Refining Your Twitter Followers

June 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dead Twitter BirdTwitter is a great platform to use as part of social media marketing plan, but if after using Twitter – following people, having people follow you, getting amplification by re-Tweets, etc. – you are not finding value, maybe it’s time to clean up your relationships!

After four and a half years on Twitter, my account is overdue for a purge. It’s bloated and is not as useful as it could be. For the first year or so on Twitter, there weren’t that many other people around, so we ALL followed EVERYONE.  I knew it was time to clean house because I was no longer reading my Twitter stream, but reading my Twitter lists or visiting people’s Twitter page directly. Part of me didn’t want to ‘offend’ anyone by un-following after I had already extended an olive branch. You know what? Chances are I’m not providing value, entertainment, knowledge, or a service to a good number of their accounts either. After finding TheTwitCleaner.com, I have started the process of the purge, and set a calendar entry for every six months to revisit the process. While I have no hard and fast rules for keeping a follower versus un-following, there are some general guidelines I have in my head as I visit each page TwitCleaner recommends to un-follow. Of course as they will state, these are suggestions, it’s up to you to visit each account and make your own judgment call.

I’m sharing my fast and loose guidelines for un-following a Twitter account here. Now you understand why I don’t follow you anymore — or why I still DO.

Un-Follow Guidelines:

  • You tweet in another language. It’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.
  • You offer no original content. If your entire Twitter stream consists of ReTweets that tells me you have no original thoughts or opinions of your own. If you are a business on Twitter, I will make exceptions, but not many.
  • Your Tweets are nothing but links back to your blog. Again, businesses I expect this from and are saved from the cut (@CNN this mean you) but as a HUMAN with a Twitter account, I want you to talk with me, not link-bait to your content. That’s what RSS is for.
  • You don’t have anything interesting to say above the fold. That’s right, I’m lazy. While the scroll wheel works fine on my mouse, I choose not to scroll to find conversations of value. You’re only as interesting as your last 10 Tweets.
  • You like to kill things. I am not joking here. Somehow I managed to follow a good number of hunters and fishermen. I’m not against hunting or fishing, but not a fan of shooting wolves from helicopters or details about breeding night crawlers let alone reading messages about it.  If your personal ethos or morals are in direct conflict with mine, you get un-followed.
  • You are overtly pornographic. Trust me when I say I’m no prude, but honestly, I don’t care about YOUR *personal* life, I care about MINE. And mine is not on Twitter.
  • You are pushing the ‘hard-sell’. Listen, we are all selling. All day, every day, we all are chasing coin. I am not interested in getting more Twitter followers, losing weight, getting whiter teeth, or higher rankings in Google. Well, actually, I am interested in all of those things, just not from YOU.  If all you talk about is your own product or company and providing no other value, I have no need to follow your account.
  • Anyone trying to sell me what my company already does. Seriously, did you even READ my bio before you started spamming my DM? I work at a social marketing and technology firm. I really don’t need to hire you to teach me how to use Twitter to increase traffic to my website.  If you aren’t selling but providing value, entertainment, or resources then I will follow the account.  It is when they reach out or auto-Tweet pitching to me it all turns sour.

Follow Guidelines:

  • You are a friend. A real life in the flesh friend that I would invite to my house for dinner. Even if you Tweet about your goldfish all day, I still love you and value the insane babbling you publish on Twitter.
  • Rockstars in my profession. Yes, it’s the popular kids thing to do, but they wouldn’t be rockstars if they weren’t providing value. Chances are a lot of them are my friends as well.  This seems to conflict with my guideline for not following people in my own industry.  Think of this as ‘aspirational marketing’ rather than stealing or stalking.
  • You provide a valuable community service. @RedCross and @InstantAmber are perfect examples. I will never drop an account where there is the possibility that just one message can save one life.
  • You are a business that ‘gets’ IT and knows how to use social media / social marketing to build community. Trust me, I have private lists for those of you that don’t get IT, as well as some slides in the conference talks I do.
  • You are a client or business industry I have my eye on. I’m a very good businesswoman. I know how to use the information that comes out of the magic box and onto a computer screen to work my business. By the time I walk in your front door, everything there is to know about your firm that’s in (digital) print has already been implanted on a chip in my brain.
  • You are a person that behaves like a human. Sometimes I just like to follow people because I find them interesting, or know other people that would find them interesting or valuable. Being a connector is just as important as being connected. Expand your circle, your interests, and maybe you will grow with it.

Twit Cleaner StatsFor now, this is what will get you kicked out of my club or in the door with a handshake. Don’t take it personally, it’s my club, not yours. You have every right to un-follow ME. Of course if you think I’ve un-followed your account in error and you are about to Tweet the meaning of life or the next PowerBall winning numbers, feel free to @ me and get my attention. But DM the PowerBall numbers to me, don’t make it public, I really don’t want to split the prize. I need a vacation and could use the coin.

I am finding myself un-following a good number of people/businesses but categorizing them in lists instead.  This is a GOOD thing (for me anyhow).  Filling up my Twitter stream with pages of links to Etsy items or makeup tips is counterproductive to me.  By having you on a list, I can still consume your ideas/content/links but on a better schedule for me.  Don’t take it personally, instead, find a way to make your content and message relevant to ME – then I’ll pay attention and open my wallet.

(Edited and republished from an article written by Lynette in 2010.)
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The 10 Worst Social Media Ideas For Business

January 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

Over the years of working with businesses to get them involved in social media, expand their success, or dig out of a failure, we have come across some of the worst business ideas around! This type of thinking has stifled companies from successfully moving ahead using social media. By identifying these ideas and working on improvements head-on you can improve the way your business interacts and attracts business.

1. Assume social media is a quick and/or cheap way to get business

We all know that accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are free, but that’s about where the free meal ends. Earning customers on social media is no different that earning them anywhere else. It takes time, money and resources. Using these platforms on a personal capacity requires simple tools. Using these platforms in a business capacity requires business-grade tools. Even if you can develop a toolset using free software, the people using those tools are not free. Interns are free/cheap labor and are at a company to learn. They are never EVER a good idea to use as the frontline communication contact for your company. Would you put a professionally inexperienced person as your senior sales person? Would you send an intern to close a deal with possibly the biggest client your business has ever seen? Of course not. So don’t put an intern or someone without solid business and professional experience in front of potentially millions of customers. People with limited professional or social media experience can still be successfully, and inexpensively, utilized in the company’s social media plans. Just be sure they have strong leadership and guidance along the way, otherwise it can cost you a lot more than money. [Read more...]

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Ahead of Social : Getting ahead of the pack with LinkedIn

January 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

What a great response we have been getting to our new Ahead of Social newsletter! Did we mention you can WIN a year subscription to Ahead of Social for FREE?  We’ve been getting entries, but as it turns out a lot of you just want the newsletter for $4.99 a month and don’t want to wait around to see if you’ve won!  Keep in mind that once the contest is over the price doubles to $9.99 – still an amazing price for 8 highly detailed social media tricks a month that get results.

Here is a sneak peek of what goes on inside just one of our Ahead of Social newsletters.  The tips aren’t quick & dirty bullet point items but highly detailed, step-by-step information and instructions on how to utilize a very specific technique to get results in social media for you or your company.

Ahead of Social Newsletter

LinkedIn is undoubtedly the most popular business networking social platform available today, but did you know that by creatively filling out your profile you can gain higher search results within LinkedIn AND Google? By making sure the things you want to get found for are listed in the *right* sections of LinkedIn, you have a much higher chance of getting found – both on LinkedIn and on Google. We are going to show you how you can change your LinkedIn profile RIGHT NOW to get results.

First, a bit about LinkedIn and Google together. LinkedIn is a very highly ‘trusted’ site in the eyes of Google. What that means is that (based on a lot of proprietary calculations and some behind-the-curtain-voodoo) Google has determined that information on LinkedIn – including your 100% complete profile – is relevant, important, and valuable and will display LinkedIn information ‘above the fold’ on the first search engine results page (SERP) in Google. LinkedIn’s high trust value combined with location-aware search results (Google can determine approximately where you are located by your IP address & customizes your search results to display results that may be physically close to your location) packs a powerful punch in getting your information SEEN by those that are most likely to want to connect with you or do business with you.

How can you take advantage of this?

The key is to know what fields and information Google looks at within LinkedIn and make sure it matches the types of search terms your prospective connections would be typing in.  Now of course by increasing your ‘searchability’ helps inside of LinkedIn as well.  Below are the main areas that LinkedIn (and Google) value the most in finding information:

Subscribe to Ahead of Social to find out!!

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LinkedIn and Twitter – Better Together

October 22, 2010 By 1 Comment

LinkedIn is widely considered a powerhouse professional business networking tool.  The community on LinkedIn has its own ecosystem and set of ‘unwritten’ rules on use and etiquette.  One hotly debated topic is how to incorporate Twitter messages into LinkedIn – tactfully.  What you decide to publish and on what platform is up to you – but there is technology available that makes it easy.  The simplest way to bring in updates from Twitter is to use the #in hashtag when sending a Tweet to let LinkedIn know that you want to cross-post just that message.  Now your professional network connections on LinkedIn don’t have to read every Tweet you send, only the ones you feel they would be interested in!

What type of information do you find works best to cross-post between your social networks?

Twitter Settings in LinkedInConnecting LinkedIn & Twitter

  1. Log into your LinkedIn account
  2. Click on your name in the upper right corner – choose Settings
  3. In the “Profile Settings” section, choose “Twitter Settings”

Here you can make changes to how LinkedIn handles your Twitter messages and accounts:

Account

This is where you can add or remove Twitter accounts that you would like associated with your LinkedIn account.

Display your Twitter account on your LinkedIn profile

This option allows you to display all of your Twitter messages on the right side bar of your Profile Page (“Add an Application” at bottom of right side bar). This is not the same as having your messages show up within your LinkedIn ‘wall’. By showing the side bar with your Tweets, you will not flood your connections timeline with your Twitter messages.

Share your tweets in your LinkedIn status

This option allows you to gate what Twitter messages actually show up as a status update in LinkedIn. Selecting “Yes, share all tweets” will publish EVERY Twitter message as a status update in LinkedIN. Selecting “Share only tweets that contain #in” will ignore all Twitter updates unless they are specifically tagged with #in and then only publish those as status updates to LinkedIn.  (Note: #li also works but is not as frequently used.)

Tweet display

Your only option here is to display rich text links (or not). It is generally accepted as ‘user friendly’ to display rich links so that readers have more information to help determine if the content is worth a ‘click’.  Checking/unchecking the option will show you a live example of each display option.

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Why Social Media is Like Having Children

October 13, 2010 By 1 Comment

Because sometimes it’s easier to explain the steps and level of commitment to a full cycle social media technology and marketing initiative using every day examples.  So, where are YOU in the cycle?

LIFE : Crazy single life
SOCIAL MEDIA : Hit the social media platforms and be friends with everyone and anyone, with complete disregard to if they are worth it or not.  It’s a numbers game at this point!  You have an irrational need to be popular, collect friends, and honestly think that the world revolves around your status updates.  Soon you realize that at the end of the day you go home alone, and not one of your social media ‘friends’ are willing to help you move a couch into your new apartment.

LIFE : Courting/relationship
SOCIAL MEDIA : Once you see that settling down and focusing is the better option, you will need to buckle down and research to see if this ‘thing’ something you want to commit to.  Pick the traits and qualities that you most need to develop in yourself (or company) and dig deep and find out what you need to come out of the other end of the funnel.

LIFE : Marriage
SOCIAL MEDIA : This is where you have to put a ring on it and say the words “I do”.  Figure out what needs to happen (goals) to get what you want.  Think long term – you don’t think about having being married for a year and then bail.  It’s a commitment.

LIFE : Hello sex…
SOCIAL MEDIA : Tactics are the actual how-to pieces of reaching a goal.  The result of a tactic should be a tangible, measurable item that either gets you closer to your goal or achieves it.  You get out of it what you put into it – results, relationships, customers, engagement (sex might be more fun though).

LIFE : Baby!!
SOCIAL MEDIA : Humans start out as infants, then grow from there.  Start small.  You have to take on little parts first before you can take bigger bites.  If you stumble, pick yourself up, take a look at what caused you to fall in the first place, and either improve or pick a new direction.  You have to walk before you can run, and you need to learn from every step you take in order to take the next ones.

LIFE : Get schooled
SOCIAL MEDIA : Sometimes you fall down in the playground & get bullied, you gotta get back up, brush off and deal with the situation.  Take your lumps if it’s warranted.  Be sure to address concerns as they come up, ignoring problems/customer feedback won’t work & will bite you in the end.

LIFE : Puberty / growing pains
SOCIAL MEDIA : Sometimes your plans go crazy and out of control and in a different direction than you thought.  Learn to adapt and go with the flow. With a solid foundation you can weather this.  Being a teenager sucks sometimes, but it also provides us with some of life’s best lessons.

LIFE : Off to college
SOCIAL MEDIA : If you did your job properly, you need to let it go on it’s own while always providing wisdom & sometimes spending money to keep it independent and functioning on it’s own.  Don’t get caught off guard!  College kids come back home constantly for money , food and laundry.  By constantly monitoring what’s going on you can be prepared for those boomerang situations.

LIFE : Kids getting married (a.k.a. waiting for grandkids)
SOCIAL MEDIA : At this point all you can do is hold out for something completely new created by the people that carry your brand on social channels, realize you have nothing to do with you but is brilliant none the less.  Realize that now your children (brand advocates, customers, etc.) are in control and all you can really hope to provide is guidance and some direction so your grandkids don’t grow up to completely hate you and drain your bank account.  Candy helps.

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Culture Cliques

April 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It’s been said time and time again for a business to succeed in social media, they need to understand their customers.  Designing and incorporating a strategy for social media isn’t a checklist, it’s an evolution.  Jumping in and talking is fine if  you are a person, but as a company, there are some things to consider first.

  1. It’s important to understand the culture of  the platforms you are interested in engaging on.  Fark or Digg has an entirely different persona than LinkedIn.  If you are interested in talking to college-humored males with a penchant for Photoshopping funny pictures – Fark and Digg are the place for you (hey, they spend a lot of money…)  Looking for sales professionals?  LinkedIn is where you need to be.  Know your audience, know your platform.
  2. Don’t start with the technology – start with the goals.  Just this week a project came across our desk from a company looking to enter social media. They had already determined what technology and social media sites they wanted to be on, without having the slightest idea who they wanted to talk to, what they wanted to talk about, and who actually hangs out on these sites.  Backwards.  Goals first, tactics second.
  3. Don’t just talk about your business.  Be a person first and have fun.  While it seems counter productive to chit-chat about personal items on company time, the fact that you present yourself as a human being goes a long way to building trust.  No one is saying tell everyone what you eat for lunch every day, but sharing some volunteer efforts your company engages in or publicly thanking co-workers for decorating your office (and sharing a quick picture) for your birthday shows you aren’t just about the end sale.
  4. You have to be a listener, not just a broadcaster.  Ever take part in a conversation where the other person talks about themselves for 20 minutes, and when you finally get a word in, they are gazing over your shoulder looking for the next person to pitch to?  Try practicing ‘active listening‘ on the social channels before starting to start your own agenda.
  5. Does it blend?  How does social media fit with your entire PR & Marketing plan?  Social media marketing is a subset of a larger comprehensive plan to launch your company into a new era of customer communication. Abandoning everything that’s worked in favor of something you know little about is a guaranteed failure.  Stick with what works, and add to it.
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Show Me The Money

April 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on social media success.

So you’ve got a decent handle on listening and your ‘fans’ and followers are interested in what you have to say.  Then the dreaded ROI (return on investment) phrase starts coming up from management.  Sale numbers that have a direct line back to social media output is demanded.  Just when you thought things were humming along, you’re told to PROVE your time and their money have brought a significant increase in the bottom line.  Before we go any further, one question needs to be answered.

What’s the ROI of your telephone?

Your phone is a critical tool to communicate and listen, just like social media is a tool.  Who ever said that social media is a direct pipeline of prime leads for your sales team?  Twitter isn’t a fat database of people sitting around waiting for you to pitch to them.  Facebook is not an e-commerce site.  Yes, you can make money from social channels (Dell claims $3 million in sales from Twitter alone).  When planning your entry into social media, items like ROI need to be addressed early and revisited often.  On the other hand, we are not saying that efforts in social media shouldn’t earn money.  How you earn (or save) money for your company should always be taken into account, but sometimes items like brand awareness, employee retention, idea generation, or customer satisfaction don’t have hard numbers or formulas to follow.

So how do you make money from social media?  It depends on why you use social media.  If you are using it as a customer service outreach (Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us is an amazing book on the topic) then not only can you save hard money on the cost of an employee’s time picking up the phone, but the frustration and negative word of mouth so rampant with bad customer experiences.  How much money does it take to win back (assuming you even can) a customer that you’ve lost due to poor service?  How many customers do you loose even before the sale due to weak brand awareness or negative word of mouth?

Utilizing social media for sales generation?  Be there *before* the sale.  Offer help even if it means suggesting a competitor’s product.  Ask questions.  Listen.  Do more than sell – do anything but ‘sell’.  Be human.  Be well-rounded and showcase other facets of your company.  Talk about philanthropic efforts.  Provided your product or service is top-notch, all this is building trust between you and “people that may-or-may-not someday purchase your product or refer someone to you that might.”  Funny thing is, social media being structured the way it is, everyone gets to witness your efforts online and draw their own opinions on your company based on interactions they see you have with others.  In the past, the sales transaction took place ‘behind closed doors’ and not many people outside of the people involved saw the process.  That means a very limited amount of people could form their own opinions on your company outside of their own experiences.  Now the entire world can see how you treat customers, before, during, and after the sale.  The idea is scary to a good number of companies that aren’t used to operating in the new social economy.  Those companies that ‘get it’ realize that you could never put a price on (let alone actually pay to have done) the amount of positive exposure you get on social platforms.

How about using social media for talent acquisition? Product research and development?  Competitive analysis? Each group has very unique goals and should have very different strategies to using social media.

Sometimes the goal isn’t even to make money, but to save it.  Pepsi saved $20 million dollars on the 2010 Superbowl and put it towards the year-long Pepsi Refresh Project.  PepsiCo is getting much more than $20 million dollars in media coverage from the move.  Pepsi can afford to take chances like this, but can your company?  Social media is supposed to be a supplement to already successful outreach programs.  Dropping newspaper ads (if they work) to launch a Facebook Fan Page is not a smart business move.  Dumping your email campaigns (if they work) in favor of Twitter is a setup for failure.  Incorporating social media means having to take a good hard look at what you are involved with right now and cutting every single item that operates in the red.  For example, car dealerships may cringe at the thought of abandoning newspaper ads.  Just because your company (or your industry) has always done it a certain way – doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it that way.

End result, if you don’t know what your goals are, you will never reach them, social media endeavor or otherwise.

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More Friends Please

April 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Whitney's amazing 'message' #pcb4Soon after the first status messages go up on Facebook, there is a panic when the number of people following your accounts don’t reach critical mass within the first two weeks.  The comparison to mailing lists and distribution databases start to come up.  (Can’t we BUY followers?)  More followers equals more people to broadcast cleverly-crafted marketing messages to.  What good is spending all this time (a.k.a. money) on these channels if we don’t have a hundred thousand followers consuming our messages? Why don’t more people want to read what we are broadcasting? Why don’t they like us?

To put it bluntly, numbers matter.

Collecting numbers just for the sake of having numbers isn’t the goal.  Often times the quality of “the numbers” is overlooked.  Easy question – would you rather have 10,000 ‘fans’ that don’t really care what you are about and ignore you, or 500 ‘fans’ that are actively seeking information on your products or services?  Of course even with 500 ‘fans’ you can get impatient and wonder why your widget isn’t flying off the shelf or customers aren’t lined up out the door.  Christopher Penn has always said if you are selling Gulfstream G5 jets, and only need to sell one every two years to live like a king – you only need two followers, one of which is ready to buy a jet, and one that knows someone that wants to buy a jet.  You need to find the right numbers. [Read more...]

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Publish SOMETHING!

April 9, 2010 By 4 Comments

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Without a tangible status update and ‘friends & fans,’ it feels like there is no *proof* of our social media efforts.  The sooner we can hit ‘publish’ – the sooner management sees we are actually working and not playing around all day on FarmVille.

Taking a step back, listening, and learning are all nice in theory, but ‘lazy’ in the business world.  Action produces results.  Listening is inaction.  We define success in how quickly we rack up the number of fans, friends, status updates, ‘likes,’ and re-Tweets.  Numbers we can count and reproduce on a chart.  How can you be considered successful if you gained less fans this week than last?  How can you justify to your management that your efforts are successful if you LOST a few followers?

The listening precursor is a real sticking point in a good number of companies.  You can see the results of not listening in multiple facets of a company.  Customer Service is reactive to problems and always on the defense.  The Sales team struggles to keep up with unique product offerings until the demand of customers hits the tipping point.  Research & Development work in silos far removed from end users.  Marketing follows a safe and predictable path that fits nicely within the niche and genre of their industry.  Human Resources is seen as the ‘heavy’ in the company.  Information technology departments treat employees like teens that cannot be trusted with the Internet for fear of rampant porn viewing and personal online socializing resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue due to unproductive worker bees.

The bottom line – handing in a status report with slow-gaining numbers is perceived as a failure in Corporate America.  Fast. Quick. Instant.  NOW.  Because the technology (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) produce instant content, the perception is that success should be instant as well.  Trust takes time.

Solutions are easy to identify, but hard to implement.  Change is hard. It’s disruptive.  It’s unproven.

[Read more...]

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Secrets to Success on Social Media

April 7, 2010 By 6 Comments

The answer is simple – BE SOCIAL. Now of course if you get that part, you won’t need my company’s help or to even finish this article series. For the rest of us that realize we are learning every day no matter how successful or experienced we are – read on…

It’s 2010 and while it may be old hat for some, most companies had technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on their radar at least from last year (other companies realized the revolution started in 1984).  Wait it out, be safe, see what others in their industry are doing (and if it works…)  Without realizing what goes on behind the scenes and viewing only the tweets and status updates, many are tempted to jump right in.  Show progress, DO SOMETHING.  Great from a personal perspective, but it doesn’t fare as well professionally.

After working in this field for well over a decade, we are finding patterns in the resistance, adoption, and implementation to social media.  Understandably, not all companies are set up to be ultra-progressive and on the bleeding edge of technology.  The thing is, the curve is starting to see the crest, and holding out any longer puts you on the dark side of the slope.  Even a 70 year-old brand can adapt.  Hell, a 360 year old company can adapt.  If they can – YOU can.

There is no more ‘wait and see’ in this economy.  Results are proven, so long as you are not expecting social media to be a direct line to your company’s bottom line.  If you treat social media as a telephone, and not a sales database, you will see results.

Becoming engaged in social media doesn’t mean a mad rush to smash on the ‘publish’ button and produce content.  A good part of the ‘need’ to get on social media platforms is a result of several factors, in a very predictable course.  With each step, there are traps to avoid and strategies to accomplish goals.  The dangerous part?  The process that leads to success and the (multiple) ones that lead to failure look very similar to the untrained eye.  Trying to tackle social media endeavors using the same tried and true tactics and initiative you’ve used in the past will FAIL.  In the past being active looked like productivity.  Activity = Progress.  Not so anymore.  Sales people thought that the way to make more sales was to call more people.  The game has changed, and fact is, you need to learn the new rules (or make your own) – but it is NOT the same as it’s always been.

Over the next few days the Purple Stripe team will be publishing the following articles related to the different steps involved in developing a social strategy.

A few additional topics may surface as well.  We welcome your comments and thoughts, and hope that over the next week we can help you find some soft spots in your social media plans and set the course straight!

(Be sure to subscribe to get the articles as soon as they are published!)

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

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Does Every Company Need to Be Involved in Social Media?

December 14, 2009 By 1 Comment

Short answer – NO.  Not everyone needs to be concerned with having a professional business presence in social media networks.  How do you know if you can get a note to skip gym class?  Here’s a quick and easy checklist to determine if you should take social media seriously:

  • Do you value what your customers are saying about you?
  • Do you need more customers?
  • Is customer service important to your company?
  • Are you looking for ways to stay ahead of your competition?
  • Do you sell goods or services?
  • Are you actively expanding your customer base?
  • Would you like to gain additional business from existing customers?
  • Are customer referrals important to your business?
  • Is becoming the first place people look when purchasing the goods and services you sell important to you?
  • Do you need to build a brand outside of your existing customer base?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then a social media plan could be beneficial for your bottom line.  I’ve met plenty of companies that have answered ‘no’ to all of the questions.  While they may not admit to answering ‘no’, their actions prove otherwise.  Incorporating a social media strategy into your business plan is not difficult or time consuming, but it does require expertise and planning.

Do you know where to start?  Start by listening!  Two places to start – your Google and Twitter.

You don’t need accounts to perform searches.  Start by searching on your company name, industry,  and relevant phrases and terms (as well as competitors) to find out what conversations are already going on.  Surprised at what you found – or didn’t find?  Social media content is essentially “Google food” and together with a well-crafted plan, can get you actively involved with potential customers.

So what’s holding YOU back?

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