7 Step Marketing - Social Media Marketing Strategies for Business

7 Step Marketing - Social Media Marketing Strategies for Business

7 Great Ways to Network on Twitter Effectively

Whether you want to grow your business or connect with people to land a job, Twitter is a great site that every professional should be using. However, it should never be used just to push you. Remember that “people buy from people” so take time to enhance the Twitter experience of other users and engage with them through conversation.

Here are seven great ways to use Twitter effectively.

1.     Account for Your Actions

One mistake people make when using social networking sites is to share opinions that should be kept to themselves. Use Twitter to connect with others without Tweeting about difficult topics, such as politics. What you say on Twitter should be something you’re not afraid to say anywhere else. Of course, Twitter can also be a place to explain your actions. For example, if your business got into the news for something less savoury, use a Tweet to apologize or explain what went wrong.

2.     Make it Clear What You Want to Talk About

A Tweet shouldn't be a short grouping of words and Hashtags  Your post should be meaningful and capture the attention of readers. A Tweet should never make readers question what the post is about. Think before you Tweet. Does your post make sense to you without further explanation? Consider what users who know nothing about your business would get from the Tweet. If it wouldn't  make sense, you need to tweak your Tweet.

3.     Retweet With a Purpose

People make the mistake of simply retweeting others posts simply because the person shared one their tweets. Instead, you only want to retweet posts that will be of interest to your followers. For example, if you own a business that deals in books, retweet posts about books, reading devices, and other book-related material. Retweeting is a great way to gain more followers and easily share information that is related to your field.

4.     Go the Extra Mile- Show People You Care

It’s important that you show how grateful you are to those that connect with you and retweet your posts. Take the time to send a direct message that isn’t automatic. Automatic direct messages seem impersonal and are a bit annoying. Another great tip is to give a shout-out to new followers by tagging them in a post.

5.     Engage Conversation

Comment on Tweets that interest you and ask questions through your Twitter account. This will cause more people to pay attention to your Tweets and be interested in what you’re going to Tweet next. Twitter should never be a one-sided conversation in which you simply share your links. A great tip is to start conversations about news articles that are related to your business. Ask followers what they think about the story and reply to their comments.

6.     Introduce People- Be a Connector

If you know others that are in the same career field, introduce them to your followers. Tag these people in Tweets and say something about them. For example, let’s say you have an interior design website and have connected with a number of designers. Let your followers know about their work by connecting them.

7.     Be Friendly and Approachable

Don’t be too stiff when using Twitter. Let your personality shine through so that you appear friendly and approachable. This will encourage more people to follow you. For example, share a clean joke every now and then, share a link to your favourite music video, or talk about the book you just read. You want to be seen as a real person, rather than monotonously sharing links. People want to know that the people they do business with are more than just business-oriented. People want to deal with the real you.

If you want to network with professionals in your field and those that would find your services useful, you need to use Twitter and do so professionally. Consider how you can get the most out of Twitter, while also improving the Twitter experience for others.

What can you share that they will find interesting? Who should you connect so that other users have more followers?

If you’re using Twitter for the sole purpose of sharing links for your own benefit, you’re not using the platform properly. Take the time to enhance your Twitter experience and the experience of others.

7 Steps for an Effective Weekly Social Media Marketing Schedule

Here’s a 7 step social media marketing schedule I follow. It’s not definitive but I have found it to be effective and would welcome your views and thoughts.  Hopefully this may stimulate ideas to help you create your own schedule that will meet yours and your social communities’ needs.

1          Twice a day

• Check your Twitter feed. Reply when required and check the keywords you are listening for. Join a conversation or two.
• Check your LinkedIn profile and visit some of the Groups you are in. Engage with your LinkedIn network in some way twice a day, every day.
• Check your Facebook Page company page. Post something of value or respond to comments.
• Check your Google+ page and company page. Post something of value or respond to comments.
• Check your Google Alerts for information on your competitors, mentions of your own brand and articles you feel are worth sharing with your community.

2          Once a week

• Work on your Twitter and Facebook lists as well as your Google+ circles to be better organised to send targeted marketing messages when appropriate.
• Spend some time with LinkedIn discussions in the Groups you belong to. Respond to some relevant posts and start a few discussions.
• Schedule tweets and status updates for the next week so you are consistently providing your connections with valuable information.
• Spend some time building relationships with other influencers.
• Keep up to date on new products and social tools that will increase your efficiency and reach.

3          Monday

Schedule your tweets and status updates to your social profiles.  Provide meaningful content in addition to the content you scheduled in your once a week session. This information may be less generic than the other things you scheduled.

4          Mondays and Wednesdays

Get involved in an industry specific conversation on Twitter.

5          Tuesdays

Respond to blog comments on your blog and leave a comment or two on another blog. Remember what I said about building trust and credibility!

6          Thursdays

Respond to comments within your Facebook and Google+ posts and updates

7          Fridays

Check on the things you’ve been listening to. This would also be a good day to take a look at your analytics and analyse your website and blog traffic for the week.

Your schedule could well be very different from this one. Consider your time commitments. Be sure you are leaving time for yourself to do all the important things that are relevant to your business. Make the schedule something you will really do every week. Tweak the schedule along the way but remember that consistency is the key.

Feel free to share some of your own ideas below!

7 Steps to Creating a Twitter Profile That Drives Results

When you first set up a Twitter account, you have a number of options for your profile. What goes into your profile is of vital importance, because it’s your public face on Twitter – but this is where lots of people make mistakes. Let’s look at the elements of your profile in turn.

1. Your name

On signing up, you’ll be asked to include your name, Use your real name here, for two reasons. I'm generally a big fan of using real identities over brand names at every opportunity:
A real name sets the right tone for making positive personal connections. You want your real name because Twitter profile pages rank highly in search engine results but that will only work if your Twitter profile corresponds to your real name.

2. Your Twitter username

Your Twitter username is your Twitter ID or “Handle”– it’s what you’ll quote any time you want to tell others where they can find you on Twitter, and it will also form your Twitter profile’s unique URL For all these reasons, your choice of username is a key decision.
You want one that’s closely associated with you and your business, and preferably memorable.
If your real name is still available, use it and shorter is generally better – short usernames are easier for everybody to remember and type.

3. Your profile image – the do's and don’ts

Profile image is one area where many, many Twitter users are making what is almost always a huge mistake.
Twitter is a social network; that means individual people interacting with other individual people. I DON’T therefore recommend using any of the following for your Twitter profile image…

Profile image DON’Ts:

The egg; The egg is the default image provided by Twitter. it fairly screams out either ‘neglected account’ or ‘this person doesn’t know what they’re doing’, and even indicates a certain carelessness,

Company logo; Impersonal and does nothing to increase personal recognition of the individual ‘Twitterer’. I know some people will take issue with that, but, as always, people buy from people, not faceless corporations, so for all but the largest, most well-established organisations, I think using a logo is usually a mistake.

Animated graphic; Just annoying!

A full body shot; You know the sort – maybe a holiday snap of you at a famous landmark. It looks fine on your laptop or even Smartphone in full size, but reduced down to about 1cm squared (the actual size most people will see it at) it’s just another incomprehensible image and recognition is impossible.

A vaguely suggestive picture of an attractive young man or woman; Nothing says ‘Twitter spammer’ more obviously than a profile picture of a scantily clad young woman.

A head shot, but with effects added; It’s very easy, with software like Instagram, to add cool effects to photos now. That’s fun, but don’t do it here. Keep it nice, clean and clear.

Profile image DO's:

Be recognisable; One of your goals on Twitter – as with any social network – should be for people to recognise and get to know your face, so if they saw you in real life they’d recognise you.

Use a good close up shot of your face;

 Use the same photo on all your social profiles; If the goal is to be recognisable, it follows that it’s a good idea to use the exact same photo on all social networks where you have a presence.

Consider getting a professional shot taken; It may be worth spending a small amount of money to get some professional head shots done; these have applications beyond Twitter and social sites too – your website and any press kits being the most obvious examples.

4. Location

Twitter is an international environment so I recommend specifying your town/city and country here. Providing this information allows people to get a better picture of where you are and start developing some trust towards you.

5. Your Bio

Your bio is arguably the most important part of your whole Twitter profile, because:

a)      It’s what you will be judged on by potential followers;
b)      You will sometimes be found on the basis of your bio by searchers looking for interesting people;
c)       As we shall see, your Twitter Bio plays a key role in determining whether people visit your website as a result of your activity on Twitter. Lots of people don’t make the most of this opportunity.

You have just 160 characters for your bio, so use them wisely. In particular:

Make it obvious what it is you do;
Include your keywords 
Include a ‘call to action’ (tell readers what you want them to do next).
This is all key, because your bio, along with your photo, is what is sent to people in an email each time you follow someone new, 
 At the time of writing, my current bio is as follows:

"Providing effective training & support tools for business owners wanting to gain more qualified sales leads. Follow me & visit my website to find how!"

I have chosen this because:

• It’s clear.
• It includes one of my keywords (“qualified sales leads”).
• There’s a call to action both to follow me on Twitter (“Follow me”) and to go to my website (“to find out how”).

6. Website URL

The website URL you associate with your Twitter account is a huge opportunity because it’s the natural thing for interested parties to click on when you connect, interact or post an interesting tweet.

7. Background image

It’s worth getting your own custom background and having at least one or two calls to action on the left hand side of the background (the natural place for it). These won’t be click-able but many will type them in.

For a more in depth look at how to create a profile that will drive results why not click here to attend one of my workshops! You will also learn the other 6 steps to building an effective Twitter marketing strategy to attract more customers for your business.

Guy Outram

7 Tips to Encourage Retweets – Please RT

Retweeting is easy – all it takes is one click. So why isn’t everybody retweeting your tweet?

Getting others to retweet you isn’t just luck. You need to encourage others to do so, but how? Here are 7 tips to help you out:

Keep them short
Don’t think of Twitter’s 140 character limit as a target. Your target, instead, should be around 100 to 120 characters – this gives others between 20 to 40 characters for their own commentary as well as “RT @YourName” too.

Use #hashtags
Hashtags identify your tweets with specific topics, so others who are searching for those topics can find your tweets. Hashtags are especially useful for events, when a lot of people who might not be following you want to follow that event closely.

Watch your timing
The timing will vary depending on your audience, but for the most part, you’re more likely to get a retweet before 7:00 in the evening. Even the day of the week matters, with retweets spiking during the weekends. Do some experimenting, and try to find out when your followers are in a sharing mood.

Give them a nudge
It doesn’t hurt to ask for a retweet as long as you don’t overdo it. Add “please retweet” or something similar in some of your tweets – you’d be surprised at how many people oblige.

Don’t be too pushy

Don’t keep linking to a sales pitch - Share things that you think your followers will find useful.

Lead by example
Retweeting others says a couple of things about you: that you’re not a bot or spammer and that you’re not focused entirely on yourself. Retweeting also helps you build goodwill with others and increases the chances that they’ll follow and retweet you.

Don’t forget your content
As I’ve already said; tweet about things you think your followers will find useful. Whatever media you use, content is still king.

7 ways LinkedIn can help you develop local business

No matter what size of organisation we work for, a local market is going to be important to us. Our individual versions of “local” will vary of course – it may be a town, a county or even a whole country, but it is our home market and one that needs to be considered. For many smaller organisations, it can often be their only market or, at the very least, the mainstay of their business and hence a key area to nurture and develop.

With LinkedIn, perhaps more so than any of the other major social networks whose scope are after all global in nature, we have the chance to tap directly into our local marketplace, so it’s important to make sure we know how to use the tools at our disposal to do just that. Making ourselves visible and easy to refer is one half of the equation; the other is to use the facilities on LinkedIn to proactively identify, approach and market to this key group of people.

Here are 7 ways in which we can use LinkedIn to do just that:

1. Find new prospects and clients

If you are looking to identify new opportunities or clients in your local area, and let’s face it who isn’t, then LinkedIn’s search facility is a perfect way to achieve that. Using the advanced search, you can focus in on the geographic area you are interested in and then drill down to find individuals working for a specific company or in a certain role or within a certain industry. Having identified them, then it’s up to you how you wish to make contact and start to talk to them – perhaps directly is most appropriate or alternatively using a more gradual “getting to know” approach that LinkedIn can help so perfectly with.

2. See who’s talking about what locally

LinkedIn Signal – you’ll find it in the News menu item – gives you the ability to tap into what people are talking about within your local area, giving you an insight into both the personalities and subjects. By using an initial search, you can focus specifically on the topics that are of most interest to you and filter them by location, giving a very clear idea of who might be interested in the products, skills or services that you can offer.

3. Approach local businesses through Groups

There are over a million groups now on LinkedIn and there will almost certainly be a number which represent the local marketplace you want to get into, whether that’s a town or a region. Use the Groups Directory to find them and join the ones that look most relevant and active. Check who the main contributors are and then start to participate in the discussions to get your name seen and known – try to avoid selling yourself too strongly though, particularly at the start. Instead, use the messaging facility that is available to contact people directly as well as connecting with them and take a more softly softly approach.

4. Get found by people searching for your skills

More and more people are turning to LinkedIn when they are looking for local suppliers – this “Social Search” is the next natural step in the ever changing ‘business search’ habits which previously has seen Yellow pages type paper directories give way to online search through Google and the like. Make sure that your Personal Profile includes local elements (such as the towns and cities that you cover) so you can be found by people searching for local suppliers using these words rather than using the ‘location’ facility. It’s important to pander to all of the potential search options and in any case, these will be terms that people will spot as they scan your profile.

5. Find key local networkers

Find and connect with people who are potential ‘hubs’ within the local area/community you are looking to deal with. The more closely connected you are to the people looking for you and your services / products, the better placed in the results and the more easily referable you will be. How to find these highly connected local ‘hubs’? Well do an advanced search and specify the postcode you are targeting, choosing the 10 or 25 miles radius – when you get the results, order them by ‘Connections’ instead of ‘Relevance’ and this will give you a list, starting with the most highly connected people in your area.

6. Putting out updates for local marketplace

Along with discussions in Groups, posting Updates which go out to your direct 1st level connections is a very powerful way of getting your message in front of the right people. The key element is the news that you share – make it appropriate and it will also encourage others to share it in turn, thus ”spreading the word”. By using the “attach a link” to highlight a news item on your own site, you can also get your logo in front of them and a link back to your website into the bargain!

7. Get your Company Pages working

For most people, the logical next step after finding you via your personal profile page is to then check out your Company Pages, and perhaps your Products and Services section in particular. They are also searchable in their own right, both on LinkedIn and on the internet in general, so getting them set up properly is a real boost all round. And remember to get recommendations for the products from the local market that you are looking to appeal to – social proof at its best!

So, with those elements in place, you will be well placed to use LinkedIn to help further develop your key local market.