Top 10 Reasons Small/Medium Sized Business Should Use Social Media

It seems as though whenever I speak with a small- to medium-sized business owner, the topic of using social media to grow their business always comes up. At this point you might be thinking, “Of course it comes up, you are an online marketer.” And that is definitely true. In fact, as I reflect on many of those conversations I would say many times I did bring the subject up myself, but not every time. When the subject does come up, either by them or me, business owners usually are looking for much of the same information.

They ask me questions like, “Can it really bring me customers?” or “I have limited resources, will using social media really give me a better ROI than my other marketing campaigns?”, or my favorite, “In our industry that type of marketing doesn’t work.” Okay, that last one is not a question, but my answer is still: YES! In fact, in the industries where social media “doesn’t work”, often times it works the best! But even with me shouting the word “yes”, it still doesn’t seem to be enough to convince them. That’s understandable, and so I will usually give them some practical reasons that support my answer so that they can understand why I believe it will help their business. 

So today I would like to share my Top 10 Reasons Small/Medium-Sized Businesses Should Use Social Media. Please enjoy them, and if any of my readers have additional reasons they’d like to share, please post them below.

10. Online Reputation Management: You can keep an eye on what others are saying about you and your company. You should be your company’s strongest advocate, but you can’t be if you’re not part of the conversation.

9. It’s Cheap: Most social media sites’ best features are FREE! Some of the more advanced techniques can cost a little money, but most business won’t ever need them. So what does it really cost? Time—yours or someone else’s. Every effective sales/marketing campaign will cost you time, but the others will cost you a lot more than that.

8. Niche Marketing: Most business owners cannot afford to market to thousands or millions of potential customers using the traditional marketing methods, but with social media you don’t have to. Sure, you have the potential to market to millions of people, but most companies will generate more sales from creating a very targeted niche that focuses on only those that truly have buying potential. Niche marketing not only makes the most of your content and message, but it’s also much more manageable and cost effective. For example, if you’re a realtor who specializes in new home sales in Salt Lake City, Utah, then why would you waste your marketing budget on someone looking to buy a foreclosure in Palmyra, New York?

7. Compete with the Big Boys: Often times it’s hard for small/medium-sized businesses to compete with the big boys. But social media can give you a more level playing field. With little technical knowledge, and relatively little investment, you can take larger companies head on!

6.  SEO: Improve your search engine rankings. Google now uses links from social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to calculate ranks. Also, Google loves blogs. Give it a try, search for a few different topics using Google and see how many blogs come up.

5. Go Viral: Posting your links to your website on social media sites can certainly increase your traffic. But if your content becomes viral, then you could see thousands to millions of hits.

4. Greater Credibility: Blogs are a great way to build credibility because you can showcase what you know. You get to choose the topic, the question, and the answer. Also, by participating in discussions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other sites, people will begin to see you as an expert.

3. Get Personal: Creating a personal relationship with your customers can be difficult, especially with a large customer base. But the very purpose of social media is the ability to create personal relationships with many people over any geographical distance. 1 out of 6 marriages are between people who met online. Now that’s getting personal.

2.  Word of Mouth: How would you like hundreds or thousands of your customers referring your company to others? How would that affect your sales? Social media makes it easy to motivate customers spread the good word about your company.

1. Increase Sales: This is the number one reason, in my opinion, to use social media marketing. I believe that a marketing campaign is only as good as the sales it generates. Sometimes that can be hard to calculate, but I can tell you this: I have personally sold deals worth thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, through leads from social media. If I can sell a business consulting deal worth $100,000 to $250,000 through social media, then I believe you can sell just about anything.

iBrand uTweet

iBrand uTweet

Get Noticed NOW- In person & Online

Wednesday, April 20^th 2010

11:30 am to 1:30 pm

Salt Lake City, UT

iBrand uTweet is a strategic tutorial on how to effectively integrate online social media with face to face networking to shift from frail market awareness to generating qualified, and interested buyers. Businesses that get noticed are able to combine innovative online marketing with powerful face to face networking to create immediate and massive interest.

At this workshop you will learn to:

•  Convert online leads into in-person customers
• Get noticed on strategic social media sites
• Network like a Pro in any setting
•  Create vast networks and stay connected
•  Make a dynamic memorable first impression

Networking can become all consuming; eating up your time, resources, creativity and giving little in return. Cut the fat, cut the cost and focus on what works. Register today.

Presented to you by The Maxon Group. To learn more about The Maxon Group visit: www.themaxongroup.com

Day 34: Social Media Rule #1

Today is day 34 in my quest to become one of the 1000 most followed Twitter accounts. As of today number 1000 is Duane Patterson's account with 269,880 followers. I now have 603 followers. So that means I only have 269,277 followers to go. Not an impossible task, but certainly very challenging.

As I promised today a I'd like to discuss my first rule of social media.

Rule #1:   It doesn't matter what you have to say if no one is listening.

In other words, your content, no matter how good it is, and now matter how often you post it, will do nothing for you if no one cares enough to read it, watch it or listen to it.

Yesterday I spoke to a potential client about helping them with their social media strategy and he asked me a very valid question about why they should use my services instead of hiring a part time college student to blog for them. He is part owner in another company that has hired a part time college student to do many of the same things I am proposing to do for him. Only cheaper.

My response to him was this: That other company has now been doing blogs, SEO, paid clicks, webinars, Tweets, LinkedIn, and Facebook for years now, in fact they just other day they just did their 1000^th tweet. The webinars are usually pretty successful, and usually have around 100 people register for each one. And yet they aren’t getting very much business from all of these efforts. Why? The answer is no one is listening. At least not very many people; those that are listening aren’t the right people.

How can I say that you ask? Especially after saying they have about 100 people sign up for each webinar. The answer is: It’s the same people that sign up for each webinar. Also, those same people, 237 to be exact, are following them on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, those 237 people are very loyal followers. They love the message. They attend the webinars, and read the blogs. But how many businesses can survive only 237 leads? Especially when it has taken them years to accumulate that many followers. For what they’re getting, their “cheap college student” doesn’t seem so cheap.

To make matters worse, they aren’t just using the student to create content as he told me. They are actually using very expensive people to contribute content to the blog. In my opinion the content is top notch, but does that really matter if no one is listening?

So now that I feel I have made the case for needing listeners, let’s talk about HOW to get people to listen. There are probably many other ways, but here are a few that I’ve used. I know they work.

1. Link your social media plat forms together. Once you post on one, post on them all.
2. Join LinkedIn Groups. There are thousands of LinkedIn Groups with different focuses. Find one that is filled with people that will want to hear your message.
3. Become "popular" on Facebook. Be friends with your friends' friends. In fact be friends with you enemy's friends. Facebook makes it easy to make new connects.
4.  Make strategic connections on LinkedIn. Connect with influential people with many contacts. Connecting with those types of people brings you a steps closer to connecting with many others that may want to hear your message.
5.  Follow people that will follow you. Many Twitter accounts will follow you just because you follow them. If you follow someone that doesn’t follow you within a few days, unfollow them and move on to the next person.
6. Tweet about interesting topics that people are likely to re-tweet.  This works especially well when you tweet about someone else’s content. Being re-tweeted will help you add followers.
7. Follow back those that follow you. If you don’t, they may not be listening for long.
8.  If someone connects with you are one platform, get them to connect with you on another. That will expose them to your message multiple times.
9. List your blog on blog index sites.
10. Promote your social media accounts on your company website.
11. Add you social media account info. to your emails
12. Promote your social media accounts in person.

Of course there are many other ways to promote your content and to get people to listen to what you have to say. These are the ones I am currently using. If you have other ideas please post them in the comments box below. I will feature the best ones in my upcoming blogs.

Thanks for your interest. Until next time, good luck in your own social networking.

Ascent Advisor Video Testimonial

Check out the video testimonial that Jack Donaldson put together for Ascent Advisor. As Director of Sales and Marketing for Ascent, I definitely had some input on the video, but really this was done by Jack. Juan, David and I are very pleased with how it came out. Also, a big thanks goes to Digital Gateway for letting us film them.




To find out more about Ascent Advisor go to: www.ascent-advisor.com

Day 19: Darwin’s Three Rules of Social Media Marketing

I am now up to 390 followers. According to twitaholic, http://twitaholic.com/, the number 1000^th most followed Twitter account is Maria Rita with 258,715 followers. So I have only 258,325 to go.

In my quest to become one of the most followed Twitter accounts I have also began to really explore and learn how to use the other popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Obviously these other networking sites can help me with my goal, but there is so much more potential. In 2010 Facebook hit over 600 million users. LinkedIn hit 90 million and Twitter was at about 195 million. Those of course are huge numbers of users and access to that many potential customers is any salesman/marketer’s dream.

As a marketer/salesmen, how do you take advantage of that kind of potential? I’ve read many blogs and articles on ways to promote yourself, company or product using social media. Each article is written by a so called SMM guru, and each one has a different approach. I find myself asking the question, “Which one should I to follow? Or should I follow a little of each?” Because there are so many different techniques and strategies I don’t think I would ever be able to follow them all, so I had to come up with a way of filtering each approach to find the ones that would best meet my needs.

I’ve been in sales now for about 14 years, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that the only things that really matter are results. With that mind in mind I developed three SMM rules to help me evaluate the approach and advice I will take as I move toward my Twitter goal and as I build up my social media marketing campaign. My rules are as follow:

1. It doesn’t matter what you have to say if no one is listening.
2. It doesn’t matter if someone is listening if you have nothing to say.
3. It doesn’t matter if people are listening, and if you have something to say, if you can’t collect the data on who is listening.

Based on these rules I have developed a strategy for getting people to listen, having content for them to listen to, and finding ways of collecting data on who is listening. So how will I do that? Good question. I’ve a pretty good plan to start with, but I am sure it will evolve overtime. Because each of those rules requires a lot more explanation, I plan on blogging about each of them separately over the next few weeks. That will give me time to try a few different strategies, and so when I write the blogs I hope to have some actual results to report.

Until next time.

Day 9: My Three Fold Strategy

As many of my followers know I am on a quest to have one of the top 1000 most followed Twitter accounts in the US. Today is day 9. Number 1000 according to http://twitaholic.com is Vernon Kay and he has 253,255 followers currently. At this point I have 123 followers. I think that is pretty good considering 9 days ago I had never even thought of creating an account on Twitter.

So far my Twitter strategy has been very simple and straight forward. I follow others in hopes that they will follow me back. I also am tweeting about what is going on in my life, and about things that are interesting to me. This strategy seems to be working, but very slowly and I know there are things I could be doing that will work much better.

Therefore I developed a new Three Fold Strategy to increase my followers. Below is each area where I will focus my efforts.

1. Improved content

2. Email campaigns

3. Get published on popular websites

Here's what I plan to do for each category.

Improved Content- I realize that chronicling my quest to the top 1000 may not be interesting to all people. In fact, it might not be interesting to most. So I need to find additional content for my blog and for my tweets. That content can come from myself or someone else. Because there is already an abundance of interesting content on the web, I will look there first.

I read a blog post written by Techno Marketer that talks about different ways to find current and interesting content to blog or tweet about. He suggests using RSS feeds, blog searches, tweet search, monitoring services and Google Alerts to keep abreast of current interesting topics and events. Then using this information for my posts. I will attempt to implement this strategy right away. To read Techno Marketer's post go to:http://technomarketer.typepad.com/technomarketer/2008/12/success-in-social-media-means-being-ready-to-pounce.html

Email Campaigns- In my function as Director of Sales and Marketing at Ascent Advisor I have to market our free websites, executive briefings and our websites. One way of doing that is through social media like this blog, or my LinkedIn account. To see an example click on one of the following links:

http://www.ascent-advisor.com/events.html

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/799383936

In addition to these methods of marketing we also do email campaigns. Because I plan on using my Twitter account to keep followers posted about some of the events that Ascent Advisor is up, I will also use the email Ascent Advisor email campaigns to help promote my Twitter Account.

Is there a conflict of interested there you might ask? I would say no. My tweets are not designed solely to promote Ascent Advisor, but they are designed for me to communicate about my life, and subjects that I and my followers find interesting. And since Ascent Advisor is a large part of my life, and many of my followers should find their webinars and other events interesting, I will keep you all posted about their events. As for putting the email link on our email campaigns, I have cleared this with my boss. I believe that my Twitter Account will help our customers and prospective clients to get to know me and through me, the company. Hopefully that will improve Ascent Advisor's relationship with our customers.

Get Published on Popular Websites- This one may be the hardest for me to accomplish. Except for my own blog, and a few websites I've created when I was younger I have never been published on a website. So what will it take to get published? And where should I or could I go to get published? The answer is I don't know. But I will being working on that immediately.

The first thing I will do is ask for your help. If you have any idea on how or where I can publish my blog posts I would to hear them. Please post all ideas on the comment box below. Also, I will ask all of my followers. Perhaps one of them can help me. And lastly I will look online for ideas on how to accomplish this feat. As you all know the web is rich with both valuable content and infinite garbage.

In my next blog I update everyone on what I am doing and how I am doing it. As always, I welcome your feedback and would love to hear any addition ideas you may have on how to accomplish the strategies I've discussed today, or on how to increase my followers in general. However, I will not pay for followers. I plan on growing my following through strictly organic means.

I'll miss you coach Sloan.