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Archive for the ‘Using Social Media for Business’ Category

6.) Business Exchange – Network with Industry Leaders and Become the Thought Leader

Business Exchange is literally the Business Week of Social Networking. What I like about it is that it is similar to LinkedIn in terms of demographic but it gives you the ability to network with and share/learn information with/from other professionals in pre-defined categories and industries. For instance, for the topic of social media alone there are actually categories covering analytics, branding, business failures and successes, design, social media in the workplace, social media innovation, job hunting, marketing, operations, privacy, training, and social media vs. old media. Find your industry’s category(s), start sharing information that would interest decision makers in your industry, and build out relationships as you would on LinkedIn. on Business Exchange for the latest in social media strategy. B2B social media marketing is like anything else social media-related: new tools, old rules. Business has always been social. You just need to find where your audience is and get used to a new paradigm where you professionally network with others and try to gain mindshare in a virtual, online world. That is, in a nutshell, B2B social media marketing.

(Source: Neal Schaffer, Windmills Marketing)

5) SlideShare – Present Your Business to the World

My newest fave is SlideShare, which in essence is a site of professionals and businesses uploading their PowerPoint presentations. SlideShare in itself is one of the top 1,000 most visited sites on the Internet according to Compete.com, and it’s traffic is equivalent to more famous sites such as the social bookmarking site Delicious.com.

SlideShare is significant for businesses because this is where other businesses are putting up their presentations, so just as you Google the Internet for information, many businesses and decision makers are coming straight to SlideShare to look for relevant information to help them solve their business problems. Business usage of SlideShare is increasing to the point where SlideShare rolled out advertising services to allow businesses to get more views of their presentations as well as generate actual lead data from views. Start with your corporate presentation and then upload your marketing presentations and see what happens. You may be in for a pleasant surprise! (Source: Neal Schaffer, Windmills Marketing)

4) StumbleUpon – Traffic Generating Community

Part of utilizing social media is to help your company and website to get found. If you are a consumer brand this is easier to do, but niche B2B businesses can be challenged just to drive any traffic to their website. StumbleUpon is actually a lesser known social bookmarking site, but because of its algorithm and 10+ million users who like to “stumble” or navigate through several sites at time, some studies have shown that StumbleUpon actually attracts more traffic to your website than any other social media site outside of Facebook. My personal experience with StumbleUpon has been the same, even surpassing Facebook. It is important to note, however, that StumbleUpon should not be used just for SEO and it is a social networking platform in its own. In addition, because you will need to be sharing content as part of your social media strategy, think of StumbleUpon as your company’s content recommendation engine. You may not find your Fortune 500 customers on StumbleUpon yet, but I do see an increase in small businesses joining the platform…and there are other compelling reasons listed above that should convince you of SU’s value. (Source: Neal Schaffer, Windmills Marketing)

Facebook has long been known as the top choice for business-to-consumer (B2C) social media marketing. But which social networking sites and social media sites are effective marketing channels for business-to-business (B2B)? How can B2B leverage social media to strengthen customer service, engage with customers and prospects, and differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace? Starting this week, and over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of the top 6 social networking tools for B2B success in the social sphere compiled by Neal Schaffer of Windmills Marketing.

Remember not to limit yourself to just these six . Research all opportunities in social media marketing. Go where your audience is and LISTEN, and then LEARN. They will tell you what their problems are and what solutions they are looking for. There are many opportunities for B2B’s, and these tools are just the tip of the social media iceberg.

1. Your Website & Blog – What most people forget is that social media does not exist in a corporate vacuum and it is only an extension of your marketing, not a replacement. You will still be doing email marketing as well as other types of traditional marketing, although I do know some start-ups who are putting their marketing budgets solely into social media.

Regardless, you need to lead people somewhere from the conversations in social media to acquaint them with your business and start engaging in a conversation that will hopefully lead to a conversion in the future. This is why your website is even more important with the advent of social media, and you need to make sure that your website is “social media optimized” to lead others to your social media profiles as well as to help others share your information throughout their social media channels. Finally, another important part of social media is sharing content, and creating a blog is the best way to achieve this. Make sure your blog is active and website optimized before engaging in social media.  (Source: Neal Schaffer, Windmills Marketing)

I hosted a webinar last week entitled “How to Grow Your Business Using Social Media” and much of the content covered three main points: how to use social media to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and the SEO benefits of social media. If done right, a well-branded social media network can serve as a powerful search engine optimization tool for getting your brand on first page search results. The search engines can index everything including a LinkedIn profile, a facebook fan page, newsletter, press releases, blogs, articles, and a website. When used together Social Media and SEO are very effective in raising awareness and driving traffic. Social media provides fresh content and back links the search engines love. The more you refresh your content, the better your chances of moving up in the search page results. The key is to keep generating relevant and valuable content via social networks, upload your multimedia to the social media (YouTube, Flickr), blog as much as possible, generate a newsletter, send out press releases, submit articles, and keep your web content fresh.

I did a talk tonight for a local non-profit group and most were very interested in social media and others couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Fuss indeed. Whether we like it or not, the social media train is fast, it’s here, and it’s not going away. Those businesses and non-profits that see the value in using the tools of this new digital frontier will enjoy the benefits of the organic growth a strategic social media campaign can generate. In the social sphere, there are many ways to generate business using social media and we’ll start with some simple blogging strategies to follow :

Blog consistently – it’s a great way to position yourself as a thought-leader and differentiate your business from your competitors. Start off by subscribing to a few blogs that interest you and get a feel for how other businesses are using this tool to promote their brand and expertise. Great place to start might be your competitors – believe me, there are a few out there who get it. The more consistently you blog, the easier it gets and the more likely you’ll develop a following or get your content shared.There is also tremendous search optimization value to your site when you blog so always include link resources back to your site.

Make it easy for others to share your content by adding a “share” button to your blog and website. You can find more info on that here:

http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com/?fh

http://sharethis.com/publishers/getbutton

Other resources:

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood

Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley

More on generating business leads using social media next week!

Social media, when included in an overall  business development plan, is very effective in generating targeted leads. The key is to work your network across multiple channels. Use Twitter as a lead developer vehicle for identifying and engaging with prospects. Invite your new follower to become a fan of your Facebook Fan page. Once engaged, provide an incentive to your new fan to opt-in to your marketing lists. Give your email campaigns and other marketing efforts more reach by cross promoting in your social network. Use Google Analytics (free), and other measurement tools to measure social media, web and blog traffic. Trackur is a  social media monitoring tool that  tracks nearly every element of online media, from blogs, RSS feeds and Tweets, to images and video. It start at $18/mo subscription but also offers a free version.

How will you measure  how well your social media marketing delivers?

A new year with some fantastically low cost ways to market a business – from blogging, to tweeting, to creating a fan page on Facebook, to yelping, there is no reason not to take advantage of these tools. Sadly, there are a lot of businesses out there either not using them or not knowing where to start…it can be overwhelming. You don’t need to do it all or know it all…but there are some basics that are no-brainers. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some tips, tricks, and basics on how to grow and promote your business in the socialsphere. Stay tuned…