Social Media Becoming a Business Productivity Tool

Until recently social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ were largely limited to marketing and community building functions at companies. But a recent survey conducted by McKinsey & Co. concluded that a majority of the estimated $1.3 trillion in untapped value from social technologies lies in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises.” In other words, social media as an office productivity tool, in much the same manner that email did in the late 1990s.

Companies are moving beyond advertising on social media networks and are using social networks to build internal teams that solve problems faster, share information better among employees and partners, and bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier.

And as a bonus, the enormous popularity of the major social media networks means that for the most part your employees already know how to use them. That means that employees already have a basic ability to access company information simply because it’s easier to get to it. And because of employees’ familiarity with social media networks, very little training may be required.

In recent years, companies have begun to use social media tools such as internal networks, real-time chats and wikis for uses that go beyond marketing and community building to improving office productivity.

Here’s just a few other objectives that social media networks can improve for your business productivity and bottom line:

•Wikis: Lets you build a knowledge-base that keeps the latest most up-to-date information in front of your managers, sales team and customer service reps with a wiki.

• Blogs: Brainstorming and vetting new ideas. After all, your small business thrives on bringing new ideas to market faster. Blogs let you do that.

• Web-based file-sharing:  You probably have the ability to share documents internally, but web-based file-sharing gives you the ability to share private documents with customers and partners in a secure, auditable way.

• Microblogging: Lets you manage projects more effectively. Your team can’t always meet in person; microblogging keeps everyone in touch.

Much of work is social. But in today’s economy many employees now spend much of their time away from the office. Using social media as a productivity enhancement tool  helps workers stay connected and can increase your ROI.

Easy steps you can take to add Twitter followers

Twitter is one of the hottest marketing tools in the world. Everyone has an opportunity to voice their opinion, share news, make people laugh andeven put together political campaign.  Twitter allows you to influence people’s lives, careers, and daily life events. In short, Twitter has become a publicity powerhouse.

It costs you nothing to market on Twitter.  It is absolutely free, targeted advertising.  And Twitter is viral.  People who care about what you say will re-tweet your comments and share them with others.  That’s why it is so important to build relationships.

Now, let’s talk about how your business can add more followers on Twitter:

1. Educate: Give a good business tip that might help your followers.  Share with people what you do and how you can help them.  Educate your followers.  It’s all about helping them!
2. Profile description: It is not a job application so make your profile light, easy, and enjoyable to read. Be yourself. People want to know who you are. Avoid silly avatars.
3. Speed counts: Reply to people right way if they’ve said something to you, especially if they are not yet a Follower.  Then follow them back.  Establish rapport as quickly as possible.   Give them something valuable to read or think about.
4. Available tools: Use the search feature to find people and topics you want to discuss in your niche.  Bring offline clients online to follow you or motivate them to start their own Twitter profile.
5. Be yourself.  Do not create new persona on Twitter. Be yourself and maintain your brand.  Twitter is part of your overall marketing strategy. Be consistent.
6. Compliment freely: Praise people, compliment them. How do you feel when someone praises something that you’ve said or done? Everyone loves compliments – pay it forward.
7. Questions:  People love questions. Ask and you’ll start a conversation. Questions create a dialog. Make sure when readers answer that you reply back to them. Courtesy is the best policy on Twitter.
8. Be a good host: Invite friends and followers from other social networks. For example, I invite friends from Facebook to follow you on Twitter. They love it and it is fun and simple.
9. Re-tweet: Re-tweet or repost what others say if you like it and it makes sense to you. Try to find out what people do first before you re-tweet. Read their profile. It is a must if you want long term relationships.
10. Keep control of your marketing: Make Twitter part of your overall marketing strategy. Send all traffic to your blog; Don’t give anything away for free without asking people to opt-in; Build solid relationships;  Tell followers about your book, your speaking engagements, offers and more.
11. Links: Include links on Twitter to your blogs, your other social networks, your press releases, articles and other publicity platforms.

The volume of followers on Twitter gives you leverage and more traffic. Quantity counts. That’s why it’s important to build relationships and, in doing so, builds a network.

Correct Keyword Placement in Your Blog Posts Will Boost Your Search Rankings

The correct keyword placement in your blog posts can be as important as the keywords themselves. So what are the most effective ways to use keywords in your blog posts to achieve the highest search rankings possible? Here are some tips for placing your keywords and achieving higher search ranking.

1. Your most important keywords should be placed is in your blog title. It’s the first thing people will see in search results. If possible, place your most important SEO keywords early-on in your blog post title. Google generally assumes the words that appear earliest are the most important. That’s why the title is the most important part of your blog post when it comes to SEO.  
2. Videos are working nicely! Make sure your interviews or narration use the optimal keywords. YouTube and Google index all the closed-captions. You could even upload transcriptions. So try that and embed a vid on your post!
3. Search engines, especially Google, love internal and external links in the body of your blog posts so use your best keywords as text links. Link to other articles on your site or you can link to other authority sites.
4. You should add images to your posts and use your best keywords as alt tags for your images. Search engines don’t see the images when scanning your site, but they do read the alt tags.
5. Use the best and broadest keywords as your categories. Each one of your blog post should feature one of your best SEO keywords that fit into at least one of these categories.
6. Tags are another way of saying keywords. “Blog specific” keywords should be used is in your tags for each blog post. 

Finally, as important as the correct use of keywords in your blog posts are, you should write for readability. Reading the same keyword phrases over and over is not only bad writing – it’s also bad SEO strategy. Search engines deliver people who are actively searching for what you have. Unless you employ strategies like keyword placement, your site may never be found by those who need what you offer.

Growing Your Revenues with Affiliate Marketing

Imagine a marketing program with the potential to increase your sales from 10% to 25% – and you don’t pay a dime unless you get results. It may sound too good to be true, but that’s the concept behind affiliate marketing. 

Through these online programs, your company signs on with a partner.  That partner then markets your product or service, often through a link or banner ad that you place on their website.  The affiliate gets a commission based on the sales, visits, or leads that result from his/her efforts.  It’s the ultimate “pay for performance” program.

There are two basic approaches to approach affiliate marketing:

1. You can offer an affiliate program to others.
2. You can sign up to be another business’s affiliate.

Let’s take a quick look at both approaches:

Offering an affiliate program to others.  As the business driving an affiliate program, you’ll pay your affiliates a commission fee for every lead or sale they drive to your website.  You’ll want to find affiliates who’ll reach untapped markets; such as a geographic area or market demographic that, for whatever reason, you haven’t been able to penetrate.  Introducing your offer through a trusted company can help get the attention of prospects that have totally ignored your marketing efforts.

Include marketing restrictions into your affiliate agreement so that you’re not competing with your own affiliates.  The use of marketing channels that you’re using (such as search engines, content sites or e-mail lists) should be restricted or even off limits to your affiliates.  It’s your program and you need to set the rules – even if you let your affiliates run the majority of your internet marketing.

You can maximize your affiliate program by working with the best and cutting ties with the rest.  Most of your revenue will come from a small percentage of your affiliates. Managing an affiliate network can be time-consuming so you may want to consider starting small by selecting only a few companies initially.  Remember, affiliates are an extension of your sales force and represent your brand, so choose your partners carefully.

Signing up to be another business’s affiliate.  Joining another company’s affiliate program is all about extra revenue. You want to think about your customers’ needs and wants.  What products or services do you not offer that would interest them?  Join affiliate programs that offer those products and services.  Carefully selected affiliate programs can increase your sales and revenue with no upfront costs to you.  Plan your strategy and select the partners that will have the greatest impact on your business.

Affiliate marketing continues to grow as companies recognize it as a legitimate way to generate additional revenue in these tough economic times.  Forrester Research estimates that U.S. affiliate marketing spending will reach $3.7 billion in 2013.  It’s no surprise that more and more companies are looking to capitalize on this growing trend.

Are You Taking Advantage of All the Social Media Marketing Options Available to You?

By now most companies have a Facebook and Twitter account to announce special deals and incentives for “Followers” and “Likes”.  That’s a great place to start your social marketing efforts, but if that’s all your company in doing in the social media marketing arena, you’re missing some golden opportunities and you need to seriously consider expanding your social media marketing in new areas.

Unlike more traditional marketing, social media marketing centers on creating content that attracts consumers’ attention and encourages them to share it with their social networks.  Your corporate message spreads from user to user because it appears to come from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company.

Here are some social marketing sites that you need to seriously consider using:

Blogs.  Okay, technically a blog isn’t a social network or even part of any social networking site.  But blogs are social and blog comments integrate into other social media tools, helping spread the word about your business.  A blog is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.  If you’re not already blogging, you need to start – ASAP.

Using a blog gives your company an identity and helps you gain visibility on the web.  Utilize your blog to educate and help clients and you’ll build trust and strengthen your credibility as an expert in your industry.

Blogging requires a time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has in-house.   Fortunately, blogging is something that can be contracted out. Even though your postings are almost instantaneous, tangible results can take time.

LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is a social network for business professionals. It’s big, with 161 million members in over 200 countries.  People are joining LinkedIn at a rate of approximately two new members per second.  And more than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.  Use this business social network as an extended business card.  As people hear your name or mentions about your business, there is a good chance that they’ll check you out on LinkedIn.  So fill out your personal and business profiles and link them back to your business website.

YouTube.  The best known and largest video site is YouTube.  Although you don’t have to, you should consider producing your own videos for your marketing efforts.  For example, if you post a video to your blog, upload it to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has a powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.  While your customers might not be on YouTube, you can still use it as a place to store and tag your videos, and then distribute them to other social networks where you might prefer to invest more time and effort.

Flickr.  Start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers or your products (or both).  Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business.  Like YouTube, your customers might not be on Flickr, but you can still use it as a place to store and tag your photos, and then distribute them to other social networks.

Pinterest.  Pinterest allows account holders to create a virtual bulletin board – posting pictures of what interests them – and other users can drop by and evaluate your taste.  If others see something they like, they can repin that image to their own Pinterest account.  In other words, Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows members to take images, videos and other objects from your board and “pin” them to their board.  But what does it all mean from a marketing perspective?  Pinterest can effectively showcase your products on boards with links to your e-commerce or designated website. Such pins can be easily tagged with prices, repinned, and ultimately purchased.

There are hundreds of other social media sites – too many to mention all of them here.  There are benefits and drawbacks to using each site.  Explore the different sites to find which ones fit into your marketing philosophy and needs.  Using the various social networks effectively, will help your brand reach more customers, drive more traffic, and sell more products.

Just remember, it’s about consistency and your social media marketing campaigns are part of your company’s overall marketing strategy.  Make sure each message is aligned with your brand and marketing strategy as well as company philosophy and values, regardless of the medium.