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Social Media

Social Media Tips For Non Profit Managers

In the world of non-profit organizations it is not rare for just one person to get assigned the social media duties for the whole company.

They may also have dozens of other demands to deal with that have nothing to do with public relations so they will probably need all the help they can get to be able to come up with fresh content week in and week out.

One good tip is to use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to offer a first look at an upcoming event or newsletter, introduce a staff member, share photographs of volunteers as they are working and ask a trivia question, the answer to which will shed light on your company’s particular cause.

Other good tips include connecting a news story that is currently trending in your non-profit work, sharing a client’s words of gratitude, sharing a success story, thanking a staff member or volunteer, or sharing a photograph that was taken at a special event.

If you take a specific approach on a regular basis, the audience will start looking forward to what is coming next.

Advertising Via Social Media Sites

For all the hype that surrounds the use of social media when it comes to small businesses, many owners have learned the hard way that a Facebook or Twitter account alone is not going to drive up sales.

Successful social media campaigns need forethought, planning and skill and using a few tips can assist you to give more traction to your social media campaigns.

Advertisers often see Facebook as the social media site of choice but other social networks might actually be more effective for your particular brand.

LinkedIn for instance offers a wide array of users from the world of business while B2B clients might find Slideshare the ideal vehicle.

Advertising a niche product in a magazine aimed at the mass market is an obvious ‘no-no’ and the same applies to social networks.

Profile pages offer an amazing amount of data about users and this can be used very effectively to target the audience that best fits the demographic that you are targeting with your product or services.

Make use of video marketing
Seventy two percent of business executives watch videos that are related to business on business websites a minimum of once a week, according to Forbes. This means that you are seriously missing out on what may be one of the greatest lead generation techniques ever devised.

The bottom line is that creating an informative and compelling video is an excellent method of attracting attention from other businesses and indeed today video marketing is almost essential as a lead generation technique.

The main thing when it comes to using video marketing is to have a plan.

Think about the audience that you are attempting to reach with this video, as there are likely to be different approaches and language used when trying to reach executives as opposed to average people.

You also need to think about the benefits that targeted viewers can glean from the video as without benefits there will be not much in the way of follow-up!

Keep things short, make sure the sound quality is good and include the logo of your company at both the start and end of the video.

Content publishing tips
Having a good hold on content generates a lot of opportunities before you have even started promoting your business due to the fact that you can create and edit and then even publish that content by yourself.

When you have become efficient enough to be able to cope with B2B content you will then be able to help the online reputation of your business grow. Publishing content leads to increased exposure over the internet and results in more and more potential clients paying a visit to your website, so making sure that there is a good representation of that business is obviously going to help you generate and keep a good reputation.

The website’s content should be free from errors and feature appropriate and accurate material. The accomplishment of the website, and by extension your business, is dependent on the content being of the absolute highest quality possible, which means there should be no comprises made of any kind.

There are a number of different techniques, both classic and decidedly offbeat, that can be used to help turn customers into subscribers and even passionate advocates for your business and brand.

One tried and trusted method is to give special treatment to your subscribers. This can take the form of office perks, offering services to subscribers (plus their networks) or one-day specials on products via your social media channels, providing online recognition by asking your followers to post their own stories about your services and products.

Social Media: Authenticity And Perseverance

Social media is the current zeitgeist and the way of the future, or so we are told. This makes it all the more important to make sure that we are conducting our social media behavior in the correct manner.

Two of the most important things in the way we conduct ourselves in the world of social media are transparency and authenticity. In other words, do not try to pretend to be anyone or anything but what you are and be honest in all your interactions.

That said, perseverance and a thick skin can also come in handy. You cannot worry over what anyone else thinks about you 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the world of social media any more than you can in the real world.

Build and work your plan and just get out there. Make sure that you manage your brand, your image and your reputation. Take any legitimate criticism onboard, but do not be beholden to it.

Optimizing social strategy in emails
Senior management often tells B2B marketers to be more social when it comes to their B2B marketing efforts, but how exactly are you supposed to go about doing that?

The more familiar channel of email sees B2B marketers pushing their brand, solutions and messaging onto a targeted list of leads who are quite likely to either ignore it or even list them as spam.

One good tip when it comes to using email marketing for social media is to share rather than tell. It is not sufficient to leverage social media by just adding your social media links onto the bottom of an email. Provide links in emails in order to let leads share the content.

You also need to remember that at the end of the day it is all about the content. Sending the right content to the right person in the social sphere will have the result of amplifying the effect of that content, so take note of who your space’s loudest social media users are and try to get them to join in with your communications in order to leverage their long reach.

How to grow your market
There are a number of innovative methods with which you can attempt to connect and ultimately grow your market.

One good method is to actually invent a whole new market segment. B2B marketing is all about making sure that your service or product is put in the position of being at your category’s “logical extreme.”

For example, B2B companies that create disruptive technologies tend to be heavily funded when it comes to R&D, but the winners will be those companies that have positioned themselves to be the first in people’s minds.

Another good method is to swap your sales funnel for a sales network. These days there are innumerable ways to get out of the B2B sales funnel, with the market of today making it very expensive to find new prospects.

The trick is to create services and products that are so amazing that your existing customer base will not be able to stop talking about them to their friends and colleagues.

Pinterest: The Next Social Site For Small Business?

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Facebook, followed by Twitter, have always been the go to social media websites for businesses.

This year, we saw the rapid rise of Pinterest, which is now the third largest social media site today. The website continues to attract plenty of users and enthusiasts – including small and big businesses alike.

What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a virtual pin-board that lets people organize and share photos that they find anywhere on the web. They can create specific boards and pin any photo that they come across – in case they need it for inspiration.

The website is often touted as a digital dream collage, or a corkboard with magazine clippings and recipes.

Users can create boards about anything, and pin any photos they like ranging from recipes to gifts to fashion to food.

The website is image based only, except for the small captions on the photos, thereby taking away the clutter of texts and webpages.

Users can also view the most recent pins or the most popular ones, follow other users, like other photos and even re-pin them on their own boards.

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, where accounts can be made private, all pinned photos on Pinterest are available for public viewing, so anyone can basically comment or re-pin your photos. Likewise, you can like and pin anything that catches your attention as well.

Who Is Using Pinterest?
Pinterest has indeed grown over the past year, with a total unique visitor increase of 2702.2% since May 2011. It averages around 1.36 million users each and every day and is driving more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and even Twitter, and the number continues to rise.

Top businesses have also taken to Pinterest to reach out to potential clients. These include mobile phone carriers such as Verizon and AT&T, mobile phone manufacturers like Motorola, LG, Samsung and Apple as well as other brands such as Whole Foods, Krogers, Nordstrom and the like.

Why Should You Consider Pinterest?
Pinterest is something worth considering because it is a website that inspires action in people. It serves as a recommendation engine, or a repository of ideas, purchases and sales waiting to happen.

Pinterest users constantly visit the site to look for ideas, inspiration and other things that are out of the ordinary. Likewise, they visit the site to look for things they or their friends might find interesting or to remind themselves what they need to buy, use or revisit.

Many users also visit the site to recommend and share products that they like; and they can serve as potential buyers.

Remember that millions of users do these on a daily basis – and some of them might just end up as your near-future clients, long term buyers and potential product advocates.

Twitter Writing Tips

Writing on Twitter is by necessity an exercise in brevity, and it may surprise you to find out that B2B marketing can actually be quite effective even when you can use a maximum of only 120 characters.

Here is an important tip: just stick to the facts. Long titles may be SEO friendly, but more than likely they will just get lost on Twitter, where they simply do not work. Titles need to be short, to the point and appealing.

On Twitter it is not a bad thing to be familiar; messages with a famous quote, a hit song or a piece of pop culture often resonate.

Tweets that carry with them some kind of positive connotation will give your message extra impact.

This does not mean, however, that you can just copy text outright, so exercise some discretion.

Being timely is also important on Twitter. You are writing for a real-time audience, and any message needs to be in tandem with the current interests of your followers. Remember, he who hesitates on Twitter is truly lost.

Steps To Secure Your Social Media Strategy

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Keeping your internal network secure is one of the top jobs of IT consultants like Tech Experts. You don’t want confidential company or client data to show up on the web.

But what happens when you start marketing your company on social media sites? How do you keep your company secure?

In general, cyber criminals aren’t stupid. They troll sites like Facebook and Twitter, looking to take advantage of useful information employees naively post.

A policy that educates your employees on the “Do’s and dont’s” of social media posting can save your company an enourmous amount of aggravation.

Here are a few steps to include in a social media policy to ensure social media is conducted in a secure manner. It’s important to have a solid policy if you want to ensure that your network and data remain safe from potential social media threats.

Watch where you click
Almost all social media postings contain links to other content. This is the sweet spot hackers are targeting. They place innocuous links to virus and spyware programs, or even worse, hijacked accounts of your friends and business associates.

You should tell employees involved in your social media efforts not to click on any suspicious links. If they receive links from friends that seem uncharacteristic, it’s a good idea to not click on them.

Update privacy settings
Social media sites constantly update and change security settings on their networks, leading to unexpected exposure of information you might not want indexed on the web. It’s a good idea to ensure that all of your profile information is private, and that you regularly review your privacy settings.

Don’t share personal information
This might seem obvious to you, but there are still unsuspecting users out there who share too much of their personal information on social sites. Remember, social media is all about being social. Pretty much everything you share can be viewed by others. The last thing you want is an identity thief accessing your contact information and other personal data.

Log in using HTTPS
HTTPS is a web protocol that ensures the data sent between your computer and a web site is secure and encrypted. Many social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus support HTTPS, and you should ensure that you use it.

To use HTTPS, you simply put an S at the end of the usual http address in the URL bar of your browser. I.e., https://facebook.com will open a more secure version of Facebook. By using HTTPS you can eliminate Man-in-the-Middle attacks and other similar types of phishing.

They key thing to remember: If you don’t know them, they aren’t your friend. You’ll be miles ahead if you treat social media interactions like you do real life interactions. You wouldn’t offer a stranger your cell phone number or home address until you knew them well. The same precautions apply to your social media accounts.

Timely Tips For Social Networking Safety

Social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

As the popularity of these social sites grows, so do the risks of using them. Hackers, spammers, virus writers, identity thieves, and other criminals follow the traffic.

Read these tips to help protect yourself when you use social networks.

Be wary of links
Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social website. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would links in email messages.

Post judiciously
Know what you’ve posted about yourself. A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the account login page.

To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, home town, high school class, or mother’s middle name. If the site allows, make up your own password questions, and don’t draw them from material anyone could find with a quick search.

Watch out for a friend’s hacked email
Don’t trust that a message is really from who it says it’s from. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like they’re from your friends, but aren’t. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks. For more information, see Scammers exploit Facebook friendships.

Protect your address book
To avoid giving away email addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your email address book.

When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your email address and password to find out if your contacts are on the network. The site might use this information to send email messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you’ve ever sent an email message to with that email address.

Don’t friend everyone
Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you.

Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this website, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.

Posting is permanent
Assume that everything you put on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print photos or text or save images and videos to a computer. And don’t forget, Google caches!

Avoid apps and games
Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications to steal your personal information.

To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the web.

Social Media For Your Business: Three Quick Tips

Social media is all the rage – we’ve written about it here, and you’re certainly hearing about it on the news and in your email.

Here are some quick tips to get the most out of three of the most popular services.

LinkedIn Can Help Grow Your Business
LinkedIn has more than 150 million registered users, which is a lot of opportunities for those who wish to use the professional social media site to help them grow their business.

The real worth of LinkedIn for businesses is to be able to connect on a one-to-one basis with other business professionals.

Many of the connections you make on the site can end up not only introducing you to partners and business influencers but potentially also referring your business to possible new customers.

Having a personal LinkedIn profile is often viewed as a digital business card or a form of online resume.

While using it as such is a good place to start, it can be taken much further to help you build a powerful presence online in order to help encourage more business opportunities and is an excellent way of both attracting and managing your business connections.

Using Twitter
Twitter is one of the fastest and best methods of amplifying the message, product and services of a business or an individual in all the social media available in the twenty-first century.
The first thing you need before launching your business on Twitter is a strategy.

Review your marketing and business goals, and don’t make this preliminary step too complicated.

Think about how your business can benefit from social media and how the industry that you are in is using it as a whole. The great majority of the time, social media will be able to fit into your digital marketing efforts.

Some things that you need to think about include what you intend to use Twitter for. Are you using it for customer research or for branding? Are you using it in order to reach a specific segment or target, for customer support, or just to raise awareness?

Another question you need to answer is whether you will be able to come up with enough relevant content to make it worthwhile.

Optimize Your Profile on Pinterest
Your B2B business may by now have created a presence on the popular and ever-growing Pinterest.

This site has achieved incredible growth, which is very hard to overlook when it comes to the potential for B2B marketers to engage with both existing and prospective clientele.
There are some ways in which you can optimize your profile on this site, however.

The About area is the keyword description of your page as it will appear in search results, should someone search for your page.

The image you use needs to be consistent with the profile graphic or avatar you use on your firm’s other social profiles for the purpose of easy recognition, though you also need to keep in mind how the image will look on your followers’ Pinterest streams.

The Social Linking area, if done correctly, can be a great source of content for your other profiles.

Decide whether you want to manually or automatically publish your pins to your Facebook or Twitter pages.

The Hide setting should be turned off so others can find your profile and pins when searching and search engines can index your activity.

Has Your Company’s Facebook Page Converted To Timeline? Here are Some Must Know Tips

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

If you follow social media at all (and you should be!) you know that the landscape changes almost on a daily basis. One place this is very evident is Facebook.

Facebook is constantly working to “improve” your experience and now they’ve done it again with Timeline – not only for our personal pages but for our business pages as well.

Many business owners fought the changes and waited until they were forced to accept the upgrade to Timeline. Now that it’s been switched over, they’re complaining that it’s cumbersome, unattractive and difficult to navigate.

But the Facebook juggernaut is unstoppable – the new layout is here to stay. So, here are a few tips to make the most out of your company’s Facebook page, and dealing with Timeline a little easier.

• Create a cover photo: this is a great way to use Facebook to further build brand recognition.

The options are virtually endless when it comes to this image as long as you remember that you can use a brand or logo but you can’t offer a coupon or discount (no “%” off sales or coupons or similar ploys), no contact information (that’s what your “About” section is for) and no calls to action (that’s what your status updates are for).

• You can get private messages from fans through your business page: this is a new feature and very useful. Before, if your fans wanted to send a message to you through Facebook, it had to be through your personal page.

Now they can contact you directly through your business page. This one may be a little difficult getting used to, so make sure you check those messages – you don’t want to alienate a potential customer!

• Highlighted post option: you can now select a post to be highlighted (this can be those discount, sales or calls to action that you can’t put in your cover image). Highlighted posts simply means your post can take up both sides of the page.

These are just a few of the useful changes that Facebook Timeline brings to your business page. Don’t worry – the new timeline may not fit well with your thoughts about change but it’s all in our best interest. Don’t panic and go with the flow.

Social Media Management: Think Local

Marketers seem to be hearing three words a lot more these days: “social,” “local” and “mobile.”

With more and more users relying on cell phones and tablets and the geo-location technology that accompanies them, more and more businesses are realizing they need to think locally.

One good way to use social media to appeal to a local audience is to develop a blog. Blog posts are excellent places to write about things specific to your local area – events, people, places and restaurants, for example.

When writing blog posts, make sure you optimize the post by using tags that demonstrate the local nature of your business so you will benefit from your local search strategy and will be indexed in the correct manner by search engines.

Another way to better optimize your social search is to submit your profile data to local directories such as Yellow Pages and SuperPages.