Category: General Tips

Here is my ABCs of Social Media…

AUDIENCE – Where do your customers hangout online? Google +? Facebook? LinkedIn? Start simple. Start with one Social Media site and work on making connections daily.

BUZZ – Engage your audience. Get them talking about YOU and your services.  Don’t forget to respond.  This is best when it’s a 2 way conversation.

CONTENT – Create fresh and unique content to share with your audience. Have you heard…. “Sharing is caring”?   Remember, your content is for your audience. So be sure you know what your audience wants and needs.  It’s not about you.

DATA – Where are your leads are coming from. More importantly, where did your most recent Customers come from. You need to measure and track your audience’s activity so you focus on the best places that bring you the best customers.

ENDORSEMENT – As we research and shop online, we always look at other people’s reviews of a product or service.  Always ask for a testimonial/review to help attract new buyers for your product or service.

FOLLOWUP – Building trust and credibility happens when you follow up. Its not something that happens on day 1 when you first meet someone. As you make connections, friends, follows, and get LIKEs, it important to stay in contact with those people. Don’t waste them.  Get these people on a mailing list to continue contacting them.  This is a vital step to turn leads into buying customers.

Together, all 6 of these will help you be successful with Social Media.

Using Twitter’s own search tool, you have more control over what you can search for. And you can search without needing to join Twitter.

If you simply enter the words NEW and CAR, you’ll find tweets with those words somewhere in it.  Maybe you want to search for the exact phrase “NEW CAR“, just use quotes as shown.

Would you like to search near a specific city or town? Try this…“new car” near:phoenix    You’ll get a list of tweets from Phoenix containing the exact phrase “new car”.

You can even shrink or expand your search area by adding within:??mi, like this… “iphone” near:phoenix within:100mi

This will search the larger metro phoenix area for tweets containing iphone.

Your search will include tweets from the last few days. But let it run, unattended, and new tweets that match your search will pop up.

Try it and see.

If you want to change your search criteria, just click on REFINE RESULTS. Twitter provides an easy to use form to add or change what you want.

Have fun with this.

Twitter is a popular tool for sharing information and for finding Leads.    It might surprise you to learn that there is more than 100,000 Tweets sent every MINUTE.

Look here to see more stats on Twitter usage.

So how can you use it to find Leads?  There is a free tool called NearbyTweets.   With it, you can search for a specific topic within a city.  It’s really easy to use, and you don’t even need to have a Twitter account.

Just provide the city you are interested in, and the word(s) you want to search for.   Keep in mind this is a primitive search.  The words you enter can appear anywhere in the Tweet.  Even if you try to search for a specific phrase, like “new car”, NearbyTweets will display Tweets with NEW and CAR anywhere in the Tweet.

Now to find some leads, lets search in Phoenix AZ for DOG.  It doesn’t matter if you use capital letters, it will match words regardless of capital letters.  You may see some tweets of frustrated people with dog issues along with sales announcements on dog items.  Try using a word for your line of business.  You are likely to find people who need your product or service.   Keep trying other words to see what is working best to help identify the best Leads for you.

You can do a search like this on Twitter too.  And Twitter provides more advanced search options.  I will cover that in another Post.

Video is a popular way to educate and entertain your audience.  How would you like an easy way to direct Leads to your Website or Landing page, with a simple click?

Normally when you watch a Youtube video, clicking directly on the video is how you PLAY and PAUSE.  But Youtube has transparent advertising that creates a clickable area to send your audience to your website or a targeted landing page.

Watch this video to see an example.   During the first 15 seconds of this video a transparent clickable overlay appears near the bottom right corner, to send people to the specific landing page, allowing them to make a donation.

After the video has finished, the overlay reappears.  This example shows a good way to get Leads at the begining of the video and again at the end.

This overlay is powered by google adwords.  You can use Adwords to promote your video as a normal Pay Per Click ad.  Or you can skip the advertising cost and just use the clickable feature to direct people to your landing page.

This is an easy way to get more Leads with a simple click on your Video.

Have you heard about Google+?   Google has jumped into Social Media. While its way behind in numbers, when compared to Facebook and LinkedIn, Google+ made a huge leap with 10 million+ people who have already joined.

But what is Google+?   Imagine having a single tool, like Facebook, to connect  with friends.  Add in video, like Skype.  Add text messaging, like Twitter.  And add the ability to share videos and photos. That is Google+

Google has a nice demo so you can see it and learn more about it.

Want to become a member?  Just click JOIN THE PROJECT

Enjoy!

Connecting with others on LinkedIn is important for networking online, sharing your info, and building relationships. A great way to enhance building trust and relationships is to send your new connection a brief note after you accept their invitation to connect.

This Linkedin article provides more great info about this.

Enjoy.

I’m sure you have heard of  “‘6 degrees of separation”.  It’s where you are just 6 steps away from someone you want to meet.  You do it through a friend of a friend, of another persons friend, who knows the person you want to meet.

LinkedIn can help.  By showing who you know, your connections, who knows someone else to lead you to the person you want to meet.

You may have noticed that your LinkedIn connections are tagged with “1st” and “2nd”.  This is following the idea of 6 degrees of separation.  Your direct connections are labeled as 1st.  People you know or meet through those first connections become 2nd connections.  And so on.

Here is how you do it.  This only works if the person you want to meet is on LinkedIn.

Lets say you want to meet or contact the CEO of Banner Health, here in the Phoenix area.  I dont even know who the CEO is, so I can’t search by a name.  But with LinkenIn I can search for “banner health ceo”.   The list I get back shows David B is the Phoenix area CEO of Banner Health.  For me, he is tagged with a “3rd”.

When I click on David B’s name I am presented with his profile.  Along the right side, LinkedIn shows how I’m connected to this person.  I can see that 2 of my connections could help me with reaching David B.

You can do this too.  Who is it that you want to meet this week?  Use LinkedIn to help with your networking.  Use it to see your connections who can help.

Of course, you need some connections to get this started.  Take some time every week to search for co workers and friends on LinkedIn.  Connect with them.  Did you collect some business cards from people this week?  Connect with them too.

As your connections grow, you’ll be able to extend your reach to meet anyone in the world.

Enjoy!

With the popularity Facebook Business Pages, LinkedIn has joined in with Company Pages.  It’s not obvious how to create a Company Page.  And there are 2 requirements:

1) You need to be an official representative of the Company, preferably a current owner or employee of the Company.

2) A registered, company-owned email domain. This unique domain name would appear in all company email addresses following the “@” symbol (e.g., [email protected]). Email domains such as yahoo.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com or others will not be accepted when creating a Company Page because they are not unique to an individual company.

If you meet these requirements, then you are ready to create your Company Page:

– go to http://www.linkedin.com/company/add/show

– Fill in your company name and company email address, and check the box for ” I am the official representative of this company …”.  Click CONTINUE.

– If LinkedIn does not recognize the email address, LinkedIn may send you a confirmation email to continue the process.

– Fill out the additional company page info, upload a logo if you have one, and click PUBLISH to save your changes.

After you create your Company Page, you and your employees can link your profile to this Company Page.  Just like Facebook, the profile is all about the person and the Page is all about the Company.

This following step is important or your employee won’t show up on the Company Page.  All employees with a LinkedIn account should do this:

– Click PROFILE at the top of your home page.
– Click EDIT next to your current position.
– Click CHANGE COMPANY and type the full company name.   This step is crucial. Click the correct company name in the dropdown list.
– Click UPDATE.

Thats it!  You now have a LinkedIn Company Page, and you are listed as working for that company.

Just as you can ‘connect’ with other LinkedIn members, you can ‘follow’ Companies to keep up on the latest news, updates, and ‘connect’ with the Company’s employees.

Now you are ready to invite everyone to ‘follow’ your new Company Page.

Enjoy.

Here’s an interesting Post.  He is specifically talking about Twitter.  But I say these words shouldn’t be in any of your Bio’s.  Not in LinkedIn, Facebook, Business Listings, and anywhere else you have info about yourself.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/small-biz-advice/8-words-that-should-never-appear-in-your-twitter-bio/1752

Take time to freshen-up your Bio and watch for these words.

Do you have a call to action in your email signature?

We send dozens of emails every day to family, friends, and customers.  While most of us are good about having a signature in our emails that contains our name and phone number, don’t  forget the other important items:

• Your website
• Your favorite social media site, so people can connect with you
• A simple call to action for your email recipient to do something

Use color and a picture to make your info stand out and be memorable.  This can be done with email tools that support “rich text”. All the major email services (gmail, yahoo, msn, and even AOL) allow rich text email signatures. You can use rich text to change font colors, resize the font, and make links.  Some email clients, such as Outlook,  also do rich text signatures.

Something they don’t say is that you can use HTML in your rich text signature.  But not by typing the html into the signature box.  Instead, create your html signature in an html file.  Open the html file in your favorite Browser.  Then copy your displayed html signature and paste it into the rich text signature box.   If you use a picture, put the picture on your website’s web server.  That way your picture can be displayed in everyone’s email.

For example, here is mine:

Are your Customers finding your Website?
David Johnstone
http://FlashForwardSites.com
480-444-2520

PS: If you could click on on my facebook page, that would be great!

For your call to action, what would you like a potential customer do to identify themselves as interested in your product or service?  Here are some ideas:

• ask for a free report
• click on your facebook LIKE button
• signup for a free newsletter
• click to see your specials
• enter a sweepstakes
• take a survey
• click or call for a free quote

That’s it.  Pretty easy.  Send me an email with your signature.  I’d like to see what you created.