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Seven Tips to Generate Leads from Your Social Media Accounts in 2012

January 17th, 2012 | Author: admin

There’s a lot of talk about growing a strong social media presence for your business, but in the end there’s no point if you can’t convert your reading audience into a buying one. To make 2012 your biggest year ever, here are seven tips for turning followers into customers.

1. Focus on retweets. Your message will a much bigger reach if you can get others talking about it. The key to this is simple: give what you want to get. If you’re generous about retweeting others in your community, they are more likely to retweet you in turn.

2. Get a reputation for responsiveness. People want a company that won’t ignore them. Get in the habit of responding to every question and comment on your social media accounts, always be prompt, and you’ll get that ever-important reputation for good customer service.

3. Participate in discussions. Get in the habit of searching Twitter frequently, looking for people who are asking questions your business can answer. Being the one who helps someone out can put you in a very good light when they’re ready to buy.

4. Use LinkedIn Answers for B2B leads. Linked in is a great place for businesses to connect with other businesses, so if this is something that would be helpful for you, get involved with the Answers forum and show your expertise.

5. Create a study with a survey. Host a survey on your blog, publish the results along with your thoughts, and advertise your findings on your social network accounts. This also opens the door for you to contact other relevant blogs about sharing your study with a wider circle.

6. If you’re not making videos, you should. You can get a pretty decent little camcorder for very little money these days, and there are plenty of online tutorials to teach you some video production skills. Making videos will help your audience get to know the real you, and what your company does and stands for. This connection is important.

7. Concentrate on the networks that matter. Not everyone has accounts everywhere – have you done your market research to find out where your potential customers are? If they’re mostly on Facebook, then most of your social media effort should be there. If they’re more likely on Twitter, get to tweeting! It’s more productive in terms of leads to give a more concentrated effort in fewer places, than to try to spread yourself evenly everywhere.

Posted in Facebook, Google+, social media, Social Policy, twitter | No Comments »

What Do Google+ Business Pages Mean for You?

November 10th, 2011 | Author: admin

This week Google finally announced that it was allowing businesses to create Google+ Pages for their brands. Since then there has been a lot of opinion in both directions about whether or not the pages are worth the trouble of signing up, and there are a few things that businesses need to keep in mind when considering a Google+ Page.

If you’re going to do it, do it now. Even if you’re not planning on using your business Google+ Page right away, if you think you will want one eventually, you should go ahead and claim it now. At the moment, Google is not requiring any kind of verification in order to claim a page name, so basically anyone can sign up with any brand name. If you want to reserve your name, it’s first come, first served.

You will not be able to run contests. Unlike Facebook’s business pages, Google+ Pages do now allow any kind of promotions or contests to be hosted on the page. This may change in the future, of course, but for now if the main purpose of a page for you is to run promotions, you’ll find that Facebook is still the best tool for your needs.

It’s a good SEO decision. Remember that this is Google we’re talking about – everything you do on your Google+ Page will be strongly integrated with search results. Your Google+ business posts will no doubt help your ranking tremendously, and of course the more fan engagement you can get going on your page, the better.

Hangouts equal conferences. Google+ Hangouts was initially a way for people on the network to have video chats with each other, but now that businesses are getting in on the action, this pretty much amounts to the ability to have video conferences directly from your Google+ account, which is a nice bonus.

It doesn’t work like a Facebook page. One of the things people new to Google+ are complaining about is that it simply isn’t as intuitive as having a Facebook page. Users are reporting problems and confusion with the signup, as well as issues dealing with a user interface that isn’t quite as friendly as Facebook’s.

Clearly the jury is still out on what sort of impact Google+ Pages will have for business, but there’s certainly a lot of buzz right now, and only time will tell if this social network ends up being the Facebook-killer is was hyped up to be.

Posted in Google+, social media | No Comments »