A number of businesses are on the fence about implementing social media into their internet marketing strategy, this Soshable article provides those businesses with 10 ways to put social media to work for your business and how to do it successfully. For more internet marketing advice please feel free to contact us!

Source: Soshable

Social media has emerged as the trendy marketing tool of the last few years. More and more, businesses are using it to promote their products in ways that combine the broadcasting potential of television and radio and combine it with the conversational messaging of word-of-mouth marketing. And yet many still have trouble integrating the day-to-day affairs of running a business with the networking in social media.

It sounds odd, but social media is the enigma that works much better in reverse. Unlike other forms of promotions, it’s something that requires constant interaction to be effective. You can shoot a television ad and have it run for months. You can have your site optimized for search and let an SEO firm continue to build links without your own attention paid to it. You can build banner ads, record radio spots, and have print ads built, all of which do not require daily activity.

Social media is the rebel. It must be nurtured. The best way to do so is to combine activities and make it an essential activity on a daily basis. To do so, you must have some structure about what you’re wanting to do and how you want to do it. Checking your Facebook page daily is not enough.

Every day for the next 10, we will be expanding on individual items in the list. First, the overview:

Search for Opportunities

People display their needs and desires publicly on Twitter and Facebook every day. If they’re going to post on their Twitter feed that they “need a new car” and you’re a car dealer, shouldn’t you be paying attention to your local area?

Thank Your Customers By Name

Businesses that cater to a handful of customers a day can thank just about everyone. Those who deal with masses of customers such as restaurants will need to get a little more creative. Either way, you should be doing it and it takes no time at all to do so.

For the full article click here.

Internet marketing is an extremely popular way to promote your business, especially using social media. Some business who don’t have an internet marketing strategy or are new to the social media world struggle to get started. Social media success doesn’t happen over night it is a long term commitment, this article provides a few great tips to help your social media accounts get seen.

Source: HubSpot Blog

I can’t even begin to explain how frustrating it is to be searching for a specific person, business, or brand in social media only to find that they’re impossible to find! If social media is supposed to make it easy for your fans, prospects, and customers to connect with you, shouldn’t it be easy for them to find you there in the first place? And a lot of times, it isn’t because the particular subject doesn’t have social media accounts set up. It’s simply because they’re not promoting the presence they have!

Once you’ve created your social media accounts and optimized your profiles, the next step is to promote them and increase your reach. Don’t miss out on these 5 simple places to promote your presence. It’s as simple as adding social media follow links and buttons, but you’d be surprised how often this low-hanging fruit gets neglected…

5 Places to Promote Your Social Media Presence

1. On Your Blog: Considering it’s such a hub for new activity and fresh content for many websites, your blog is often the first place people will look to see if you’re on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Add easy-to-find follow buttons to the sidebar of your blog. If you don’t have a business blog but still maintain a social media presence, consider adding these follow buttons to your homepage instead.

2. On Your “About Us” Page: The “About Us” page on your website is another logical place to promote your presence. Frequently visited by new site visitors and often a destination page for media professionals and bloggers looking for more information about your company, products, and services, your website’s “About Us” page is an obvious choice for the promotion of your social presence.

3. In Your Emails: These days, email and social media should go hand in hand. Include small follow buttons or links in the footer of your email sends to encourage email recipients to connect with you in social media.

For the full article click here.

Facebook, being the most popular social networking site on the Internet, is great for staying in touch with friends and even making new ones. What some people don’t know is that Facebook can be great for business as well. Internet marketing becomes more popular daily as more companies, both big and small, have success with it. This Social Media Examiner article provides six habits that if done daily can greatly improve your chances for social media marketing success.

Source: Social Media Examiner

Facebook marketing, when done right, is an extremely powerful tool. It can increase your leads, attract highly targeted prospects and position you as a sought-after industry leader. To reap these business-building benefits, the key is to develop daily habits.

The following list of six daily habits will keep you focused on what really matters when it comes to Facebook marketing: real fan engagement.

#1: Become addicted to solving problems

When you regularly solve problems and answer questions for your fans, you not only foster trust, but you also set yourself up as the go-to expert in your niche.

A surefire way to create engagement on your Facebook page is to regularly offer your expertise and insight. One great example of a master problem-solver is Facebook expert Mari Smith. Mari encourages her fans to ask questions on her Facebook page. Because she is quick to respond with valuable responses, she’s turned many Facebook fans into loyal followers and customers.

But she doesn’t stop there. Mari takes her support a step further by providing a resource center directly on her Facebook page. She continually keeps this resource link up to date and full of valuable information. As you can see in the image below, Mari has set up multiple info tabs including Changes, How To and Rules & Safety, all related to Facebook marketing.

#2: Talk to individual fans daily

I make it a habit to comment on other people’s posts 3-5 times each day. I do this because these comments are the real conversations that build relationships.

Taking a minute to comment on a fan’s vacation photos or adding my two cents to a peer’s recently posted video is my way of letting my fans and peers know that I genuinely am interested in what they are talking about online.

To check out what your fans are posting on their own pages or profiles, first check out which fans are posting on your page. When fans post on your page, you can click on their avatars and you will be taken to either their pages or profiles, depending on how your fans have posted on your page. You can then post on their pages (or if you are also a friend via their profiles, you can post on their profiles as well).

Here are a few tips when commenting on fans’ posts:

• - Use first names. When your fans know you are paying attention to them, they are much more likely to speak up and tell you what’s on their mind. Knowing what your fans are thinking is invaluable!
• - Be yourself. Talk to others in the same style you would talk to a friend over dinner. Before you click send, read your post and make sure it really sounds like you.
• - Be brief. If your post is too long, it will be overlooked easily. To get more people reading your post, get to the point faster.

For the full article, click here.

To learn more about social media marketing solutions or other Internet marketing solutions, visit this Internet marketing company’s website or click here to contact us!

Social media is a relatively new internet marketing tool, it is very different from traditional methods like email marketing. Lots of businesses have shied away from social media, afraid of change or not sure how to use it. Some businesses that are involved don’t know how to implement a functional social media strategy, let alone gauge their social networking success. Luckily, our internet marketing company is here to take care of all of that for you, and our blog is here to share marketing strategies and tips!

Source: Perfect Customer Experience

What does success look like in social media?

Thought leadership? Better SEO? Increased sales? Better customer service? Better customer experience? All of the above?

Nearly every marketing manager, director or VP who is attending my MBA class in International Marketing tells me that increasingly larger percentages of their budgets go to digital over traditional marketing. The primary driver is social media and the urgency to stay on top of what is going on with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the relentless need for content to fuel their corporate blogs. The students in my class are divided on the value of corporate blogs however; some see it as critical for defining thought leadership and others use them purely for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While they are split on this issue, the class is unanimous that the era of digital marketing driven by social media is here and moving very fast.

What does Success Look Like in Social Media?

Just based on my class alone, only one in ten social media programs today is delivering on the goals they were designed for. That’s just 10% of social media programs attaining the goals they were originally funded to achieve. We’ve spent a good two to three hours debating this in class, looking at success stories of BestBuy, Comcast, Southwest Airlines and many others. What I really like about teaching at the MBA level is that you can have these debates in class and everyone gets very engaged, even passionate about their beliefs. It is a great learning experience for everyone to just hear the varying opinions. Based on these discussions and analysis of our own companies, the following ten ideas for improving social media strategy effectiveness emerged.

1. Be original and define key performance indicators that closely capture progress to your awareness, selling and service goals. The most successful social media programs the students had run and we studied were bold and defined their own key performance indicators and metrics of performance. Those managing these programs were not afraid to define their own unique metrics, creating an entirely different approach to defining success.

2. Realize that defining success of social media strategies on popularity and clicks alone, followers and fans is like watching mile markers disappear in your rear view mirror as you speed down a freeway. They are both comforting as they show velocity and distance – they are great measures of progress – but what’s more important is the direction and time to the goal.

3. Give each social media channel you explore a good year of effort to understand prospects’ and customer’ expectations with regard to how and what information is delivered. Personas emerge from each social media application or platform over time; watch for the nuances of differences as they will show how prospects and customers vary in how they choose to get information. Behavior varies widely across social media channels as does participation. Take a good year to track that and understand it, with no expectation of payback. Once insights are gained by personas, making strategies work is much easier.

4. The best content is compelling and evokes strong emotions through stories. This is a major point and a secret that emerges from the analysis our class did of successful social media strategies. The companies charging out of the recession right now appear to have found a way to use stories to change the frame of reference and priorities of potential customers.

5. The best social media marketing campaigns tend to be run by people more on a mission of service than salary. You can definitely see this in the case studies and the inspiring stories from the marketing directors and VPs in my class. Better to hire for passion and find someone who wants to excel at this, and who has social networking innate skills including communicating, collaborating and conflict resolution.

6. Planning for customer complaints by giving front-line social media strategies control over escalation paths and budget to solve customer problems is a win. The companies we reviewed in our case studies that range from BestBuy to JetBlue, Southwest Airlines to Comcast all defined escalation paths for dealing with customer problems. Customers choose which social media channel to learn from, they also choose which to complain through. Anticipating and planning for that, and creating escalation paths as part of a social media plan pays off in responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

For the full article by Louis Columbus, click here.

Since the onset of the social media age, businesses have had to evolve in order to stay relevant and survive. If your business is still using more primitive business methods and clinging to life, it is not too late to convert to more social business methods. The article below that I found on Convince&Convert provides the foundation for evolving your business into a more tech savvy one. If you have any further questions about making your business more internet friendly, our internet marketing company has the answers.

Written by: Michael Brito.

Building a business is easy. Start with an idea. Find a wicked developer who is willing to work 80 hours a week for small paycheck and equity. Spend some time on Sand Hill Road. Hire smart people and then watch your bank account grow.

Building a social business is not so easy. It requires people to actually communicate — processes and governance models that help shape employee behavior online — and technology to facilitate collaboration across the organization.

A social business is built upon three pillars – people, process and technology. All three need to work independent of each other, yet need to be completely integrated into the DNA of organizational culture.

1.Change Management is the foundation of a Social Business

The foundation of a fully collaborative social business, whether for a small or large firm is the company’s most valuable asset, its people. It addresses the need to drive organizational change in an effort to shift employee behavior, communicate more effectively across job functions and geographies and tear down organizational silos.

All the technology, collaboration software and community applications deployed behind the firewall will not be effective unless there is a fundamental shift in the way employees think, interact with one another and communicate. These change management initiatives have to be driven by organizational leadership and practiced at every level in the organization from senior leadership all the way down to a customer support agent. Otherwise, change will not occur. This means that executives must not only talk about changing the organization but exemplify the behaviors that really do facilitate and practice change.

The end result is an increase in trust among all employees at every level; trust of employees and empowering them to engage externally; an increase in budget investments to social business initiatives, collaboration and more effective social organization models.

2. Creating Processes that Create Organizational Consistency

Process cuts right through the entire fabric of the organization. It ensures that every job function in every business unit and within every geography is consistent when performing certain tasks. For example, when a new employee joins a company and wants to start blogging or Tweeting on behalf of the company, a process should be in place that governs training, certification and social media policies.

For the full article click here.

For more tips on how to improve your business’ social media presence and other internet marketing related assistance, please feel free to contact this internet marketing company.