Utilizing Social Media is Beneficial for Your Small Business

As if you needed reminding, social media is the way to go when you are building a business of any sort. There are even authors using Twitter to build up their following! Seeing that, there should be no reason whatsoever for any small business owner to pass up the opportunity to work on branding and using social media to do just that.

A funny thing has begun to happen in the world society over the past several years; a reverting back to the days of our forefathers so to speak. When grandma and grandpa went to the country store in their small town or village, they knew the store owner. They knew who was selling them flour and sugar and coffee. While for some years, society as a whole became seduced by the “get it quick, get it cheap” lure, people all over the globe are now seeing that cheaper isn’t always better, and that fast doesn’t compare to trust when it comes to getting a product or service you need.

With the birth of the internet came a huge opportunity to expand your reach as a business owner, or start that business you never would have in the first place. But online business comes with its own set of obstacles; the biggest one being the desire of consumers to have a familiarity with the companies from whom they make their purchases. When people enter in that precious credit card information upon ordering your product or service, they want to feel as though they are handing cash over to the local store owner, just like grandma and grandpa did.

How do you do this when your business is online? It’s all about social networking, my friend, so hop on board and start learning how to make the most of sites like Twitter and Facebook while the getting is hot! Let’s take a look at just a few specific ways that social media can help you grow your small business:

The world is aflutter with tweets from the bustling site, Twitter. It seems that everyone from Al Gore to Miley Cyrus has something to say! Using Twitter allows you access to your core customers in real time, that’s the draw. To be truly successful, don’t focus solely on business topics. Be real, be you, be known.

Facebook is a great social site for businesses because it gives the ability to create not only a profile but also a fan page. This customizable page allows you to place coupons for your customers and post business updates that they may find interesting. Keeping your Facebook fan page up to date is as important is tweeting several times each day.

With all of the sites one can use – Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc – it’s easy to get caught up in “out there”. To really make a connection, it is highly recommended that any business also have their own blog or social hub that is updated regularly. Really, this is the whole purpose of making noise on other sites, to get people to visit YOUR site! This is where you can speak in your own voice in your own area of expertise. A blog or social hub is where you can offer great tips and tricks of your trade and create a reputation that will draw customers back to your site time and time again.

Each of the areas of social media marketing takes time. But as a business owner, your main focus is to bring more business through your doors – real or virtual. By spending necessary time getting to know your customers through social media, you will win trust and grow your business big.

All About Hashtags

One thing is certain: the internet world is constantly changing. This is the challenge for those of us who make a living utilizing its power. But as we keep up with the latest trends, we can come across interesting ways to capitalize on the social media front.

One example of change on the web is Twitter. Seemingly, this social site came out of nowhere and jetted right to the top of the popularity list. There are all sorts of people on Twitter, tweeting about anything and everything that comes to their minds. While many Tweeters are there strictly for social purposes, there seems to be a strong emergence of business people treading their way through the Twitterdom.

Hashtags were created to create groupings within the site; an organizational tool of sorts. They are a popular way of getting focused attention to your Tweets. Additionally, you can search hashtags to find tweets that are relevant to research you may be conducting, or just relevant to what you want to know about. For instance, if one would like to find tweets relating to article marketing, you can perform a twitter search for all tweets specific to that by searching “#article marketing”.

If you look further into the use of hashtags, you will discover that they have somewhat of a limited fan base at the moment. While their was a surge in popularity for a time, as well as a usefulness, overuse by some has caused popularity to wane. During the 2007 San Diego wildfires, hashtag use was instrumental in alerting the public to current events. They also were used as a call to action on the part of emergency services. This shows just how useful hashtags can be.

When considering the use of hashtags in your Tweets, it may be worth the time to perform a bit of research to see if your particular keyword is already being used in a hashtag thread. As you use hashtags, the key is to use them sparingly and to use them when you really want something to be followed. By looking around a little bit on Twitter, it is easy to find users who hashtag just about every Tweet they type. Really, nobody wants to read “I had the most amazing #chocolate #milkshake from #Carl’s Jr. today!”
Remember, Twitter asks a simple question: “What are you doing?” Answer the question; use natural keywords, use hashtags sparingly when you really want to drive home a point or call attention to something. Some of the things that hashtags are good for are emergency situations or natural disasters, as proved in 2007. Hashtags can also be used when tweeting quotes from others. “Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.”~Albert Einstein #quote
Hashtags may have their place, but Twitter IS a social media site directed at fulfilling peoples’ curiosity about one another in the here and now. Part of using social media in your business is to gain visibility…and familiarity. Overuse of hashtags can make your posts seem aimed not at the individual, but at the inner workings of the site itself.

Don’t lose sight of the other benefits of social media marketing. Pairing high touch with high tech is the way to build an enormous following. Hashtags, used sparingly, can be a part of your Twitter life, but shouldn’t take over the personal touch.

Hubpages, One More Thing To Outsource Now

As you are probably well aware by now, hubpages are one more avenue you can travel down to increase the traffic coming to your website. However, there may be many who have yet to turn down Hubpage Street due to lack of knowledge or just plain lack of time. Let’s be clear, there is no good reason for you NOT to take advantage of every single road that will bring more visitors to your site. Higher traffic equals soaring profits equals the success you set out for. So let’s get to it!

If you have not begun your walk down the Social media path, starting that walk with hubpages may be a great idea. And here’s the way to get started today. Outsource this task to a writer or company who can write effective articles for you. Writing quality articles is one way that many online businesses gain visibility. But the thing with articles is that they are time consuming. You as the business owner are dedicated to those tasks which directly build your business. Therefore, you are to assign writing tasks, not attempt to complete them yourself.

Outsourcing hubpages is a task you can do relatively quickly. Through word of mouth, online directories, or companies which specialize in SEO and marketing, you can find quality writers to create articles directly related submission. So while you want a quality writer, you will also want to make sure you work with a person or company that can handle the behind-the-scenes portion of hubpages as well.

In order to find the right tags to use in your hubpages, some research is necessary. It is not difficult. In fact, it is a simple Google search. But the real issue here is not the level of difficulty of the task; but the amount of time it will take you to research both keywords and tags for your hubpages. This is why it is highly recommended to find a quality writer or company that will invest the necessary time.

While you may pay a little bit more for a professional company to handle these sorts of tasks (I know how tempting it can be to outsource to the lowest bidder), this is just another investment into your business – your future. When you continually look at the big picture, which is to drive as much quality traffic to your site as possible, then you can easily see the necessity in hiring the right person or company to write your articles and hubpages the first time around.

In building a high functioning, profitable website, outsourcing is a must. It is the fastest way to get ahead of the competition that may be lagging in taking a step towards their success. Outsourcing to quality professionals can move you in the right direction quickly and consistently. Your job is to seek out the right people to do the job and then let them run with it. Hubpages and other articles are some of the easiest things that you can outsource, but also some of the most important tasks you will assign. Do it right the first time and you will quickly reap the rewards of outsourcing to your business.

Tracking Trends on Social Media Sites

Building a super successful ecommerce business really is something you can do from your Lazy Boy recliner! That doesn’t mean you should, of course, it just means that there are numerous tools in place to help you stay at the top of your game at all times. And at all times, the game is about keywords and relevance.

 

When running ad campaigns and attempting to drive more traffic to your site, keywords are of the utmost importance. Go too vague, and you loose consumers who are looking for something specific. Research is absolutely necessary before you begin any adword campaign, and also periodically throughout your marketing efforts. The following tools will help you gain valuable knowledge regarding keywords.

 

When searching the latest and greatest social media sites for buzz on keywords related to your business niche, it is important that you look at the words used in conjunction with your keywords, for oftentimes users are simply mentioning something and a particular keyword happens to be included. The goal is to find out if there is a buzz related to what you have to offer, and what that buzz is.

 

Lexicon is one tool that will help you get your hand on the pulse of the general public. This application is used with the popular social media site, Facebook. To utilize Lexicon on Facebook, you need to first have a Facebook account, for this application is used in conjunction with the site. Lexicon searches wall posts to obtain a general conversation held throughout the site; pretty fascinating, if you ask me.

 

Once logged on to Facebook, simply search “lexicon” (quotations not necessary) and the application will become available. You can use this application to search for specific keywords related to your business. For example, if you sell pizza, you will see that in December, relatively few people post about pizza. Perhaps this indicates that many are still recovering from their Thanksgiving day festivities. Try out Lexicon for your niche and see what sort of buzz you tune into.

 

And then there is Twitter, the new craze that has wings flapping and fingers strumming keyboards all across the globe. For searching Tweets, there is Twist. Twist was actually launched in 2008, but not everyone has caught on to the benefits of Twitter tools for business just yet. What Twist does is similar to Lexicon, but for the Twitter site only. Twist finds all mentions of your specified terms in messages and graphs them over time. Using Twist, you can even click on any specific term and go directly to recent Tweets for that phrase.

 

Using Twist, you can compare terms against one another. For instance, let’s take the pizza business again. Comparing pizza to burgers, you will find that pizza wins out every time as far as mentions go. From this data, you could draw the conclusion that the pizza business would fair better than a burger joint.

 

Now, you are most likely not selling pizza or burgers, I know; but examples are what they are. The main point of these applications is to help you see what the general public’s awareness is on any given topic. When your focus is to build your business, it is the voice of the general public that matters the most; and therefore utilizing social media sites and their tools will do the best job of telling you what you need to know.

More Than Meets The Eye

Bookmarking your favorite web pages has been something your web browser could do for some time now. Virtually every toolbar has a handy bookmark link that will easily store a user’s favorite pages right there on their computer. Typically, bookmarks are created for pages that a user visits often and doesn’t want to forget.

The problem with bookmarking on your personal computer was soon found, and thankfully solved. What was this nasty little problem? Simply put, when you bookmark a favorite page using the bookmark tool on your personal computer, and then you find yourself away from said computer in need of one of those pages, you cannot get to it. Using this method, bookmarks are stored only on a users personal computer. This is limiting, and nobody likes to be limited!

Alas, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and digg were born in an effort to bring the public just what it wanted and needed: an easy and convenient way to organize, store and share bookmarked sites, videos and articles. In the process, a new business building tool was also born.

Here’s what bookmarking can do for your business: It can increase traffic to your website, help your search engine rankings, and also create an image of your company on the social media scene. On social bookmarking sites, postings are ranked by users, not editors. As I’ve said before, user created content and reviews are perceived as a sort of recommendation on the part of another average consumer, not a sales pitch from a large company.

Many businesses have blogs, which make great bookmarked pages. The key here is to make sure your blog has interesting and informative articles that keep readers wanting more. Because you are posting blogs to social bookmarking sites, you will want to keep in mind that people can share your bookmarks (this IS the whole idea!). The more your bookmarks are shared, the higher they will rank on the bookmarking site you are using. And judging from the buzz, if you rank high on these social media sites, your web traffic will increase significantly.

The only thing you need to do in order to make your bookmarks rank in search engines is to be sure to add the right tags and/or keywords to bookmarked pages. This is something that needs to be done consistently in order for your efforts to pay off. But this is most likely a practice you should be used to by now, as it’s the same in any SEO marketing effort.

The best thing about bookmarking is that all it requires from you is a little time. You’re most likely already writing articles and posting them to directories. You may even have some hubpages out there; or better yet, some videos. So what are you waiting for? Take those marketing efforts that you have already done and put them to the best use possible by posting them to an easy to use bookmarking site. Some consistent effort in this arena can steer you in the direction you want to go.

Twitter – The Ultimate Networking Tool

Anyone in business covets the benefit of everyone knowing your name.  Remember the song from Cheers?

You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.

Ah, how often song lyrics just seem to get it right!  When it comes to doing business, the biggest obstacle is building up the clientele that will catapult you into the ecosphere of success.  This is at least doubly true for those fortunate souls operating an online business.  Although the internet is a great world in which to work, it is a vast space full of competitors.  When consumers cannot tell your site from any other, they have no real reason to stop on yours…unless they feel they know you.

With the bounce rate from internet sites at such a high rate across the board, bringing a face to your business is a priority for any business owner.  Ok, so you want to increase web traffic and decrease the bounce rate from the site pages you are linking to.  How does Twitter have anything at all to do with those aspects of building a solid web business?  Well, here’s a simple answer:  using the social aspect of Twitter, a business owner or company can learn what makes the consumers tick.  While this does not happen overnight, there really is no better way to get in touch with the heart and soul of the average consumer than through social media.

Not only can you learn what consumers are chatting about on Twitter, but you can determine if they are chatting about YOU!  That’s right!  For instance, just today I learned that Home Depot is opening a store in Valdosta, GA.  I also learned, through a link to a news article, that my weekly indulgence in Pinkberry yogurt is not all that bad for me.  This is getting us to a point, really.  Whatever your business is, you can search Twitter to see what’s being said.  You can even search your actual business name and see if anyone has “Tweeted” about you!  Invaluable information can be obtained through searching posts on this rapidly growing site.

One thing you can do with Twitter is to post video links.  Therefore, as you create new tutorials or product reviews, you can post a “Tweet” with the link to that video for users to see.  It’s important to remember that Twitter, like Facebook, IS indeed a social site.  That means that not all users are there to hear about your business and they certainly are not there to be sold on a product or service.  Using social media marketing is completely different than your typical forms of hard sell marketing techniques.  Using social media, you are actually getting to know the public, and they are getting to know you.

Keeping in mind that Twitter is a social site, you can go a lot farther by posting things that are not solely about you and your business.  You can do this while still maintaining a professional vibe.  Make comments about other posts, post about recent events or what you are learning about.  Instead of posting an update geared towards “What are you doing right now?, post more along the lines of “What’s got your attention right now?”  What are you reading?  What are you learning or teaching?  What did you hear in the media this morning that made you think?  What sale or promotion is your company running at the moment? These are all questions that can get you started posting relevant content to Twitter.

Twitter, with over 3 million posts blasting out each and ever day, is here to stay.  Grab hold of the tools Twitter has to offer and your marketing efforts can be much more effective!  With millions of members worldwide, just think of how many customers could know your name!

Benefit From the Tools of Twitter

Everyone is talking about Twitter. This rapidly growing site is even expanding language: “Tweets”, “Re-tweeting”,”Twittermance”..I’m sure there is much more Twitter slang that I am unaware of at the moment. The real point is, Twitter’s time in the spotlight has finally come. Although to many of us it may feel like Twitter magically appeared just recently, the company behind this social site was actually created back in 2006!

Twitter was created as yet another social site where friends and family could maintain their relationships while living busy lives. However, because of the openness of the site, anyone can find anybody and follow their “tweets”. This aspect of the social site has opened the doors for businesses to head down another social media marketing path. Here, we’re going to look at a few tools that you can use in your Twitter marketing campaigns. Just remember! This IS a social site and therefore if you utilize any tools to create hard sell type information, it is unlikely you will gain followers – or business.

Twiddeo is a powerful but simple service that let’s you do one thing very well: Twitter updates with Video.

To get started using Twiddeo, you must first have a Twitter account, of course! Using your Twitter username and password, you then log in to the Twiddeo site. From here, you can upload video from either your computer, from your cell phone, or from your Webcam. Webcam video posts are for those who are super confident in their abilities to get their message out quickly and eloquently on the first try – there is no editing here!

Uploading videos is a quick and simple way to keep in touch with your Twitter followers. And since so many people prefer to watch videos over reading text of any sort, video is an incredible format in which to get your message – and your face – seen by consumers every single day. Furthermore, there are those who write and those who speak. We all have our own innate talents. If yours is the spoken word, go with it and capitalize on the video marketing techniques you can use on Twitter!

Using Twitterfeed, you can get your blog (or any other RSS or Atom feed) sent directly to the popular micro-blogging platform. In addition to posting your desired feed directly to Twitter, this service also posts to identi.ca, custom laconica installations, and via HelloTxt or Ping.fm simultaneously to the many platforms supported by these services. I don’t claim to know all of the services out there, but luckily this article is mainly focusing on the Twitter platform.

The thing about using Twitterfeed is that you will need to also have an Open ID. This is a free service that basically sets you up with one ID that you can use to login to all of the password protected websites you use on a regular basis. You may be able to just use your blog login on Twitterfeed, but it will take a little figuring out. This just might be a project you want to outsource!

Because Twitter is a social site that seems to be clambering forward full steam ahead, there are certainly many more tools and applications that will emerge as time goes on. For now, find those tools that best suit your marketing needs and run with them!

Hubpages Equal Success

In the lush forest that is ecommerce, internet marketing is like the roots of a tree.  Without nutrients (web traffic) flowing through the roots (internet marketing), the tree (your website) doesn’t grow.  You want your tree to grow.  Therefore, you need to make sure you nurture deep roots from the very onset of planting. Building an ecommerce site is an exhilarating experience full of adventure.  That’s the positive way of saying there are tons of changes to keep up with.  Technology constantly changes; and new ways of getting the word out about your business are emerging with each setting of the sun.  While there are benefits to these changes in internet marketing and social media marketing, there is one major drawback.  You have much more important things to do than follow emerging trends in marketing. You have a business to run. Taking on the task of learning SEO, writing articles to submit to online directories, writing scripts and producing videos is not necessarily the best thing you can spend your time doing.  Creating Hubpages and other social media marketing strategies is something many ecommerce business owners are choosing to hire a professional for.  Now that is the way to increase web traffic!

Hubpages are a marketing tool we hear much about.  These are like mini-sites that can be created on any topic of interest.  Hubpages, like everything else having to do with building a successful website, should be optimized and full of keywords.  They are similar to a Squidoo lens, except for a key point that Hubpages should not and cannot contain outright marketing for your own ecommerce site.  There is incessant gardening going on in these pages and too many links to your own site will get your growing tree pruned very quickly.  Tricky little bugs!

Because the name of the game with Hubpages is originality teamed up with length (the longer the better), stellar writing skills are involved.  Busy CEOs do not have the time to hone their writing chops while also preparing their sites shopping cart, communicating with vendors and dealing with employees.  This is enough to drive you mad before you take your first order! With all that there is to learn about Social Media Marketing and Hubpages, a business owners best bet is to get on board quickly by outsourcing the processing of these pages to a professional, like the team at Start Ranking Now.  Outsourcing not only saves you a great deal of time and frustration, but it also guarantees the success of the writing and submission process. Don’t fret.  Hubpages and Social Media Marketing work wonders to feed the growth of a website.  This internet marketing strategy is great for getting information out to prospective clients.  And with the proper content, you’ll be able to tell right away if you’re headed towards success because these pages are usually indexed by Google in a very short time. Get some help.  Get in the game.  Get your money tree to grow!