Time is public enemy number one of small business owners. Undoubtedly, it is one of the challenges cited most frequently by our client base. Who doesn’t need more time to make people aware of their services and products; more time to communicate with clients and prospects; more time to analyse the ROI of existing efforts? Yet your competitors are using social media marketing to grow their business and you risk losing new customers if you don’t keep up.
Here are three efficiency measures that will make every minute devoted to social activity work harder for you:
1. Use Buffer to share links
Time waster: One of the biggest time drains in social marketing activity is content sharing. When you stumble across something so relevant and cool you need to share it across all your networks, productivity and focus take an immediate hit.
Solution: Set aside a dedicated chunk of time first thing every day to select the worthiest, most interesting pieces of content in line with your social media strategy. Then use Buffer to automatically share them via your chosen social networks at pre-determined, optimised times throughout the day.
2. Create a ‘stalker’ list
Time waster: There’s little point in interacting with those who don’t move in the right circles or have any influence within your sector.
Solution: Be more selective about who your target with social activity. Begin by creating a list of the 20 people you most want to interact with in social media. Create lists for these people on Twitter and Facebook, and a circle for them on Google+. You should bookmark their blogs, where applicable, subscribe to their feeds and find them on LinkedIn. More »
There has been a lot of buzz about the latest social media research from YouGov these past few days. Much has been made of the finding that two in five (41%) of the UK’s online population claim to be getting bored of social media. While the majority of reports have been fairly negative, this research in fact highlights the ongoing prevalence of social media use, and creates a call for new ways to offer richer engagement.
The first useful finding is that Facebook is still king in terms of active users, with a staggering 95% of 16-20 year olds accessing the site within the last month. YouTube ranks second behind Facebook, with half (50%) of all UK internet users using the site within the last month, followed by Twitter (23%), Windows Live (14%), LinkedIn (13%), Google + (12%) and Spotify (10%).
Spotify’s rising popularity points towards a new breed of social media channels (while primarily a music service, Spotify recently added social media functions) which offer something of purpose beyond communicating with peers.
Backing this up, we see that consumer financial advice website moneysavingexpert.com, now has as many active users as Twitter. Alongside expert articles on financial issues and products are tools for users to create profiles, leave comments and interact in ways not a million miles away from those on the more obvious social networking sites. More »
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still perceived as the holy trinity of social marketing activity, based largely on their reach and popularity. Many businesses assume that the big three act as the cornerstone of an effective social media strategy, but is this a) a true reflection of how people are using social media today and b) the best option for every type of company?
Facebook marketing may be a no-brainer for global brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, but for a law firm specialising in divorce, nobody is likely to publicise their personal situation by ‘liking’ your company page. It may be more useful to create expert video advice on how to prevent divorce, or steps to finding the correct lawyer if separation is unavoidable. This video could then be posted to your own website, and adapted into a company blog post to be shared on Twitter.
These steps will help anyone from a reiki healer to a bookkeeper establish which platforms to make part of their social media activity:
1. Discover and investigate your target market by searching Google, Facebook, Twitter Search, YouTube, LinkedIn (especially the Groups and Q&A sections) and niche specific forums. More »
PostcardMania, a Florida-based DM postcard marketing business, has revealed that it can attribute at least 24 fresh leads per week directly to LinkedIn.
This amounts to around 600 leads in the past year, more than either Facebook or Twitter are delivering for the company – and bear in mind LinkedIn’s high quality, business-focused user base; leads from this source are more likely to convert.
Joy Gendusa launched PostcardMania in 1998 with just a computer, a phone and a powerful philosophy. Mendusa wanted to offer free, valuable marketing advice that companies might pay through the nose for from an agency.
Such a content marketing strategy, regularly serving up compelling information, works a dream on social media channels.
LinkedIn, serving a business community where PostcardMania could build a contact base of advice-hungry marketing professionals, has proved the ideal platform on which to execute Gendusa’s philosophy.
PostcardMania shared its top LinkedIn marketing tips on socialmediaexaminer.com, which are adapted here: More »
Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch today revealed that LinkedIn is fast surpassing Twitter as a social driver of traffic to its site, attributing much of this growth to the new LinkedIn Today product. The chances are that you have a LinkedIn account that you use to connect with business contacts. But are you making full use of LinkedIn marketing opportunities?
LinkedIn may not yet pose a serious threat to Facebook, but intelligent features coupled with user growth make it an increasingly strong component of a social media strategy.
If your profile is lying dormant, here are five simple strategies which will help to exploit its potential:
1. Company profiles
One of the lesser-known perks of setting up a company profile is the function to add company products to LinkedIn. ProBlogger did just this with its book and has already attracted 18 professional recommendations. Click here to see social peer-to-peer recommendation in full effect.
2. LinkedIn Today
Launched in March, LinkedIn Today aggregates news from LinkedIn and Twitter, yet serves as much more than just a news source for anyone that publishes content online. Consider getting aggregated via a LinkedIn Share button on your site to exploit its traffic-generating possibilities. Find more information on getting set up here. More »
LinkedIn announced on their blog yesterday that video sharing is now available on their site, which is great, but the festive video card they’ve invited us to share in celebration seems, well just a bit sinister:
With the launch of the LinkedIn ‘Share’ button this week, corporate blog content and website articles can now be easily shared with professional networks on LinkedIn.
If you click a LinkedIn Share button on a website or blog, you will be asked to login with your LinkedIn account, and then you’ll be able to share a URL (with the network’s shortener) in your status update box.
According to Techcrunch the option to share content via a universal Share button makes sense for the network, since users already tend to share business content such as news, whitepapers and presentations with their contacts. Significantly, the button will show how many shares have been made for a particular piece of content – data which will be of particular use to publishers on the type of content that readers are sharing with their contacts.
Until recently LinkedIn has lagged behind other social networks in building connections to external sites – Facebook has its ‘Like’ button and Twitter its retweet one. The move will build on other strategies implemented by the social network this year (improved groups functionality, integration with Twitter) The Share button is part of LinkedIn’s broader strategy of bringing LinkedIn to platforms that people may use in their professional life, including Twitter and corporate blogs. More »
Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.
LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).
Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.
Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.
Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%). More »
While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.
Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’ but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns
In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?
The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%) and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). More »
B2B marketers are equally split in their take up of blogs and social media and are bottom line focussed, a US survey has found.
50% of B2B marketers in the Genius.com/BtoB magazine survey said they don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.
Many are also not using Adwords or SEO tools.
The key success measurement for B2B marketers is revenue, with 61% focussed on revenue generation, followed by sales agreements (40%) and qualified leads (39%).
Over five times more marketers cite revenue generation as a key metric than they do website traffic or impressions (12%) or click-through rates (12%).
Time is public enemy number one of small business owners. Undoubtedly, it is one of the challenges cited most frequently by our client base. Who doesn’t need more time to make people aware of their services and products; more time to communicate with clients and prospects; more time to analyse the ROI of existing efforts? Yet your competitors are using social media marketing to grow their business and you risk losing new customers if you don’t keep up.
With the launch of the LinkedIn ‘Share’ button this week, 
