Tag Archive for: Social Media

What is RSS and How it is Addictive

The typical definition for the initials RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”. This is simRss Feed Iconply a method of broadcasting your blog or other frequently updated content across the internet or, by subscribing, following multiple sites with one easy tool.

By supplying an RSS feed, readers of your blog can quickly and easily access your blog in an RSS reader, like Google Reader, without the need to navigate to your blog whenever they want to see a new posting. The importance of this is it makes it easy for readers who are interested in your blog to know when it is updated and read the new content without actually visiting your blog.

Refer to this Wikipedia article for a more in-depth description of RSS feeds.

How is it addictive? Right now, I’m following about 20 blogs daily. No more click, search, scan, click search scan. Just sit back, scan the headlines, and choose whichever ones strike my fancy and blog away. That is addictive stuff for bloggers and business people like me.

Do you need an RSS feed? Who would you subscribe to? Your favorite blogger, a prospective client, your competition?

First Steps to Successful Marketing on Facebook

Today, there are more than 500 million active users, 50% of these users log in daily. Every average user has 130 friends. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

With those kinds of statistics Facebook is a natural for B2C businesses trying to build a loyal following: businesses like restaurants, hotels, sporting establishments, services and so forth.Social Media

Best of all: It’s free and easy.

Start your Facebook Personal Page

First step: you will need to establish your own personal page. The personal info you provide for this page is also your registration with Facebook for your business page, so you will only need to enter it one time. Often this is where someone worries about their privacy; don’t worry, you will (and should) adjust your privacy settings under your personal profile and restrict it so you limit who can view your personal page.  After that, you’re clear to create a business page.

Start a Facebook Business Page

Check out my free e-Book for step-by-step tips on starting your Facebook Business Page including screen examples of the Facebook personal page, business page and group page steps.

Start a Facebook Group

There is little to adjust for privacy on the business page; it’s open to all (except for age restrictions) and allows minimal control over how people interact with your page. If that lack of control bothers you, then maybe a facebook group is for you. It allows complete control of content, but is more effort for you to maintain.

Promote, promote promote!

All set up? Now, focus on promoting your business. Make frequent posts that are brief, upbeat and entice people to visit your business; or at least think about it more favorably. Understand your audience by developing your Online Persona. This helps you write posts that get attention and appeal to your fans.

Learn the power of reposting. This is one simple technique that is often overlooked. Ask a few of your most loyal customers (or friends and family) to repost your page or group on their walls by clicking the share feature. This starts a fan wave that exposes people to your business to whom  you do not have access.

Finally, use the new ‘Tell Your Fans’ feature that allows you to upload your contacts from your email or CRM program. This will allow the exposure of your site to grow.

Next issue? What would you like to hear more about?

First Steps to Successful Inbound Marketing

So, you’ve watched Socialnomics with Eric Qualman and now you ‘get it’.

Haven’t seen it yet? Here it is again.

Now, you’re ready to begin the first steps to successful Inbound Marketing. Because traditional marketing will never be the same. It will no longer get you ‘there’. If you want to move your business forward, then you will need to focus on what you’re doing online. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Own Your Own Website
There is nothing more important than owning your own website. It’s your basecamp. The place that all your social media efforts revolve around. The place where all your communications should originate from -and end up at.

Location, location, location!
Now more than ever location matters. Whether it’s a busy street corner or a hard to find hole in the wall, getting your spot on the map right is vital. My recommendation is first things, first. Can people find you? If you’re a restaurant, hotel or auto repair shop, then start by registering your address and details on Google Places. This will literally, put you on the map.

Google Places http://www.google.com/help/places/index.html

Get Found
Make it easy for others to find your website (you do have a website, right?) by adding it to these most popular search engines, as listed below. Yes, all of them. This will allow the search engines to find you without waiting for them to ‘crawl’ your site. Being proactive on this is a good thing.Socialnomics

Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Bing- http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
Yahoo! Local – http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
Yelp! http://www.yelp.com/business?country=US

Consider these:
__Craigslist- http://yourcity.craigslist.org/
__Here is a link where you can submit your site to MANY places:
http://www.locallytype.com/pages/submit.htm

Next steps
For all businesses, the top things that you need to do is establish a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and start a blog. For hospitality businesses, include TripAdvisor in that equation. Put it at the top of the list.
I’ll cover those in future articles. Stay tuned!

Fun Facts about Symbols

Hi Everyone!

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving Day with friends and family. Keeping it on the lighter side today, as everyone runs out for Black Friday shopping or whatever you do on a ‘free’ day like this one.

Sometimes it’s nice to look behind what’s going on in our world, things we often take in without too much thought or analysis. One of those is the use of symbols. It ‘s a great story that our friends at Dark Roasted Blend wrote and is woven into everyone’s life, even the life of a Social Media maven.

Thank you for visiting my blog. I wish the best for you and yours. -Lynn

 

 

Strategy Problems? Six ways to know if your business is failing.

Surrounded by dumb asses? This is a great article explaining the “dumb ass syndrome” otherwise stated as ‘not understanding why you’re successful or unsuccessful’ by Dave Logan of BNet.Warning!

A summary of the steps are:

1. Recognize how common the dumb ass syndrome is in the world of business.

2. Ask yourself the question: “Do you know-really know-why you are getting the results you’re getting?”

3. Do the opposite of what comes natural.

4. Look for many causes.

5. Run low-risk experiments to test your explanations.

6. Allow for the fact that most people are victims of the dumb ass syndrome.

Was this useful? What type of articles help you most?

Cleaning before the Holidays? Think freecycle.org

I was doing some of my pre-Thanksgiving cleaning this weekend and realized that I routinely use what may be one of the most powerful, but underrated examples of Social Networking. It’s freecycle (www.freecycle.org), a social networking site that allows people to post their unwanted items and pick up needed things –all for free! The posting is free and the stuff is also free. It was established to keep stuff out of landfills.

Social networking and Inbound Marketing

Social networking, the backbone of Inbound Marketing, creates groups of like-minded people, now commonly called online communities, tribes and movements. Just looking at the effectiveness of freecycle.org illustrates how successful it can be.

Freecycle does more than just keeping stuff out of landfills. One of its strongest benefits may be an unknown and unplanned one: critical giving for those less wealthy, dare I say, poor. My husband and I found giving on freecycle.org is, well, priceless.

Why freecycle is priceless

A while back, we decided to buy two new mattresses. The old ones had to go and we posted them on freecycle.org.  A young couple called to pick up our son’s old mattress. When they arrived the young wife was verging on tears. She explained that their washer had broken on Monday, Tuesday the refrigerator broke, and that very morning, Thursday, her son had woken up and said “Mommy, my bed is biting me”. A spring had broken through the top and was literally sticking him.  After they left, my husband and I felt a warm feeling that we had not experienced in years.

The giving of the second mattress produced similar results. We posted it online and a lady called us saying that she would like to pick up the mattress for a friend. When she arrived, she told us that her friend was actually a young pregnant woman with a six-year old son. She was so happy to get the bed for them because they had been sleeping on the floor! The young mother was 6 months pregnant and the mattress was coming to her at a perfect time.

We learned that the reason mattresses are in such high demand is that places like St. Joes and Goodwill cannot take them due to health laws. Seems someone overlooked something with this law.

Anyway, we have found “just the right way” to get rid all of our unwanted “things” is on freecycle.org, a social networking site. They will allow pretty much anything to be given away -not just mattresses. Check freecycle.org out and make someone happy.

Social Media- Room to grow

Here are some interesting facts about who is… and who isn’t using the Web. Do you think there is room to grow?

  • 40% of small businesses don’t have a web site
  • 81% of entrepreneurs still don’t take advantge of social media
  • 47% don’t think that Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn are beneficial to their business
  • 84% don’t provide for e-commerce
  • 62% don’t use email marketing

(Source: CBrogan via Citibank survey 2013.)

Where are you going? …with your Inbound Marketing efforts

attracting customersInbound Marketing refers to attracting customers to your lodging property through a variety of social media and content distribution and interacting with readers, rather than the older means of buying attention through disruptive advertising and other devices. Simply put, Inbound Marketing employs a ‘pull’ strategy, rather than the ‘push’ strategy employed by traditional marketing techniques. With the sophistication of the Internet, the opportunity for distributing content and building communities make Inbound Marketing the best chance for small businesses to get noticed in this overly messaged world. Engagement and differentiation is where small businesses have the advantage. So where are you taking your business?

What are you doing now to get found?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog and your website are all set up. You have them cross-referenced to interact with each other. They all hold a consistent brand message. You have clients that are interacting with you online. Life is good, right? Everyone should beat a path to your door, right?

Well, not exactly.

Where the problem lies for many businesses is in getting ENOUGH people to VISIT and then TAKE ACTION. That’s where you’ll need a good plan (and maybe some help). One that includes developing a content strategy, sound social media execution and personalized, genuine follow-up. How many visitors will you need each day to convert ENOUGH people into TAKING ACTION?

Feeling overwhelmed? Make no mistake there is a huge amount of effort that goes into leveraging SEO, blogging and social media to increase website traffic. Face it, now may be the time to invest some time and money into this endeavor. A certified and experienced Inbound Marketing professional can help you with a detailed analysis of your business and the competitive landscape. And help you set and achieve your online marketing goals. To get started on your detailed plan, determine your goals, and get people to TAKE ACTION, give us a call. Don’t worry, the first visit is always free.

“Goals without plans are meaningless. Plans without deadlines and measurements are wishes.” –Unknown

Note- First published Nov 2010 and republished Dec 2014

This Should be Keeping You Up at Night

Saying “The world has changed” is a gross understatement. The momentum is building so quickly, there isn’t much you can do about it, right? What about evolutionizing your business, so that it doesn’t go the way of the dinosaur? Where do you begin? It begins with learning, in general, and, specifically, new technology, new media and embracing “all things Internet”.

Still skeptical? Check out this video from XPLANE | Visual thinking:

http://bit.ly/9GknN9

Scared? What do you think? Is it time to change how you are doing business?

Chili Today, Hot Tamale!

No, this isn’t a food blog. And I know I won’t get great SEO from today’s title, but I couldn’t resist!

Here’s the hottest tamale, that I saw today, on Facebook. link: http://on.fb.me/aaTVWP. Look’s like The LibraryThing.com page is hiring for a bookish social-savvy employee. Embracing all things social media should win, right? Based on Facebook, it looks like Bug Girl get’s the job. She had over a dozen endorsements from users in just a few hours! Nice way to work it, baby! Hope you get the job.