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3 Fast Tips to Share Your Small Business and Avoid Flat Advertising Techniques

Tuesday, March 3, 2013by The BWD Team in Advertising, Marketing, SEO

Advertising is one-directional: it’s typically a message delivered outward by a business at a certain cost and to a specific audience that falls flat. The ad itself isn’t likely to be valued for its own sake, and this form of marketing is easily recognizable by today’s consumers for its overtly commercial nature.

Good content, however, gives something back to the user. It gets them thinking about a topic that’s meaningful to them, leading them to realize how your product or services fits into their (or their business’) life or goals. Unsurprisingly, this is the only way to market brands, products, and services successfully on the internet in 2013, and especially for SEO. High quality content naturally gathers a great number of inbound links to a website as we’ve noted before, therefor driving up perceived value, referral traffic, and search engine rankings.

So instead of thinking about simply advertising your small business and making a small business internet marketing mistake, here are some tips on how to start sharing it and taking advantage of the new social web instead. Given a few hours of work each week, this form of marketing is often cheaper and more rewarding than traditional, flat advertising methods.

Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to us for individual strategy and more.

Tip 1: Network and build social capital through social media

Your link building and internet marketing efforts may sometime feel like a vast web, and that's a good thing!

Networking with the social web means “community strategy,” and it often ends up looking a lot like a digital web or constellaton.

People trust recommendations, and they trust them even more from individuals with high levels of social network influence. There are many glittering stars out there in the social media constellations, and when you produce content that they’re excited to share, they’ll drive a geometrically expanded number of users to your business. We generally call this process community building when one or more social networks are used.

These influential people aren’t necessarily looking for discounts as a reward; what motivates them is insider-status and getting to a great product or company “first.” While networking with these types of individuals and organizations may seem tricky at first, remain confident in the fact that if your business, products, or services are of the highest value, then your content will certainly follow through in demonstrating this to taste makers and social movers on the internet. Maintain reach outs by actively tagging your content, and using productivity tools to keep your finger on the pulse of their current conversations.

While these types of digital connections may be more obvious in some industries rather than others–for example a small local bakery vs. a mid-sized financial wealth firm–we’re happy to help you guide you and your business to the exact strategy you need to reach them. The results will not only affect your inbound traffic levels, but SEO as well.

Tagged with: Allrecipes, Facebook, Kohl's, Pinterest2 Comments

10 Commandments for Amazing Small Business Community Management, Revenue & Traffic

Wednesday, February 2, 2013by The BWD Team in Community Building

An amazing community manager is usually the #1 way for new and small businesses to make the biggest impact with their marketing online.

An amazing community manager is usually the easiest way for new and small businesses to make the biggest impact possible with their marketing online.

As small businesses move forward in 2013 it should be clear that every business needs some form of community management and strategy in place in order to succeed with internet marketing.

On the smaller end of the spectrum, a community manager may simply be an in-house employee donating a few hours a week to basic Twitter “upkeep”. Large businesses with active content on multiple networks such as Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and other platforms often outsource the entire function to specialists. Regardless of where your business may fall on this spectrum, your success will definitely depend on an effective content marketing strategy through these 10 requirements.

Why is community management essential? It drives your placement in search engines (SEO) and results in increased traffic, more leads, and more customers.

Here are our 10 commandments for being a great community manager & strategist:

Write extremely well: Think community management can be left to a green intern? Think again. Excellent college-level writing skills are essential for broadcasting your brand in marketplaces. Altimeter recently concluded that writing ability was the number one requested skill for a community manager. The best writing fascinates, welcomes, and envelops readers and customers.
Pay attention to the daily details: Strategy building requires that a community manager be in constant communication with all departments of an organization, and must be proactive in gathering valuable feedback from stakeholders. A real-time awareness in all directions is at the core of community management.
Keep your finger on the pulse of everything related to your industry: These days, content can come from anywhere: blogs, news, and even moment to moment conversation. As a community manager meant to essentially control each of the social aspects of your brand, it’s important that you are constantly in touch with other individuals and tastemakers online. As a result, your organization will not only be extremely cutting edge, but a major part of the conversation online as well.
Build great analytics tracking and reporting: Quantitative documentation is what drives credibility in the online world. The community manager’s role within the company is partly that of educator, and a structured analysis of content marketing outcomes will support good budget decision-making with stakeholders as well.
A great community manager keeps their finger on the pulse of every social aspect of a brand.

Think visually: As you can imagine, a piece of content can definitely entail much more than some typed words. Design carries a huge amount of information about your company, so working with professional creatives to develop images, video, and other media content that’s expressive of your company’s brand is essential.
Innovate constantly: The field of community management is evolving rapidly, and responding quickly to new platforms or features and developing new approaches to content placement on established ones, such as the case of Facebook and image-based posts, is essential. By actively joining the conversation surrounding the tasks that make up community management–an easy thing to do for a community manager–and even broadcasting your own innovative ideas into the community, you’ll quickly elevate both your brand and your own professional clout as well.
Expect to take on many roles: As widely acclaimed community manager Jeremiah Owyang points out, we really are in the “wild west of social” with no rules for internet marketing. In this pioneer environment, it’s essential that you remain super-adaptable as a community manager, taking on roles from detective to therapist to cheerleader to damage control to analyst, all within a single day. While some may liken modern community management to PR, we can definitely attest to the fact that a community manager maintains much more varied and adapted roles.
Be goal oriented: The social media world can be noisy, so guarding against distractions is essential. Make a list of goals for a set period of time, and stick to them. Divide and maintain the social channels that you’re “listening in on,” and try to avoid the latest cat meme or video! Goals can include features such as reducing support costs, increasing customer acquisition and retention, and driving product innovation.
Manage your time as well as your community! Social Fresh surveyed community managers in its 2013 “Community Manager Report” and found that the majority of managers put in more than 50 hours per week! The good news is that this time is often spread into “free time” when the greatest new idea may pop into your head, or you think of a witty tweet that just has to be written down before you fall asleep. Community management is fun, fulfilling work, so think work/life harmony, not “balance” or “exclusion.” Here’s the hourly breakdown from Social Fresh:
- 6% were at less than 10hrs
- 17% spent 11-20hrs 14% spent 21-30hrs
- 21% spent 41-50hrs
- 26% spent more than 50hrs
- 2% didn’t know
Love the toolset. Be the toolset. Streamline your Twitter marketing with scaled solutions such as Buffer, Tweetdeck, Topsy and Little Bird, and use fascinating analytics systems like PostAcumen and Curalate to compose and present your data depending on your budget.

And as if you needed any more convincing that the role of a community manager and strategist is an increasingly important one, salaries for this type of postion are continuing to rise! Social Fresh reports, “The first year we surveyed we got back a salary range of $30k to plenty of folks making 6 figures. That range continues to hold true, even internationally. But the average salary has gone up from $49k to $51k to a larger jump this year.”

What kind of community management work do you think your business could use to increase revenue and traffic? Need some assistance nailing these details down? Give us a shout!

Tagged with: Buffer, community management, Facebook, TwitterLeave a Comment

4 SEO Reasons your Business Should Have Started Blogging Yesterday

Thursday, February 2, 2013by The BWD Team in Marketing, SEO

The rules of ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) have changed. It’s no longer possible to easily buy your way to a top spot in Google’s organic search engine results pages, and the only way to excel in the modern world of internet marketing and SEO is through great content marketing and shareability.

The most recent updates to Google’s ranking algorithms, Penguin and Panda, have been the basis for a great deal of speculation and discussion about these types of changes to SEO in the last 12 months. However, all high level marketers now agree that great content marketing through blogging or another means is at the heart of SEO success.

If you’re on the fence, here are four reasons your company should’ve started blogging yesterday, and ways to think of content creation as much more than just a few blog posts per year:

1. Blogging & content marketing are not necessarily what you think they are

It’s time to put your business first and rid yourself of any preconceived notions about the frivolous nature and poor quality of blogging from the early days of the web. Today, content marketing actually involves producing a variety of formats based on desired effects and prospective audiences. For example, events like Felix Baumgartner’s daredevil free fall from the edge of space–released on YouTube for the launch of Red Bull’s Stratos line of energy drinks–are a modern example of very expensive content marketing. The video of his fall simultaneously broke many only viewing records, including 8 million live concurrent viewers from around the world at once, while also producing an amazing amount of buzz and marketing for Red Bull.

While most businesses don’t have the budget for this kind of stunt, you can be rest assured that developing content strategy and ideas for your business’ blog or other publications has the potential to be much simpler. Past academic thesis can work perfectly in serialized formats. Or consider the 100 case studies sitting somewhere on your company’s intranet for only a few potential clients to see each month! This type of high end content can bring new life, better search rankings, and more revenue to your business.

2. The only way to gather inbound links and excel on Google is through great content

Unless you’ve literally invented the greatest product since sliced bread, the number one factor in sending visitors to your website thanks to SEO or referral traffic is through inbound links. And what’s the best way to gather inbound links? Through fascinating, high quality content production and distribution on a blog or similar piece of technology. (Check out our Introduction to Link Building post for a quick primer.) Google’s latest updates indicate that its web crawlers will be more interested in conversations that are constantly evolving and adding value to the web, rather than online “brochures” thanks to a constant flow of content. It’s clear by now that static websites will and have become the “billboards” of the web that fade into the background, even with the best design and animation.

While these facts has proved to be true for many years in SEO, the Google Penguin and Panda updates of the last 12 months have truly sealed the deadly fate of these brochure-style sites.

3. Content marketing is the best way to build authority and gather new opportunities and customers

Great content marketing has less to do with an occasional blog post, and more to do with how marketers formulate strategy distribution. It involves finding where your target audience is already residing on the web, and involving them in industry conversations with fascinating, high quality information that sets your business as a clear leader in your industry.

This section of a client's website clearly demonstrates authority in the industry, calls for visitors to stay connected via email for valuable & free information, and clearly states the services and goals of the company.

We’ve developed and executed content marketing strategies for companies that would have never thought blogging was a sensible marketing solution 5 years ago. In this instance we incorporated a new blog and email newsletter to an industrial company’s existing website.

All too often managers and owners of small businesses tend to believe that “blogging” is not for them. This has proved to be especially true in the law, industrial, medical science, and the financial industries. While social media and blogs may be considered too “soft and fuzzy” in these spheres, professionals in these fields really should really frame their potential marketing work in terms of producing and distributing valuable white papers, industry reports, studies and much more instead, and whether they’re in a million dollar business or not.

4. Facebook search will factor in content and recommendations

Conversations and content will also be the basis of high rankings in social search, such as the upcoming Facebook graph search. The web has become the 21st century equivalent of the medieval market or the Middle Eastern bazaar. Blogs and social media networks have become more than a place to buy things and be entertained, as they’re now a place to confide, gather advice, and discover new things. This buzz will be essential to listings in the new Facebook search, because just like Google’s, Facebook’s algorithms will factor in conversations, content, and more. One of the easiest ways to fuel positive feedback for your listing is by taking an active role to ask customers to join in the conversation, either through blogging or social media outreach and community management. Excellent content marketing is just what your Facebook followers need to seal the deal and leave a positive review.

One of the best examples of a company that went from a small neighborhood shop to an international craze through content strategy–thanks to the hit American shows Sex in the City and SNL–is Magnolia Bakery, who kicked off the cupcake craze of the late 1990s and now maintains an active blog and social community continually fostering their popularity.

Great content marketing strategy’s next big challenge will be to reinvigorate the spheres of law, finance, industrial services, professional services, and medicine. The content is there, just waiting to come to life. All that’s needed is some great strategy and a beautiful platform.

Need some help to boost your content marketing strategy? Give us a shout and our experts will begin their work asap.

Tagged with: blogging, content marketing, Facebook, SEO, Twitter1 Comment

7 Rookie Internet Marketing Mistakes for Small Businesses to Avoid

Wednesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Link Building, Marketing, SEO

When we say “internet marketing” we now mean everything from SEO, to social sharing, to general link building, to PPC, to community growth on social media, to CPM, to Pinterest marketing techniques and very strategy for visual social networks in general. Internet marketing can be as small as a Facebook “like” and as huge as a link to your website from CNN.com. It’s the building of your brand in every digital way possible to generate growth and revenue. It’s developing business relationships through social media or email that drive sales or your general authority within an industry. It encompasses guest appearances in real life or digitally (hello webinars!), and it can even be the single factor that makes or breaks your business.

Whew! What a list.

The new, holistic approaches to internet marketing–thanks to changes by Google and other search engines in the last 12 months–are enough to make anyone’s head spin, let alone a small business owner or manager who wears many different “business” hats everyday. Thankfully there are plenty of resources–such as this blo–to help you out along the way to internet marketing success, and in this article we’ll cover 7 rookie mistakes that we’ve found again and again in our nearly 10 years as internet professionals to make those first steps even easier.

Thinking of allocating a budget to outsource the entire process? Feel free to browse these guidelines and send us a message to see how you can streamline the growth of your business by focusing on what you do best instead.

#1 Failure to maintain an on-site strategy focused on quality content

There used to be a time in SEO history where cheap microsites fueled search engine results pages (SERPs) thanks to a huge network of inbound links from websites of a similar, cheap type. However, with Google’s Panda, Penguin, and other algorithimic updates last year, these types of link farms (along with cheap options to purchase batches of links) have been essentially wiped out from relevance.

The fact that these cheaper sites added no real value or quality to a users’ experience on their websites is what ultimately sealed their fate and failure with search engines. Instead, Google now strongly promotes websites and digital properties of the highest quality. Ranking websites on search engines with poorly created strategy or no consistently updated content whatsoever is now nearly impossible.

But what does having high quality content on a website actual entail? Google ranks quality based upon the:

Quantity and quality of inbound links to the page (1 link from CNN = excellent, 100 link-farm links = bad)
Quantity and quality of social signals linking to the page
Grammar and spelling on the page
Text formatting indications on the page (well organized text with subheads, bold, italics, bullet points is easy to read for readers, and translates into great quality)
Length of content (masses of poorly written 200 character posts will always rank poorly against longer posts of varying length and higher quality)
Outbound links from the page (link to relevant websites that are helpful for readers and enhance their experience)

Adore Your Place Interior Design Blog, Social Media, Small Business Websitehttp://blogwhatdesign.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=1975&type=image&#

This client maintains an excellent on-site strategy by regularly posting interesting content with a variety of media.

If you’re thinking that these parameters seem pretty subjective: you’re right, and we’ll never have clear-cut guidelines as to how Google ranks websites to ensure no one games the system. However, these parameters are general enough to help create the strategy necessary for valuable, search-driving marketing on-site. Take a look at our Intro to Linkbuilding article from last month to get some initial ideas flowing.

3 Goals for Guaranteed Greater Revenue from your Website in 2013

Thursday, December 12, 2012by The BWD Team in Marketing

Our personal New Years resolutions may be made and quickly broken, but we’re certain that this set of digital goals for the New Year will not only be achieved with minimal investment, but will give the boost and return your business needs to hit unprecedented revenue goals in 2013.

While the term “monetization” might be a nice way for blog hobbyists to dream of unrealistic revenue goals with a poorly designed and functioning website, we find more excitement everyday in working with clients who are ready to take their digital projects to the next level to create real revenue goals. So, here’s what’s required to kick “monetization” out the door and start generating real business with real revenue with minimal investment in time and money in 2013.

Prefer to outsource any part of the techniques discussed here to a company of professionals? Contact us for a risk-free proposal.

Take Analytics Seriously: Set numeric goals, especially for social networks and conversions

It might seem obvious for businesses, but remember that numeric goals and analysis–known as analytics in the world of digital marketing and advertising–are the key to success for any digital project. The reward and satisfaction from hitting these types of goals with your business–especially if they’re realistic and well planned from the start–is always immensely satisfying.

Restaurants and other local store fronts always have great opportunities for social network conversion and analytics as well, especially through visually focused networks like Facebook and Pinterest.

Featured Portfolio Project: Restaurant MEAL. Restaurants and other local store fronts always have great opportunities for social network conversion and analytics as well, especially through visually focused networks like Facebook and Pinterest.

To start, the bottom line that businesses should be constantly checking is: what is my return on investment for this piece of digital marketing? Although “ROI” can be difficult to determine with social networks, we’ve found that simple numeric goals and tracking do an excellent job in getting started. Take the process here one step further by gathering data from potential clients from the start through better conversion tracking, and clearer analysis of this type of data so that you can turn “window shoppers” into buyers and “lurkers” into long time readers. Let us know at anytime if you’d like to take these ideas a step further by receiving a risk-free proposal.

Facebook: Take a look at your rate of new “likes” for your Facebook page for the last 30 day period. What was the rate of growth for this period compared to the previous one? What do you think you did to help achieve that kind of growth? What can you do to increase that rate just a bit for the next 30 day period? Use your page insights to nail down these numbers, and set your goals. Consider investing a monetary budget into Facebook advertising, or just a bit more well-planned time into community building (which we’ve found often yields better results over paid!) To reinforce your efforts, check to see which of your Facebook posts were most popular and had the highest engagement rates. Why do you think that happened? How can you produce more posts of that type? Worried about the effects that EdgeRank has had on your reach counts? We’ve found that these updates have actually helped our clients, not hurt them: read more about that here.
Twitter: Just like Facebook, do your best to figure out how many new followers you received in the last 30 day period (tsee our note on 3rd party trackers below), and work on increasing that rate either through strategically set budgets for time spent on community building on Twitter or paid Twitter Advertising. Check on which of your Tweets were retweeted or replied to most often, and why that might be. Are you reaching out and taking advantage of the link building benefits of Twitter? Since Twitter hasn’t yet provided great analytics tools for their business users, we love using TopsyPro to gather exciting insights and metrics into our clients’ Twitter data. Topsy lets us not only track other accounts, mentions, and retweets, but general phrases, hashtags, and other trends to see where and how discussions are heading on Twitter and how our Twitter marketing efforts are shaping up.
Click to check out our most recent small business tips for Pinterest.

Pinterest: The metrics that count with this visual social network are repins and board followers. While Pinterest is certainly working in the right direction towards better “in house” insights for businesses starting with verified accounts linked to domains, take the time to do an estimation of your repins and new board followers in the latest 30 day period and work to beat those growth rates in the next 30 day period. What kinds of pins were really popular? How can you produce more of their type? We also have our eye on Curalate: a marketing tool suite for the visual web–especially Pinterest. Their portfolio of clients boast companies like Campbells, Gap, Michael Kors, and much more, even for small business! Take a look at the exciting ways in which their technology works in their welcome video here, and we’ll report back once we’ve enjoyed a complete campaign tracking Pinterest analytics with this service.

An Introduction to the Art of Link Building: the Gold Standard in Internet Marketing and SEO

Thursday, December 12, 2012by The BWD Team in Link Building, Marketing, SEO

We’ve long explained to our clients that inbound link building is the gold standard in internet–and especially search engine–marketing, and the logic seems to be pretty clear: the entire purpose of having a website is to be digitally “seen” in order to drive sales or another cause. You may have a beautiful website, but if no one is linking to you, then you’re nearly nonexistent in digital terms. While this logic is simple, the actual process of getting those links to your website–a practice known as link building–is a bit more unclear, especially for business owners unfamiliar with internet marketing

So, let’s break it down. When we say “inbound link” we’re talking about any hyperlink that sends users from one website directly to yours. As you can imagine, inbound links can appear in an infinite number of ways such as shared content on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, referrals via a URL in a YouTube video, a pin on Pinterest re-pinned 100 times over, a strategically placed “read more” link in an email marketing campaign, and many, many other options. Inbound links can be paid or unpaid. Straight to your front page or to an individual blog post. They can be sent through an image or through a text link. And they can even be the deciding factor in what makes your brand an overnight viral sensation.

In this post we’ll discuss our link building and internet marketing mantras in addition to a number of great examples and free opportunities that business owners and managers can start taking advantage of immediately.

Your New Internet Marketing Mantra: Creativity, Relationships, Community, & Quality

One of the ultimate keys in creating powerful link building strategy is creativity. Within the last four months Google and other search engines’ algorithms have continued to prove that they are rewarding creative, meaningful, and high quality inbound links rather than craftily placed key words and anchor text to determine their search engine results pages. This type of old, cheap link building of the past is certainly dead, as many leading SEO companies have recently noted. Since the link building of today requires a bit more time, networking finesse, and creative effort, the strategy has commonly been rebranding as “link earning.” As a result it’s important to realize that link building both indirectly drives websites upwards in organic search engine results through SEO, while simultaneously yielding a continuous flower of new visitors directly through the new links as well.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are a part of Link Building

Link building is a hugely important part of SEO. Whereas links could previously be purchased in easy, cheap batches, Google and Bing’s search algorithms have become amazingly complex, rewarding high quality links and remaining thoroughly properietary. Although we’ll never have a complete answer as to the technical details of these algorithms years of research and trend study has yielded some great indicators like those noted here.

While, there’s no cheap or easy way to get ahead with link building anymore, the good news is that fostering an active and interested community around your digital platforms and properties will create compounding results in which your followers are doing much of the link building work for you in the end. While we ultimately want each of our clients to reach this point, there are important first steps to take as you break into any industry and its digital communities and try to create that initial first spark.

Your link building and internet marketing efforts may sometime feel like a vast web, and that’s a good thing!

While a standard plan won’t work for every website–let alone two of a kind–there are many general guidelines or “mantras” that can help marketers big or small to move along in their link building strategy. As is the case in the physical world of management, powerful connections with individuals and communities are what yield the best results for your business. These ideas culminate in our mantra for link building of: creativity, relationship building, community growth, and high quality content. Here are some of the tenants and examples of this mantra in practice:

Build Traffic: Post Images on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, & more…

Thursday, September 9, 2012by The BWD Team in Social Media

A recent modification to one of our client’s Facebook strategy yielded an average of 300% more interaction per post than previous rates.

Global communications company M Booth and media measurement and analytics company Simply Measured just recently announced their findings that the content type holding the greatest value on all types of social media networks and websites were visually-based posts, such as Facebook image or video-based posts, Twitter image-based posts, Pinterest pins, and more.

While it’s no secret that visual content is much “prettier” and pleasing to our most commonly used sense, it might not be immediately evident that text-based posts on Facebook (for example) will simply never see the same type of engagement rates that visually-based posts produce.

How Visuals Rule Social Media

According to Facebook, the top 10 most popular brand pages on their network receive the highest levels of engagement for image and video-based posts
- Videos are linked 12X more than links and text posts
- Photos are linked 2X more than text updates
42% of all Tumblr posts are photos
At YouTube, 100 million users are interacting with videos every week
Pins on Pinterest–the wildly popular photo-pin-board tool having recently taken the social media world by storm–drive more referral traffic than Google+, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn combined.

Managers of Facebook pages consistently find that link-based and text-based posts simply do not generate the same amounts of interaction and traffic that image-based posts supply. Instead, it’s best that managers of Facebook pages accompany a photo-based post with a little bit of text and a link to the page they’re referencing. Remember to include the http:// or www. prefix to ensure the link is clickable for other Facebook users after you publish your update.

Image courtesy DonorsChoose.org.

When constructing your social media updates, use big, beautiful, bold photos and graphics. If you can, custom-design them to include text and more. The website DonorsChoose.org even found that images with inspirational quotes on them were the most likely to be shared out of all of their image-based posts. Next came those custom images with scans of hand-written notes by children, “Share this photo if…” -style graphics, “Caption this photo” posts, and photo-based “fill in the blank” requests for comments.

Think it’s time your social media strategy were invigorated with a bit of visual flare? Are you not seeing the same amount of interaction with your social media posts as your competitors’? Contact us asap for a quote and strategy session.

Tagged with: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter1 Comment

4 Ways to Boost Your Professional Value via Social Media

Wednesday, June 6, 2012by The BWD Team in Community Building, Social Media

For a number of business professionals, social media is still a new and somewhat intimidating phenomenon. While many companies successfully use social media everyday, there are still those who see such activity as unprofessional and there for of little value. This belief couldn’t be any farther from the truth; optimizing your social media strategy will not only elevate your professional value online, but will continue to exponentially build your brand’s worth with minimal (if not non-existent) cost.

4 Ways to Get Professional via Social Media

Display & Text Advertising – Social media provides professionals with a number of tools to advertise their companies or organizations including a variety of innovated options. Post an update on your business’s Facebook Page about your newest product. Tweet about this product on Twitter to your 100+ followers. Pin a photo of that same product on Pinterest with a link to purchase. And these are only just the free options! Companies like Twitter, Facebook, and more also offer paid advertising solutions as well. Twitter is busy on extending small business solutions to a wider pool of customers, while Facebook already offers super affordable options as well.
Appealing to the Consumer – Happy customers = plenty of healthy revenue. Social media allows you to connect to your customers on a professional and personal level to ensure this. Through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your company’s personal blog, and the numerous other social tools at your disposal with a proper social strategy, you can share important information about your business, post product coupons and deals, and simply provide customers with a much more personalized experience.
Instant Notifications – Social media helps your company exist in real-time. Share information about your latest product or service release, recount a great customer experience on your blog, or tweet about the money your business just raised for charity. By making your business somewhat personable, you’ll only elevate your professional value.
Professional Networking Opportunities – One of the most obvious tools social media offers is the ability to quickly and easily network with a group of individuals you may have otherwise never encountered. Take advantage of these tools to reach out to potential new hires, customers, and potential partnerships.

Social media is the new form of professional business communication. Find ways to integrate it into your company’s “daily life” and demonstrate your digital professionalism. For more comprehensive and individualized social media strategy, feel free to contact us today.

Tagged with: advertising, Facebook, TwitterLeave a Comment

Engage Your Social Media Followers With 3 Tips

Thursday, April 4, 2012by The BWD Team in Social Media

As a blogger or small business owner in today’s technologically competitive world, it’s important to maintain a strong social media presence in order to stay ahead of the game. Ask yourself how and what you are doing to make sure your current and prospective social media followers constantly stay engaged with you and your brand. Here are three ways to engage your followers.

3 Ways to Engage Your Social Media Followers

Always Respond and Use Different Tools –Acknowledge each and every comment or piece of feedback, even if that response is negative. It’s human nature to vent about things we’re dissatisfied with, such as poor customer service or a faulty product. Many customers choose to vent using social media tools such as Facebook or Twitter. Show your customers that you hear them and care about their feedback by taking the time to respond to each complaint. Read “4 Ways to Deal with Negative Comments on Your Blog,” for advice on how to deal with those kinds of comments.
Start Conversations and Ask Your Followers to Promote Your Brand – If your followers already enjoy and appreciate your brand, you might be surprised as to how eager they are to share their experiences and in turn promote your brand. Encourage them through questions or open-ended type surveys via Twitter or Facebook to spark conversations. Ask followers to post photos with their favorite product. Hold giveaways on your blog for some extra excitement.
Be Creative – Unleash your creativity! The latest social media tools allow you to take your brand’s marketing strategy to a whole new level. Surprise your current followers and gain additional followers by thinking outside of the box. Create a new marketing campaign, or work on your artistic presentation through beautiful Facebook cover photos.

Constant communication with your followers, even if it’s simply through social media venues, is both a great way to gain feedback while demonstrating that you care about your followers as well.

Tagged with: Facebook, marketing, TwitterLeave a Comment

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