Big and steady corporations are beginning to consider the advantages that social networking brings but it’s more interesting to note that a method can provide more for a startup business. The very nature of being smaller provides startup companies the ability to focus clear without having to break down an objective into simpler and more direct objectives. A larger company may have more channels but as time passes by, these channels are afflicted by lack of updates and ultimately become empty.

To completely increase the benefits brought by social networking to your developing business, it would be helpful to think about a few things:

Narrow Your Target

Don’t create another Facebook profile simply to possess one more to have an offer that is different from the rest of what your company presents. To attain great results, keep everything together. You do not need to produce another page if your company that offers mobile phones decided to sell other gizmos, for instance. If you have more goods in the future, just think exactly how many pages you would need to manage. Keep it uncomplicated!

Organize And Connect Almost Everything

It’s good to know how the Internet works such as the web of a spider and this basic principle applies best in social networking. If you’re not utilizing Twitter or Facebook just yet, try to connect your company with this media. If you work with one, just link them to one another and link them to Youtube or LinkedIn – you are having a great start.

Amuse And Inform Your Target Audience

This means that you can create your own following just by being useful or applicable. Visualize a personality or persona that you would like to portray and be consistent with it. Know your target market and find methods to attract them, either by means of contests, free gifts, or remarkable content.

Be Consistent

All too often, individuals and companies develop a blog, post one or to things, and then wait for the customers to roll in. This, unfortunately, just isn’t how successful and profitable blogging works. Consistency is everything. In order to attract as many visitors as possible you have to contribute to your blog on a regular basis. Write a few initial posts that will attract your desired audience to your site. After you have published a few posts that are receiving consistent attention from the general blogosphere, set a consistent blogging schedule for yourself. Blogging requires a significant amount of effort and time. Try to contribute a new post to your blog at least once every two weeks. Designate a specific day to be the day that you update your blog. This way your readers can know when to return to your site to read your new post. Earning a profit and gaining more customers from blogging means that you have to get new readers on a regular basis and get those readers to come back. A consistent blogging schedule is the first step in getting readers to return.

Be Varied

While much of blogging is just about writing, a successful blog has to involve other elements as well. Many bloggers try to create a successful blog by only writing similar posts over and over again. Attractive blogging requires interesting posts, attractive web design, pictures, videos, and different kinds of blog posts. One of the best ways to bring variety to your blog is by including pictures and images with your blog posts. However, you should also consider the different types of posts you can feature on your blog. Don’t just write posts about your product or service. Let guest bloggers write posts that relate to your niche area of blogging. Try including video post or podcasts. Write list posts that give your readers an easy template to skim and follow. Write posts about recent news relating to your area of interest. Involve your readers in your posts by encouraging commenting and discussion. By creating a blog that is varied and interesting, you are more likely to gain a wider readership.

Build a Community

Blogging is one of the best platforms to develop your company’s reputation with. Build a community around your blog. Talk to your customers and potential customers throughout the comments that they leave. Blogging is in many ways a very personal ordeal. Your readers can feel like they are getting to know you and your product on a more personal level. This will help you to gain their trust and in turn win their approval. Also, you can use your blog to develop a relationship with other companies and individuals involved in your area of interest. By getting to know your blogging community, you can better provide for your customers and better understand your competition.

Byline:

This is a guest post from Carol Wilson who writes for business insurance. She contributes articles about a variety of marketing, business, stock market, small business topics. She can be contacted at: wilson.carol24 @ gmail.com.

Marketing Research

Social Media websites make it easier for small business to interact with their customers and thus know what they are looking for. This can give rise to some informal focus groups whereby you can quickly understand what your customers are looking for and thus customize your product and services to better fit the bill. And the good thing about that type of research is that social media sites are free too.

Traffic

Not all traffic comes from search engines nowadays and social media sites also have their part to play. Even Google has understood this and is now entering the social media realm. For this reason it might be important that you develop your presence on these sites to make sure that your business benefit from this surge in traffic.

SEO

Social Media website can also help boost your ranking in the search engines. Indeed getting a link with your anchor text on these sites can greatly improve your ranking and help increase traffic to your site. The key here is that you should have some useful content on these social media sites and not some crap content that will just make you appears as a spammer.

Conflict Resolution

Nowadays when a person has a problem with a particular product or service they will gladly make all other people know through the use of Facebook or Twitter. Although this is inevitable, you can still use this to your own advantage. For instance addressing these issues correctly should allow to position your company as one that is listening to its clients and prepared to walk the extra miles to please its clients.

Brand awareness

A good social media presence can also allow you to improve your brand awareness and put you on the mind of a majority of a people. The good thing about social media is that you can use your own customers to make your marketing. For instance people will want to retweet or share your information on Facebook thus allowing you to target some more people.

Social media we can use in for both manners for traffic, branding & lead generation. Let me divide it in two parts.

img source:- link

Traffic: – when it comes to traffic then there are lots of famous social bookmarking websites like digg.com, stumbleupon.com, mixx.com & reddit.com. If you work a bit hard & spend some time on these websites then you can derive thousands of visits from these websites in just few days. Believe me the traffic can crash your site. The only thing you need is quality & unique content (try to avoid duplicate content).

Branding & Lead Generation: – When it comes to branding & lead generation then Facebook & Twitter are the two big names. Recently Linkedin also started ads network where you can generate some targeted traffic as per CPC. On facebook you can do ads as per CPC & CPM basis & from here you can do some branding & generate some targeted traffic to your website. With twitter now you can also do paid tweets & get some followers to follow you. There are lots of social media tools available which can be used in any social media campaign.

If we assume we will do paid advertisement or hire a consultancy for social media marketing but the major problem is to track traffic from social media sites. There are lots of other websites available for traffic & branding but the main issue is most of the people use these websites through applications like iphone, desktop application etc. & it’s being really difficult to track traffic from these websites. Here are some tips how we can track traffic from these websites in Google analytic. There are some simple steps which you need to follow & you can track some traffic from these websites.

Once you planning to start social media campaign for your website, product or services then you should always be careful about monitoring your brand as well.

Social Media Monitoring

In simple words “Protect your privacy and reputation and define your online image”

There are some social media monitoring tools available which can help you in social media monitoring. Some of them are paid & some are free so it’s up to you how important monitoring is for you. In simple way we recommend you to use Google alerts to monitor your brand. It’s easy to use & you will see the results as it happens.

What to monitor?

You should always track your brand which can be your company name, name of your product or name of your competitors. You just simply need to add the name of your brand in any social media monitoring tool & it will start tracking it for you. It will show you complete analysis about your brand like who is talking about your brand? What are they saying? And Targeted Influencers depending upon which tool you are using. We recommend you to check this tool & see if it can help you somehow.

Why social media monitoring is important?

In online marketing people buy products from well known & reputed companies. May be your competitors or any person try to destroy your brand reputation by just writing some bad or fake reviews somewhere on internet which can give bad impression to your prospects or other customers. Not only this but it helps you to find some influencers who are talking good things about your product or brand name. So if you really want to monitor or protect your brand then you should start monitoring your brand.  There are tools in which some are very costly & some are just available in $10-$50 per month.

Here are top 7 reasons for social media monitoring?

Online Reputation Tracking

It is really a simple way to track your brand reputation online. These tools are not so much costly but buy just spending few $ every month you will see the difference.

1. Find Influence-rs
   It will help you to find people who are talking about your brand or your product so that you can easily find your prospects & convert them in to your targeted customers.
2. Testimonials
   May be there are some people who have used your product & write some good reviews about your product somewhere on internet. It will show you those links as it happens & you can use those links as your testimonial to increase faith from other prospects.
3. Brand Development
   It will also help you in brand development because if people wouldn’t find any bad reviews about your product or brand then they wouldn’t mind buy products from you.
4. Communication
   It can be a source to find targeted people who are talking about your product but are not your customers so that you can easily communicate with them & educate them about your product qualities.
5. Targeted People for Networking
   These tools will also help you to find people from social networking sites like twitter, Linkedin & facebook so that you can grow your network with your targeted audience & add them in your account.
6. Competitors Activities
   You can simply add your competitor name in these tools & it will send you the links about your competitor’s activities & you can easily track them & try to find best activities for your product as well.

We never know who is talking good or bad about us on internet so social media monitoring is must for any business & it’s up to you how much it worth for you? You can simply use free tools or you can use paid tools to get some better analysis for your brand.

Recommendation

Online brand protection

According to a new research by Pew Internet project there is a rapid increase in the number of application savvy consumers in US. Out of 82% total cell phone users in US, 43% have applications on their cell phone, which means that almost half of the total users have cell phone application. Out of which 24%, i.e. two third of them say that they use the application frequently and 13% users have said that they have paid for at least one such application Now that’s a lot of application usage.

The study pointed out that, the mobile applications or “apps” as they are conveniently christened, are hugely popular with the younger generation, mostly men, tech savvy and more affluent in comparison to the rest of the population. The slightly older generation still sees cell phone’s as the mode of communications majorly. The study also noted that, there was an increase in usage and downloading of the application as they further reduced the age of the users.

Image Source:- pewinternet.org

Other than communicating the users preferred their cell phone for taking pictures (76%), followed closely by sending or receiving text messages (72%). The percentage drops to almost half when it comes to accessing the internet on the cell phone (38%) followed by playing games (34%), sending and receiving mails (34%), recording a video (34%) and playing music (33%). I would say that it is a rather impressive figure considering the fact that these applications were launched just two years ago (Apple in 2008, followed by Blackberry in 2009). It is picking up fast 20% of cell phone users who downloaded application in the past 30 days on their phone were under 30. The ratio of adult cell phone users who have downloaded an application as early as last week is 1:10.

On the downside, applications have to create a bigger market for themselves. As the old cell phone users, (that are fairly large in numbers to be ignored.) are not “apps” friendly or are too lazy to adapt them. In the words of Kristen Purcell, associate director for research at the Pew Internet Project, “many cell owners do not know what their phone can do.” 18% of the researched cell phone users did not have any knowledge about the applications in their cell phones and surprisingly this number increased as the users age was increased.36% users under the age of 50 years showed total ignorance when asked about the applications in their cell phone.

Image Source: – pewinternet.org

According to the survey conducted by the Nielsen application playbook, gaming application top as the most favorite and the most downloaded application with 60%, of the total users downloading it within a span of one month. 52% have downloaded the weather and news applications. Other applications like navigation, food, maps, entertainment, music and social networking, have a sizeable downloads. However, communication (21%) and Travel (18%) applications are the bottom contenders, amongst the users. 57% of the recent application downloader’s claim that they are using their applications almost daily, while the 24% said that their application usage is minimum 30 minutes per day.

Study also revealed that there is a certain pattern that existed based on the gender of the application user.  It was observed that the applications like social networking (63% vs. 58%) and games (53% vs. 42%,), were their most preferred downloads, in compared to men who gave much higher preference to the applications related to  productivity and banking at (29% vs. 21% and 32% vs. 25% respectively).

It was also stated in the study that people preferred to keep the most used applications handy, so that they are available without much effort.

If we take a look at the overall picture, than it would not be wrong to point out that application age has arrived and looks like it’s going to stay here for long.

Source:- pewinternet.org

It’s no secret that brands are using the plethora of options on the Internet and consumers are using social media and networking to talk about brands they prefer. Ultimately, your brand is what your customers, market, and employees think about it.

Image Source: brands.com

Key Strategies to Represent Your Brand Online

Representing your brand online is more challenging than ever today. Businesses are screaming to be heard and to grab consumer attention away from all of them you must look for creative and valuable marketing opportunities. It is extremely important to have an updated website, with clear information about all your services and contact details.

Blogs – Fundamental to Growth of a Brand

If the Internet has rewritten the rules of marketing then blogging is one of the key factors. This amazingly cost-effective means has helped millions of small, medium and even large businesses “speak” to their audience and provide an excellent platform to talk about their products and services. Most importantly, blogs promote an active interaction in the community leading to a greater ranking in the search engines and increased credibility for the brand too.

With a blog, a business owner can ensure that a consumer reads more than an online classified ad and at times, more than what the website states too. However, if you start a blog you need to ensure that it is up-to-date with relevant information.

Also, with a blog, you are in complete control of – penning down your viewpoints and moderating comments too. Hence, you are in complete control of your marketing strategy and can experiment as you want.

An updated blog signifies that as a brand you are always trying to improve because you are writing regularly about your efforts to improve product quality and service. Employee’s blogging about his or her experiences and perspective is an added plus too.

Must-Read Blogs:

1. Jonathan Schwartz (President & CEO, Sun Microsystems)
2. Craig Newmark (CEO, Craig’s List)
3. Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks)
4. Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext)
5. Matt Blumberg (CEO, Return Path)
6. Alan Meckler (CEO, Jupiter Media)
7. Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect, Adobe)
8. Robin Hopper (CEO, Founder – iUpload)
9. Jason Calacanis (CEO, Weblogs)
10. John Dragoon (CMO, Novell)

Social Media Tools

The social media trumpet has sounded and it is loud and clear. Social Media Optimization or SMO is all about activity on various sites, such as, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc. With and active and meaningful presence on the various social media websites, you can effectively convey your brand message to your target audience, at a much faster speed, at no cost at all!

However, it is important to be creative while you plan a social media strategy, give it some breathing time (don’t expect results in a day!) and analyze the results for better planning ahead. Also, it is important to engage with your potential customers through participation in forums and discussions.

Here’s a simple example – If you have around 200 friends on Facebook and each of them are connected to another 100-odd friends, you are automatically connected to friends of friends too, many of whom could turn out to be your potential customers because they read about your products and services on your Facebook page. Polls, sponsored groups and social ads are great options to represent your brand online and bring it to the notice of millions of web surfers out there.

Image Source:- flickr.com

Social media is best used in connection with your blog. With the blog as your main representation online, you can use the social media tools to share latest posts and more information on your brand.

And if you think that social media is a fad, think again. Also, check these statistics for yourself:

• Facebook has over 500 million users today.
• 66% of online Americans use social networking sites today, up from just 20% in 2007.
• 68% say they have shown their support of a product, service, company or musical group by becoming a “fan” or a “friend” on a social networking site.
• According to the May metrics report released July 1 by mobile ad network Millennial Media, there is a 50% rise in mobile ad campaigns that direct users to multiple social networking sites.
• 21% of BtoB marketers surveyed can directly attribute sales or revenues to their Twitter efforts.

Sources:

smrb.com
socialmediaatwork.com

In fact, Justin Kistner of socialfresh has stated that “we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and its The Era of Social Media”. There’s much analysis and data to recommend social media as an innovation to invest in for businesses worldwide. The bottom line is to have a clear objective and be a valuable resource while you represent your brand online.

Facebook has shut down a real estate business page with 47,000 plus members giving zero notice to the page owner, Jonathan Rivera.

Read Complete Story

Social media strategy means every person has an opportunity to involve with any type of conversation with such great ideas and speak on that. This strategy shows that everybody engage with product testing. They may use multiple tools and spread their presence.

There are some important strategies to achieve the goal.

• Describe the target goal
  Social media is a set of different types of tools, where you can get anything you want. You should engage with your targeted people.
• Categorize the target people
  In social media find the target people and know about their categories of people with active original thoughts. They should get the feedback of people.
• Define specific strategy
  With social media tools you should show the message and maximum visibility. For example when you use the blog for writing it should have challenges and information regarding business. You should communicate with people and share the general ideas from different kind of social media tools.
• Measurement of strategy
  For measurement of strategy you should use the combination and evaluation of metrics with strategic people.
• Connect with conversation
  Social media is two way conversations where you can get the instant feedback of people. You should use every type of social media tools for engage with people having different value and information.
• Always ready to customer help
  You have an opportunity to help the customer if needed. You should ask them about their likes and dislikes.

Above all the things are helpful to achieve the targeted goal. Social media is not a faster way to join the community without doing any work on that. This is just a way to engage with people who are helpful for your plans.

Why social media strategies are helpful for your company?

A good social media strategy requires a lot of opinion and scheduling. This is a cheaper way to advertisements. By the good content skill you can communicate with other users of social media. It has a responsibility to build a brand of your product and give the feedback of customer as soon as possible. Good strategy has a power to manage all the require things for branding and advertising.

Why Social bookmarking?

If I am not wrong then it is not easy for a new website to get indexed in Google. Now day’s social bookmarking is becoming a very popular way to derive traffic for any website (domain age doesn’t matter). You can easily get indexed your pages with in 24hr’s by submitting your site to social bookmarking websites like digg, Mixx, propeller etc. But 1 thing I would like to add here is “Please Don’t Spam”. What I mean for Spam is, sometimes people just try bookmarking all inner pages multiple times to social bookmarking famous websites like digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx etc. These websites not allow us to submit pages which are sales oriented or having some kind of forms etc. Social bookmarking is also a game which we should play with rules only else your domain will be punished for life time.

Blogging & bookmarking

Yes I can say this is a perfect combination of a blog & bookmarking websites. Blogging is an only thing which can help you to become a good brand through social bookmarking websites. If you really looking for social bookmarking benefits then you should create a blog for your website. Once you created your blog then you can start writing & sharing good content. You can do some internal linking by using keywords in your blog post.

In above picture you can see how we have added a link to our website with one of our targeted keyword. You can do the same & you can increase internal linking as well as you can increase page views for your website so that the bounce rate will not go so high. You can create 2-5 blog post in a week.

Some time people buy software & bookmark there pages to 200-300 websites in just one time to get indexed. Yes you can do this but it will only help you in indexing nothing much but I would like to tell you an alternate & very effective way. You can create an account on 5-7 famous bookmarking websites like digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx, propeller, delicious etc.  These websites are having a good PR for their home page & once your content will hit the front page on any of the above mentioned website you will get lots of back links for your post. Yes we know it is not easy to get front page on these websites but believe me we can do it. You need two things power profile & unique content to hit the front page.

“I am a power user to all social bookmarking websites & if you need any kind of help just fill the form on my website or contact me any time. You can also join us on our Facebook page where we share important tips & information about social media marketing.“

Why need a website?

1. Brand Awareness
2. Members expect online support
3. Web sites save your money
4. Your Web site tells your members they’re important
5. People are online looking for you

Click here to read why we should have a website?

We have identified three goals for any new website honours.

1. Branding
2. Traffic
3. Knowledge sharing

Branding
We believe branding is a first step for new website honours, because people would love to buy things from establish brands. These days Social networking websites like Twitter & Facebook helps  a lot to establish a brand. Create your profiles on Twitter & Facebook & start following people who are related to your industry. You can check if your competitors are already on social networking websites also you can check what your competitors are sharing and you can create a bit same strategy.

Traffic
Targeted traffic is also very important for any new website. Here are 10 free ways to derive traffic to a new website. As much traffic comes to your website there are possibilities for conversions. These days social bookmarking websites like digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx helps a lot in traffic generation. If your website hit the digg & Stumbleupon front page then you won’t believe how much traffic you  receive for your website. We know Mixx wouldn’t provide much traffic but it helps a lot in SEO. Here you can read about our post How Mixx can help us in SEO.

Knowledge sharing
We know most of the people comes online just for getting knowledge about their industry. If you think you can share some good information about your industry then believe me it would be very helpful. Here are some famous channels which we can use for knowledge sharing  Blog, Article Submissions website, videos, Images & guest blogging.

Above mentioned three steps should be targeted by any new website honours. Earlier we have created a poll to identify most important factor for business success?. Your votes are much appreciated.