Not Generating Leads from Social Media? Here’s Why
If you’ve been working on your social media for some time but haven’t gotten the results you’re looking for, don’t fret. Chances are you’re making one of these seven common mistakes.
Social media isn’t a lever you pull that instantly generates leads. Instead, it’s more of a gradual dial that you need to turn up slowly, over time. Any mistake in the process could lead to your leads drying up.
These are seven of the most common mistakes people make in social media. Fix them and your leads will start flowing in.
1. You’re in the Wrong Social Media 
No matter how well you’re executing your social media plan, if you’re in the wrong type of media, your message isn’t going to be heard.
If you’re regularly publishing on Facebook and Twitter but you’re primarily targeting CEOs who only spend time on LinkedIn, then your strategy really isn’t going to work.
Figure out where your market spends their time. Then create a strong presence in those social media networks.
2. Not Putting Likes and Shares on Your Website
Inspite all that social media has going for it, one thing it’s not great at is getting initial traffic. It’s great for following up with readers and it’s great for putting out viral content. But the best way to get people into your social media funnel is still your own website.
Make sure that you have the like buttons, share buttons, tweet buttons and follow buttons embedded on your website to generate healthy social media leads.
3. Not Making the Most of Captured Attention 
When someone on social media comes to your page, you have something that’s extremely rare: Your customer’s attention.
Don’t waste it. Make sure that every inch of your social media real estate is filled with value adding, brand building material.
For example, if you have a Facebook page, make sure that you have everything filled out: make sure you have company information, website details, photos, etc all uploaded to your page.
4. Not Adding Value Through Content
Marketers who treat social media as just a platform to push advertising are missing the boat. Not only won’t they get buyers, but they’ll alienate their platform.
However, even marketers who don’t make that mistake still often don’t provide enough value. Giving updates about your company for example doesn’t count as adding value to your customers’ lives.
In order for your social media lead generation initiatives to really take off, it has to really make your customers’ lives better. You need to solve problems for your customers. You need to provide valuable content that your customers will be glad you shared.
Got Bad Online Reviews? Here Are 5 Tips on What to Do
Even if you run a top notch business, negative customer reviews are going to happen. Though you can and should do everything you can to prevent negative customer reviews, it’s still important to have a plan in place for how to deal with negative reviews if and when they come up.
Here are five tips to help you deal with this kind of negative customer-sourced publicity.
1. Never Ignore It 
Perhaps the worst thing you could do when it comes to negative publicity is ignore it and hope that it disappears on its own. It simply doesn’t. In fact, if anything, it will get worse and worse until you handle the situation.
Assume that any piece of negative review online is an urgent action that needs attention.
2. Respond Quickly
If you respond fast, you’ll be able to keep the fire to a minimum. You’ll also send the message to your consumers that you care and that you’re paying enough attention to catch problems before they become too big.
To illustrate the point with a counter-example, take a look at United Airline’s “United Breaks Guitars” colossal blunder. When a customer who was a musician witnessed seeing his guitar thrown by United Airlines employees and found this guitar broken afterwards, he complained. United refused to pay for the damages.
He wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. United Airlines didn’t respond until hundreds of thousands of people already saw the video. Today, the video has over 11 million views. Watch the video here.
If United Airlines had addressed the issue either on the spot or when it became clear that the customer was going to make an issue out of it, they would have saved the company millions of dollars in bad publicity.
5 Powerful Ways to Connect With Sports Fans on Facebook
Sports fans are one of the most rabid and passionate groups on the planet. For zero monetary gain, they’ll follow every move of their favourite sports team, know the details of every player, memorize the scores of every game and just generally put their heart and soul into the game.
Marketing to these fans involves understanding and using a different kind of psychology. Fans can be unforgiving of marketers who don’t speak their language. Speak to them in the right way however and you’ll have earned yourself the most loyal followers in the world.
Here are five tips for marketing to sports fans on Facebook.
1. Host a Discussion
Sports fans love to talk. They love sharing notes about their teams, reliving highlights from the last game, bashing on opponents and even just plain chatter. They love sports and they love talking about sports.
Not everyone can make it to an in person sports game. Sports lovers want to feel like they’re part of the game experience, even if they’re not there. Hosting live discussions allows them to talk about the action as its happening even if they couldn’t make it to the game itself.
2. Talk About it All Week
One big mistake marketers make is only marketing to sports fan when there’s a game on. However, sports fans are sports fans 24/7 – They want to talk about it all day, all night, whenever they can.
Before a game, there’s the leadup. They can talk about the players, the matchup, who they think will win, trash talk the opponent, get excited, etc.
After the game, they can discuss what happened and celebrate or commiserate the results.
Don’t just market to them during game time. Market to them all week. Every day.
4 Fundamental Building Blocks of Successful Social Media Contests
A good social media contest can bring in tons of new visitors, build excitement among your existing user base and create buzz in the industry as a whole. Pulling one off successfully requires a lot of planning. Just one or two mistakes can not only bring down your whole contest, but even put your company in jeopardy.
Here are four of the most important things to know before starting your social media contest.
#1 – The Legalities
When you’re doing an online contest, you should almost definitely have a lawyer look over your legal disclaimers and the contest as a whole to make sure you’re fully compliant.
Different states have different laws about what you can and can’t do in a contest. Sweepstakes can never require a purchase. Contests that are based on skill or participation have special rules as well.
Your contest will need to have appropriate disclaimers. These should be written by a lawyer. It’s important to realize that you can actually get sued if you don’t have your legalities down.
#2 – Understand Cheating
Cheating is an often under looked aspect of online contests. If there’s real monetary value to the prizes you’re offering, there’s a very good chance you’ll attract people who won’t play by the rules. 
Forms of cheating include using proxy servers to vote on their own submission, hiring out voting or other processes overseas or even downright hacking.
Start by studying how contest players game various different kinds of systems. Then implement basic protections, such as one vote per IP, cookies to track users, etc.
Finally, check your logs regularly to see if there’s any suspicious activity. For example, if you suddenly see 2,000 users an hour coming from Vietnam voting on one user, you might start to get a little suspicious.
5 Killer Strategies for Using Social Media to Recruit Brand Ambassadors
A brand ambassador is someone who’ll actively seek out others to help spread your brand. They’ll tell their friends, their co-workers and even their social media networks about you. Through a single brand ambassador, you could be exposed to as many as 500 people through tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Brand ambassadors can’t be “hired.” They can only be earned. Great companies turn many of their customers into brand ambassadors.
When someone has a great experience at a company, they tell their friends. People want to share stories about great service. People also want their friends to experience great service. If you really create a satisfied customer, you’ll naturally create brand ambassadors who help spread your brand.
On the flip side are people who actively seek to hurt your brand. It rarely happens, because in general people want to help rather than hurt. In order for someone to want to actively hurt your brand, you’ll need to have really mistreated them or underperformed their expectations.
According to IBM, customers will usually give you as many as ten warning signs before turning against you.
So how do you cultivate brand ambassadors rather than brand haters? How do you create a fanatic fanbase of users that try to evangelize your product wherever they go? Make sure you follow these five guiding principles.
1. Consistency
In a survey of restaurant customers, people were asked questions about why they regularly ate at a certain venue. Was it the service? Was it the food? Was it the price? Was it the location? 
When the results came in, researchers were surprised to find that the #1 thing customers looked for was consistency.
They wanted to know that they could go to a certain restaurant and have a certain experience. They knew what kind of service they’d get, what they’d have to pay and what kind of food they can expect.
Consistency is very important to customers. If you want to cultivate a long-term customer, it’s tantamount that they know what they can expect from you. Be consistent.
2. Be Product Centered
What is it that separates your brand from other people?
In the short run, marketing, branding, outreach and other such techniques can mask poor products. However, in the long run, the success or failure of a company really comes down to whether one product is better than the other.
Take the example of Google. Before Google, there was Yahoo, AltaVista and a number of other search engines. After Google, there were dozens of search engines to start as well.
Google had no marketing budget. They only had word of mouth. For a long time, they lagged behind their competitors. But slowly and surely, they gained market share, for one simple reason: Their product was better.
In the short run, it might seem like being product centered doesn’t pay. However, in the long run, creating a top notch product is what will put your company on the map.
9 Tips & Tricks for Better Google+ Brand Pages
This article is a follow-up to our earlier post How to Use Google+ to Promote Your Product or Service.
In social media, Google+ brand pages are the way of the future. Using Google+ brand pages, you can create an informative, interactive profile for your fans on Google+ to connect with you. Few companies today are taking full advantage of what Google+ brand pages have to offer.
The easiest way to access your brand page is to go to your own Google+ page. Just click the drop down menu under your username to switch to your brand page’s view. Here you can edit the page, add people to circles and post status messages.
Here are top 9 tips & tricks for using Google+ brand pages to their full potential.
#1 – Creating an Easy to Reach URL
By default, Google+ gives you a custom URL that’s fairly difficult to read or remember. For example, your URL might be something like “plus.google.com/8723570370197390157.”
To make this easier for people, create a redirect on your own website to your Google+ brand page. For example, people should be able to reach this page by going to www.yourwebsite.com/googleplus/
You can also use Google+’s URL shortener to create a better URL on Google’s domain.
#2 – Add Buttons to Your Site
Want to make it easy for people to find your Google+ page on your site? Want to put live feeds of your status updates on your sites? Want to make it so people can re-post whatever you said with one click of a button?
It’s easy. Just add the respective Google+ buttons or widgets to your site. Access these under the “Get Started” menu in your brand page.
#3 – Don’t Share Your Visitor Count for the First Few Months
If you see that a page only has a handful of visitors, chances are you’re not going to want to visit that page. In other types of social media, like Facebook or Twitter for example, there’s not a whole lot that you can do about this.
However, with Google+, you can choose to hide your follower count. While this isn’t a good long term strategy, it can be very useful in the short term.
#4 – Give Great Resources
Google+ gives you the ability to add as many links as you want to your profile. The links can point back to content on your own website or to other people’s sites.
Make liberal use of this feature to point your users to the best possible resources for their problems.
7 Effective Tips to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Social Media Battle Winner
There’s one thing that separates LinkedIn from all the other social media networks out there: Everyone who comes to LinkedIn is there for a professional purpose. Your future employers, your future investors and your future business partners all likely have a profile on LinkedIn.
If you want to network professionally online, there is no better place than LinkedIn. Spending time to perfect your LinkedIn profile is therefore a high ROI activity.
Here are seven quick tips to help boost your LinkedIn profile.
Tip #1 – An Attention Catching Headline
Your headline should be written so that anyone who sees your profile in the search results would want to click on your profile and learn more about you.
It should say something either unusual or incredible about you. It should stand out from all the other results. It should speak directly to your target audience.
Tip #2 – Have Someone Proofread Your Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is your chance to make a professional impression. Having misspellings, grammar mistakes of factual inaccuracies on your LinkedIn profile is like going to a professional networking event with a mustard stain on your shirt.
Don’t blow the all-important first impression. Even one little mistake you miss could cost you a future job or client. Hire someone to proofread your profile before going live.
Tip #3 – Make Liberal Use of Recommendations
Recommendations are one of the most powerful things you could have on your profile. It’s the 
one thing that people trust the most on a LinkedIn profile, because it involves other people recommending you.
Getting a few good recommendations can change your entire profile. Contact a few former employers, employees and co-workers to ask them to leave you a recommendation. Most of the tie they’ll be happy to do it.
7 Creative & Effective Ways to Engage your Facebook Fans
How engaging is your Facebook page? When people land on your page, do they feel inspired to engage with you, or do they simply “like” your page and never return? 
Getting someone to “like” your page is simply the first step in a long two-way relationship. It’s not the end goal. Once someone has identified themselves as a fan of your organization, that’s when the real work begins.
Here’s how to engage your Facebook fans.
Aim to be Interactive
The idea is to pull your users into engaging with you. The dialogue should be a two way street. Engaging users isn’t just about putting out great content, it’s also about pulling the user into interacting with you in meaningful ways.
A lot of brands make the mistake of just sending content at their user in a one-way street. Instead, aim to be interactive. Get your user base involved.
Ask Questions
One easy way to get your user base involved is to ask questions. Multiple choice questions as well as open ended questions both end well.
The questions can be related to your market or current events, they could be personal or they could just be random and off the cuff. Experiment with different kinds of questions to see what your user base responds best to.
Create Polls and Quizzes
There are many, many tools you can use online to create interesting polls and quizzes.
Polls and quizzes are a fast and easy way for people to interact with you and with one another. The quiz should ideally be very short, only about 10 to 15 questions long. It should feel like a fun and entertaining thing to do, rather than a survey. Read more
How to Use Google+ to Promote Your Product or Service
Google+ is the newest social network in town and the fastest growing social network in history. As more and more people come onto Google+, it’ll become more and more important for businesses to be well versed in Google+ marketing strategies. 
By learning about Google+ today, you’ll put yourself ahead of the curve. Not only will you be seen as progressive, but you’ll be able to establish your brand long before others have even realized the importance of Google+.
Here’s how to use Google+ to promote your product or service.
Create Meaningful Circle Segments
Perhaps the most valuable thing Google+ offers that Facebook doesn’t is the ability to sort your market by different segments. Using Google+’s circles, you’ll be able to choose exactly who gets to see what messages.
So how should you segment your customers?
Ideally, you should create a different circle and therefore a different segment for each different kind of “mindset” of customer that you have.
For example, you might have one circle for people who’ve bought your product, one circle for people who haven’t bought yet, one circle for people who’re affiliates of your product and one circle for people who’ve entered into a contest but didn’t win.
Each of these people might respond to different messages. For example, offering customer-only discounts to your past buyers could be a stellar strategy to get repeat buys. On the other hand, with people who haven’t bought yet, you might want to provide primarily trust building content.
Take Advantage of Google+’s Posting Features
One thing that’s inherently different about Google+ than Facebook is the length and style of your posts.
On Facebook, you can only post 420 characters in a status update. That really puts a limit on what you can post. Essentially, you can only post short thoughts, short content and links.
On Google+ however, the limit is well over 2,000 characters. (There’s no set limit yet.) In addition, you can link to several videos, links and pictures within your post.
That means that unlike Facebook, on Google+ you can post entire pieces of content for your network to see. You can use Google+ as a direct way to publish useful information to your circles without having to refer people to an outside link.
Use this feature liberally. If you want to build a brand as an expert, Google+ offers a much more suited style than Facebook does.
What to Include In Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
A well planned and executed social media marketing (SMM) strategy takes you where your users and buyers are. It lets you share the voice of your organization, get real time feedback for your products, create an instant buzz for your new product offerings, build customer loyalty, and reach an informed target audience. The great thing about a well carried out SMM strategy is that it requires very little financial investment from your side.
I) What to Include In Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
An effective SMM strategy will leverage all quality online social hubs where users and customers meet and converse. A good SMM portfolio includes a presence on diverse and multimedia social sites. Let’s take a look at the key elements of a good SMM strategy.
- Social Networking Sites
There are various social networking sites where you can create profiles to connect with your target audience directly. Create a Facebook fan page. Create tweets and retweets on Twitter. Create your organization’s profile on Linkedin. According to statistics released by Facebook, the social networking website has around 500 million active users, of which around 50% log in every day for commenting or browsing. A Facebook fan page thus makes a lot of sense to reach an active online audience. On the other hand, Twitter has real time updates and news-worthy tweets that even search engines show in their search results. The tweets about your products are quickly read and responded to by other users. A Twitter account to respond to and create a buzz about your product is therefore essential. Linkedin is accessed by a variety of professionals and businesses looking to connect and research for work and business. Hence, a Linkedin account for your organization is great for networking within the industry or with vendors.
- Blogs, Microblogging
Blogs give you a wide platform to talk about key issues. Blogs are also a great way of bringing traffic to your main website. For an effective blog, you need to post fresh and relevant content frequently, monitor and respond to comments, create internal links, and build a community of loyal readers. Microblogging through sites like Twitter also lets you send short, crisp updates.
Some famous company blogs are www.engadget.com, googleblog.blogspot.com, blog.facebook.com & en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/default.aspx. If you want blogs related to SEO, you can check out searchengineland.com, www.seomoz.org/blog or www.searchenginejournal.com.
- Online Videos
Websites like Youtube have created a whole new arena for multimedia interaction. Sharing and viewing videos is now, not just an activity enjoyed by individuals for their own pleasure, but also a great way for an organization to share information about its products. Organizations have found sharing interesting and related videos on Youtube to be a great way of ensuring continual, sustained interest of the target audience. You can upload interviews of your top management, share presentations, or even share videos of social or business events in your organization. When Intel uploaded fun and digitally enhanced videos of its Consumer Electronics Show exhibit, it not only created a buzz but also ensured users got to know about its new Core Duo processor.
- Photosharing, Slide Sharing
Sharing relevant and interesting images with your user base also helps in creating pleasant, long-term associations. The images can be about widely anticipated events like a product launch, celebrity associations, or the organization’s internal events. Websites like Flickr have an active user base and can be leveraged for this purpose.
Slide sharing, on the other hand, directly appeals to the user’s needs by sharing information that they need and would use in their business. If your organization has conducted any good-to-know research, you can share the findings online. You can also share your presentations, slides, and reports through websites like Slideshare and Scribd.
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