Courtesy of agilescout.com

#1: Social Media Has Matured

Social media is no longer some wishy-washy fad concept that will blow by at any minute. It’s matured into what is the most important marketing route forward for your business. Executives that are still dabbling in or ignoring social media are going to find themselves coming last in the marketing race, in a few years’ time.

Social media is not only here to stay, it’s taking over. Sideline it at your own great peril.

#2: Facebook is a Sound Investment

Facebook continues to grow like crazy, thanks to a very clever expansion and development plan from this idea team. Your Facebook business page is essential to the success of your social media strategy. Some experts are even saying that as much as 30% of your social spend should be limited to Facebook. It’s where your clients are!

Spend more time this year developing your Facebook page, and investing in advertising.

#3: Pinterest is Poised For Mass Traffic

You’ve heard about the new site Pinterest, but haven’t bothered to test it out for your business. Well here are some sobering stats for you – Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter and Google+, and it attracts more interaction than anything on Facebook. In other words, it’s highly valuable to your overall social marketing strategy.

Executives who focus on Pinterest early, will be rewarded with huge traffic streams.

#4: Social Media is Going Mobile

If your business has yet to jump on the mobile bandwagon – do. All social media in the future will be accessible, perhaps even exclusively, by mobile. With devices out there that keep people on the go, it’s unwise to not get involved in the changing online attitude. Your websites need to be mobile. You need mobile apps and infrastructure.

Prepare for the mobile onslaught by investing in mobile technology early on.

#5: Be The Interaction You Want To See

If your pages are dead and lifeless – you’re not out there making friends and supporting other people’s social campaigns. If you want lots of fans, followers and engagement, then you need to be highly interactive yourself. No one is going to do it for you. Get your staff involved – start a sharing movement in your business.

These five crucial points will keep executives working in the right areas, while improving their overall business. Best of all – they’ll be steps ahead of their competition, because they had the vision to see the social future. Get your business involved in these points, if you want to have large scale success later on in the life of your business.

Is there something else executives should know about social media? List your tip here for our community to see!

Here are today’s top 10 tips for sharing in the current social climate.

Courtesy of theonethingblog.com

#1: Use ShareThis Buttons

Though understated, ShareThis create social sharing buttons that tell your community how many other people have shared your content. This in turn motivates more sharing, and leads to more connectivity overall.

#2: Twitter Follow Button

The Twitter follow button opens up directly on the reader’s page, and doesn’t divert to Twitter. Sign ups are done faster and easier, which means more follows for you and your website.

#3: Google+ Share

If you still haven’t added a Google+ button to your blog or website, then do it now. Even though the platform isn’t doing so well now, it’s proven to be a great place for influencers to meet and chat.

#4: CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a plugin we use here on SMM, its great for giving your readers a chance to leave backlinks to posts they’ve written. It motivates people to comment, and helps share more information from your blog.

#5: Disqus

Disqus is a comment app that integrates with most blog platforms. The best part about it is, it notifies your commenters when they get replies, which stimulates repeat comments. It’s also free to use in its basic version.

#6: Facebook Subscribe

The Facebook subscribe button allows you to follow people who aren’t your friends. You can still read their updates though, which means you can gather more info from top news sources, personalities and competitors.

#7: Work At It

Sharing means you’ll be giving away a lot of content to others. This is a good thing. While you might spend months working hard to get others to share with you, it’s really your own habits you should be working on. When you begin to share, and care, about your networks – people will do the same for you. It’s how social sharing works.

#8: Face The Music

If you’re not on video yet, doing livecasting or face to face video updates for your fans – where are you? The next logical step in sharing is come out from behind the 2D photo, and become a full 3D person that talks and laughs with their viewers. The more info you share with video, the more traffic and return shares you’ll get back.

#9: Gravatar

A lot of sites are requesting small avatars to use, so that when you comment people can see who you are. That’s where Gravatar comes in. Upload your photo, create a mini profile, and you’ll never have to worry about a blank space again.

#10: AddThis

AddThis is a super powered bookmarking widget that you can use to get more sharing going, on your websites. It casts the net wide, so any one of your readers will be able to select their favorite platform when they are about to share your content.

How do you share content online? Share your story.

Here are 10 ways you can ensure that your business is being as social as it can be. Even a few of these will improve your social profile online.

Courtesy of communifire.com

#1: Create Videos

Video marketing is an understated social tool – but it has incredibly high impact results. Build your business a Youtube channel and contribute videos to it. The key is to focus on getting subscribers, views and keeping your comment threads active.

#2: Facebook App

Get a Facebook app created for your business. When your fans can interact with you in new and exciting ways, it definitely makes your business more social, approachable and fun! Plus you’ll earn more from your Facebook campaigns.

#3: Build an Email List

Email is still a great social tool, and an excellent way to really get to know your readers. Invest in a great opt-in page, sign up form and incentive – and grow your email list. Keep in contact with your list at least once a month.

#4: LinkedIn Newsletter

Instead of syndicating an email newsletter, create a LinkedIn group and use it as a way to distribute newsletters to fans. The benefits are immediate – real-time interaction, questions, new connections and whole lot more social buzz.

#5: Twitter Starter

Spend some time on Twitter starting conversations with people interested in your niche. Make a point of answering any questions they have, and go out of your way to help. Doing this will get you on more lists, and will enhance your social profile.

#6: Image Feed

Sign up on an image sharing site like Flickr, and share your business images, infographics or photos all around the net. Join in on conversations about your niche in the comment feed and let people use your images for free.

#7: Get Staff Involved

If your staff aren’t allowed to use your social media pages, it’s time to change that. If your own staff can’t even say nice things about your business, how will your fans? Draft a social media policy and let them loose. Free PR for you!

#8: Print Social Media

Being more social is also about letting people know that you are, so advertise that you have a social presence online. Display icons in your office, on business cards, in emails, in adverts – everywhere you can. Great for a social boost.

#9: Friend Your Competition

This one is hard, but it proves that you’re ready to embrace social media completely. Become friends with your direct competition – real friends, and share information with them. Being social means putting aside your differences.

#10: Comment Explosion

Tired of managing your social media pages? Stop for awhile. Focus on commenting on everyone else’s pages. Comment on Facebook updates, Twitter updates, blogs, reviews, articles, videos, slideshare presentations, image galleries, LinkedIn groups – just keep talking.

Use these great tips to become a more social business online!

How do you stay social on the internet? We’d love to hear more about the strategies you have to get social and stay that way!

Courtesy of social-media.co.uk

There are however, a few ways you can ensure that your communities are primed for your sales pitches. Let’s take a look at what you should be doing here.

Segmenting Your Market

Some of your community will be ready to buy, some will be great at sharing and commenting – and some will follow you, and never give you a darn thing in return. But that’s okay. You need to find out which people in your community are interested in buying. To do this you need a delicate combination of efficient research, data collection and segmenting.

What? Basically, you need to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your blog to collect certain groups of potential customers together. With Twitter, it’s easy – you just use the list tool. With Facebook and LinkedIn, you have to be a little more involved. Use analytics tools to review what your community has been doing. Segment them into different groups.

Think about location, interaction, intention, age, likes and dislikes. All of this information is a window into the mind of your potential customer. Then check to see if your marketing messages are appealing to these people.

During this process you might find a group of people that are very interested in your business and advice. These are your ideal customers. Shooting them a private email with a personal marketing message, might be all they need to buy your new product.

Sales increase when you approach people as people, and not ‘a bulk community.’ Many small businesses build relationships using social media, and then personally invite certain people to buy their products.

If their research is spot on, this renders a far higher sales conversion rate than blanket marketing. We’ve even seen serious marketers build social profiles of each individual in their community.

It sounds a bit invasive, but really it’s not. Remember that your community is already interested in your business. They want to learn, to grow. By targeting your messages at individuals you are removing spam from the equation, and offering them a legitimate opportunity. At the same time, you’re also sending out the message that you care about who they are. It’s a win-win.

The Logistics of Targeting Your Customers

As we mentioned before, you need to have certain things in place, in order to attract the right people. Keywords for example, are instrumental in doing this. If you aren’t already using Google’s Keyword Tool, or WordTracker, then you need to start using them. The right keywords syndicated in blogs, articles, video – as many different forms as you can, will attract viable customers.

Customer engagement is the all-important factor here. You need to genuinely get to know your community, so that you can determine who is ready, or interested in buying. It’s a long process, with a lot of hard work involved, but it’s worth it in the end. Just ask Starbucks, McDonalds and Apple – they do it all the time!

How do you use social media to target your customer base? We want to know, so leave your comment for us below!

Courtesy of socialups.com

A very large part of each marketing goal or social media campaign – should be geared towards gathering as much credibility and trust as possible. Let’s look at how you can do this with social media.

#1: Harnessing The Power of Your Blog

Your blog is the undisputed champion of your business reputation online. It’s a very powerful tool for building both trust and credibility. But you have to do so much more than publish excellent content to make it work. You already know that social media is about networking, and as a blogger – you should be networking with other top blogs in your field. Swap posts, actively look for new guest bloggers, and become a guest blogger yourself.

Most credibility comes from a mixture of visibility and opinion. If the world sees your brand out there, beyond your own social media and website – they will naturally find it more credible. This is especially true if you’ve worked hard to gather social proof to reaffirm that others think your business is great. With blog posts, this happens in the form of discussions, comments and replies.

#2: Social Relationships Build Trust

Just having a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn page, already tells people that you are willing to form relationships based on trust. When you go out of your way as a business to educate, help and share – it constantly reaffirms that your business is in fact trustworthy and credible. A great way to keep in touch with industry leaders is to share their content with your community.

Make a point of not only sharing, but becoming part of their community as well. This means commenting on their blogs, and interacting on their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. You can gain more credibility for your business, if you put yourself out there – teach, learn and develop, along with everyone else online. A social relationship is always a give and take. Don’t forget to take!

#3: Show People, Don’t Tell People

When you get into the habit of constantly publishing new content – in the form of updates, tweets, articles and blogs – there comes a point when you have to realize you are telling, not showing people how great your business is. At least 50% of your social media campaign needs to be built around other people. Focus on truly helping another blog become successful, promote someone else’s product for free – give other people the social proof they need to become credible.

In the end it all comes back to you – and helps you build that trust and credibility you need. Actions are just as important as words when you use social media. Don’t think of your social sites as closed off areas. See them through the eyes of your community members.

They don’t only read 1 blog. They might have their own business, and their own sites to worry about. Where do you fit in? How can you help? Make these changes, and social karma will do the rest.

How do you build trust and credibility with your social media sites? Contribute to the conversation and leave a comment below!

Courtesy of mywebgal.com

Your brand says a lot about your business. Take a few minutes to look at your brand, and jot down some impressions that come to mind. Is it bold, modern, edgy? Can you see this just by looking at it, or do you have to spend some time reading or browsing to get the overall impression first? Let’s take a look at how you can use social media to improve your brand perception.

#1: Know Your Goals, Make a Plan

You need to be fully aware of what your brand is communicating to people at all times. Then you need to evaluate whether or not your brand perception is in line with your marketing goals. People react to your product based on your ad campaigns, your slogans, your colors, your content – and the way your brand interacts with people on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, your blog and LinkedIn.

Make a list of what you’d like your brand perception to be, and then work towards enhancing these characteristics as often as possible. Ask for feedback from your community and take note of what they say. Remember that what you think people think, and what they really think – are two very different things. You need real feedback to get a decent reading on your general brand perception.

#2: Cool By Association

One of your priorities should be to form relationships with other leaders in your industry. If your brand is in direct contact with other brands that have the perception you’re looking for – you’ll become ‘cool’ by association. Work to connect and build relationships on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where leaving comments and getting involved is easy. Pick 5 businesses or people, and make it happen.

#3: Use Social Proof

If you’re trying to promote the perception that your brand is the best, and there are few other brands that can approach it in quality – you need some social proof. Social proof comes in the form of testimonials, positive feedback, comments, discussions, tweets and posts. Prove to your community that you are these things, by having other people in your community reaffirm these perceptions.

#4: Create Content That’s In Line With Your Goals

All of the content that you create and publish on your social media sites, should be promoting the brand perception that you want people to have – of your business. The only way to do this is to consistently monitor your social media content for feedback and conversations – so that you can keep a finger on the pulse of your community. All of your content should say something about your business. If it doesn’t, it’s completely pointless.

And finally, always work to keep your brand perception in check. That means managing negative feedback, handling bad reviews – everything that could ruin your brand perception. Do these things, and your social media pages will help you improve your brand perception over time!

How do you improve your brand perception on Facebook? Leave your comment below!

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What does this mean? Well it means that your business should have a functioning online media department, where a communications strategy is unraveling.

Ultimately your goal is to control the flow of information about your business. To do this all events need to be worked into your social media strategy – your own private media machine.

So, what kind of social media initiative can improve, simplify or otherwise aid your next business event?

1. The Business Networking Event

A social media site like LinkedIn can mean the difference between 100 people attending your networking event, and 1000. Running a group, or creating a discussion in relevant groups, can lead to all kinds of benefits. Early ticket sales, booked out events – even discounts on the place you hire out – are just some benefits of integrating a real world networking event, with your businesses LinkedIn initiative.

You’ll find that when you offer these events on a social media platform like LinkedIn, the response is huge. As well as helping your event, it also improves your reputation as an authority, and loads heaps of credibility into everything you say on the platform from then on. B2B networking will never be the same!

2. The Long Awaited Product Launch Event

Social media is powerful because it gives you a ready made audience to promote to, and it allows you to create hype before something like a product launch. That’s why launching a product in the real world while using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to boost media attention and sales is a brilliant idea.

Many businesses have done this with great success, and have experienced unparalleled feedback from their communities about their product. This means free market research, controlled flow of information about your product and as a result unlimited publicity. The product launch social media initiative is a winner.

3. Team Building Events

Though not as profitable as the previous two, the team building event is not to be underestimated. Social media has a way of giving everyone a voice and an opinion, which means that your employees will be able to put together team building events that everyone will enjoy and learn from.

Bringing people closer is the name of the game here, and you could integrate mobile social media into team building games and lessons. Send them to find clues in the real world, and have them update their progress on Twitter. Heck, send them their instructions on Twitter. Host a live event, so that your community can join in, comment and be entertained by your company.

Virtually any event these days can be made to go with a well planning social media initiative. All it takes is imagination, creativity and a bit of hard work to make it successful. Now that everyone’s using social media, how are you going improve your business events? Think about it!

Have you ever integrated a business event with your social media initiative? We want to hear about it!

Courtesy of socialamerican.com

First of all you have to let go of the idea that you can convince everyone you come across that you have something worth buying…eventually. People generally don’t like talking to other people with only one thing on their minds – sales.

So let’s stifle the burning desire to sell, sell, sell and figure out how to communicate better with your community. That way, when your sales take off – you’ll know why you spent all that time sharpening your chatting skills.

It’s easy to get caught up in ‘sms speak’ or to go on and on about something that isn’t important on social media. This is very popular on Twitter. Try to make sense – always – so that new users can follow what you are saying.

A conversation happens between two people, which means that after you’ve said something – it’s your turn to listen. If you don’t, your conversations will end before they have even begun!

Meet real people, and make real connections on your social media pages. Learn their names, and speak to them about non-work related topics. Find common ground, like you would do in a friendship – and build something from it.

If you’re going to be defensive about your expertise or secretive about your life – don’t expect to become a master communicator on a sharing platform. Work at sharing for free, even if you don’t want to.

Sounding like you are the world’s most amazing leader in a certain field is great, but it’s intimidating to a lot of people. It also tends to keep the conversation one sided, as you don’t value anything anyone else has to say.

Always being right is close minded and irritating, and your community will see that right off the bat. If you make mistakes, or are corrected – accept it graciously and move on with the conversation.

If you spend enough time building real friendships, create a log of everyone you meet, and detail parts of their lives that they have shared with you. That way the next time they come online, you have a reference guide. Hay Tom! How’s your daughter? People love that.

Consistently writing about nonsense or silly things is not going to win you any friends – and when you do make friends, and they do a little digging on who you are – they’re not going to like what they find. Only blog or post when you have something interesting to say.

Instead of waiting for 8 hours to see who has replied, try to organize times where a few of you (or a lot of your community) are on at the same time. That’s when live, real time chat comes into play. Each time you do it, you’re narrowing the stranger-friend gap.

There’s no point in being the most friendly person on earth, and you don’t know how Facebook works – so you use it like a fearful second grader. Spend time working out how each platform works, all the tips – all the tricks.

Work on these points and soon your communication skills will improve. It’s only a matter of time!

How do you fine tune your communication skills on social media platforms?
We want to know!

Courtesy of nexell.net

It’s easy to get distracted by your growing community of followers. It’s easy to become obsessed with the bottom line. But human relationships made on social media platforms can last, and transform into richly rewarding lines of communication.

How do you manage your personal and your professional relationships on social media? Is the one the same as the other? Probably not. You have your private Facebook page that you use for personal reasons, and you have your business Facebook page that you use for sales, community interaction, promotions and market research.

People on your personal pages follow you because they know you, and people on your business pages follow you because they benefit in some way from it.

Yet if you had to have a small sale now, the people from your personal pages would be the people buying. Can you guess why? Those are REAL relationships. A comment here, and a free gift there – only gets you so far in the eyes of the ever elusive community of nameless faces.

Wake Up And Smell The Trends

It’s 2011. Social media is morphing into something more than just ‘businesses’ and ‘communities.’ The businesses that are making the most money off social media are the ones that spend the most time nurturing genuine relationships. Start thinking of it as a full time job.

If you’re not on now, your not on to the world – so they’ll do something else. The only way to manage your professional relationships this year is to work at them – like you do with your real friends.

The Social Media Call Centre Theory

Imagine you had a person communicating on social media platforms 24/7, for your business. Can you imagine the possibilities? Someone live, whenever a direct question is posed. Someone there whenever a complaint filters through. That’s how you build a real relationship with your community. Friends expect you to always be there for them!

They expect to be contacted, filled in about your life and asked to participate in it. If we apply this set of rules to our management goals for our social media strategies – good things will happen.

Responsive community members. More people that trust you. People who care what’s happening in your business, and what promotions you are having. Online friends. We are approaching the Social Media Call Centre era, and we’re not prepared.

So, how do you manage your personal and professional relationships on social media sites? I handle them both the same way so that I can build real, rewarding relationships with people. That’s the only answer to give if you want to make money this year!

Tell us how you manage your personal and professional relationships on social media. Do you treat them equally, or does your business end seem a bit too clinical…?

The first is Domino’s Pizza, which has created a whole new campaign called The Pizza Turnaround.

Here’s what we like about it:  they took time out to listen to their customers and focus groups, swallowing some tough criticism along the way.  Then, they went back to work, recreating their pizza from top to bottom, documented it all in a short movie, and posted it on YouTube as well as their Pizza Turnaround site.  Right now on their Twitter and Facebook Fan pages, people are  talking about the new pizza recipe and Domino’s attempt at recapturing some lost customers.  Domino’s made their social media presence a little more interesting and have given people something to talk about – now whether or not it pays off for them is something we’ll have to wait to see.

The second social media effort we find interesting is Kodak’s latest push.

With a company blog, a couple of Twitter sites, a Facebook page, YouTube and FlickR channels (and more), Kodak is pretty much all over social media.  While they’ve encouraged a lot of customer participation before, particularly over this past summer, they took it a step further over New Years Eve.

Kodak posted a request on their blog, encouraging people to email them a snapshot of themselves (or their family) that would then be placed on Kodak’s big-screen in Times Square for ten seconds at a time, up to six times from December 31st, 2009 until January 31st, 2010.  Once approved, each participant would receive a number to text with a specific code, allowing them to choose when they wanted to be shown on the Kodak big screen.  While it’s still a bit early yet to be seeing how the response was, from the comments posted on the Kodak blog, it may have been a pretty popular move.