The arrival of social media has heralded a change in how we view our customers online. Social media platforms now offer the facility to cement your relationship with clients and customers. These applications give businesses an opportunity to lay the groundwork for repeat business. We have found that there is a five step plan any SME can put in place to get their social media strategy right.

1. The time of day you interact with customers is likely to be on a routine or unofficial scheduled basis. When someone buys a newspaper in your shop at the same time every morning, they may also log on to Facebook at the same time each evening. We are creatures of habit and every business must establish when the best time to interact with their customers through social media is.
2. Social media offers a branding platform like no other. It is important for SMEs to brand every aspect of their social media presence. Whether that means using the same corporate colours or ensuring your logo is clearly visible, make your branding an integral part of the overall Social Media strategy.
3. Engaging in conversation is what social media platforms offer us perhaps more than anything else. Businesses must be aware of the difference between talking and selling. Hard selling in a social media environment will not come across well. A general rule of thumb is to adhere to the 80/20 ratio. Spend 80% of your time networking and making connections and spend the remaining 20% selling.
4. It can be tempting to focus on gathering fans and to concentrate on the number of fans that can be attracted. It is far more advantageous to have fewer fans that interact with you and each other than hundreds who joined on a whim and who do not spend any quality time on your profile.
5. And finally, when it comes to newsfeed optimisation, simply because you post something, it does not mean everyone will read it. Make sure your posts are automatically highlighted by Facebook (everybody can customise but if a fan does not customise their newsfeed, Facebook will decide what is highlighted).  The following issues are usually taken into account – how recent the post was made, what your connection is like with your Facebook fans and whether it is a post, video or photo.

Keep these five key issues in mind when executing your social media strategy and make the most of this excellent opportunity to connect seamlessly with your target audience.

Would you start a conversation with a customer only to walk away halfway through? If you’re a retailer and on Facebook, this may be one of the things you are doing – without realising it. Facebook in business is a valuable tool for anyone involved in selling directly to the public. But it must be treated more like an engaging, informative shop floor conversation than a warehouse clearance sale. Social Media in business is a long term investment but too often is seen as a short term fix.

1. Like any other aspect of business, strategy is what will keep you focussed and defining your Facebook strategy is crucial. First of all, the target audience must be defined. In some cases the target audience online is identical to that which walks though your shop door. Establish if you are trying to engage with the same people online as you already do offline. Or are you using Facebook in business to target a new market? And what do you want them to do when they are interested? All this must be planned defined and calculated as much as possible. Random posts about the odd special offer is a waste of your time and may have little impact on an audience that is only approached when there is a sale on.
2. Social media in business is a conversation and the retailer must behave like they having a conversation with their customers. Listen to what your customers tell you on comments, by email and more. Deal with negative comments head on. Customers need to be heard – online and offline. Customers are more than fat wallets and social media is an idea platform on which to engage and chat.
3. Retailers must make sure that their customers make the connection between their online Facebook and their Main street shop. This can be achieved by clear branding, using your logo, shop name and location just like it appears on the street. Making the connection between the geographical location and the Facebook identity should improve local traffic in particular.
4. When consumers take the time to become a Facebook fan, they are making a seriously positive statement about your brand for all to see. It is advisable not to let that go unnoticed. Discounts and other freebies are obvious answers but creative, well thought out offers and gifts will likely increase your fan numbers.
5. Facebook in business is the face of your brand on the Internet. It’s that simple. Retailers should not be afraid to be themselves in the online world. If you are larger than life behind the counter, Facebook fans may be disappointed to see a quiet, conservative Facebook profile. Have fun with your Facebook business profile.
6. Facebook is all about activity and if a retailer is not active, the initial efforts in gaining brand profile and presence may be in vain. Once the effort is kept up, it will be worthwhile in the long run.
7. And finally…. post what you think your Facebook fans and friends and potential customers want to see. Be it video, podcasts or photos, it’s important to keep your customers’ requirements in mind at all times.

Happy Connecting

I work a lot with the tourism sector and find that smaller properties like B&B’s are finding it increasingly difficult to increase their Facebook connections (likes).  Here are some tips that may help (some of the tips are generic and could be used by any business):

1. Promote your Facebook page in the rooms. Consider placing a tent card in the room with your Facebook page details and ask guests to connect with you. Give them an incentive to connect e.g. discounts, up to date news, competitions etc
2. Do you have a public computer for guests to use? If so, set your Facebook page as the home page, every time a guest uses the computer they are immediately brought to your Facebook page
3. Put the Facebook logo on ALL promotional material, including business cards, brochures, leaflets etc. Don’t miss any opportunity to make people aware that you are on Facebook.
4. Put the Facebook logo on menus – some of you may not like this one, especially if you serve dinner or evening meals.  Nobody wants to be sitting beside someone that is on their phone in the middle of dinner but it may be ok at breakfast time.
5. Use QR Codes on printed material to allow people to access your Facebook page with ease. It is a great talking point and may give you an additional opportunity to persuade them to connect with you.
6. Ensure the Facebook logo is on your website in a prominent position – don’t feel that it should be in the footer of the site as this may never be seen by your website visistors.
7. On departure, send an email to all guests asking for feedback.  Give them the option to leave it on Facebook or Trip Advisor, most people will have an account in one or the other
8. Competitions – Facebook competitions are a great way to increase your “likes” but you must use a third party app like www.wildfireapp.com or www.northsocial.com . Competitions entries can be completed by liking the page or get more inventive and interactive and ask people to submit photos or videos.  Don’t waste the opportunity, use competition signup  to gather data for e-newsletters or bulk text marketing.
9. Embed the Facebook Like Box on your website  and ask them to like your page.
10. Add your facebook page link to your email signature
11. Create a welcome page – as you are providing a very personal service why not include a welcome video
12. Add e-commerce (f-commerce) elements to your Facebook page. A lot of the booking engines can now be integrated into Facebook .  The ideal one will allow people to book on the page and not take you to a separate pop up page.
13. Get active – no point in asking people to become a fan if you are not going to converse with them.  By timely and remember the 80 /20 rule. 80% personality and sharing information. 20% selling.  Important that you dont appear to salesy, you will loose fans that way.
14. Ensure your Facebook link is on your LinkedIn Profile
15. Use the @tag when writing on other business or friends walls.  This could be used in the body of the post or sign off using it. To do this simply type in @ and your page name and it will automatically create a link to your page.  This is especially important when writing posts on other business page walls that would be relevant to your business and your guest interests.
16. Add link button and share button to your website and blog. This allows readers to endorse and share your content which will gain you more connections. People trust peer recommendations.

I hope this helps you on your way to Facebook domination. Happy connecting

Any questions call me on 087 8348279 0r 062 67054.

Great news for all you folk out there that created a profile page for your business instead of a fan page. You can now migrate your profile to a page. To explain this further, if you are collecting “friends” on your business page it is the incorrect type of page. You need to get people to become a fan or “like” your page. Facebook frowns on people who set up a profile page for a business, another reason you should have a fan page is that the profile is limited to 5000 friends so once you get to 5000 you can go no further.

This new feature will allow you to migrate your profile to a fan page but be aware it will not sync up all content. Your friends will be changed to fans or “likes” and your profile picture will transfer but everything else will be lost so it’s a good idea to download your images etc before changing over.

This is excellent news and long due. For more information click http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate

Facebook has just rolled out some new features to their pages which are interesting. 

1. Notifications by email: you can now choose to get notifications by email when someone posts or comments on your page, this I feel will make it a lot easier to monitor interaction without having to log into the page several times a day. I would have expected this feature a lot sooner but better late than never.

2.  Posting preference: You can change your preferences and choose to post under your Business Page name or your personal profile name that your business page is connected to e.g. I could choose to have all my posts to MY business page in my personal name Sandra Moody Hennessy,  or my business page name Dynamic Web Marketing.  Great if people know I own the business and manage the page, not so good if they don’t as I could be a random person posting information.  Interestingly, the only posts feeding through to my Twitter are the ones posted under my business page.

3.You can activate a new feature ”Use Facebook as page”.  If I change my settings  to “Use Facebook as Page” the layout changes to the new personal profile layout and it appears that the business page will now function just like personal profile. Getting notifications and information on new likes via the icons on the top left etc.  This is good as you will now be able to see all interaction on your page with easy. About time this was rolled out.

What worries me about this feature is that my personal profile now seems to have disappeared, even though I set up both pages within the one account (same log-in) I cannot see any of my personal page details. The home page is now the new Business page home page.  I have to go to Account and click the link to switch back to be able to access my personal page information which in my mind is extremely annoying. 

On the plus side this new feature means that you can now comment on other business pages as under your business page name OR your personal page name, so if you want your business page to be seen by more people then you will be very happy with this new addition. Something to think about though, will this mean an increase in spamming. Businesses posting any type of nonsense on your page just to get their page name seen.  We will have to wait and see.

Do you manage your companies’ social media? Are you finding it hard to find the time to update Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?  Did you know that the average office worker is interrupted by co-workers, emails or phone calls every 11 minutes and it takes the same time to re-focus? Does this happen to you? 

Millions of people each day use social media to interact with companies, friends and family and by interacting with them you are influencing where they spend their time and money.  Here are some tips to try easy the pain:  

-          Use applications like Tweet Deck and Hootsuite to schedule your posts.  Take an hour a week and schedule the most important posts. You will always know special offers and event details ahead of time, so ensure that you have them scheduled well in advance.

-          Want to cut out the interruptions?  Why not start work 1 hour early, one day a week.  I can already hear you all screaming at the computers as you read this, saying things like, it’s easier said than done, I cannot get up any earlier etc etc,   but I tell you it really helps.  You will get so much more done when there are no interruptions and it may take less time than you thought so maybe you only need to get up 30mins early next week.

-          Make it count – find the right time of day. Analyse when your connections / followers are online.  If they are online at 5pm then ensure that your posts go out at 5pm.  If they go out earlier they will get lost in amongst all the other posts from companies, friends and family.  If you are timing it better and getting better interaction and results you may find that you don’t need to update your pages quite so often.

-          Focus on the social media sites that your existing or potential clients use.  All too often I meet people who are active on all the major social media websites, just because. Why not find out which ones your clients are most active on and focus on these.  Better to use 2 well than 6 badly.

-          Remember to sync your accounts together; this means that your Facebook posts can feed into Twitter. Twitter into LinkedIn etc.  This will reduce the amount of work needed, but be careful to ensure that this works with your strategy. If you are targeting different sectors on different social media sites this will not work as the information needs may be different.

Happy posting

Do you have a blog?  Not sure how to optimise it? Using WordPress.org?   Here is a list of my top 5 plugins that you should be using on your WordPress Blog to ensure your blog is well optimised and users can share the information easily on their social and business networks.

All in One SEO Pack

This is my favourite and with over 6 million downloads, makes it one of the most popular SEO Plugins for WordPress.org users. It is easy to install and very easy to use. The All in One SEO Pack plugin allows you to set auto generated Meta Data for your blog posts, categories and tags.

Google XML Sitemaps

This pluging generates an XML sitemap which can then be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.  Sitemaps make it easy for the search engines to crawl your blog and index the posts, tags and categories. You can see my blog site map here http://blog.dynamicwebmarketing.ie/sitemap.xml 

Defensio Anti-Spam

It is important to moderate your comments, this means that you have to approve comments before they are made available on the live blog.  Defensio Anti-Spam is a great free plugin that will help you capture spam comments. Using a colour code and categorisation (Somewhat spammy, Moderately Spammy, Quite Spammy and Very Spammy) Defensio will capture spam comments.

You should ensure that you review anything marked as spam as some relevant comments may get caught in the spam filter. More information available at http://defensio.com/downloads

Sociable

Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. Choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! (WordPress 2.6 or above is required).

Wibiya Toolbar

Another great way to allow your blog readers to share your blog posts on their social networks.  Look down and you will see my Wibiya toolbar at the bottom of this blog post. Simply go to www.wibiya.com and create an account, choose from a range of applications and when you have finished the set up choose the WordPress Plugin.  To keep track of how many people have shared your information, log into your Wibiya account and check out your analytics and stats.

Happy blogging

We all have the same problems;  not enough hours in the day to do everything we need to ensure our business thrives and with the birth of social media sites like like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn etc the list of daily tasks just gets longer.

I help businesses every day with the set up and management of their social media strategies,  here are some of my tips to help you along your way into the exctiting world of social media:

• Before launching into using social media, first think about  your strategy. No point in launching into using social media if you have no idea who its targeted at and what you want to achieve. Is it greater brand awareness, do you want to promote specific products, promote an action?
• Which sites are your clients using?  Do not launch into anything until you know if your customers are using these sites. The easiest way is to just ask. Why not send them a survey or next time you are speaking to them ask what they are doing on the Internet and make note of each clients response. This will very quickly allow you to gauge which sites will work best for you.  You can also profile your customers by using The Social Technographics Profile, simply input in your customers age profile, gender and location and this nifty tool will show you whether your clients are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactive.
• Now that you have decided which social media website to use, the next step is to sync them together. It will depend on which sites you are using but the most popular I come across are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, IGOPeople, YouTube and Flickr.  There are many more and it is normally quite easy to sync them so each time you update one site the update feeds into any others they are synced with it. Every time I update my blog, it feeds into my Facebook page, which updates in Twitter which in turn updates my LinkedIn and IGO People accounts.
• Managing multiple account from one place – use websites like Hootsuite, Ping.fm, TweetDeck to manage multiple accounts and update multiple social media websites from the one platform.  There are many more but these are my favourite. They will certainly save you a lot of time.
• Mobile applications – you should ensure that you are current with your information, nothing worse than seeing posts with old information. If you cannot post from your mobile phone upgrade to a phone that allows you to post while you are on the move,  there are a range of great applications available for all phone types that will enable you manage your social media while on the move.
• Make yourself viral – remember to post things that are of interest to your followers, if they are interested its likely they will pass it onto to their followers and so on. Remember its called “social” media so do not always go in with the hard sell, you should enjoy the interactions as much as your followers do.
• Repeat posting – people are online at different times of the day and may miss your most recent posts, try reposting some (not too many don’t want to look lazy) at different times. Gauge when you get the most interaction from your followers and keep a few minutes aside at this time each day to work on your social media.
• Monitoring – remember to monitor interaction, you don’t want to miss an important comment or question

Happy posting

As I travel around Ireland meeting businesses I am finding that there is still a lot of confusion about Facebook Pages, Facebook Profiles and Facebook Groups.  Many businesses set up profile pages (sometimes having been advised) without realising that its frowned upon by Facebook and there is a chance their business “profile” page will be deleted by Facebook. So here is my breakdown, you choose which is best for you:

Facebook Profile:   This is for an individual with first name and last name. Should NOT be used to promote business as its is limited to 5,000 friends and has bad visibility in search engines. Also, some content is not fully visible to users so makes it difficult for people to decide if they really want to connect with you.  You want to avoid having to post the following:

Facebook Page: Formerly known as a “Fan” page and if I am honest I still refer to them as fan pages.  Facebook pages enables public figures, organisations and businesses to create a public presence online and to network with existing and potential clients. In Facebook’s own words: “Authenticity is at the core of Facebook. Just as profiles should represent real people and real names, so too should Pages for entities. Only the official representatives of a public figure, business or organization should create a Facebook Page.”  

Facebook pages are the ideal option to promote your business, they have unlimited fans or likes (as they are now know as) and have great visbility in search engines.

Another common confusion is thinking that if you have a Facebook page you can become a fan or friend of another profile or page, this is not the case.  People with profile pages become fans/likes of your Facebook page. You can however add another Facebook page to your favourite pages box, you can do this by clicking the link under the pages profile picture/logo “Add to my page’s favourites”.

Your Facebook wall posts will be seen by fans/likes in their news feed.

Do you have profile and need a page? If you have a Facebook profile and should have a Facebook page, I recommend that before you get many more friends, you set up a page and ask people to migrate across. Better to do it now than have to move 5,000 friends in the future.

Facebook Groups: Ideal for small communities and for people to share common interests. Group pages can add new members by invite only or they can be open to the public for anyone to join. Groups allow people to come together and discuss issues or common interests, post photos  and share content. Members can interact and share content with one another so an ideal place to meet people with similar interests.