertise, social media will help your expertise become more well known.
- 7. How Do YouGet Started? 1. Listen first 2. Create a Strategy and a plan before jumping in 3. Create a profile that helps people verify your legitimacy
- 8. How Do YouGet Started?
- 9. Where Do YouGet Started? • Yelp http:// www.yelp.com/minneapolis • Twitter http://www.twitter.com • Facebook Pages http:// www.facebook.com/pages/ • Blogging • http://wordpress.com/ • http://www.typepad.com/ • YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ • LinkedIn Company Page http://www.linkedin.com/company/ad d/show • Pinterest https://pinterest.com /join/signup/ • Google+ https://plus.google.com/
- 10. Sample Strategic Plan IdentifyObjectives •Restate your objective so that it is “SMART” (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based) •Tie your objectives back to your overall company goals Objective Tie to your overall goals Increase “client” base by 10% in next 6 To make money and to stay in business months, recruit new “clients”, draw traffic to website Keep the local community updated on To increase the number of new “clients” happenings, discounts, events in increase sales by 5% in the next month Understand how “clients” use social media To stay connected with clients and provide and monitor what “clients” are saying about better customer service your company increasing client engagement by 20% year over year
- 11. Create Your Strategy •Identify Audience – Who do you need to reach to meet your objective? Why this target group? – Is this a target group identified in your company’s communications plan? – What key points do you want to make with your audience? – What social media tools are they currently using? – Where do those people live online? – Do you have a built-in community, or do you need to create one?
- 12. Create Your Strategy Turning Strategies into Actions, Find & Follow, Listen & Learn Build A Listening Dashboard If I told you that you could listen in on your customers and prospects? Would you listen? What type of impact do you think a listening platform would have on your business? a. Respond to Reviews d. Brand Monitoring b. Customer Service e. Not sure what a listening c. Reach out to Prospects platform is
- 13. Build A ListeningDashboard 13
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- 17. RSS • RSS (RealSimple Syndication) allows you to subscribe to any website that has one of these in the address bar. You can then track every site you’re subscribed to without having to go to each individual site.
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- 19. Build A ListeningDashboard
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- 23. Current Social MediaInventory • Sample Summary of Existing Online Presence • Facebook • Page established • Lack of consistent activity, maintenance, management • Twitter • No presence • Blog • No presence • Yelp • Listing established • Issues with listing, management at less than 1 hour/week
- 24. Sample Strategic Plan –Facebook • Purpose: To increase recognition, increase social engagement, establish online social network, searchability • Metrics for Success: “Likes”, shares, comments, comments that are referrals
- 25. Sample Strategic Plan –Twitter • Purpose: Increase recognition, increase engagement, stablish network, establish brand, searchability • Metrics for Success: Followers, Retweets, referrals
- 26. Sample Strategic Plan –Blog • Purpose: Increase recognition, increase engagement, searchability • Metrics for Success: Number of posts, audience growth, comments/likes, subscribers, SEO improvements, referrals
- 27. Ideas for Content Testimonials Giving back to your community Events Specials
- 28. Create Your Strategy Whowill implement? – Can you allocate a minimum of five hours per week to your strategy once you've passed the learning curve? – Do you have the most efficient work flow and tasks in place? – Do you need any outside expertise? – Will your work depend on any other resource or person?
- 30. Guidelines • Be transparent and state where you work • Never represent yourself or your organization in a false or misleading way • When disagreeing, keep it appropriate and polite • Behave diplomatically if writing about competition • Never comment on anything related to legal matters • Never participate in social media when the topic being discussed may be considered a crisis situation • Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and your company’s confidential information
- 31. What Do YouTake Away? • Put a plan in place before you jump in • Your blog or website should be the center of your social marketing efforts • Establish a consistent habit of posting, and stick to it • Mix up your content types • Integrate, integrate, integrate • Use calls to action to entice people to stick around • Keep an eye on what people are saying about you and your competitors
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- 33. The author isresponsible
- 34. Questions? Brenda Arndt Social Media Manager, Deluxe Corporation Brenda.Arndt@deluxe.com @deluxecorp Facebook.com/deluxecorp YouTube.com/deluxecorporation linkedin.com/company/deluxe-corporation
Editor's Notes
- #3 Hello and welcome to the Deluxe webinar Jump Start Your Small Business Using Social Media web seminar! I am your host Brenda Arndt and on behalf of Deluxe Corporation, we are truly excited to have you join us for this live event. You may know Deluxe as the check company but we have a whole other side to us that focuses on Small Business Services such as personalized printed products to logo design, web services, and search engine marketing that helps your business get found, we work to deliver the most innovative products and services to help you focus your attention on why you got into business and what your passionate about. To get us started, please take a moment to answer the polling question that you see on the bottom of your screen. Choose your answer, then click the submit button. We’d like of you to think of this as a valuable learning opportunity… A chance to hear about how social media can help your business be successful… Share your ideas via polling questions… Ask questions thoughout… And don’t forget to follow deluxe corp social media for more educational articles and tips in the coming months.
- #5 So, Why all the fuss about Social Media? You have heard you should be there but does it really result in more sales? Consider these facts: Facebook has 845 million active users If Twitter was a country it would be the 12th largest in the world LinkedIn signs up 2 new members every second The average visitor spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube Three million new blogs come online every month 97% of the fans on Pinterest’s Facebook page are women 5 million images are uploaded to Instagram every day The Google +1 button is used 5 billion times every day And, based on the graph here, small businesses are seeing an over 50% increase in sales among other things just through social media!
- #6 So, let's take a look at the social media landscape. There are hundreds of different social media channels, we'll talk about how you can determine which ones might be good for your business. It can seem overwhelming at first but I suggest you start out with only a few and learn to do them well before you expand.
- #7 You got into business for a reason, The most common mistake with social media is thinking your expertise is common knowledge. Just because you know your industry like the back of your hand doesn't mean that everyone does. You can use social media to share your expertise. People already hire you or buy from you because of your expertise, you don’t have to be a celebrity to be relevant on the web. As long as you know your business and share that knowledge, people will hire you for your expertise. You already are someone who has valuable information, is a trusted source and knows how to communicate in a friendly, effective, and possibly even, entertaining manner. Social media and the Internet have leveled the playing field for small business owners, helping them foster closer relationships with clients and identify potential customers. Although small business owners are under much pressure to generate new customers, they should spend time nurturing and maintaining their existing clients as well and social media is the perfect venue for this.
- #8 We hear from a lot of people that they are overwhelmed with where to start. So, how do you get started? Being intentional about how you approach social media and what roll it plays in your overall marketing plan is key. Creating a strategy from which to move forward will help you organize and determine resources necessary to be successful. If someone besides yourself is managing your online communities make sure you empower them to speak about your products and services, arm them with useful information and have a plan in place for escalating an issue. Be aware of privacy and have a policy in place that everyone adheres to. Being personal and transparent is also key, people like to know who they are speaking with. Integrate your social media content. If you write a blog post share it out on your other channels, create a video to accompany it and post it on YouTube, integration is the key. And remember, Facebook is NOT a strategy!
- #9 What social media channels should I be on? This is a tricky question and totally depends on your business. Let’s start by saying that I suggest everyone should have a website with a blog regardless of what you do. It will be the hub of all your articles and activity and house all of the information that you share out on other social networks. As an example, the Deluxe has a small business blog that is the repository for all of our content. Once we have a post in place we can share it out on social media such as our company page on LinkedIn or twitter and Facebook. Once you become somewhat experienced at blogging you can decide what other social media platforms you want to use based on where you see the most conversations for your industry taking place.
- #10 We’ll go into how to find out where you clients are a little later, but I wanted to share with you the links that will help you get started.
- #11 It takes less than 5 minutes to set up a Twitter Account, a little longer for a Facebook Page. It's as easy as 1-2-3. But before you do (even if you’ve done so already) think about what you are trying to achieve with social media? Is it more customers, more exposure, more sales? You need to take some time to answer and reflect on your responses. Write them down as we did in the sample here. Make sure they are SMART, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time based. If you are unsure how to put in place objectives you may want to seek guidance from the right professionals. This is an important step, don't skip it!
- #12 You need to identify your audience by asking yourself these types of questions and then using the listening techniques I’ll go over next to answer some of them.
- #13 Here is where we can answer some of those earlier questions. What social media tools are they currently using? Where do your clients and prospects live online?
- #14 So, we’ll start by building a listening dashboard
- #15 If you don’t already have a google account, now is the time to set one up. You will need it to take advantage of several services that Google provides.
- #16 You will want to determine what keywords you’d like to listen for. As an example, if you are a Pizza shop you might listen for “I love pizza”, “Im hungry for pizza”, pizza coupon, “good place for pizza”, “good place to eat”, or some of your competitors names. I have a number of Google Alerts set up to be delivered to my email daily. Occasionally I set some up to be delivered in real-time. This tool covers the web well, but not social media.
- #17 You can use Google blog search to find industry related blogs that you would like to follow. In this case we used the key words commercial remodel to find relevant and related blogs. You can then subscribe to Blog alerts which will send you a notice when these blogs have new posts.
- #18 recommend setting up a newsfeed that you can peruse on a daily basis. I would include competitors’ blogs, sector blogs, internal blogs, news feeds, and any other online information you want to keep track of. I use Google Reader so I can track it from any other Google platform I have open. I glance at titles and read anything I feel I need to. There are a number of news aggregators out there including Netvibes , NewsGator , Feed Demon and others. Find one you like.
- #19 Google Reader is a feed reader. It allows you to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds.
- #20 You can manage feeds, label them, and even share your feed collection with others.
- #21 With over 2,000 new tweets posted every second, there's a heck of a lot of information to wade through on Twitter, especially if you're looking for something specific. I use Twitters advanced search option when I want to get valuable Twitter search results.
- #23 Social Mention is good for real-time searches. Depending on how strong and precise your search term is, you will get good results. You can see from the dashboard above that there are two ways to search: on social platforms or on the web platforms on the “All” pull-down menu on top. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works well for you. Finally, here are a few reasons why you should monitor your brand online: Discover early warning signs of negative or false information that can trigger a crisis, if left unattended. Identify your key critics and watchdogs; key influencers and advocates. Identify which social media channels best suit your organizational culture, and which ones your stakeholders frequent. Follow your competitors and discover what is engaging and trending in your sector. Uncover ethical blind spots your organization may have. This is just a short list of free tools you can piece together for a good monitoring system. Do you have a monitoring system set up? How does it work?
- #24 Now that you have your listening dashboard in place and have a better understanding of what social media channels you want to be in then, take an inventory of what social media channels where you are currently participating and where you are in the process with each. You will need a home for all of your content to sit, do you have a website or a blog that you can make your central repository? List also the channels that you would like to participate in in the coming year based on what you have learned from listening. This helps you build a road map for your plan.
- #25 Then take a look at each one of the channels and the purpose each will fulfill. Determine how you are going to measure what success looks like. Is it “Likes”, referrals that lead to sales, followers if you are just starting to build the channel following?
- #26 With Twitter you can look at how many followers you have, how many times you are mentioned, like the example here or how many Retweets you receive on a specific tweet.
- #28 So, you may wonder how am I going to come up with that much content? I’ve got a few ideas for you: Offer a peak behind the scenes – photos of your warehouse, pictures of your employee outtings and so on Put your website content to work – write a short paragraph about one of your services and link back to that page on your website Answer the questions clients ask most often – Do a running Q & A Share photos to increase location and product awareness Promote products and events Hold contests Ask followers for new product feedback People become loyal to other people, not brands. If you run a pizza shop you can spend time on Twitter talking about your passion for pizzas and your history with the pizza making. You can talk about your quest for finding the right ingredients and interact with other people who have similar passions. Social media is a fantastic way to break down the barriers of facelessness. By showing your potential customers the people behind the business you are giving yourself a chance to be different from all the other competition. They will become loyal to you.
- #29 Now that you have a plan in place, you will better understand what kinds of resources you’ll need to implement it and keep it current. Do you need to bring someone in from the outside to help? I wouldn’t suggest hiring your nephew for this, hire a reputable company that can show you some solid past results. I know Deluxe offers social media set up and ongoing support among others that are out there.
- #31 Post meaningful, respectful comments Stick to your area of expertise Use common sense and common courtesy Behave diplomatically if writing about competition, have the facts straight and appropriate permissions
- #32 So, what should you take away from all of this? Put a plan in place that enhances what you are already doing for marketing, social media should be just one piece of your overall strategy. Remember, you’ll need a place for your content to sit whether it’s a blog or your website. Use what you find out by listening and monitoring posts to understand what content resonates with your audience. Experiment and mix things up.