18. QUESTIONS? Suzanne Hull Contemporary Business Solutions [email_address] Twitter: @contempbusiness
Editor's Notes
Talk about my business and what I do. I put together this workshop series because this is the process I went through for my business and I wanted to share it with other small business owners. I do no paid marketing or advertising for my business – while there is a place for both traditional marketing and social media marketing, I really want to educate small business owners on this free marketing resource if the cost of traditional marketing is going to break your bank. Housekeeping – do you have all the handouts? The URLs I’ll be referring to are listed in your resource guide. If I missed one, just let me know and I’ll email it to you. Extension cords and power strips in the back. Bathrooms are around the corner…If you need to go, GO! Short introductions through the room – 15 second, name, business and why you’re here. I want this hour to be a conversation more than a dialogue – I find that the groups I interact with get more from the discussion this way.
I like to show this slide because it is a great visual that brings everything together. Those who you engage with via social media need a place to “land” which is your website. The reason you want people coming to your website is because that’s where you’re going to house your content. You use the social media platforms to drive traffic to your website and to the other social media platforms. For example, your customers might not be aware of your business blog, but you can use Twitter to find your readers and drive them to your blog by mentioning a post you just wrote. Does this make sense?
When determining where to begin with Twitter, you need to figure out a STRATEGY (a game plan). How does Twitter fit into your overall social media marketing strategy? What are the outcomes you want to measure? Is it more phone calls? More traffic through your door – to your website? Are you trying to reach a certain demographic? TOOLS – The tool that we’re going to use is Twitter. CURRICULUM – You’re here because you want to learn about Twitter or learn more about Twitter as it pertains to your business. I personally do a LOT of reading – blogs, white papers – and I have social media mentors who have been great guides…I’ve also gone to a lot of workshops and presentations. And I continue to do all of this…this is a continuously changing landscape, so continuing education is a MUST. TACTICS – How are you going to implement what you’ve learned here to achieve your desired outcome? How are you going to use Twitter to drive your overall strategy? An example of one tactic:: After you start blogging, use Twitter Search to locate those interested in what you have to say. METRICS – How are you going to know whether you’ve been successful or not? Based upon your strategy, you need to measure progress. Whether that’s Google Analytics, the Twitalyzer – if we Google ourselves, are we showing up higher in the search results…what are we going to use to measure success or failure? Doug Mitchell at CreateWOWMedia created a pretty amazing case study on how his group has helped Boesen the Florist through social media. The URL to download the report is listed on the resource page.
people choose to view your updates by searching for specific keywords or by following your account. This means that if you are compelling to people on Twitter, they’ll choose to view your updates. The reverse is also true—people may choose to un-follow you just as easily. So making your posts on Twitter interesting is key, but what are you going to post about? That depends on your goals. Do you want to build deeper relationships? Get on the radar of potential new customers or partners? Or do you want to provide more responsive and immediate customer service? You can meet several communication goals simultaneously by thinking about your Twitter account as a friendly information booth or coffee bar. It’s a place for people to ask you spontaneous questions of all kinds—a spot to share intriguing company insights they might find interesting. When you hit stride with these exchanges, they often lead to unexpected, valuable relationships. To get a sense of what Twitter can do for your business, spend a little time listening in on the conversations happening right now (you can use Twitter search whether or not you have an account). Listening will help you quickly learn what people are saying about your company, and it will also give you a feel for the flow of conversations on Twitter. In addition, it can give you insight into how other companies handle Twitter exchanges
Complete your bio with as much information as possible – as comfortable as you feel Listen regularly for comments about your company, brand and products—and be prepared to address concerns, offer customer service or thank people for praise. Tip: In addition to keeping an eye on your @messages, you can use Twitter’s Saved Searches feature to easily track mentions of your product, brand, company, etc. From your Twitter home page, simply run a search, and then at the top of your results page, click “Save this search.” A link with your search term will appear on the right side of your page, and whenever you click it, you’ll get real-time results for that query. To delete a search, just head to the top of your results and click “Remove this search.” Use a casual, friendly tone in your messages. 70% sharing messages, 20% chatting, 10% promotional While you shouldn’t feel compelled to follow everyone who follows you, do respond to some questions or comments addressed to you. If you like a particular message, retweet it. People often appreciate the sharing and amplification of their ideas, so look to retweet cool stuff. Post links to articles and sites you think folks would find interesting—even if they’re not your sites or about your company
Posting duplicate updates to an account: Posting the same update over and over throughout the day is considered spammy and a possible violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Cross-posting duplicate updates to multiple accounts: If you post the same update to multiple accounts, you could violate Twitter’s terms of service. Following churn: Following and unfollowing the same people repeatedly, as well as following and unfollowing those who don't follow back, are both violations of our terms of service. Tip: Think you’ve encountered a spammer? Let Twitter know, and they’ll look into the account. You can alert Twitter to spam profiles by sending a direct message to @spam! In addition, you can block the spammer by heading to their account page, and on the right side, clicking the block link (they won’t know you’ve blocked them).
Reward customer loyalty by running promotions and contests via Twitter Promote in-store sales events and/or workshops and offer a discount to those who mention that they follow you on Twitter for example Keep customers in the loop – Great Harvest Bread Company – They should be tweeting out when a new flavor of bread comes out of the oven… Find potential customers – www.search.twitter.com – Chiropractor searches on “neck pain” in a geographic area Let customers contribute. Collect video testimonials from your customers – Upload them to your YouTube Channel and share them on Facebook and your website. I did this at the Natural Living Expo for vendors and attendees and we are using it in our marketing campaign for 2011’s Expo.
before you get involved in any social media platforms, you need to LISTEN to what’s going on and the conversations that are taking place. If you’re at a social event and you’d like to join in on a conversation, do you go up to the group and immediately start talking to them, or do you take a few minutes to listen to the conversation and then add your two cents? This same rule applies across all social media platforms. Take 15 minutes a day to listen to the conversations that you’re interested in joining. Step #1: Set up listening posts. Use Google Alerts to track your business name and have it send an e-mail to you every time it is mentioned. Every time your keywords are mentioned on most websites INCLUDING Twitter and Facebook, you are notified via email. This is invaluable because there is no way that you can be monitoring every website all the time. Funnel all of the listening posts into a central repository, GoogleReader, so you can monitor the results. You can subscribe to RSS feeds in your Google Reader. RSS, or Real Simple Syndicate is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works, such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video – in a standardized format. What it does, is it strips away the pictures and additional information that makes the webpage look pretty and just delivers the text/video to your Google Reader. What’s great is that once you subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed, for instance, you never have to go back to the blog…unless you want to comment. Every time the author creates a new blog post you know about it because it is automatically delivered to your Google Reader. Step #2: Monitor what is going on. Use your central repository to read everything said about your industry, your community and key areas of interest. Try to make this a DAILY activity to make sure you don’t fall too far behind or miss something that is time sensitive.
Sharing also applies to Twitter. Retweet someone’s message or link. This not only demonstrates what your business’ interests are, it shows that person whose message you just retweeted that you’re listening to them and are interested in engaging in their conversation.
If you are new to social media in general, I don’t suggest that you get started in all of these platforms at once. The first two I think most small business owners should get started with are blogging and Twitter. Again, as this is new, just start with one blog post a week. As you become more comfortable, consider adding another platform and make sure you drive traffic amongst them. You need to be visible to your consumer wherever they are. Go to them, don’t make them come to you. Some people are on Facebook, NOT Twitter, connect with them there… I hear from a lot of people that they feel that social media is a time suck and that they don’t have enough time for it – it’s a time suck if you have no strategy or measurable results. There are various tools you can use to create and manage content to save a LOT of time. Talk about TweetDeck. Social media marketing is one of those things where you get out of it what you put into it.
I know this is a lot to take in. Please make good use of the resource guide I’ve give you, my contact information is on the bottom. If there’s a workshop that you’d like to come to, but you have a conflict, based on demand for this series, I’ll put together another series for the fall. I encourage you to sign up for my newsletter which is where I’ll be announcing the dates for those. I also keep office hours to answer questions about starting your business and social media marketing and anything else that’s on people’s mind. Sign up for my newsletter which is where I’ll announce the dates/times.
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