Social Media Is About More Than A Facebook Page
Filed under: Facebook Promotion, Small Business Marketing, Small Business Web Development, social media
Even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for a few to several years it has really been this past year that main street small businesses have really started to take notice. As people realize more and more that their customers are not consuming information in the same way they have in the past it becomes obvious that billboards and newspapers are not the only way they have to market their business these days.
Although some business owners and consumers still look at Facebook and say, what a waste of time, why would I use that? One thing to keep in mind is that we as business owners need to realize it is not about how we used the social media and in particular Facebook, it really has everything to do with our customers. And they ARE using it, more and more everyday. 55 minutes per user average per day.
Let me make one more reference, the other thing people say is a complete waste of time is TV. Most businesses WANT to advertise on TV but cannot afford it, yet social media is a very targeted medium that is a "time waster" yet people resist because they do not understand. Once again, people need to step outside of how they use the internet and think about how their CUSTOMERS use the internet.
Social media is the ultimate "word of mouth" marketing, if you need away to think of Facebook or Twitter, look at it like this, it is a friend telling another friend what they like. Sometimes seemingly meaningless posts about what store someone just bought something in is the ultimate advertising for your business.
All that said, many people, once they understand they have to take the leap and open a free Facebook page for their business, make the mistake of not moving the page forward and thinking about a true plan of how to engage their customers.
Although a Facebook page or Facebook Places page is free, in many cases it is worth it to pay a small fee for a local company to help you get your page setup properly. Although you may not be ready to do everything that is possible on Facebook at this time it may be worth it to take the advice of someone that has taken the time to understand the possibilities of how it can be used to engage customers of your business.
In some businesses, such as a coffee shop, it may be important to send specials, events, or other things out on a daily basis but also you can use it as an educational tool to teach your customers about the various coffees and types of coffee drinks. Your customers will pay attention and spend more time on your page or website if you try to educate them rather than sell to them everyday.
Also, sometimes it takes thinking outside the box, some businesses that seem "legacy" still have a need to get a message out. Large corporations have figured this out but many of the local marketing companies that people work with daily are really just now getting their minds around social media and are having a hard time articulating a plan to their customers about how to use online marketing and social tools as a solid marketing mechanism. Once again, ask for ideas outside of just creating a Facebook page. It takes more than that.
A few examples of what your business should be prepared for is proper pay per click advertising on Facebook, understanding how to use it in a manner that is effective and targets customers in your target demographic and area is very important. Once again it is about more than just buying keywords and paying per click, if it is not targeted and driving people to your Facebook page or website that actually matter to your business the clicks are of little use. As I said before, it is about more than being able to create a Facebook business page.
Another great example of create Facebook use is creating a visually appealing landing page or tab for your Facebook page. A couple examples are:
As you can see it is a page within your Facebook presence that allows for you to give people a way to interact in a way they are used to with common websites. Although these webpage like interfaces are by no means required it is becoming more important to have a professional appearance for your business when people find you on Facebook. This is a great way to do that. The cost to have a professional create these types of pages is minimal compared to what the cost of creating marketing materials or logos costs in many cases.
Once you have your page setup you need to make sure you keep it active. What does this mean?
It can be as simple as taking 30 seconds to a minute to post a link to a specials page on your website. Or maybe ask your customers a question about what they would like to see added to your store. Little things to connect with people that have shown interest in your business in the past but may of lost top of mind awareness of what you offer.
The key though is working with someone that can see the bigger marketing picture, although you may start with just having a Facebook page, if you are taking advice from someone, make sure they have a history or working online and understand how people are engaging with businesses on the internet. If they cannot help you come up with a real plan that makes sense for how your customers are using social media tools it may be time to switch the marketing company you are working with.
Also, for further reading, here are a few Facebook How-To's and Tips.
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
Top Twitter Plugins For Wordpress
Filed under: Blogging, Twitter Plugins, social media, wordpress plugins
As I work with customers more and more everyday I get asked more and more, can you set my site up to work with Twitter, can you have my new content or products automatically go to Twitter and so on.
Usually if more than one person asks me the same question it turns into a blog post, below I outline several of the top Twitter plugins for Wordpress and some other tools that you can use to integrate Twitter with your website or blog.
Twitter Tools - The Twitter Tools plugin is probably one of the most widely used plugins for Twitter and Wordpress integration, until recently this is the plugin I used and still do on a few of my sites. It provides a very high level of configuration and allows for digests of your Tweets to be sent out or blog posts to be created from your tweets. It also allows for very simple ways to show your Tweets in your sidebar.
Twitter Tools Bit.ly URLs - We are all choosing our favorite URL shorteners as we use Twitter more and more to promote our content or sites, Bit.ly is extremely popular and this plugin allows Twitter Tools to use Bit.ly as the link shortener when posting links to Twitter.
Twitter Tools HashTags - This allows you to set the # hashtags in the Tweets you send from Twitter Tools to allow for easy searching for your Tweets on Twitter.
Tweetmeme Retweet Button - It used to be that everyone showed their Digg count, now more and more showing your ReTweet count is important, this tool also allows for you to easily have users ReTweet your content straight from your site. It uses the very popular service Tweetmeme.com.
My Twitpics - This allows your to show your pictures you have posted through the Twitpic service that allows easy posting of photos to twitter in your sidebar. I use this on BruceMarler.com
Twitter Style Links -This one is pretty cool, if you post a message to someone on your blog using the standard Twitter @NAME it will search their comments and then add a link to their name, in other words @NAME will be automatically linked.
Twitter Widget - Very simple plugin, simply adds a sidebar widget to show your Tweets.
Twitter Tracker - This allows you to show a Twitter sidebar based on a search term, it can be used to track certain topics, such as domain names, social media, etc.
And one that is not a plugin but still very useful, this is something I have used for quite sometime with very great success on some of my automated news aggregators, it is Twitterfeed.com , this allows your to schedule a set time to have an RSS feed sent to your Twitter account, this could also be used to post news that is not from your blog but instead from another source that your followers may find of interest.
Post your favorites in the comments section, there are pages and pages, the above are a few I have a tried with success or have heard of other people using, I am sure you have many more.
Micro-Payments for the Twitter Crowd
While Twitter continues to figure out ways to monetize its fast growing, highly addictive micro-blogging services another company has found a way to *attempt* to monetize the tweeting crowd.
I was just reading a post on TechCrunch.com, they are reporting that Tinker is launching a professional micro-blogging network. Tinker is a micro-blogging tracker of sorts. It tracks social network posts containing certain terms and reposts in widgets embedded on blogs and sites.
The selected "professional micro-bloggers" will be paid a share of ad revenue created by their widgets and Tinker streams. I expect their to be a deluge of requests to be considered a professional blogger. At the end of the day, unless you have a large amount of traffic I see the potential for this to be pretty small, maybe its just the term micro-payments that get me.
Wordpress Plug-Ins for Minisites
Wordpress is one of the most flexible and easily implemented tools for developing minisites for your keyword domains. Whether I am looking to develop a high traffic minisite or a more niche topic I can find ways to use Wordpress as the base for my site and use one of many free Wordpress themes to customize the look and feel.
Many webhosting providers provide point and click install of Wordpress through Cpanel and Fantastico which makes the process even faster.
Once up and running I have several Wordpress plug-ins I use to make the site more SEO friendly and make site more functional from both an admin and user perspective.
There are hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins, these are my goto plug-ins for vritually every site, some I recently started using and am moving back through my older sites to add:
Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Plug-In
This tool adds a button at the end of each post that allows the viewer to easily share your story on Digg, Facebook, and may other social news and network sites.
Google XML Sitemaps
To make sure your site is fully indexed and visible to Google (Yahoo and Microsoft as well) it is very important to create a compliant sitemap. This plug-in automatically creates the proper file and updates it as you add posts and pages. It is very configurable and allows automatic notifcation of sitemap updates to Google, Yahoo, and more.
All-In-One SEO Pack
The All-In-One SEO Pack makes it a snap to easily setup your post titles, meta tags, and other important SEO items in one spot. Where I really find this tool useful is on a per post basis you can configure description, keywords, etc.
Statpress
Statpress is a tool for viewing stats for your Wordpress blog, this allows for reporting based on last referrer, keyword referrals, and other areas of interest as well as tracking the top referrers and keywords. I still use Awstats but find myself referring to this frequently as well.
OK, a couple that I do not use on every site but have found useful too:
FeedWordpress
This plug-in allows for automatic posting of RSS feeds from other sites to yours. If you are wanting to setup a niche news aggregator using Wordpress this can be an quick and easy way to do that.
WP Super Cache
If your site gets frequent updates and high traffic this is a must, this plug-in creates cached files of frequently viewed pages of your site. I have a couple sites that this became a must on after traffic grew over 1000 uniques a day.
Twitter Tools
This one is a recent addition for me, this allows for your blog posts to be automatically fed to twitter or for your twitter posts to automatically generate blog posts on your Wordpress blog. I also use it to create an auto-updating "tweet view" on my right sidebar. Its a nice way for visitors to keep up and gives the site a more personal feel in my mind.
I am sure there are many more that can be pointed out that can be useful, feel free to leave a comment with plug-ins that you find useful as well.
In a buying mood on the domain…
In a buying mood on the domain front. Looking for a quality product related .net