Ok, have you started using Facebook yet as an Internet Marketing tool? If you have you now need to think about that classic marketing topic of “promoting your business”. In this case, let’s talk about promoting your Facebook Fan Page. To keep it simple, let’s discuss the 5 best practices. These practices are: 

1. Create an Engaging Page. Give users a reason to become fans of your Fan Page (special offers, inside information, etc. only available to Fans). You should also use the Facebook applications like the discussion board and YouTube video box to add more interesting and engaging content to your page. 
2. Leverage the Viral Nature of Facebook (the News Feed). An added benefit of creating an engaging page is that every time a fan engages with your page (from becoming a fan, to posting a comment, to attending an event) that activity is published to their “news feed”, which is seen by all of their friends on Facebook. 
3. Draw on Your Existing Network. If you already have email subscribers and blog readers, make sure you let them know they can become a fan of your company on Facebook. Publicize your fan page on your blog, website, email, etc. 
4. Make Your Page Publicly Searchable. By default, your page will be public so that it can be indexed by search engines, which gives you the opportunity to drive organic search traffic to your page. 
5. Use Facebook Ads for an Extra Push. Facebook ads allow you to advertise a website or something on Facebook, including pages, groups, and events.

Once you start using your Facebook Fan Page, you will see that it is a great tool with a lot of potential for expanding your Internet Marketing campaigns. If you are in the Sacramento or Northern California region and have any questions or want help with your Facebook campaigns, please give us a call. If you are simply looking to get some questions answered, make a comment or send us an email.

So, we discussed some ideas of how your company can use Facebook to leverage your company on the Internet, but how do we get started? A great question, and one that will stop a lot of us from using this great Internet Marketing tool.

So, let’s start with a “Facebook Page”. These “Fan” pages give your company an identity on Facebook and have more functionality and provide you with greater opportunities to engage with your customers and prospects than a Facebook Group. You should use your fan page to:

• Build a following and create a buzz about your business in your local area and among other professionals.
• Promote special offers.
• Highlight upcoming events that your company plans to host.

Next, consider using the “Facebook Polls”. These polls are great for companies looking to get a quick answer about a particular campaign they would like to implement, or just to discover general information and opinions from a specific demographic. What types of polls might you run? Will here are some suggestions:

• Industry Poll; see what industries your fans belong to, so you can communicate to their specific vertical market.
• Services/Products Poll; see what services or products your fans already use and what ones they are looking to use.
• Trends Poll; ask your fans what other social media platforms they are using and why they use them.
• Stats Poll; post a stat relevant to your company or industry and poll your fans on how they relate to the statistical data.
• Seasonal Poll; see if your fans have any new plans for the upcoming season and how your products/services can apply to their goals.

How about “Advertising” on Facebook? Facebook has a powerful advertising engine that enables companies to specify a demographic target, see how many people that demographic will hit, and advertise to that demographic. One key point is that the Facebook click thru rate are much lower than in Google Adwords, however the cost is much lower also.

Next we’ll discuss the 5 best practices for promoting your Facebook Fan Page. I would love to hear how you have used Facebook, so share with everyone by adding a comment to our blog.

As I am reviewing the top social portals and helping to define where a business should start I have found a number of great resources and informational videos and articles. If you have not already considered the role of Social Media Marketing on your business, you should view the following video. Social Media Marketing is impacting not only Internet Marketing, but traditional marketing services and philosophy. 



What do you think?

Ok, to date we have reviewed the major social portals at a high level and taken a closer look at a primary component of any successful Social Media Marketing strategy, your blog. So what we want to look at next is a recent social explosion called, Facebook. In a nutshell, for those of you who have not been pulled in to the Facebook experience, Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with friends, co-workers, and others who share similar interests or have common backgrounds. Originally designed to only serve the college scene, it is now a major portal for connecting with old and new friends. Facebook is different from other social networks because of its extensive privacy controls, development platform, and a large and quickly growing user base. In fact, with 350 million users worldwide, Facebook has even surpassed email as the most frequently used tool online!

Now, how would you as a business user or company leverage Facebook? An excellent question and I’ll start by answering how companies are leveraging Facebook as a business and marketing tool.

• Branding: Facebook can be a great resource for generating brand awareness, as it has become popular with a wide range of different demographic groups and can be used as a great interception point for building your relationship with your consumers and potential customers.
• Customer Engagement: Using Facebook applications can be a great way for communicating promotions, contests and events. Again, this is another interception point that can be leveraged to entice customers to engage with your brand, your products or your service.
• Drive Web Traffic: Facebook can easily become an important portal point for driving traffic to your company website and other online properties.
• Reputation Management: Facebook can be a very useful tool for seeing what users (can you say customers?) are saying about your company and brand. Further, your Facebook profile can now be indexed in the search engines and as a result may provide you withy additional listings in the organic search results of the search engines (a good thing!).
• New Customer Acquisition. Facebook provides you with another opportunity to find consumers you may not have otherwise discovered.
• Lead Generation: Another way to say, Facebook can act as another potential lead generation tool that can help you qualify leads. Reviewing prospective prospects’ profiles may help you build a relationship with your prospects and aid in the lead generation qualifying process.
• Client Retention: Facebook provides another potential interception point to build a relationship with your existing customers.
• Access to the Social World and its inherent value – aka “the Cool Factor”: The perception that Facebook is “IN” and the fact that your company is using Facebook could help influence potential customers and their perception of your company brand. This can be especially true if you have succeeded in acquiring positive posts about your company. Having said all of that, there are still many who are anti-Facebook, so it could become a negative factor for those prospects. The fact remains, Facebook continues to gain in popularity and it is not going away anytime soon.
• Feedback Mechanism:  Using Facebook and the various applications available can help you understand consumer behavior based upon the sharing of content and commentary on the social networking site.
• Build Business Use Cases: Facebook can provide you with an opportunity to build successful business cases as you target specific vertical markets with specific business objectives.

What do you think? Do you see or use Facebook for any of these strategies? In the Sacramento market, do you see
our local population engaging or not engaging with Facebook? Are you engaged?

Next, we’ll discuss how to leverage Facebook in your company.

 

Ok, so as we start to really look at what makes a blog a good blog, we will discuss what steps that you need to take for developing and maintaining a successful blog. One good example for you future bloggers, is to see the movie “Julie and Julia” about an individual who starts a blog to put some focus in her life and ends up writing a successful book and having a blockbuster movie.

So, what are the seven secrets to turning a blog in to a great Internet Marketing tool? Here they are:

1. Narrow Cast. You should develop a very targeted topic that speaks to specific content. Zero in on what your customers want to discuss. If you need to discuss multiple topics, then consider developing multiple blogs.
2. Invite Conversation. One of the most important aspects of developing a successful and popular blog is growing your audience. A critical component for achieving that goal is to develop relationships with your readers. This means you need to write compelling and valuable blog posts for your readers. Just have patience, if you have good content they will come.
3. Always Link, Always be relevant. Just like Search Engine Optimization, good linking practices will help develop a successful blog. Strong link anchor texts and theme-relevant content gives the blog exactly what the search engines are seeking.
4. Write for the Web Reader. Remember, web readers don’t read, they scan. Many successful blogs keep their content brief and focused, use short sections with clear titles.
5. Publish Consistently. If you don’t update your blog content with new posts, there is no reason for people to visit your blog. The more frequently you publish new posts, the more new content there is for people to see, and the more reason there is for people to visit again.
6. Take Risks. Allowing consumers to share opinions on your business offering can be a big risk, but it is one worth taking. If you don’t allow them to voice their opinion with you, they will only voice them somewhere else. Wouldn’t you rather be able to react quickly to either negative or positive comments?
7. Be Authentic. People want to know your company in a real “light” and that they are able to “trust” your thoughts and actions. Be honest and up front in your communications and you will go a long way to developing loyal customers.

So, if you haven’t started, then pick a topic of interest to your customers and start a discussion via a company blog. If you need help, give us a call and we’ll be glad to help.

Do you think I missed anything in my seven secrets to blogging? If so, let’s discuss. Post a comment and see what happens.

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest website for Lennen Construction of Stockton California. Lennen Construction needed not just a new and updated website, they needed a website that could store large project documents online for their sub-contractors to download easily and at anytime of the day or night. Now, when I say large, we are talking documents up to 200mb. So, WSI provided the staff of Lennen Construction a website that they can self-manage and looks great. Take a look for yourself at www.lennenconstruction.com.

So, let’s review what a blog is and why you should have a company blog. A blog is a type of website that is geared toward specific topics with a goal of providing a specific community with frequent postings of information. Usually, a blog encourages the participation of the community by allowing comments to be posted on specific blog posts.

There are five primary reasons why you should have a company blog.

First, a blog is the ultimate humanizer for your company. Writing a blog allows you to express your company’s personality. Your customers ultimately need to feel comfortable with you and your company if they are going to give you their business. Blogging allows you to showcase your knowledge of your industry and that you are real people, not just some company name.

Second, a blog allows for easy distribution of information. Since a blog is a website, the content is easily distributed, shared and referenced by others. If you provide great content and promote your company blog well, your blog will likely be picked up by others and mentioned on other blogs as well. This all contributes to building your company brand.

Third, it’s better than your email newsletter. Blogs are essentially more easily edited versions of a newsletter. You can update your company blog on the fly, any time you need to provide updated information.

Fourth, it’s a great place for comments. Since blogs encourage feedback and comments it is another great way to find out how your company is doing and to connect with your audience or customers.

Fifth, a blog provides your company with direct SEO benefits if used correctly and strategically. When you write from a strategic perspective, your blog can drive your website organic rankings on the search engines, which we all know is extremely important in today’s online world. If you use a blog that is external to your company website, make certain that your blog provides links back to your site, so the benefits of the blog are also provided to your website from an SEO perspective.

As you can see, it is a very important aspect of your online company success to create and successfully manage a blog. In the next installment, I will discuss the seven (yes I said 7) secrets to successful blogging. Join me in a few days and see what you think of the seven secrets.

If you are just starting with an Internet Marketing plan or are beginning to expand in to Social Media Marketing, then you know there are a tremendous amount of choices, which make it difficult to decide how and where to start. So, my recommendation is the same that I would give for any business decision; “define the goals you want to accomplish in your social strategy.” For example, if you want to connect with existing and potential customers online and provide quick updates about your company, then Twitter and Facebook are a great place to start because of their ability to instantly push messages to a community. If you want to educate customers by posting regular articles, then creating a blog should be an early priority. If you have video commercials you can publish, then YouTube would be a preferred portal.

The key is to go where your audience is most active. This varies depending upon your industry, and the specific goals of your business. However, in general you can determine the relative priority of social media portals based upon the nature of your industry. A few industry examples would include (with the priority of the portals listed):

Professional Services: blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr

Manufacturing: blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr

Retail: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, LinkedIn

Real Estate: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Flickr, LinkedIn

That is just a sample of industries and is based upon the experiences of leading WSI Consultants throughout the world. If you would like to discuss which portals may be best suited for your company, send us an email or give us a call and we can make a quick recommendation.

As you have probably guessed or figured out, there are an ever increasing number of social portals. Over time, some will become significant (as we have seen with Twitter and Facebook) and others will fade out as being insignificant. However, if you are beginning to direct your Internet Marketing efforts to include Social Media (which you should be doing) then there are five key social media portals you should know and use. These five include; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and YOUR Blog (there are lots of different platforms you can use).

 

Twitter: This portal focuses on brief messages or updates of 140 characters or less. The Twitter challenge is one where single postings are largely ignored. To effectively use Twitter you need to repeat your postings more than once to even be heard on a minimal level for an effective ROI. This portal is the most difficult to maintain and will demand a large amount of time for such a limited space, but with help this can be a huge boon to your Internet Marketing goals.

LinkedIn: This is an all business portal that is organized like an online Rolodex. The LinkedIn portal is a great connector for businesses of all types. You need to use the Q&A section frequently to be noticed and you must establish yourself as a proven expert (the network easily discovers fakes and wanna-be’s). This can be a very valuable portal, but needs to be maintained with good business content to help your Internet Marketing efforts.

Facebook: This portal is focused on creating personal connections and loves games. This portal has a higher than average tolerances for times between updates, but grows extremely well if daily updates of interest to a community are made on a routine basis. From an Internet Marketing perspective this social portal has significant opportunities to help grow your business.

YouTube: This portal is all about videos. When you first start, this portal requires little maintenance with a video posting a month being a reasonable strategy. As you achieve success you will need to increase the amount of content. Videos are an excellent addition to your Internet Marketing strategy and YouTube is an important component of that strategy.

Blogs:  This portal is a specialized type of website or a component of your existing website. From an internet Marketing perspective, it is much like Twitter in that you need to provide regular and frequent updates to your content. The biggest difference here is that you need to do a lot more content than on Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. Readers subscribe to blogs primarily because they find value in the postings, so this portal needs content focused around specific subject matters.

For businesses looking to establish an effective Sacramento Internet Marketing strategy, these portals provide a valuable resource for competing on a regional or a national basis.

Ok, I thought I would start with how to choose the right social portal for your industry. However, as I gave the topic of “what is social media” a little more thought I decided we should cover some general guidelines on how to use social media in Internet Marketing. Now, these are general guidelines and if you need more specifics feel free to ask a question or do some online research. Finally, remember that every social media platform has its own rules and regulations and you should check them out as you start to dive in to marketing with social media.

So, here we go…..

1. Be Transparent. Be honest in social media, dishonest statements or comments will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are talking about your company, products or services use your real name and tell people you are representing the company.
2. Be Judicious. Make certain you know what you are talking about in your conversations. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a very long time.
3. Write about what you know.  When you write, write in the first person and write about your area of expertise. Remember to respect your company brand, trademarks, copyright, fair use, trade secrets, confidentiality, and financial disclosure laws. Remember, in the end you are responsible for your content.
4. Perception is Reality. When participating in online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are vague and can be confusing. Be certain that all of the content associated with you is consistent with your business, business image, values and professional standards.
5. It’s a Conversation. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations. Your personality, just like at work, should be a part of your conversation.
6. Are you Adding Value? There are billions of words and conversations in the Internet. The only way you will get your content read is to write about things that people value. It should be thought provoking and help build a sense of community.
7. It is Your Responsibility. What you write is ultimately your responsibility, so be thoughtful before you put it out there.
8. Be a Leader. Try to frame what you write in such a way that you invite differing points of view without inflaming others. Remember there is a fine line between a healthy debate and inappropriate reaction.
9. Did you Make a Mistake? If you do make a mistake, admit it and be quick with a correction.
10. If it gives you a pause, then take a deep breath before Posting. If you are about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don’t shrug it off. Take some time to determine what is bothering, or ask for some unbiased opinions. Once you publish, you can’t take it back.

So, next we will discuss how to choose the right portals for your industry. If you have any comments or suggestions to add or challenge what I have written, please post your comments so we can discuss.