5 Free Social Media Tips For Local Businesses
Although this blog has been a lot quieter the past couple months I have been very active working with small businesses on everything from selecting the right domain name for their website to using social media to promote their business effectively.
As much as we may be a for profit business we also truly feel it is our mission to help educate the local business owners who understand they need to move a portion of their marketing efforts online but either a) think the cost is too high or b) feel like it is too time consuming or technical.
One of the things that we show as part of the holistic marketing model they need to look at now that they can no longer just use the legacy methods (i.e. print) as their only form of advertising is social media.
Over 50 percent of their customers are now looking online but most have not shifted any of their marketing spend to online (more on that in a future post). Since they may not feel comfortable spending money online as they are just now in the beginning of the education process we feel it is important to help them with low cost or even free online marketing tips, in many cases these are social media tips.
Here are 5 tips that a local small business can use today to help promote their business for free using social media:
Use Proper Links To Your Website When Posting On Facebook:
One of the most frequent mistakes I see people make when promoting their website on Facebook is not actually making the link to their website active, for example if I was to share something about this blog and put the following you would not be able to click on it and go directly to this site, instead you would have to hope your friends on Facebook either copy and paste the link or type it in, people will not typically actively do this:
Check out my blog at BruceMarler.com
Instead you need to add http:// in front of the link or website name to make sure it is an active link in what you are sharing on Facebook, for example it should look like this:
Check out my blog at http://BruceMarler.com
If you do the above on Facbeook people can click directly on the link to the site and this will drive significant more clicks to your business website.
Create a Facebook Page For Your Business Not A Personal Account:
One of the more frequent mistakes that people make when first thinking about using Facebook for business promotion is using a personal Facebook account rather than a Facebook Page. This happens more frequently than you may realize.
It is best to keep your personal account separate from your business account. This will help you promote to your customers rather than family and old high school friends who may not be interested in a business thousands of miles away and on the other side keep you from posting vacation pictures to customers rather than your family.
Facebook pages are free. They are great for interacting with your customers and promoting special offers. They also allow you to get top of mind awareness with your customers after they had forgotten about you. As many people may visit your website, do business with you, and then move on by taking advantage of a Facebook Page to put links to your website and specials and events you may be having you can keep your brand or business in front of customers who have visited you in the past.
Claim Your Facebook Username For Your Facebook Page:
One of the easiest things you can do to protect your business brand online is by claiming your Facebook Username for your business page. This means that you no longer have a long string of characters as the link to your page, instead you have a short and brandable link to your fan page, example is http://facebook.com/localtek
You can see exactly what brand is being promoted (Localtek) instead of something much longer like this:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/CITY-NAME-MO/YOUR_BUSINESS_NAMEs/7708322067?ref=ts
As you can see the top link is much more effectively promoting your local business online. To do this you can read this How To Set Your Facebook Page Username Tutorial.
Promote Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts Offline:
As much as we online marketing folks like to believe that the world revolves around online marketing and nothing else matters that is not true, more and more a holistic approach is needed when promoting a business. One easy way to take advantage of mixing various promotion types is to make sure you add your Facebook Page and Twitter account on any print materials you may have or even make sure you mention in any radio promotions you may be doing as well.
As an example we recently designed new business cards for our company and on the front we have standard corporate business card information (website, address, etc) but on the back we have our social media information to make sure people know where they can connect with us through our social media presence online.
If you are already paying to have materials created you should promote your online presence. If they become your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter even after they through away that business card you still have access to them when your promote yourself on either service.
And one more tip:
Suggest Your Facebook Page To Your Friends:
To be clear as I say suggest your page I do not mean be spammy, do not promote it daily to all of your friends but if you are in business and need to promote why not start with people that are comfortable with you and are likely to accept your Facebook page suggestion?
That way when you put out promotions they are likely to "Like" them and this in turn means it is likely to be seen by their friends as well which begins to take advantage of what social media is all about when it comes to business promotion, peer to peer recommendations. A recommendation from a friend will always go further than any advertisement someone could do.
In many cases we have heard customers tell us that they have created a Facebook Page but could not understand how to get people to see it. The step missed was suggesting to friends and family to get things moving.
The above tips may be simple but they will help get you moving at no cost, if you have further tips feel free to post in the comments.
Is Linkedin Gaining Traction Due To The Bad Job Market?
We have had quite a few seminars in recent weeks in various parts of the state of Missouri and during these seminars I ask several different questions related to technology usage. Some of these are about local search and print media trends but many are around social media and how it relates to how people are promoting their businesses online.
I always ask for a show of hands to find out how many people in the room have Facebook accounts (always more than 60 percent, typically way more), Twitter (typically 40 to 50 percent), and then Linkedin.
As someone who thinks Linkedin is one of the most underutilized social networks for getting business done it has always been interesting to see the number of hands raised, typically less than 20 percent, sometimes close to zero.
Why is that? Because most people do not understand that social networks can be used to get business done, with most peoples first knowledge of social networking coming from stories about MySpace (My who???) or from the early days of Facebook people cannot be faulted for not understanding the importance of social media and business but it has always been a nice feeling to see that look in peoples eyes once tools (and that is what it is) like Linkedin are explained and case studies shown.
Well, I have noticed a major uptick in Linkedin accounts when I ask for the show of hands these days. The percentage of people with accounts increased in every seminar we have had over the past month or so.
Why? I think I know.
With the economy being what it is and the tough job market continuing I think people are using every avenue they can. Not Linkedin is not just for making contacts, it has been another online source for the job hunt. A great tool to use when Monster.com is just not cutting it.
With Linkedin being a social network based on trust it seems only logical that people would actually start using it for job hunting, sure people have been doing this for years but I think there are quite a few newcomers that are just now figuring out the power of using peer recommendations for finding jobs.
I am glad to see this network starting to gain traction even with those not in the corporate or tech world. That is usually the biggest hurdle for online networks like this, getting to mainstream consumers is never easy. I think it is starting to happen.
Apple iPad And The Future Of Your Domains
I do not blog about it much but I am a bit of a gadget junkie, I had been waiting for the day that some sort of Apple tablet would be launched, now we know that is officially the Apple iPad. I even held off buying a new Amazon Kindle this past month as the rumor mill started heating up since it was obvious any Apple device would have more functionality than just reading books. I am not really big on single purpose devices so it was worth waiting.
As much as their may be a few people saying the iPad is not the end all be all of tablet computing devices they are really nitpicking items that the general user of the device will not care about, what you need to really look at is how the Apple iPhone changed the idea of what a mobile phone could be. It changed the way you accessed information and provided easy access to casual gaming without having to carry a separate device like a Nintendo DS.
With the growth of social networking due to the non-tech crowds acceptance and use of Facebook (have I mentioned that Facebook topped Google in traffic over Christmas, yes I have, and I just did again) apps for social networking were some of the most downloaded and used on the Apple iPhone. As a matter of fact Twitter apps were some of the most requested reviews on iFones.com during its initial launch.
Before I go any further on my thoughts on this Domain Name Wire did a story on this tonight as well, I had planned on doing mine later this week but wanted to give Andrew some link love while his article was still fresh.
And on that note, I think it is important to note that a source such as Domain Name Wire has pointed out the concerns with how devices like Apple iPad are changing how people access information. Although many domainers, and I am sorry to say this, have their heads in the sand and REALLY do not want to admit the times are changing they better be ready for it because it is happening even if you do not want it too.
I spoke to a few folks at the conference about type-in traffic and although the people that spoke to Andrew for his story may not be seeing it the people I spoke to admitted openly that type-in traffic had declined rapidly over the past few years. Now I have nothing that can show exact data but that coincides pretty directly with the growth of the iPhone, better smartphones in general, and also social networking.
Why does the iPhone and now the iPad matter?
It is all about the apps and also about the way people use browsers on their mobile phone. This is also the same thing on all the Android based mobile phones that are coming out, it is all about driving people to the internet through applications, it is the same information provided in an easier to access manner with more functionality thrown in than a typical website allows. People like this, the app store is making Apple millions/billions of dollars. This is not going to change, you cannot hide from this anymore. The Apple iPad is going to accelerate this, probably more so than we can even comprehend right now.
To give you an idea, within 48 hours after the iPad was announced I had 26 emails from people to iFones.com with tips about their upcoming plans for apps that will be optimized for the iPad. Most were small time developers, but so were many of the developers that now rule the app store.
You cannot hide from this....
I typically access Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone equally as much as I do from my laptop, this means I never hit a browser. With the iPad this will increase even more, with the larger screen and other applications that will be available on it there are many times I am not even sure I will have to take a laptop with me for travel. This changes things.
With visual and verbal search on the iPhone and now on the iPad typing in a website name will become something that is more of a hassle than anything, neither visual or verbal search is big right now, but it is coming.
Look, I hate to see type-in traffic decrease as the next person but I also know that there are trends you cannot fight, you have to see what is coming and plan on how to take advantage of the trends. Social media, mobile computing devices, these are things that change the way people access the sites we have.
Your goal should not be to fight them, it should be to find out how to take advantage of them. It is possible you just have to find the way.
SEO+Social Media+Mobile Apps=Success
Staying in the same place = Failure
Social Media + Mobile Search + Local Search = Success
Filed under: Domain News, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, local search, social media
If you have not read all the news about social networking sites being the future of how we access information instead of search engines then you must not be reading what is happening in the online world around you. I will help you with the relevant news articles in just a minute.
One thing I think people are missing sometimes is how the BLEND of mobile and local search along with the easy access to Facebook and Twitter on a mobile phone is making it an absolute must to have a plan on how to integrate all of these technologies together when you plan on promoting a product or service. The future is now and if you are not using all methods available then you are doing an injustice to your business promotion online.
For those that may be social media doubters and who do not realize that many people use search on their mobile phone before typing in a name (and I have not even mentioned visual search and verbal search) suddenly search is all that matters at times, be very careful basing everything you have on type-in traffic. Facebook has 350 million users and bypassed Google for traffic during the Christmas holiday, do you think Facebook is going somewhere? Yes they are, UP!
The people using Facebook (and even Twitter) are not typing in domain names, they are taking a friends recommendation without even looking at the site name. Sure the domain name is important for branding and I would never discount that, and for search an exact match name helps, but when all you are is a link hidden behind a URL shortening service that is not quite as important.
If you are still hiding in the dark and believing this change is not coming here are a few great articles to read:
Why Is Google Afraid Of Facebook
How Social Media Helps Website Marketing - My own example of usage.
If the stories do not show you what is happening then I cannot help you. This does not mean that you should not have a website with a great name, but the people growing up with the Internet today do not use it like those of us who had it come to be during the midst of our lives.
If your only plan is to buy a great domain name and wait for the type-in traffic to come you may be surprised at your competitor coming up behind you and using the power of social media to drive more traffic that has been recommended by a trusted peer network that converts even better.
Use all the tools together and success can be yours, ignore the holistic marketing approach at your own peril.
2+2=5
Long Tail Search Results, iPhone Apps, And A Third Grader On Google
I always like to sit back and watch how "non-technical" people use the tools (like search) compared to how people that live online constantly use them. It can be enlightening and show you why certain things work and why others do not.
As many people have shown with various graphs, numbers, marketing data, and other ways to show the same thing, long tail search is growing. The number of people using more than a couple words when searching grows every year which means that people are getting much more sophisticated and using the tools the same way many of us did that were early adopters. I know this is not earth shattering news to those that keep up with this trend, and anyone that buys names for network sites or who does any level of SEO research for high conversion keywords has probably spent a good portion of their time research long tail searches (up to several words or more).
Well tonight as I sat with my daughter on the couch (with both of our laptops out, bonding???) offering to help her with her creative writing home work (seriously, creative writing in third grade?), she shunned my help to use Google to search for writing prompts. I thought this would be a fun thing to watch, here is how the process went:
1) Search for writing prompts
2) Before clicking on one thing switches search to third grade writing prompts
3) Clicks on two entries that look likes made for Adsense sites, starts to click on ads but I stop her (someone can thank me later).
4) Blames Google for bad results. Says she wishes they would show something to help her, her brain works for a few minutes thinking.
5) Refines her search even further to something even longer
Now, even though she was not looking to buy, this is the basic learning process people go through as they search. This is why many smart people focus on the long tail terms for higher conversions.
I know a third grader may not sound like a good reference point, but in reality I think this means alot because if a typical (it is my daughter so I want to say brilliant) 8 year old refines their search to find more relevant searches as she becomes the consumer aged kid (lets say the tween years) how she searches is what matters. I watch her when she browses on her iPod Touch and she will sit in a Paneras on WiFi and search like any other mobile search user. Can you imagine what these kids will be doing in a few years.
The thing I hate to admit here but should be pointed out is that other than a few gaming sites I know my son visits I can honestly say I have never witnessed my kids actually type in a generic domain name. I know that may frustrate some but they are the future users. They hit Google or use an iPhone app for pretty much any information gathering online. Search traffic matters, social media matters, mobile apps matter, do not ignore that, instead think about how you can blend all those together to be successful.
OK, what is my point.
My point is watch what the kids around you do and how they use the Internet. They will be the ones driving how items are consumed online in the near future. Long tail search is just one way that we see all people changing their habits, but with kids using mobile search combined with local long tail search to find products it may be just the way to determine how to make your next domain purchase or search engine optimize your next project, or even more importantly, figure out how to implement social media and mobile apps into your plan.
How Social Media Helps Website Marketing
Filed under: Blogging, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Small Business Marketing, hyperlocal, local search, social media
One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.
With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.
In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.
Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.
Here is the number of visits per day:
Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239
Jan 19th - 246
Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155
Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?
The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board. A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!
Some Random Notes Before Heading To Branson Mo For a Few Days
I will be away from the laptop quite a bit over the next couple days so blog posts may be a few and far between. The few days away will hopefully be a mix of both business and pleasure (although when you love what you do it sometimes you cannot tell the difference). Interesting enough one of the meetings comes from an offer I had on a domain name a couple months back. Sometimes face to face is what it takes to get a deal done.
Well here are a few random notes before I head out:
EzDevelop.com will be released to the beta testers today, we are working on one last bug that is minor before I release, last thing I wanted to do was release an alpha level tool and call it beta. It took us a couple days longer than expected but in the whole scheme of things it was good to delay for 48 hours. There is still work to be done to the public face to the site, but we hope to get everything up and moving on that side as well over the next week. Main goal was getting the actual tool itself where I wanted it. Phase 2 features are already defined and will really make this tool something that is special to those looking to save time on all aspects of starter site creation.
My Facebook posts have really surprised me at the level of interest they have gotten, it looks like we all have taken a keener interest in social media. It is something I spend quite a bit of time on but had held off doing many posts around it. Linkedin is really an untapped resource for many, and I think some focus there will be something you see in my posts moving forward as well.
On a side note I am finding more and more people starting to understand they need a proper web presence starting with the domain name but then see that they are not working to tie their presence online together. Even at the simplest level making sure you tie your Twitter, Facebook, and website together in some format is a must. This is something I see from both the experienced set as well as the people just getting moving online with their business or organization. They have all the pieces but have not put them together. I see a blog post coming on that.
Online Ad Revenue Drops As A Whole But Search Ad Revenue Up
I was just reading an interesting report at Adage.com concerning online advertising revenue results (based on an IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report) for the first half of the year and how the economic downturn had affected advertiser spend. I found a few of the numbers interesting in the report, numbers talk so here are a few things to point out:
- Overall Internet advertising spend dropped 5.3 percent to 10.9 billion compared to last years comparable period.
- Search advertising revenue grew by 2 percent.
- Last year search revenue accounted for 44 percent of the overall spend, this year it was 47 percent.
- Digital video ad spend was UP 38 percent.
One thing that really stuck out to me since I just left the telecommunications industry is that telecom ad spending was up 1 percent.
Now, although overall spending was down it was still positive compared to other advertising mediums such as newspaper and radio which have faced even steeper declines in advertising revenue.
Social networking sites have seen a large growth surge in time spent on the site over the first half of the year and revenue has also grown (doubled). Personally I think social media will be of concern to some as people begin to rely on their social network for references to other sites and products and as such SEO consultants and search marketing in general really have to think about what that means for their business. If online revenues doubled for search networks that tells me people are content to stay on Facebook, Twitter, or others and not head to the search engines and suddenly normal Google or Bing search becomes a bit less valuable (don't worry Google is not going anywhere but Facebook and Twitter matter more for search than people may realize).
