Top Ten Reasons to Create a Facebook Page for Your Business
November 15, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
If you aren’t aware by now, Facebook dominates over all other social networks online. More and more businesses are realizing the potential of Facebook and creating a Facebook page (formerly called ‘Fan Pages’) for their business.
Small businesses with little to no marketing budget should consider Facebook pages as one of their marketing strategies as it is a free way to generate buzz around its products or services. If you still don’t have a Facebook Page for your business, or are not sure how to approach yours, here are the top ten reasons to create a Facebook Page:
1. More visibility. Your business will get so much exposure being on Facebook as millions of people log onto to the network everyday. This means that you can share information about your company’s products and services and reach more people.
2. Subscription to Your Page is Automatic. As soon as someone comes to your page and clicks on the ‘Like’ button they are automatically subscribed to your page. No confirmation email or extra steps to join your page.
3. Build a List. Once someone joins your page, you can lead them to an optin-form by providing a special offer or bonus on your page. Facebook has several plugins that allow you to place HTML code to your page making it a breeze to add a an optin-form and therefore building your list.
4. More Traffic to Your Site or Blog. You can run your blog feed through your Facebook page driving more traffic to your site or blog.
5. Easily Connect with Your Target Market. People that join your page are most likely interested in your product or service making your list more targeted. Plus, unlike a personal profile you can have unlimited people joining your page.
6. Create Administrators to Your Page. You can add administrators to your page to help assist in maintaining it with content and replying to comments.
7. Check Statistics. You can track the activity on your page like number of people who joined, which countries are they from, how many views, how many post feedbacks, etc. This is great information to have on hand so you can always tweak your marketing messages if necessary based on the information you see.
8. It can be Viral. If your page is set up effectively, people that like your page very much can suggest it to friends causing a viral effect as other friends will see your page and most likely join and suggest it, too.
9. It’s user friendly to maintain a Facebook page. You can add photos, videos and links as you would on a personal account.
10. Again, it’s FREE...why not take advantage of adding your company to a site that gets millions upon millions of visits per day without money out of your pocket. It’s a no brainer.
To create a page for your business, visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Social Marketing Quick Tip #8 – LinkedIn
October 20, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
LinkedIn is a business network that is meant primarily for business professionals as a place to connect with one another and market products and services in a (B2B) business to business environment.
It’s a great way to connect and network with business owners and people in a mutually beneficial way! You can add links to your websites, blogs and other social profiles. You can also set up groups that are similar to Facebook fan pages, and you can also have others recommend your services in exchange for you recommending theirs.
LinkedIn also has a lot of authority on Google and other popular search engines. If you currently have a LinkedIn profile, try doing a search for yourself on Google. There is a good bet that it will show up on the first page of results. That is authority ranking and you don’t want to miss out on it!
Social Marketing Quick Tip #7 – Create Contests
October 19, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Contests on FaceBook are a fantastic way to get a lot of people to join your fan page! People really enjoy entering contests, especially if they are easy to enter and have great prizes. You can even specifically state that the prize will be awarded when you hit a certain number of followers. This way you can get people to post the contest to their wall in order to get more entries, which will help the contest go viral.
That way you don’t have to award the prize unless you reach your target number of followers. Just be sure to keep the target number realistic, otherwise people won’t enter because they will feel the contest is a scam.
Another great way to use contests for marketing is to actually give away one of the products that you are selling. If you have your own product, this is even more effective. Your entire contest can revolve around giving away a copy of your product, which will bring a lot of publicity and recognition to your product.
Social Marketing Quick Tip #6 – Twitter Traffic
October 18, 2010 by Lisa Santos · 1 Comment
Marketing on Twitter is very easy, but you must be aware that it doesn’t always yield the desired result unless it is done properly.
Twitter marketing has to be approached in a completely different way than other forms of advertising because Twitter limits the size of posts to just 140 characters.
This means you must keep your posts very short, you can’t ramble on endlessly. You have to get to the point and do it in a way that gains your follower’s interest and gets them to click!
It’s a very good idea to read your Twitter page daily and respond to messages that your followers post. By interacting with them directly, you can establish friendships. This is very important, because your followers can “re-tweet” (RT) your messages to their own followers, potentially allowing you to reach a wider audience.
12 Favorite and Little Known Tips for LinkedIn
July 15, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Most business professionals are on LinkedIn at this point. LinkedIn tells us that:
• LinkedIn has over 70 million members in over 200 countries.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and
about half of our members are outside the U.S.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.
To me that states clearly that if you have almost ANY kind of business and are prospecting, LI will be a good resource for you. But just setting up a profile and dabbling once a week or so is not going to do much for your prospecting efforts. Below are a few tips that not many folks know about, but are powerful techniques for increasing your visibility and maximizing that “inbound marketing” that Social Media is known for.
1. Create 3 saved searches. If you are doing a search on a company, person, industry or whatever, save your searches. At the top where you see the number of records in your search you’ll see a “save this search” button – you get 3 if you are at the basic level. LI will send you a weekly email, if you want, to get updates to your search.
2. Recommendations are important, so ask for them. But make it easy. I first call or email my contact and ask if they will recommend me. If so, write the recommendatíon yourself – so you are sure that you are sending the right message. Be sure to talk about the problems you solved – that’s really the point, isn’t it?
3. Use the Question and Answer area to gain more visibility on the Internet. On the question that you answer you will see a “share this” with a drop down menu. You can email your network, Digg it, Bookmark the question on Delicious, or use the link provided in your answer and link to one of your blog posts, or somewhere else on your site to pull in traffic.
4. Join groups that are in line with your business, your objectives or your hoped for job. Fish where the fish are. The more “on target” the group, the more valuable the content they provide, and the networking opportunities will be.
5. Use groups to expand your network, but be selective. In the groups tabs, you will see “Groups Directory”. Select that and on the next page use Search Groups, selecting “other” from the drop down categories menu. Join the groups that interest you. Once you are a member, you will have access to the members in that group. Try connecting with the ones that make sense. You might evaluate based on the size of their network, the type of company or industry they are in or how much interaction they have had with the group.
6. Did you know you can export your connections? Go to “Contacts.” Then “Connections. ” At the bottom of your Connections box is “Export Connections. ” Export the connections and import them into your preferred address book. Do this frequently so you are consolidating all of your contacts in one spot (might be Outlook, Act, Salesforce).
7. Refer to both the LinkedIn Learning Center and their blog. The Learning Center is full of great tutorials and the blog has info on updated and new features with full explanations.
8. For better and more valued networking, when you invite someone to join your network, don’t use the canned LinkedIn message. Say something about who you are and why you want to connect with that person.
9. To really maximize your profile, find one or two LinkedIn specialists (Google that phrase, or check Amazon for authors) and look up their profile. Study carefully and learn by example.
10. Be creative about how you use the Answers section. It can be used to ask for solutions to problems, for resources, for vendors, for processes. But it can also be used to find good connections, or find other groups you may want to join, to deliver information on your products or services, IF it provides an answer to the question. Sometimes you’ve got the perfect solution!
11. You can share a group with your connections – more value added to your community. When you are in a specific group, on the Overview tab you will see an option to “share group” and you can send an email to 50 of your connections.
12. Don’t hop over the “People You May Know” suggestions that appears in the upper right corner of your home page. Expand the box and start connecting with people on an ongoing basis. This is a great way to widen your circle.
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for almost any social media objective – branding, lead generation, or job searching. Invest some time in learning the finer points – you will be glad you did.
About The Author
Elyse Tager is a social media strategist and founder of Elymedia. Elyse develops effective marketing strategies to help the small business grow significantly. Want to learn more about growing your business with Social Media? Sign up for Elyse’s free introductory teleseminar available at => www.elymedia.com.
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