Choosing Social Networking Sites Carefully

Everyone knows how big social networking is for business owners these days.  Social networking was originally intended to make it easier to maintain personal relationships, but businesses have made social networking a priority as well.  Premier sites have made it possible for businesses to grow their contact lists, manage their relationships and created the concepts of viral marketing.

Businesses of all sizes have taken part in social networking to promote their business in ways that they could never have dreamed of fifteen years ago.  Executives from all Fortune 500 companies promote their business on LinkedIn and companies with no marketing budget have the opportunity to make themselves front page news all over the country.

In order to make the most of social networking, businesses must learn to manage their social networking resources carefully.  It requires an investment of time and sometimes money just like anything else.  If a company wishes to benefit from social networking they must manage these resources carefully.

One of the mistakes that entrepreneurs often make is choosing the wrong social networks to invest in.  They end up spreading themselves too thin rather than focusing on the most appropriate sites.

Facebook is still the most popular social networking site and it’s free.  However, entrepreneurs must be careful not to make the mistake many others make investing all their time there.  Currently Facebook users are made up predominantly of people aged 25-54, with another 25% being 18-24.

In recent years more emphasis has been placed on business networking through Facebook.  Nevertheless, it is not as effective for professional networking as sites like LinkedIn, and Twitter is just as good a platform for many viral marketing programs.

A number of new sites other than LinkedIn have been created for business networking.  Some of the more popular sites include Xing and Ryze.  Xing is a great platform but it is difficult to get much of it without paying for the premium services.  Ryze is a good social network for new entrepreneurs, but it is not as popular as it was when it was first introduced.

These sites still can be worth joining even for users who aren’t interested in paying for premium memberships.   However, if they have a hard time finding and connecting with other users with the free plan, they should be careful before they invest a substantial amount of time and energy using them.

Businesses especially need to be concerned about the number of paid business networking sites that are almost completely inactive.  They exist only to continue scraping membership fees, mostly from new clients who don’t know what (or how little) they are actually getting from the services.  I won’t name any of the sites I have joined here, but I have run into a number of them.

The best rule of thumb is to focus on either the most popular networking sites or those that are most specifically targeted to a niche audience.  New businesses must always keep in mind that benefits from social networking only come with hard work.  They must approach social networking just like any other business strategy and look for the best return on their investment.

About the Author: Kalen Smith is the founder of Engineer-a-Business, a provider of business-to-business services and informational products for developing technology businesses. Read more about Kalen here.

How to Make Your Facebook Page Work!

Getting visitors to your Facebook page isn’t that hard.  Using basic Social Media techniques, connecting with people - on Facebook as well as Twitter and anywhere else you can - will get people visiting your page.  Once they get there though, the trick is to get them to keep coming back.  Facebook, like all social media, is about interaction and building relationships.  So to make the most of it, you’ve got to grab and hold people’s interest long enough and significantly enough so that they want to interact with you and your company.  How do you do that?  Glad you asked!  Below are 5 ways to make sure your Facebook page is working hard for your business.

1. Say it with pictures. People love to look at pictures, so use them to tell your story.  If you have a store or products, take pictures of them and post at least weekly.  If your business is just you - if you’re an expert and are blogging, writing, speaking, etc. - then post pictures of yourself doing what you do.  One great idea, if it suits the kind of work you do (restoration, web design, cleaning, etc.), is to post before and after pictures of your work.  Posting pictures regularly will help your fans get to know you, and you’ll be able to showcase your work too.

2. Say it even better with video. It’s no secret that if people love pictures, they really love video!  So take the picture idea, and turbo charge it by adding videos to your Facebook page.  Keep them short (3 min or so), and make them informative, fun, and instructional.  Remember, the goal is to get people coming back.  If you post videos that help or entertain, you’ll accomplish that goal.

3. Create a custom landing page. In case you haven’t heard, you are now able to create custom landing pages for your business.  This tells your page visitors you’ve got your stuff together and gives them an overall positive impression of your business - if it’s done right.  To make sure it’s done right, you have a couple of options.  You can learn FBML (Facebook Markup Language), or you can hire it out.  If you know HTML, you can probably learn FBML, but if you don’t want to take the time or aren’t interested in learning it, check out sites like Are We Connected or Social Identities.  For a great example of what a landing page can look like, check out Vaynerchuck’s page at Facebook.com/gary.

4. Offer something special. Any time you can make people feel like they’re part of an exclusive club, you’ll get people wanting to be in on it.  So consider offering sneak previews or discounts exclusively to your Facebook fans.  This definitely gives them a reason to keep coming back.  Not only that, but they’ll be likely to pass on your page to their friends.  People love sharing the inside scoop!

5. Engage! This is probably the most important tip of all.  Again, social media is about engagement, interaction, and building relationships.  So monitor your Facebook wall and engage with your followers.  If someone asks a question, get on it right away.  If someone posts a compliment or (God forbid) a complaint, address it appropriately.  The more people see you being a part of the conversation, the more they will want to jump in.  And if you can make it light and entertaining, many will just come to watch.  But don’t think that’s not valuable.  People who start out as observers often end up as buyers!

Remember, these pages are a great marketing opportunity - if they’re used properly.  So there you go.  Five fairly easy-to-implement ideas to make sure your business’s Facebook page is all it can be.  Do you have a Facebook page for your business?  Share it below.  We’d love to take a look!

Realize the Potential of New Media

New media surely isn’t new anymore, although if it is new to you, you are in danger of getting behind the curve. In the space of only a few years the power of the Internet has exploded like an ancient volcano, tending to cover a company’s well honed marketing structure with molten lava or ash. In the face of the new media onslaught, you should not try and desperately dig out your old marketing plans from underneath all those layers of ash, but you should embrace the potential and understand that we are now doing business in a very different world.

Traditional forms of media, print ads, television, radio, cold calling, promotional gimmicks and the like will all have their place in our future, but they must not be front and center anymore. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have, whether it is traditionally a complete “bricks and mortar” style operation, you must now have an online presence and a proactive one at that.

It is somewhat ironic that a medium as “faceless” as the Internet has in many respects turned us all into more personable and identifiable business people. The advent of social media means that there is now a human face to the corporate body and each organization should ensure that it engages social media this way. Never forget the social element, even though you are primarily focused on doing business. You may have a corporate persona, but people want to know about the human side of the business now.

Put every effort that you can into designing your website well. You must be super targeted when it comes to your keywords, the way that you describe your business. In a highly competitive business environment you need to set your organization apart and must focus on specific or long tail keywords and keyword phrases. Construct your website and optimize it so that your business stands out among its competition. Everything points back to your company website from a marketing perspective.

While your corporate website should adequately reveal who you are, what you do and why people should buy from you, including the ability to do so (a sales funnel), you should also have an educational and informative site for your business, through the maintenance of a top-quality blog. This is your opportunity to show just how much of an expert you are in your niche and don’t hold back when it comes to giving good advice, education or information. Your objective here is to reveal that you are “good guys” and that people should trust you, ultimately, to buy products or services to help assuage their needs.

Interact with social media platforms and do it well. You should have a Facebook page for your business, a Twitter presence, even your own branded YouTube where you show videos of products, services, solutions – video is a hot medium these days. Set aside time to maintain your social presence on a very regular basis. Don’t just set it up and believe that you have done everything you need to. These platforms and channels can work well for you, if you work at them.

Create good content, regularly and distribute it for maximum marketing effect. Once again, the more that people begin to realize that you know what you’re talking about, through the provision and distribution of such targeted content, the more they will believe that they should trust their hard-earned dollars to you when it comes to buying your associated products or services.

Are you still digging ash, or engaged?

Matthew Toren

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

When you see some of the most creative infographics around today, it’s little wonder that they say that people skim through webpages, focusing on graphics, rather than getting themselves absorbed in all the text. This should tell us all a story, as while the written word is certainly always “king” as we know, if we jam too much of it into one particular visual screen, then the eyes of our dear viewers will tend to glaze over it. Always intersperse your text creatively with graphics and photos and don’t forget that captions can be very powerful, as the eyes will almost certainly focus on the explanation for the presented photograph on page.

Infographics represent intelligent and very creative ways to explain subjects that are, in some cases, rather difficult to get your mind around. We present some of the “cooler” ones here for your consumption.

Over at Digg Labs, the creative guys and gals there have come up with a colored wheel which allows you to interact and select a day, month and year, to be presented with the top 10 stories by category on any given day. Check it out, but be warned you could spend a lot of time here!

While we know that Twitter is hot stuff, did you know that only five of 100 community members can be classified as really active? Maybe this graphic and the information here will help you to visualize it better?

Still on the subject of Twitter, how does it stack up against the big daddy, Facebook?
This graphic sums it up very succinctly. For example, did you know that Facebook has almost as many members as there are people living in Indonesia?

If you maintain an active blog, as hopefully you do, you may have wondered where those blog posts actually go to and how pinging services interact with your post once you have created it. We found this great interactive graphic tutorial at wired.com, which should actually be required reading or viewing for all Internet marketers. It really helps you to get a handle on the lifecycle and might help you to prepare your blogging campaigns more successfully.

The Conversation Prism is an inspirational creation, designed to graphically depict the art of listening, learning and sharing. It is visually very attractive as you can see and is available to buy as a really neat wall poster should you wish. Each one of the leaves represents an element of communication and a social media resource, with the inner circles depicting the style of communication and method, all leading back to the central brand. A great creation by Brian Solis.

Explore the social media landscape at fredcavazza.net and see which sites are linked according to purpose or intent. A handy little graphic to remind you which social media tools or services would be most appropriate for your needs.

Have you spied any cool infographics? Let us know.

Adam Toren

Send Money with Paypal and Facebook

PayPal has become pally with Facebook recently and you can now send money to people right from your Facebook site. All you need is your e-mail address and PayPal takes care of all the rest. Here is the link to the PayPal page within Facebook where you can get started.

It seems that Facebook is starting to get quite serious about its monetization. You can of course interact with Facebook financially right now, as you buy advertising space through their credit card portal, for example. They have been rumored for some time to have been looking at a “Facebook payments” program and it is only a matter of time before we start to see highly targeted and personalized advertisements appear on our Facebook homepages.

PayPal Send Money has a fan page on Facebook. This takes their level of customer service to another degree, as you can post your questions and concerns on the wall and receive a timely response from a PayPal employee. More and more people will be introduced to PayPal this way and they now allow money to be transferred to a total of 65 different countries around the world in 17 different currencies.

This development comes amid a rumor mill of Facebook versus PayPal stories circulating the web. When Facebook allowed some of its users to buy virtual and physical gifts through its new “gift shop,” this was seen as a direct shot against PayPal, still a leader in Internet based sales. The rumors were further fueled when Facebook hired Prashant Fuloria, one of the key designers of the Google Checkout platform, and other would-be PayPal competitors. Indeed, the biggest news appear to be that for the first time tangible gifts could be purchased through Facebook’s initiative, rather than just virtual gifts. Four developers were participating in the gift shop tests, including American Greetings Interactive, Greetbeatz, Somecards and Real Gifts, the latter providing physical gifts of candy or flowers.

The so called “alpha” test of the Facebook gift shop was said to be, by a Facebook spokesperson, simply a test “to explore possible new ways for users to share with their friends around birthdays and special occasions.” This latest news would appear to point toward a collaboration between PayPal and Facebook, rather than a direct competition. What was once termed to be a “PayPal killer” could in fact turn into a lucrative association for all parties. With 300 million monthly active users, Facebook could be poised to make significant income from a “Facebook payments” program. Meanwhile, Google Checkout remains curiously subdued in the background…

Matthew Toren

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