Social Media Marketing for Your Business: 6 SUPER STEPS to DO SOCIAL RIGHT!

Perhaps your business has been trying to make sense of this new social world and searching for that elusive ROI to help justify the vacuum sound you have heard as your time has been sucked away. You may have set up accounts, and tweaked the accounts, even had your college son or daughter post content for you on Facebook or Twitter, and still the frustration grows. You wake up and ask “Is there anything interesting to post today for our business?” You leave work asking, “Why can’t I get more people to follow our posts or take action on them?” You are probably standing on your desk right now, crying out, “What am I doing WRONG?” Okay, so perhaps that’s a bit melodramatic, but hearing your cry and rushing to your aid, we bring you 6 Super Steps to Do Social RIGHT!

Social Media Marketing, Social media for business, How to get more Twitter followers, How to get more Facebook fans

SUPER SOCIAL

Have a plan. Why are you wanting to set up social media sites? Do you want name awareness? Will you use these avenues to be more responsive to customers? Do you want the ability to share your expertise and be branded as the go-to person or company in your industry? Are you wanting more sales, or are you just wanting to make sure you aren’t the only person left on the planet who doesn’t have a Facebook Page for their business? The answers to these questions will determine who should manage your social media (marketing, customer care, communications) and how you connect strategically on each site.
Be Realistic with the Time it Will Take to do it Right! Many think if they throw a Facebook page or Twitter account up, people will flood to their doors. It doesn’t work that way. You must dedicate time each day to update sites, listen and respond to the community and be fabulously interesting…well at least somewhat interesting! In the beginning this may just be 15-30 minutes in the morning and then 15-30 minutes in the afternoon, but when your business grows and the community starts engaging, you will need time to analyze where your community members are coming from, what links are getting the most click-throughs, what content gets the best conversations going and more. Many organizations start by bringing in an intern to help with their social media marketing and find that they need someone with more of a marketing focus and it turns into a full-time position or they outsource a big chunk of the daily tasks.
Don’t BROADCAST! It is called SOCIAL Media, not BROADCAST Media. Those who just post (and usually it’s automated…even worse) get tuned out quickly. Unless it works for you to go to networking events and just stand in the corner handing out your business cards and postcards as you yell “BUY FROM ME!” it probably won’t work in your social networking either! Here’s a list of 7 things you can share BESIDES your products.
Listen More Than You Talk. Like any good sales person will tell you, the key to success is to spend more time asking questions and listening to your community in order to learn how to best serve them. Listen and respond to what they are talking about in your social circles. Spend some time each day scanning and replying.
Be Interesting and Helpful. My rule in social media is, “Be interesting, be helpful, or BE QUIET! Be sure your posts are worth reading and passing on. Too many people post content that is so over used or trite that no one will forward, share or ReTweet it. And when people ask me how to get their information to be more viral or ReTweeted more often I simply say, BE MORE INTERESTING!
Use the right tools. If you took a pair of scissors and set out to cut your lawn, you could certainly do it, but it would take you all of Saturday and Sunday…for the next two months. Using the right tools can make all the difference. There are many to choose from and each one does something different. For conducting searches, connecting strategically to your target audience members, tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck (both tools to manage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), JustUnfollow (a service that shows you who you have followed or connected with on Twitter that has not followed you back so you can clean house a bit), SocialMention (a site that sends alerts like GoogleAlerts on information heard on the social vine), Analytics HD(iPad app to measure site traffic), or even good ol’ Google Analytics to see where your clicks are coming from and how to be more effective. These types of tools will help you be efficient, strategic and much more effective.
Be consistent. Posting once a week or two times a month will not get you anywhere in the social media arena. Your customers and potential customers are out here everyday talking, sometimes about you and your topic and sometimes talking about or with your competitors. You can choose to engage in the conversation or hang the GONE FISHING sign up in the window. If you cannot commit to posting regular content (daily at minimum) hire someone to help you with this piece. It is important that you find someone who can be “on” when your customers are “on” and that the person or company you hire understands your brands personality, values and policies for replying to customers. I did an earlier post about that.

What SUPER Tips do YOU have? We’d love for you to share your superpowers with us!

How to use Facebook for business, Social media for business, Gina Schreck

TWEETERWOMAN

Like Batman, Superman, or Tweeterwoman, Gina and her team of superheros are just a tweet or phone call away! Let us know how we can help you succeed in this new social world! Gina (at) Synapse3Di.com or of course on Twitter @GinaSchreck

Gina Schreck
President & Chief Hooligan at Synapse 3Di

@GinaSchreck

April 4, 2011 | Filed Under Brand Management, Facebook, Facebook for Business, Facebook PAGES, Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media for Business, Twitter | 3 Comments

Smart Copy Gets Read AND Remembered…Forward or Backwards

I have used a tool called Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) back in the days of Outlook email client. It pulled social information about anyone sending you email into a box on the side of your incoming message, so you could see their profile picture, the latest conversations etc. It is a great tool for people like me, who correspond with so many people in so many different mediums that I am constantly asking myself, “Okay, who was this person? I don’t remember this conversation. What did they look like?”

Social media, social business, social media training, social media coaching

Well I switched all of our email to Gmail a while back and did have to say farewell to Xobni…until I saw they were rolling out a Gmail, Android and iPhone version soon. I went to their site and clicked on the JOIN THE PRIVATE PREVIEW link. Here is the response I got the next day via email:

FROM: Britton Montalvo

SUBJECT: Xobni for Gmail Beta

BODY: Thank you again for signing up for the Xobni for Gmail Beta. We were thrilled with the amazing response to the announcement and have been working our buns off to bring to life the feedback and ideas from the Beta testers. We’re bringing thousands of new users on each week, so your wait shouldn’t be too long. Keep an eye out for your invite – we’ve heard that they sometimes hit the Junk Mail folder.

Crankin’ away
- The Xobni Team

I laughed when I read this and then I had to reply telling him how much I appreciated their witty copy and how much more I was looking forward to working with their product!

In a world where we are all pumping out so much content that it starts to blend in like oatmeal and powdered milk, this kind of copy stands out and says, WE ARE DIFFERENT! WE ARE FUN TO WORK WITH. With so much content passing by our eyeballs in our email box, Facebook pages and Twitter streams, DARE TO BE DIFFERENT!

This kind of witty copy always reminds me to stay true to our company’s personality and voice. To write with the reader in mind and not your BLAH features in mind. Being clever and having fun will make you stand out in the sea of sameness. So work those buns off, and crank away to attract and retain more customers, AND use this tip from Xobni to write better and to put more fun into your social communications.

Chief Hooligan

Gina is the Chief Hooligan at SynapseConnecting and is the Queen of Sarcasm (She has to remind her family that it is a GIFT and not a CURSE!). The amazingly witty team at Synapse works their BUNS off to create content that matches the personality of our clients, and for those clients who have no personality….well we work magic there too!

Ready to work with us? Email Gina@Synapse3Di.com, call 303-978-0887, or send a smoke signal to **-****

Gina Schreck
President & Chief Hooligan at Synapse 3Di

@GinaSchreck

March 30, 2011 | Filed Under Brand Management, Marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media for Business, SOCIAL SHARING | Leave a Comment

Facebook Depression Hits Teens! Don’t They Know It’s like Disneyland and Mickey Isn’t Real?

According to the official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, more and more teens are suffering from what they are calling FACEBOOK DEPRESSION. This is a condition caused by teens comparing their lives to those of their “friends” on Facebook. I am fascinated by this and wonder how many adults suffer from these same feelings.

Facebook, and any other social site, is a place for people to post all of the wonderful things about themselves and their lives (of course there are those few friends who post so much of their dirty laundry that we wonder what they were thinking!). They are places where people put their best foot forward. What we need to remember is they have ANOTHER FOOT!

When you go to Disneyland, everyone is smiling. The janitor cheerfully points you in the direction of the bathrooms, even though he has been asked “Where are the restrooms?” 5,000 times in the past hour. Even the ground is clean enough to eat off of…well okay that is a stretch, but after all, it’s called the MAGIC KINGDOM! A place where pumpkins deliver princesses to balls and mice bake cupcakes in little pink houses. Of course it seems grand…IT’S NOT REAL!

Facebook for Business, Facebook Depression

My Perfect Child & Husband Ready to Eat off of Streets

Just like Disneyland, Facebook Land is filled with ultra-white smiling faces (created using PicNik, a photo editing app) and beautiful children who sit quietly studying advanced calculus (probably a fake family picture found on Flickr), as all of your Facebook friends count their millions from online sales of their latest book… all acquired from that beautiful Facebook Business Page.

Instead of comparing our REAL lives to those vacation snapshots we read each day on Facebook, we should take a step back and look at all we have to be grateful for. We have REAL friends who love taking pictures of us that we can NEVER share on Facebook. We have a perfectly imperfect family that gets mad if we talk about them or tag them in any pictures, and we have lived a life filled with wonderful experiences, hurts, and successes, that now enables us to be BRILLIANT and GENEROUSLY share our knowledge and encouraging comments with others on the walls of their lives!

Now go use that airbrush and teeth whitening feature on PicNik, you want your photo to look good when Oprah calls for you to be on her show…broadcasting LIVE from Disneyland!

Head Mousekateer

Gina and her MAGICAL team of Mousekateers help individuals and organizations use today’s technology and social media tools to build that PERFECT business and manage a MAGICAL brand. You can reach Gina on Twitter @GinaSchreck or her glass slipper phone 303-978-0887

Gina Schreck
President & Chief Hooligan at Synapse 3Di

@GinaSchreck

March 30, 2011 | Filed Under Brand Management, Facebook, Facebook for Business, Facebook PAGES, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media for Business, SOCIAL SHARING | Leave a Comment

Social Media for Business: Is Any Business Exempt?

social media for business, b2b social media, Facebook for business, Twitter for business, Gina Schreck, Social Media Management

LIKE Our Coffins

I am in gorgeous Naples, Florida speaking to a group of funeral home directors and owners about social media and the new world of marketing. I didnt exactly have 100% buy-in and a couple of them got their cables in a knot when I said, “If done RIGHT, every business can benefit from the use of social media….even the funeral industry.”

This is an industry that in the past has been run primarily by Mom and Pop, who inherited the business from their parents, who inherited it from their parents and for generations these folks have been involved in their communities. They visit the senior centers, play BINGO with the neighbors and volunteer at the annual health fair. They advertise in the Yellow Pages and personal referrals are their main source of new business. A good marketing strategy, unless your future customers are not going to the Senior centers or joining you at BINGO nights, and they thought the Yellow Pages were just for helping short dinner guests reach the table.

Now there is something a bit odd about a funeral home asking you to LIKE their Facebook Page, or discovering the Undertaker is following you on Twitter. But IF DONE RIGHT any business can benefit and build a successful online community to AUGMENT the physical or face-to-face relationships. Here are my 3 tips for DOING SOCIAL RIGHT:

Keep your ideal community in mind and provide content they would find helpful and interesting. In the case of a funeral home, going beyond the obituaries and providing hospice or elder care resources and guidelines for writing a will or moving your parents home with you would be great engaging content. Join hospice care groups on LinkedIn and source great content from twitter. If you are pet sitter or a karate school owner, what content or resources would your community be looking for? Keep them in mind as you post content on your social sites.
Blend the old with the new. You do not throw out the relationship-building activities that have been working for you, and you don’t ignore the new members who are busy connecting online. Be sure to add your social contact information on all traditional marketing pieces (brochures, business cards, presentation slides, stationary, thank you gifts and cards). Perhaps funeral homes can sponsor a SENIORS CONNECT class to have someone teach the seniors how to create a Facebook profile, so they can share recipes, oogle at grandbaby photos and write embarassing things on their kids’ walls. If you own an adventure vacation or promotional products company, what old marketing efforts can you apply a new social sheen to?
Lastly, don’t take on too much too fast. Many businesses new to social media, think they must do it all and they create a blog, open an Twitter account, start inviting people to join their Facebook page, load an eight-year-old video clip onto YouTube, and jump into 25 groups on LinkedIn…the first week. After spending 22 hours a day trying to keep up with it all, they start considering life as an Alpaca Rancher in the outer skirts of Montana. Perhaps the first week, you create a Twitter account and find 10-20 people to connect with. The second week you start searching on Twitter to find keywords being used on Twitter. Afte a month, you might feel ready to take on setting up a Facebook Page or joining ONE LinkedIn Group and exploring how to contribute to this knowledge group. Plan on 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. As your online community grows, you can shift more and more time from one group to the other.

So whether your current customers are using social media to stay connected or Mabels BINGO nights, you would be wise to start embracing this new world, before your business ends up in the casket.

What business have you been most surprised to find on Twitter, Facebook, other social sites?

@GinaSchreck

Gina and her team of Alpaca ranchers can help you take on those dreaded daily tasks of managing your social platforms…Just give us a shout! 303-978-0887 or Gina@Synapse3di.com

Gina Schreck
President & Chief Hooligan at Synapse 3Di

@GinaSchreck

March 21, 2011 | Filed Under Facebook, Facebook for Business, Facebook PAGES, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media for Business, Twitter | 2 Comments

Come Down Off the Ledge: Creating a Facebook Page for Your Business

Sure EVERYONE’S on Facebook. Sure, it’s so easy even 10-year-olds know how to set up their account. (Legal disclaimer: The legal age to create a Facebook account is 13. Anyone creating a Facebook profile or business page, at any age, may experience feelings of depression, loss of appetite, increased appetite, severe weight loss, severe weight gain, or ingrown toe nails. Please consult a physician before attempting and stop immediately if thoughts of suicide persist.)

Then why is it when most people attempt to create a Facebook page for their business they threaten to throw themselves or their computers off a ledge? Facebook does not make it easy to do. So before you jump….into creating that business page on Facebook…take a look at these 4 easy steps!

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Curse You Facebook!

Create a PERSONAL PROFILE if you do not already have one set up. Whether you are going to use to share pictures with Aunt Mable, look up that long lost heart throb from 4th grade band class, or you’re going to do nothing at all with it, set it up. You don’t have to post anything at all on it. you don’t even need a picture of your FACE for this facebook step. BUT, having a personal profile set up before you create your business page will allow you to be the administrator and you will receive some important information regarding the analytics of your page later. So trust me on this one. Just provide the required information as far as your email, real name etc, to create the profile. I suggest using an email that you check regularly, incase there is important information regarding your account. This email is not shown anywhere and you will not receive spam from Facebook. It is legitimate. Put REAL info in for best results. Skip the next steps where Facebook recommends friends for you to connect with. you can make your own friends when you are ready. For now, lets keep moving in hermit mode.
CREATE YOUR BIZ PAGE. From your shell of a profile (or your regular Facebook page if you already have the personal profile set up), go up into the address bar and change the URL (internat address that starts with http://Facebook.com/) and replace all the letters and numbers that follow Facebook.com with the word “pages.” So it reads, “http://facebook.com/pages”

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Once here, click on the CREATE A PAGE button on the upper right.
ADD CONTENT. You are now IN BUSINESS! You can officially come off the ledge…at least for today. Add photos, some helpful tips and questions for your community to engage with. Load it up with great content before inviting people to join you.
INVITE FANS! Now the work begins. You must begin driving traffic here to engage with you and your business. Be patient, it may take some time but you can invite people from your email list, add your Facebook URL (which the address of your business page–go to your page and copy that address from the bar. After you have 25 fans, you can create a custom, or vanity URL for your Facebook Page which will make it easier for people to find it.) Tell your Twitter followers about your new page and remember to mention it at least 2-3 times a week to get more people to come over and join you. Keep the content fresh, relevant and FUN and the only place you will want to jump is right in the middle of the discussions going on! Here is a video that will give you some tips on GETTING MORE FANS on YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE.

Have fun, and remember…it’s only Facebook! There’s no need to JUMP! If you need help we are just a shout away. Contact Gina on Twitter, leave a plea for help right here in the comments (there are super heros lurking ready to help) or use that old rotary dial Blackberry — 303-978-0887.