Do you like to answer surveys, enter contests, and fill out short forms just for the change to win something? You do? Most of your customers do, too. With that in mind, audit your social media efforts through promotions with these tips:

Promotions

• Have bait: Do you have something worth giving away? Some possibilities are eBooks, whitepapers, coupon codes, or other free items. Use them as bait to get people to take action and interact with your brand. Run a contest with a prize at the end for the person with the best submission, most votes, or with a random drawing that includes all entries.
• Schedule the offers: Are promotions being mapped out? Do they coincide with holidays, seasonal sales in your industry, sales conferences or trade shows? Your regular business cycle can help you plan a promotions calendar that is effective.
• Terms of service: For promotions or contests, it is extremely important to have a Terms of Service on the promotion page or linked to your profile to ensure you protect your company.
• Reporting: Have you put a tracking or reporting mechanism in place to measure the effectiveness of your contests and promotions? These might include tracking new followers or fans to see if they continue to link to and interact with your page. Or flag newsletter sign-ups according to promotion to see which one keeps the highest subscription rate versus opt-outs down the road. Cross reference new online orders with the names of people who signed up for a contest to see if you received new business. No matte what your product or service, you must take the time to track and determine an ROI from your social media efforts.

In our next installment, we’ll cover tracking and measuring results. We’ll wrap things up with a look at what happens outside of your brand efforts.

Now let’s talk about more specific content, in case you found yourself stuck and out of ideas. We’ll also cover content that other people create about your brand and how to deal with it.

Your Content

• What type: The type of content you create and share should coincide with your brand’s position in the market. Do you help small businesses, cater to executives, or focus on remaining in-the-know about a niche product or service? Talk about those things and to those people. Vary the content based on where the profile exists like LinkedIn for industry news, product specific information via links on Twitter, and personal stories on Facebook, for example.
• How often: Studies have shown that updating a Facebook page more than three times a day will turn off followers. Until you have a large percentage of your followers responding to most of your posts, don’t exceed this amount. When that happens, feel free to post more often because then other people are helping the conversation move and it’s no longer a one-sided effort. On Twitter, it’s a good idea to update with automated feeds for things like industry news, but be sure to update personally when you have something interesting to say. Ask questions of people you follow or respond when they post something you liked.
• Don’t try to hard sell: Social media followers are more interested in your insights than in being sold. Tell them what you know or offer helpful tips. If you want to promote a certain item, try a soft approach like “By popular demand, we’re lowered the price on X. Use offer code ABC at checkout as our thanks!”

Other on-site social elements

This will vary by site, but take note of them over time as the social media audits continue.

• Sharing mechanisms: Sharing options are a quick, easy and important way to let your customers share your brand message. Turn on all sharing functions such as submission to Digg and Stumbleupon or similar sites. And a button for Twitter. If your business has a Facebook page, be sure the ‘Like’ button is easily found on your main site.
• Forums: If you have a forum on your site, choose your moderator(s) by who has the best product knowledge and fits the brand’s personality. Watch to see who your most active contributors are and be sure to thank them for their time and efforts. Have your moderators participate on related forums to represent your brand and offer comments as an authority figure in the industry.
• Reviews and ratings: Are reviews and ratings being encouraged, rewarded and monitored? Encourage reviews on your Facebook page, or to have blog guests add comments to your posts. Be sure to share the best ones. Visit external review sites and set up Google alerts to tell you when new reviews are posted. If anyone writes a negative review of your business, do your best to contact them personally first, and add your own comment saying how the issue was resolved. This will help with your reputation and minimize any damage to your brand from the bad review.

In our final posts, we’ll discuss special promotions and how to track the effectiveness of your social campaigns. Until then, happy socializing!

Integration

• Social media profiles: Share your Twitter feed on LinkedIn. Tell Twitter followers what you have posted on Facebook. When you write a new blog entry, post about it on LinkedIn, Facebook and send out a tweet. Integrate your profiles to build the relationships you have on each social site. This creates loyalty, generates conversations and can get you more followers.
• Blog: If you develop a business blog, integrate the social media profiles on it. Ask your blog readers to follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your YouTube channel or like your Facebook page. Have “share” buttons on your blog so people can quickly and easily share an entry they like.
• Offline Presence: Merging your online and offline presence is beneficial and often overlooked. If you haven’t taken care of it yet, look for opportunities. Add social media profile addresses to business cards, email signatures, and other printed materials. Let customers know you’ll tweet discount codes for your online store. Have your staff wear hats or shirts with your Twitter name. Mention your Facebook page in radio ads. If you have married your marketing efforts, hold an audit to take inventory of the initiatives and be sure they’re up to date.
• Other networks: Write guest posts or leave comments on other blogs and forums, and include your social media handles in your signature. (Return the favor and let other bloggers write a guest post on your site, too.)

Blog

• Content Calendar: Is there an editorial calendar? If not, there should be. Usually people are very excited to start a blog and write quite a bit. But then other things become a priority or it becomes more difficult to think of topics. Plan your content around seasonal issues, your customers’ most common questions or industry news. Write down a schedule and stick with it.
• Regularity of posts: How often are posts being published compared to the content calendar?
• Content: What type of content is being published? Are there any opportunities for new topics or contributors?
• Comments: Take a look at the number and type of comments from visitors to gain insight in to how the audience is feeling about the content being produced.

In Part 3, we’ll look at checking online content in your control and content about you that others create.

Social media is time consuming and can feel overwhelming. We are presenting this Social Media Audit 101 in several parts so that you can take your time working through all of the advice. Take what you feel applies to you and leave the rest. As a B2B business, we don’t take part in as much social media as we discuss here, primarily because our customer base isn’t engaged in social media. However, with social media, there is always room to do more and after doing audits for our clients, we realize that we should walk the walk and are making changes to our own business. So if you are a B2C company, make sure you “do as we say and not as we do (or rather, did)”!

Set Up Profiles

• Where are you now? Document all of your social profiles (including log-in information) where your brand has a presence, even if it’s currently inactive.
• Secure your name, everywhere: Ensure brand security by reserving the brand’s name on ALL social sites to prevent brandjacking. Use a site like Knowem.com. It will check your profile name’s availability on more than 500 sites.
• Identify any personality profiles to use: The main “brand” profiles should include the logo and only business information, but you can also add “personality” profiles that might be of interest, whether it is the CEO, customer service, sales, etc. Those profiles should use a name and individual’s photo.
• Submit your information: A brand can’t be active on hundreds of sites, but go ahead and fill out a profile on as many as possible.
• Design your pages: Use custom landing pages for social visitors. Create a custom Twitter background, custom Facebook landing tab and a custom YouTube channel background, for example. Keep them up to date. Don’t forget to double check the tracking analytics.

Branding

• Consistent profile names: If your brand name is long and you need to shorten it for some profile names, use that profile name across all social media platforms. It will make it much easier for your customers to look you up and follow you everywhere you are listed.
• Graphic elements: Be sure all logos and brand images are up to date and meet brand criteria. Consistency is key so don’t create a wild new look for social profiles. Stay in line with the rest of the organization in look and feel.
• Messaging voice: Many businesses don’t create a guide for messaging so this might be tricky. Your brand voice is the style of your communication: casual, formal, with or without slang, as a respected authority figure, as a friendly customer service agent. Whatever your “voice”, be careful to match it in your social communications as well.

Later in the series, we will discuss integrating your multiple profiles, whether or not to use a blog, determining your content, tracking your ROI and more.

But surprisingly, with the growth of social media, especially Facebook, some businesses have decided to keep their online presence limited to one of the free social media sites rather than launch a traditional website.

On one hand, it seems to make sense. Go where your customers go. If they are already spending time on Facebook, have a Facebook page and you will have visitors. Right?

Well, not exactly.

While social interaction is becoming more important to customers who want to feel like more than walking dollar bills to a business, there are some things that you simply can’t do through social media sites that you can do on your own business site.

You’re in control. This might seem obvious but it can’t be overstated. You don’t control the rules of a social media site. Its creators do. And they can change the rules at any time, limiting your ability to get your message out, sell your products, or otherwise conduct business. What happens if Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn were to disappear? Your business would have to start over from the beginning.

Analytics. You can have very robust analytics on your own site, using Google analytics. We’ve discussed some of the more important analytics before, and it’s important that you understand that you can’t get these statistics from a social media site. Facebook and Twitter are making improvements for tracking conversions on their sites, but it is much easier to track your visitors and customers on a site outside of these networks.

Mark your territory. When you limit your web presence to someone else’s site, you take away your chance to assert yourself as a true authority figure. By establishing your own site, and maybe a blog or other socially interactive page on it, as THE go-to place for information, your business is empowered.

Tell the whole story. Sure, you can add tabs to your Facebook page to provide areas for more information than the one paragraph area of the General Information section. But on your own site, you can add pages upon pages to tell your story in as much detail as necessary. You can give potential customers everything they want in one centralized place.

Gather email addresses. One visit to a site generally isn’t enough to close a sale with a prospect. One visit to your whiz-bang Facebook page won’t either. But on your own site, you can request people to sign up for email newsletters or to join your list for coupons and special deals. Building a good email list opens the door to another marketing channel for your business.

Sell! Maybe another obvious one? Social media sites aren’t e-commerce sites. If you have products to sell, you can’t do it on Twitter. Customers need a site to place the order. It should be yours. If you don’t have a site, they might find a competitor’s and complete a sale there.

Social media is a good tool. But it shouldn’t be your only foray into the online world. Create a true web presence for your business that lets you keep control over your message, see how your visitors find you and what information they are looking for, and fully engage customers that connected with you in the social realm.

Well, that idea is only partially correct.

Yes, search engines do like links and they will improve a business’s organic search ranking. BUT, those links need to be inbound links from other sites. Quality inbound links make your site look more legitimate to the search engines. Basically, they give you “street cred.” Something on your site is valuable enough for an outside source to link to you, so search engines will give you credit for that.

The idea of linking content internally on your site is still valid, though. It might help with search engines if it encourages visitors to click through more pages on your site and increase the time of their visit. Search engines will deem your site to have enough pertinent content on a subject to engage your audience and keep them interested. If your Page Views and Time on Site statistics improve, your organic search rankings should improve as well.

Search engine optimization can be complex. Understanding what search engines look for, the terms used in analytics, and working to improve all aspects of an SEO plan rather than just focusing on one piece of the puzzle is how you will really improve your rankings.

For help in putting together an SEO plan for your business, or for a competitive analysis that will show you how your efforts compare to your competitors’, contact us today.

Attention all business owners:
If you have a web site for your business (and you really should, you know), you MUST HAVE ANALYTICS as well!

Here’s why.

In the first report of its kind, medical practices were rated on a three-star system: one star for below average, two for average, and three for above average. But exactly who and what was rated?

Only coronary-artery bypass grafting procedures were included in this report. And only 221 cardiac surgery groups — roughly 20% — across the country were included. Not all of the data collected about each surgery was considered as part of the review system, so there is some concern that incomplete data can be misleading to consumers doing their homework before scheduling a surgery.

With more and more pressure from patient-advocacy groups, consumers and lawmakers coming every day for hospitals and physician groups to share this sort of data and be more publicly accountable for their results, it’s only a matter of time before other surgeon groups are asked to participate. After that, it could be pediatricians, internists, or general family doctors.

Regardless of whether or not your medical group is part of a Consumer Reports review, your practice and individual doctors are being reviewed online every day. Consumers are turning to generic review sites to rate their service, venting about bad service on blogs and social media, and turning word-of-mouth into word-of-keyboard.

If your practice isn’t already utilizing a reputation management service, you should sign up as soon as possible to find out what is being said about your business, when and where. It’s the only way to combat negative ratings from consumers and will ultimately help improve your practice by showing you exactly what problems need to be addressed.

For more information about the Consumer Reports ratings, check the New York Times article about it or read about it in the New England Journal of Medicine.

To sign up for Reputation Management services for your practice, contact us today. We can provide you with a free quote and start a monitoring program for you immediately.

But…I have recently learned some amazing stats.

Twice as many people use mobile phones as use the Internet. TWICE. With more than 4.1 billion* (yes, with a B!) people using mobile phones, your odds of reaching a customer via a text messaging system on their phone is much better than with email because not everyone has signed up for an online email account.

What’s even more staggering is that 97% of all text (SMS) messages are opened, with 83% opened within one hour of delivery.**

Have you heard of such an outrageous open rate with any other method of direct marketing? Of course not! In fact, roughly 90% of email sent today is SPAM and never opened or read by the recipient.

How can your business benefit from this knowledge?

By using mobile marketing, you can combine the best of all marketing worlds. Harness the power of precise direct marketing — because your customers OPT IN to receive these messages from you — mixed with the wide reach available through TV thanks to the ease of your message being shared virally and add the superior tracking of Internet marketing.

BOOM!

You’ve reached marketing Nirvana. In 140 characters or less, you have branded yourself and connected with your customers like never before.

If you’re a visionary and are ready to take the next step, watch a couple of cool videos and learn how to sign up.

Still not sure it’s for you? Take a look at these ideas and see how you can apply the concepts to your business:

Realtors — Forget flyers in front of houses. Put up a sign instead that lets house hunters get a listing’s details in real time by texting in the address. Send out an alert to your client list and other agents when you have a new listing or schedule an Open House.

Doctors — Let your staff remind patients of their appointments with two clicks instead of wasting time calling multiple phone numbers hoping someone answers.

Restaurants — Send out the daily lunch special at 11:00am to get your regular customers salivating and counting the minutes until they can leave the office. Having a slow night? Text an offer for a free appetizer when someone shows you the message on their phone. Drive traffic to your door when you need it there!

Spas — Have a new facial with the latest secret anti-wrinkle, take-10-years-off-your-face-in-10-minutes formula? Tell your customers all about it and add a combo offer of a free mani when they book an appointment today.

Schools — Reach every parent instantly when the school needs to close because of bad weather. Remind parents that your teacher conferences are being scheduled for the next week and to add them to their calendar.

The possibilities are endless. And the best part is…all of this is possible using the most popular 5-digit number in the US.

9 0 2 1 0

Anyone can remember that, right? Secure your personal name, business name, product name or other keyword, and tell your customers to text it to 90210. Add a few signs around your business. Put in on the t-shirts of your staff. Share it on your website, Facebook page, or send out a few tweets.

That’s it and you’re set to share your messages with one person or 100,000. The possibilities are endless.

How many ideas do you have now?

Let’s talk. I’ll tell you how easy and affordable this really is.

Text ‘BrandNew’ to 90210 to reach me.

The Mobile Revolution is here. Be a part of it.

* Source: guardian.co.uk ** Source: New York Times *** Source: cellular-news

How you present this error can say a lot about your brand and your marketing efforts.

Most businesses use a standard (i.e. boring) message stating the error. Very few even change the generic wording of the page to reflect their business name, add a tagline, or otherwise brand themselves.

Here are a few samples of creative 404 error pages that would make any brand proud.

http://futureofwebdesign.com/404

http://cssremix.com/404

Note that CSS Remix promotes its Twitter feed as well as directing users back to the home page.

http://www.doorstepdairy.com/404/

Be sure to watch the video on Doorstep Dairy’s error page. It is a great way to engage visitors and keep them smiling despite encountering the error.