Social Media – Page 4

Mastering the 3 Cs of Social Media

March 10, 2014 By Linda Dessau

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Small business owners constantly tell me that blogging and social media are just too much work. The goal of this blog and my training workshops is to pass along tips and techniques that help you make the most of your time and get the best results from your efforts.

I also want to empower you to make decisions about what and how to outsource to others. In a three-part series for SteamFeed, I interviewed social media strategist Brooke Ballard of B Squared Media about the 3 Cs of social media, and how you can automate or outsource these tasks.

I shared a description of the first article in an earlier post. Here’s a quick link in case you missed it: How to Manage the 3 Cs of Social Media, Part One

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How to Manage the Flow of Social Media Conversation – The 3 Cs, Part Two

With so many other moving pieces to manage in a business, it can be difficult to keep up with the conversation on social media.

In the second part of my interview with Brooke Ballard of B Squared Media, we delved into how and when to outsource or automate conversation on social media. (Hint: Never automate conversation!)

http://www.steamfeed.com/manage-flow-social-media-conversation-3-cs-part-two/

How to Curate Content for Your Business on Social Media – The 3 Cs, Part Three

In between posting your own content and having conversations, curating content from other experts rounds out your social media marketing strategy.

To understand curation, Brooke Ballard from B Squared Media suggests you think of yourself as a librarian, not an author. Read more in Part Three of this series for SteamFeed.

http://www.steamfeed.com/curate-content-business-social-media-3-cs-part-three/

How to Market Your Business With Blogging and Social Media

January 25, 2014 By Linda Dessau

Mindmap of business blogging topics

On a cold January evening in Barrie, Ontario, 20-25 enthusiastic business owners gathered at the Barrie Public Library for my presentation about blogging and social media, including some spirited exchanges about the good, bad and ugly of trying to market a business online.

Good: Blogging is as easy as answering your customers’ questions.
Bad: Starting a blog and then neglecting to post gives a negative impression when people visit your website.
Ugly: According to one participant, promoting your blog post effectively on social media “seems like a LOT of work!”

Here is a brief summary of what I covered in the presentation, along with links where you can learn more about each topic.

Overview – Helping versus selling

I opened with the story of Marcus Sheridan of River Pools and Spas, and his incredible success with blogging and content marketing. As Marcus explained, business blogging is about helping, rather than selling, by answering actual questions from customers and prospective customers.

If you keep up with your blogging and continue to help, this will create and build a connection that can lead to a long-term relationship and a position of trust. Then when it’s time to purchase the product or service you offer, people already have a meaningful foundation from which to choose you.

For more about helping versus selling, check out Is Your Business Blog Serving Up the Right Information?

Coming up with blog post ideas

I encouraged the group to put on their “blogging antennae,” and promised that once they’d identified broad themes (categories) they wanted to write about, ideas would magically start to appear – if they paid attention.

Barrie naturopathic doctors Kerri Fullerton and Whitney Young of Rooted do a wonderful job of answering common questions about their areas of expertise. Here are just two examples on the topic of infertility, and you can visit their blog for posts about improving your mood, living gluten-free, helpful books and more:

Infertility – When Should I Worry?
Infertility – How Can Men Support Their Partners?

I asked if anyone was struggling to think of blog post topics for their business. We heard from a massage therapist, hair stylist, and sign language interpreter, and we successfully brainstormed topics for all of them.

Here is some further reading about coming up with blog post ideas:

Blogging consistently

To keep up with your blogging and avoid turning your website into an abandoned ghost town, I suggest you start with a plan, stick to your categories, and use upcoming events, holidays and promotions as a starting point.

(Just remember, blog posts should be about your customers, not about your business. So if your promotion is a sale on paint, provide tips about the hottest new decorating trends of the season.)

Break blogging up into a series of tasks so you can tackle each of them when it’s the best time for you, instead of trying to sit down and start, finish and publish a post in one sitting.

There’s no way around it – blogging takes discipline and commitment, but please be gentle with yourself in the process.

Also consider other types of posts besides full-length feature articles, such as video or audio recordings, or a review or recommendation of someone else’s content (here is how to share other people’s content without plagiarizing).

Even with these other types of posts, it’s still a good idea to provide at least 250-300 words of text to put your own slant on the topic and remind your readers of your expertise. Also, some people prefer to learn by reading and may never open your recordings.

Here is some further reading about blogging consistently:

Promoting your blog posts on social media

There are three things you need in order to share your blog posts on social media:

The permalink of your blog post – Otherwise people will have to search your website for the specific information you promised (and most won’t bother). Here’s how to find the permalink of your blog posts, or you can use a tool like Buffer.
A reason to click it – With so much competing for your reader’s attention, they have to know, “What’s in it for me if I click this link?” Here are five ways to get noticed when promoting your blog posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.
People to see it – Full-size images really draw people in, especially on Facebook and Google+. On those sites, upload your photo first, and then add your permalink to the text description. Otherwise, all people will see is a small thumbnail of the photo from your blog post. UPDATE (September 13, 2014): Facebook is now giving more visibility to posts that contain links with thumbnail images, versus those with uploaded photos (they consider that “click-baiting“). So put your link directly into the status update box so just the small thumbnail image is displayed.

Here is some further reading about growing your social media network and what/how to share on social media:

Blogging is a wonderful way to connect with new customers, give more value to returning customers, and gain visibility as an expert in your subject area. When you see blogging as a way to help, focus on a few key topics, and stick with it over time, you’ll build a rich collection of useful content to share with your networks and spread across the web.

Bloggers: We Are the Media – Interview With Jeff Korhan

September 17, 2013 By Linda Dessau

In this series about how social media and blogging work together, we’ve looked at the world’s most popular social networking sites: LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For today’s final post in the series, I’ve invited my friend Jeff Korhan to pull it all together for us. Author of Built-in Social, Jeff has a wonderful way of humanizing technical tools and marketing concepts and bringing the discussion back to the basics of good business.

Can you discuss the influences of social media on business activities today compared to how we operated before these digital media were available?

It is my belief that social media is influencing every aspect of the business environment, making it all more personal and transparent. What social media is really doing is democratizing media by giving everyone a voice. This is especially relevant for consumers that now collectively have a powerful voice that can stand up to that of any organization or corporation.

So, the challenge is avoiding the temptation to make social media another layer to add to your current marketing practices. More than just integrating it with your marketing program, its qualities should be built into all of your business growth practices to earn the trust of your community. Therefore, it’s important to thoroughly understand what got you here, and then use the qualities of social media to make them more relevant.

You will often hear it said that because business has significantly changed, what got you here will not take your business to the next level. That’s crazy! Your strengths never change. If you were fast, or strong, or witty, you still are. What’s important today is learning how to adapt or translate traditional business practices to a digital world that is also becoming profoundly social.

So, regardless of whether a business has been sales, marketing, customer service, or production driven, it should stick to what got it here and learn to adapt to the influences of these digital and social media.

This can be an amazingly prosperous time for businesses if they learn to understand the influences of social media on the buying behaviors of their customers, and then redesign their traditional practices to make them relevant for this connected economy.

Many people are so overwhelmed by social media that they don’t even know where to start. What do you recommend as the best way to begin using a social networking site for your business?

Start by observing. Notice what others are doing, and reconcile that with your business and its resources. Social media can get very personal, so it’s important to use it in a way that is congruent with who you really are. In fact, that transparency tends to work well for earning trust on each and every one of the social networks.

After that, take the time to build a strategy. Write it down; implement it; and refine it over time. The only way to make improvements is to create results that can be evaluated. I imagine that is how nearly all of us developed our proficiency – learning from successes and failures alike.

In the early days of social media we made a big deal out of the number of connections. What is clear now is that it’s more important to be better connected than the most connected.

Thus, a smart social media strategy should consider whom to connect with and how; and it should describe specific practices for encouraging engagement, and otherwise nurturing those network relationships over time.

Some people lump blogging into the same category as social media, but I tend to see it as something unique. What do you believe are the key connections that will help everyone use blogging and social media more effectively?

Personally, I like to think of my blog as my farm. It’s a place where I nurture and grow ideas that I then take to the social media marketplace for sharing and consumption.

Especially after Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, and now Google Authorship, it’s clear that we’ve progressed from blogging as a form of journaling, to now building viable digital marketing assets with solid content that will stand the test of time.

It’s important for businesses to now think of themselves as publishers, and even media companies. That mindset alone will change your blogging and social media for the better. Media used to be something that we hired. Now we are the media, and we know better than anyone else what our customers want from us.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

Sure. Well, you and I have been doing this for the better part of seven years or so, and we have collaborated on a number of projects such as this. I’m convinced that blogging is absolutely essential not only for success with social media, but it’s also where the business world is going in general. Everyone should consider how lucky they are to have this amazing resource, and of course, be consistently learning how to use it to run a better business.

Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business (Wiley 2013).

Jeff was a Fortune 50 Sales and Marketing Executive who later founded a landscape services company that was twice named Small Business of the Year during its two decades of operation. Today he helps mainstream small businesses adapt their traditional business growth practices to a digital world.

Jeff is a regular content contributor to leading business publications, with his own New Media and Small Business Marketing site ranking among the Top 100 Small Business Blogs in the world.

Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

Using YouTube to Curate and Share Relevant Content For Your Niche

September 9, 2013 By Linda Dessau

In this post we’ll get back to my interview with expert video marketer Anthony Idle from Local Video Marketing. Anthony is a Google Certified Adwords professional with an MBA in strategy and marketing. He is a former general manager of a US national business, but these days he works online helping businesses globally to advertise locally.

For Anthony’s answers to my first three questions about YouTube as a social media site and relationship-building tool, check out YouTube Gives You Face Time With Prospective Customers.

4. What are the best methods and tools on YouTube for businesses to find interesting content (to generate blog post topic ideas and share with their networks)? I call this the “Expand your mind” step.

With YouTube, there are three dominant methods to curate content. The first is to use the search bar to find either individual videos to share immediately via social media or your blog, or to find channels/individuals to subscribe to so you can follow their content over time.

For the best results from the YouTube search bar, I like to recommend something called Google fishing. I put together a video to describe the technique (direct link to Anthony’s video about Google fishing).

The second way to find content and ideas on YouTube is with the related videos that turn up at the end of whatever video you’re watching. Some people turn that functionality off, but 9 times out of 10 you’ll see related videos that have similar tags, title and description as whatever one you’re watching (including your own).

The third tool is one that I particularly like, and it’s the Subscription Manager found inside your own YouTube channel. So if you’re trying to rank for five or six different keywords, you might create a group of subscriptions (these are called collections, and are similar to folders) in each of those categories. For example, I particularly like funny, creative ads, and so I’m always looking for 30-second classic ad clips. So I have a collection for these in my Subscription Manager.

5. What are the best methods and tools for sharing original blog post content on YouTube? What are the benefits of doing this? I call this the “Expand your influence” step.

If you’re the type of person who really doesn’t want to show your face on the camera, there are ways to turn written content into a YouTube video. For example, you can take the key points of your blog post and create a slideshow presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint. From there, you can play the slideshow while you capture your screen using tools like Screenr, Jing, or Camtasia.

Anthony lists all his favourite video marketing tools at http://localvideomarketing.biz/tool-kit/.

Is video worth the effort?

While it does usually take longer to produce a video than it does to write a text-based blog post, Anthony says it’s well worth the effort. He points out that a YouTube video can get you to the first page of Googe’s search results a lot quicker than a text-based blog post. He also stresses the importance of face time in building relationships with prospective customers. That’s why he takes the time to produce high-quality videos, and helps other businesses do the same.

As someone who hasn’t done very much video blogging, I appreciated Anthony’s insights into YouTube and video marketing. The wheels are turning with ideas for videos I might create. What about you?