Courtesy of mysocialagency.com

#1: Less is Always More With Social

The key to any successful social lead generation strategy is to keep it simple, and balanced. If you own a small business and can only have a quality social presence on Facebook, Twitter and a blog – then that should be your entire profile. Exclude bits you don’t need.

#2: Collect Social Proof

Social media gives business owners the chance to collect social proof, or marketing collateral. Source testimonials, reviews and references from past clients on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your blog. Publish these prominently to build credibility.

#3: Have a Weekly Analytics Strategy

If you aren’t bothering with analytics just yet – do! They can help you fix problems in your social sales funnel. Use your data to figure out where you should focus your efforts, as well as what is and isn’t working – content wise. Only analytics can tell you this!

#4: Focus On Interactive Media

Not getting enough interaction on your pages? It’s because you haven’t given your fans a reason to interact! Create an interactive application, an entertaining video or a fun infographic that can be syndicated online. Give your fans a reason, for max interaction!

#5: Check on Your Final Sales Processes

Most businesses can’t convert leads into revenue, because the final part of their sales funnel doesn’t work. What is yours like? How do you convince people to buy? Do you make your online processes as easy as possible? Can your fans buy from you in one click?

#6: Use Twitter as a Content Sourcing Tool

Whatever happens in the world, happens first on Twitter. Use it as a monitoring tool, to keep you updated on the latest trends in your niche. You’ll be able to write to-the-second posts on something hot, because you heard it first – before the newswires did.

#7: If It Belongs To You, Brand It!

There is a distinct lack of branding on the internet, especially from small businesses. If you create a piece of content, an image, a video – even a comment – brand it! Getting your brand out there will do more for you than you think. Brand recognition is key.

These 7 excellent lead generation tips are just the tip of the iceberg. When was the last time you looked at your business from the perspective of a potential customer? Do that now! You’ll be surprised what you find.

Fill in the gaps, concentrate on making some sites better than others, and you’ll be able to source more leads, and convert them into buyers. After all, what good is your social strategy if it’s not earning you money?

How do you source and capture leads, using your social media tools, sites and strategies? I’d like to hear from you!

Courtesy of thenewjew.files.com

The Art of The Conversation Starter

Properly defined, a conversation starter is simply something interesting that exists in space, or is mentioned in conversation that sparks a discussion. In social media, these discussions are invaluable if you want to build your brand and collect a large community of followers.

There are 4 basic types of conversation starter when dealing with social content.

• #1: The Bait and Hook Starter
• #2: The Response Starter
• #3: The Visual Starter
• #4: The Opinion Starter

People respond to all of these basic types. Let’s explore each below!

#1: The Bait and Hook Starter

Throw out a bit of information, a question, a discussion point – and wait for a bite. Once someone responds, they keep the conversation going by asking questions, adding insights, and purposefully forming a relationship with the other person.

#2: The Response Starter

Does some general search and research into who and what people are talking about. They look for conversations that are already happening, and join them. These conversations can only begin if the person has something new to add to the discussion.

#3: The Visual Starter

Media, images, video, and slideshows have a way of attracting conversation. Create yours and then set it adrift in the cybersea. Wait for insights, questions and comments on your media, and then give back – by beginning a unique and niche based conversation.

#4: The Opinion Starter

A person that uses opinions to form relationships must be very careful when sharing online. Picking up conversations or starting them based on a unique angle, or a controversial opinion is highly effective, but it can also be contentious.

10 Ideas To Get The Conversation Started

• Ask a niche related trivia question
• Post a meaningful quote
• Ask your readers something personal
• Share a video from your Youtube feed
• Share talking points, like graphs, charts and stats
• Share something of a fan’s, like an image, pin, video or post
• Get your readers to contribute captions to an image
• Create some how-to suggestions
• Be inspiring and humorous when you suggest sales
• Direct your fans to evidence that you’re active in your social community

Keeping The Conversation Going

Introductions are easy – it’s keeping the conversation alive that’s fairly difficult. Once you’ve met someone, chat with them for a while. Offer your opinions and insights, and when the conversation nears the end, make sure that you join all of their social networks as well. The fastest way to make a new friend, is to join their network first.

Once you’ve done that, doing the odd retweet, share, comment and like, will keep your dialogue open. From there, you can decide how close you want to become to that individual!

How do you spark conversations on your social pages? Leave me an example!

Courtesy of thesocialworkplace.com

#1: Find Debate Then Engage Your Community

There are always hot debates happening in a specific niche, and you need to find out what yours are. Then use them to engage with your fans. Ethical, moral or theoretical debates can draw people in, and will make them want to join the conversation.

#2: Quiz Your Community of Problem Solvers

Ask your community to solve quiz-like problems, by giving them a real world issue, and asking them to find the solution. This works best if you speak in first person. Jenny only has $200.00 per month to spend on advertising – what should she invest in?

#3: Make Your Questions Vivid By Example

Use vivid examples to illustrate your point, when you’re trying to engage your audience. Don’t be afraid to ask your fans for help, or to admit that you’ve made mistakes. Your fans will sympathize, and offer their advice on what to do next.

#4: Write with Creative Flair

Your fans appreciate a bit of humor or creativity in their favorite brands, so hone in on it. Instead of saying it was ‘cold as ice’ use interesting or funny descriptions to liven up your tone. Being witty means finding unusual ways to describe average things.

#5: Use The Rule of Three in Your Writing

The rule of three involves using structures of three to improve your writing. Use three examples, three bullet points, three anecdotes in an article. People process information in threes, and it makes a powerful statement when you use them.

#6: Be Controversial

If everyone is raving over the new Facebook functionality, post a blog about its faults, or the problems it’s causing in the community. Being controversial is a great way to attract interaction – you’ll get a lot of agreement and a lot of disagreement. Both are wins!

#7: Be Personal, In a Meaningful Way

Be personal with your communities. Add personal stories that enhance what you’re speaking about. But don’t be too personal – it has to be done within reason. Don’t use your pages to complain, rave or behave like you do with your private networks, that won’t work.

#8: Include Other People

Speak to people by name, and comment on their writing, on their pages and in their communities. You have to be a mobile authority, not someone who is only interested in running their own pages. Get others involved, by being involved on their turf.

These 8 great tips will keep your fans engaged and interacting with your content. And don[‘t forget the first rule of writing – be authentic!

Which tip do you find the most useful? Tell us why you think it will work in your niche.

Courtesy of educause.edu

#1: Invite Personal Storytelling

Your fans love to speak about themselves. You can use this to your advantage by encouraging them to share their stories with your community.

#2: Use Images To Prompt Emotion

Images can be a powerful emotional tool. When you publish them, make sure they are interesting or have emotional impact. People like stirring images.

#3: Respond To Their Responses

Listen to the needs of your community members, and respond with empathy, sympathy or enthusiasm. Emotion evokes emotion.

#4: Share Real World Video Content

Share real world videos that connect fans with your life or business. The more you involve them in yours, the more they’ll respond by getting involved.

#5: Connect With Something Real

Are your social posts connected to your real world business activities? To increase engagement, show your fans that you interact with clients in the real world!

#6: Explain With Characterizations

When you tell stories to illustrate your point, use characters that your community will connect with. These characters will make or break any believable storyline.

#7: Add Value, No Really!

Add value to your fan’s lives. If your info, content or incentive doesn’t add something to their day – don’t expect them to be engaged, or interactive.

#8: Extreme Entertainment

If all else fails you can always publish highly entertaining content. This sort of content is usually emotionally engaging because it’s light hearted and amusing.

#9: Genuinely Care

Fans can tell when someone genuinely cares. But the trick is not to pretend to genuinely care, but to actually care so that your fans become engaged.

#10: Get All Kinds of Opinions

Publish other content, images and videos and ask your fans what their opinions are on the subject. Compare and strike up a debate, for max emotional engagement.

#11: Use Your Staff

Some people are better at connecting with others using text. That’s why it’s wise to have a few people posting on your pages to keep them going. Different tones and personalities will strike a chord with different members of your network.

#12: Create People Profiles

Take note of who comments most often, and find out more about your fans. Approach them on their own business page, and prove you’re truly social.

All of these tips will help you engage with your communities. Remember that a lot of exclamation marks and punctuation doesn’t mean you’re being emotional! Work on your writing skills and be natural, and soon you’ll be chatting to everyone on your networks. Lighthearted and engaging always wins the race.

How do you emotionally engage your community? Do you use specific media, or do you have a text method that works? Share your insight with your SMM community here.

Courtesy of flatclassroom10-2.flatclassroomproject.com

#1: Be an Evangelist, Not a Salesman

Sales people sell directly to their communities, evangelists are so passionate about what they do – their customers ask them about their products and services. Make people want to ask you about your niche and focus on likeability.

#2: Be an Information Station

Give freely of your advice, and by freely – I mean ‘free.’ Offer all the help you can to your communities, and be their niche oracle. When it comes time for them to buy, you can bet they’ll want to buy from the person that has been helping them all along.

#3: Be a Real Person

While it’s a standard practice to create an online ‘persona,’ you also need to be a real person. People can sense when you’re being fake, so don’t be afraid to throw in some real world stories, advice and know-how.

#4: Be Approachable

We’re constantly told to have authority and to teach, but sometimes this makes us aloof and unapproachable. You want your communities to feel like they can say anything to you, and that you’ll love whatever they have to say.

#5: Be a Zen Chicken

It’s easy to get defensive when negative comments rear their ugly head, but you need to adopt a ‘zen chicken’ approach to these attacks. Be cool, calm and assertive and address your problems with a friendly, eager-to-assist tone of voice.

#6: Don’t Be a Number Cruncher

Number crunchers are obsessed with getting more community members, which is exactly how they alienate the community members they already have! Let the numbers rise naturally, and concentrate on engagement instead.

#7: Admit When You’re Wrong

Sometimes even the most educated authorities get something terribly wrong. You have 2 choices here – apologize in good humor, or end up looking like a child who has just dropped their ice cream cone. Make the right choice!

#8: Get Your Fans Involved

When you get to know your fans fairly well, you can encourage them to contribute to your communities, with new content. Reward them for the effort, and you will create a whole new stream of user engagement.

#9: Measure Your Content

Delve into the world of testing content, and use your analytics insights to discover what content works best. What makes people respond to your questions? What do they love to talk about? Analytics is an engagement goldmine waiting to be tapped.

#10: Put a Face To The Words

It’s not fair that you can see your fan’s faces, and they can’t see yours. Talking to a logo is not as much fun as talking to a real person. Use your face wherever you can, and populate your sites with personal, business-based photos!

Do you like our list of community management tips? Which one was your favorite and why?

Courtesy of activegarage.com

Behave Like a Friend

Your goal when interacting with your community, is to behave like a friend. What I mean by this is that you need to treat your fans less like objectives, and more like real people, who are in your life for a reason. Friends are always available to help, they’re easy to talk to and quite frankly – you want to hang out with them.

If you can become a friend to your community, then it will go a long way. Friends are more likely to buy from friends, because they want to show their support. Eighty percent of the time, your interaction with your communities needs to be from the standpoint of an educated friend.

The Personal Factor

When you publish content, and assist your community with problems, you need to illustrate your point with stories, drawn from personal experience. Your fans will eventually get to know more about you, because you are actively infusing your content with that ‘personal’ factor.

Some of the best blogs in the world became successful, because the person behind the content approached it from a personal angle. You want to interest your fans in your advice, and advice is better received from a real person, with real experiences.

Be Present and Interactive

Constant presence is important to social communities. It’s vital that you spend as much time as you can with each community, so that it can grow and gain momentum. That said, interaction is equally as important. Follow your fan’s businesses or pages, and be active on them as well.

Continually come up with new ways to engage your audience. A community will only interact with you, if they have a reason to do so. This means interesting content, multimedia and social apps are all part of your long term strategy. They want to DO things on your pages, so give them things to do, and be generous with your time.

Every social community is different, so don’t approach them all in the same manner. Your content will need to change according to the platform you’re using. Focus on your core social media pages, or alternate between them. Get to know your Facebook community better for a few weeks, then switch to your Youtube community, for example. Fans love to know that you are available because you want to be, not strictly because it’s your job and you exist to make money.

If you’ve been struggling to build your social communities, then you need to adopt the ‘giving’ attitude. The more time, effort or free stuff you give away to your communities, the more they will give back to your business. Whether it results in interaction, sales, word of mouth marketing or widespread content sharing, is up to them.

How do you build relationships with people in your social communities? We’d love to hear more about your social strategy, below!

Courtesy of make-noise.com

#1: Address People By Name

Fans like to be acknowledged, so the next time you’re on Facebook, Twitter or your blog – address them personally. Show them you’re interested in their opinions, to get fans that come back for more.

#2: Give Them a Reason

If you’ve been publishing post after post, and have still not managed to get any comments – you need to change it up. Give your fans a reason to reply. The quickest way to do this is via a competition, a free giveaway or a really interesting question.

#3: Pay Attention To Each Comment

Comments are like gold on any social platform. To build a great community you need lots of them, so spend time answering each one to perfection. Most of all, don’t publish spam! Or your posts will scare real commenters away.

#4: Lend a Helping Hand

If a fan asks you a niche question, that doesn’t benefit you in any way – answer it! When you prove that you’re willing to help, people will find you more appealing and will continue to frequent your pages.

#5: Keep it Light and Positive

It should go without saying that negativity is not allowed on your pages. People are attracted to positive posts, so be encouraging, innovative and quirky to get their attention. Too much negativity will send your fans packing.

#6: Get Them Talking

Get your fans to meet each other and talk to each other to become a real community. It’s not just about you and them, it’s about everyone! Start by asking for opinions on other people’s comments.

#7: Go Above and Beyond

Pretend that your community is your online family. If a family member asks you to take a look at their blog – you should do it! Go the extra mile and your fans will do the same for you. You’ll never stop benefiting from it.

#8: Focus on Interaction

You need to be where your fans are interacting – so focus your attention there. Don’t get caught up doing other things, its people that are most important to social community building.

#9: Remember The Little Things

Get to know your community, and surprise them by remembering their birthdays and special occasions. A nice touch is to send them a discount voucher for something in a virtual e-card. It costs you nothing, and means everything to your fan.

#10: Giving To Receive

To keep your community happy you need to consistently give to them. Free stuff, great content, products, discounts, coupons, competitions, chances to win, exclusive sneak peaks – they need to form the basis of your online relationships.

Which tip do you use most often in your social community strategy?

Courtesy of comm2901.wordpress.com

#1: Cross Promotion With Facebook Apps

One of the most notable and successful features on the McDonalds Facebook page, is their ‘The Quest’ app. It serves several purposes and promotes cross promotion across Facebook and Twitter. Fans play a game on their Facebook application, unlocking various product based incentives. Then they are encouraged to share their achievements using a unique Twitter hashtag. Top marks for cross marketing!

#2: Social Game Involvement

Everyone plays Cityville on Facebook, so McDonalds decided to include a virtual restaurant that fans can add to their city. Best of all – it comes with incentives. When you master your virtual McDonalds restaurant, you get rewards and bonuses. This is superb social marketing, integrated with a game fans love to play. McDonalds likes to be where their target demographic is, even in the virtual world.

#3: Personalized Replies on Twitter

McDonalds isn’t your typical faceless corporation, it has a voice on Twitter. With over 189 000 followers, the team managing the McDonalds Twitter page, still has time to reply to individual questions, comments and compliments. Speaking directly to your customers is a great way to ensure that they continue to speak to you. It’s not all about auto-tweets, promotion and scheduled content.

#4: Community Involvement

McDonalds is beginning to include their fan bases in marketing decisions, by running competitions, polls and gathering votes. A great example is their voice of McDonald’s competition. McDonalds employees sing, and the fans vote. Excellent for promotion, and even better for social interaction on the internet.

#5: Video Sharing

McDonalds has dozens of Youtube channels, for individual products, stores or made by fans. Their videos enhance their other social sites, and showcase McDonald’s employees. People are far more likely to interact with a company on Facebook or Twitter, if they promote the actions of real people. They get comments, likes, tweets and more, in excess. Perhaps it’s time to put some faces to your business name?

#6: Widening Their Social Reach

The McDonalds Facebook page also includes a non-English application for the Hispanic population. Clearly a large portion of their demographic, McDonalds felt it necessary to give these fans the chance to engage in their own language. The lesson here is to widen your social reach across language barriers!

Use these 6 tips to inspire some genuine sharing and engagement the next time you’re looking for ways to make your fans happy. McDonald’s is definitely a leader in pioneering the use of social media for sales, community and open engagement. Overall we have to say – we’re lovin’ it!

Which tip did you find the most useful from our McDonalds expose? Leave your favorite below, and tell us why you think it’s the best.

Courtesy of comm2901.wordpress.com

#1: Cross Promotion With Facebook Apps

One of the most notable and successful features on the McDonalds Facebook page, is their ‘The Quest’ app. It serves several purposes and promotes cross promotion across Facebook and Twitter. Fans play a game on their Facebook application, unlocking various product based incentives. Then they are encouraged to share their achievements using a unique Twitter hashtag. Top marks for cross marketing!

#2: Social Game Involvement

Everyone plays Cityville on Facebook, so McDonalds decided to include a virtual restaurant that fans can add to their city. Best of all – it comes with incentives. When you master your virtual McDonalds restaurant, you get rewards and bonuses. This is superb social marketing, integrated with a game fans love to play. McDonalds likes to be where their target demographic is, even in the virtual world.

#3: Personalized Replies on Twitter

McDonalds isn’t your typical faceless corporation, it has a voice on Twitter. With over 189 000 followers, the team managing the McDonalds Twitter page, still has time to reply to individual questions, comments and compliments. Speaking directly to your customers is a great way to ensure that they continue to speak to you. It’s not all about auto-tweets, promotion and scheduled content.

#4: Community Involvement

McDonalds is beginning to include their fan bases in marketing decisions, by running competitions, polls and gathering votes. A great example is their voice of McDonald’s competition. McDonalds employees sing, and the fans vote. Excellent for promotion, and even better for social interaction on the internet.

#5: Video Sharing

McDonalds has dozens of Youtube channels, for individual products, stores or made by fans. Their videos enhance their other social sites, and showcase McDonald’s employees. People are far more likely to interact with a company on Facebook or Twitter, if they promote the actions of real people. They get comments, likes, tweets and more, in excess. Perhaps it’s time to put some faces to your business name?

#6: Widening Their Social Reach

The McDonalds Facebook page also includes a non-English application for the Hispanic population. Clearly a large portion of their demographic, McDonalds felt it necessary to give these fans the chance to engage in their own language. The lesson here is to widen your social reach across language barriers!

Use these 6 tips to inspire some genuine sharing and engagement the next time you’re looking for ways to make your fans happy. McDonald’s is definitely a leader in pioneering the use of social media for sales, community and open engagement. Overall we have to say – we’re lovin’ it!

Which tip did you find the most useful from our McDonalds expose? Leave your favorite below, and tell us why you think it’s the best.