Social media – Page 5 – Online Marketing Juice

Social Media Sales

Forward-thinking salespeople are embracing a new approach to break down old communication barriers such as Cold Calls, and Email = Social Media.

While determining the best way to connect with prospects and help coax a consumer down your sales funnel, buyers are consistently going to social networks and the Internet to research products they have an interest in purchasing. Whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, potential buyers are looking on these social media platforms for product information. As the rise of smartphones are getting bigger form factors, consumers are apt to looking, researching with these larger handheld mobile screens.

Here is a brief breakdown of Social Media as related to the Enterprise:

Business to Consumer = Facebook

Business-to-Business products (or services) = LinkedIn (if you have a first-level connection in common with the executive or buyer who will sign off on a PO)

All types of sales = Twitter

*Twitter is the best for “all kinds of sales” as it’s a very popular network (across all demographics) that doesn’t have privacy settings that keep you from high volume searches and actions.

Social Media Sales strategies

Twitter. Make sure you “add” to the conversation a little before directly engaging:

Favorite a few Tweets
ReTweet one or two Tweets
Follow them

Friend, Follow or Connect with individuals with profiles that match you or your clients. Its VERY Important to build relationships on any Social Media platform. Not only can it help to generate leads, it can also help foster relationships with current customers.

Be in expert in your space. Provide solutions or tips and feedback to your customers or potential customers if they post a question or gripe on Twitter/Facebook. Prioritize the social channels and tools your audience is already using and that you’re familiar with, then organize those by their primary function.

Listening on social media is one of the most powerful tactics in a social selling strategy. Monitor for popular hashtags and keywords that are relevant to your industry or brand to find useful insights but also see what is being said about your competitors.

Never cold pitch on Social Media platforms. It comes off as desperate and will be ignored. If there is a conversation trending within your industry and potential customers, join in to offer meaningful commentary and interact with these potential buyers. Listening for these opportunities and finding out the pain points your potential customers are having will give sales people a feel for the conversation and allow them to add value.

Social media is “networking” more than it is “advertising”. The goal is to get them to call you (or vice versa), have an open mind about your product or service, and then make your sales pitch.

When its time to engage or pitch, follow these steps:

Ask for their email so that you can send them some info on your services.

Find them on LinkedIn and add “connect” with them.

Send a polite email and mention a conversation you had with them on Twitter or Facebook. You can also mention a tweet or Post that you “favorite” or “liked” from them.

Good Social Sales tools in this space that keeps track of conversations and engagement include:

Hootsuite. More for individuals and small business.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Enterprise grade and scalable.

Its apparent that Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are not fads anymore. These platforms are now mature options to generate leads and sales online. By experimenting with different Social Media sales strategies, you can find the best way to convert them into real quantifiable results on all levels.

Social Media Crisis Action Plan

Whether your a big or small company, a celebrity or some kind of a famous personality with a large amount external exposure, chances are you may have to deal with some kind of social media crisis sooner or later. A crisis can occur at random (insensitive tweet), or it can occur with a product misstep or even a social media account hacked. In this digital world, speed of these harmful conversations can implode on you or your company in mere seconds.

While there is no once size fits all approach, the below basic social media action plan will help you quickly identify the crisis (issue) and resolve it before it goes viral and turns into disaster.

The first stage of social media crisis planning is to identify the problem or issue in real-time before it gets out of control and goes viral. There are many tools out there that can help you keep tabs and monitor the majority of social media platforms. Most of these social tracking tools depend on keywords important to you or your company. Keywords such as “Company” or “product name” “name of person” “events” “competitors” “social media accounts” etc.

A short list below:

Social Mention. A great social real-time listening tool for your brand. It measures your influence within four key categories: passion, sentiment, strength, and reach.

Google Alerts. Track your brand mentions across web and news sites.

Mention.net. Track your brand across blogs, news sites and forums.

Talkwalker. Track your brand across across mostly blogs.

Twazzup. Real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.

HowSociable. Measure and track what your competition is doing in Social Media.

Spredfast. A great Social relationship platform to monitor your brand as well as tailor and engage in the right audience.

Sprout Social. Great tool for monitoring and measuring your brands.

Radian6. A salesforce product. It allows you to quickly and efficiently track, monitor, and react to comments, questions, and complaints as they happen on most all social media platforms.

Here are five basic steps to include in your social media crisis plan:

1. Act quickly. Speeds kills, but speed also resolves! Explain the issue or problem FIRST and what your going to do to address it ASAP before it takes hold on Social Media. Be very transparent. You need to do this before it destroys your brand or major lawsuit.
2. Take charge. Step up and take charge of the issue and move fast (even if its at 2am).
3. Be transparent. If its bad and your company screwed up. Take ownership. Own up to the problem or issue!
4. Engage. Engage all the nay-sayers. Engage all the Social Media Trolls and critics.
5. Spread the word. Post your PR response on your website, company blog, social media pages and media releases.

Bottom line: Don’t wait until the threat to your company’s reputation becomes visible. Identify the crisis and get out in front of it before it takes hold.

Why Your Website Needs Social Referral Traffic

As Social Media continues to rise as the new dominant communication platform. Its crucial that Digital + Social Marketing teams must pay attention to this valuable referral firehouse (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc). Directing traffic back to your website (think sales) or online media publication is essential. Its a huge traffic opportunity. Newer users and demographics are starting to bypass search engines for this more “social” interaction to find new content and websites. Referrals are more legitimate and more trusted coming from a social media feed than most search engines nowadays.

What makes this platform (Social Media) effective is that its free and very interactive.

Lets take a look at the latest compelling sadistics (as one of my Economics professors use to say)….I mean statistics.

Pinterest drives twice the website referral traffic of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + combined (Shareaholic image) via: Danny Wong @ Shareaholic

Its crucial now more than ever to integrate Social Media into your traditional marketing activities.

Useful Tips: Social media traffic is at its best when you use more than one social network. Make sure you post the links back to your website + use #Hashtags. Always add sharing buttons to your websites blog posts. This make it much easier for your readers to share your posts to their own friends and followers. Understand your audiences and tailor content accordingly.

Always make sure you track your referrals thru the Google Analytics dashboard, Social Mention, or any analytic traffic service. Its critical to monitor your Social Media efforts and make adjustments on the fly.

How To Set Up Your Small Business on Instagram

Grab and download the Instagram app in the App Store on an iOS device (iPhone, iPod, iPad), or in Google Play for an Android device.
Open the App, fill out and register. Your Username will be visible and is how people will search for you. If it’s a business account you are creating be sure it reflects your organization. For your profile name, choose an account name that’s the same as the Twitter handle of your business.
Your given many options like “search for contacts based on contacts on your Phone” or "invite your Facebook friends to follow”, do what feels natural if your customer are on your Facebook or contact list.
Once your Instagram account has been setup, along the bottom, you will see 5 different icons. Press the rectangle icon that looks like a newspaper (far right) . This takes you to your profile settings. Click ‘Edit Your Profile’. Here you can add additional details including Go to Account, Edit Profile to finish your profile settings. Enter your First and Last name (if you want them shown), your URL, a short bio, and whatever other information you want to complete for your public and private profile. You can also add a profile picture. Add some of your business personality to your profile. This can include having an image of your office or employees, or your logo, rather than personal profiles which often have a photo of the user. A key to good business is responding to your customers, enable notifications so you can see when people share or comment on your photos. This will let you engage with them more quickly. Be sure to hit “Save” when you are done.

Getting started. Start taking pics! Be innovative. One example might be to brand your photos so they all have your logo attached. A simple way to do this would be to have a small printed out logo to hold up (by hand) in the corner of your shot as you take it.

Post pictures of your place of business/work.
Post images of your products or related services.
Post pictures of your team doing innovative work "behind the scenes”.
Post pictures of your customers happy faces.
If your a restaurant, post pics of your signature dishes.
If your a clothing boutique, post pics showcasing your new clothes. Tell your story behind your fashion brand.
If your an artist, showcase your latest work, crafts, or inspiration.
If your a contractor, showcase your latest project.
Add a caption to your photo and upload it. A good tip for business users is to ask questions in your captions to increase the possibilities for engagement. Asking questions increases engagement.
Use Hashtags! Hashtags are a key tool for organizing your photos and helping Instagram users to find photos on topics that interest them (such as your products or service).

A promotional tip: Bring the customers to you. If you make updates based on a geographical location, mention that you’ll be there and to come on down for a free prize giveaway or to check out the new items in the store.

Lastly, Monitoring Your Analytics! You need to know what people are responding to. Analytics can help you with your goals (increased sales or brand awareness).

How To Set Up Your Small Business on Pinterest

First, create a business account. Start with an eye-catching profile. Start here pinterest.com/business/create

1. Verify your website (business website).
> Go to your profile and click on the pencil in the bottom-right corner of the name box. Don’t see the pencil? Go to the menu in the upper right corner, select Settings, and go to Step 2.
2. Enter your web address in the Website field, then click Verify Website.
3. Follow the instructions on the next page. You can verify with an HTML file or a META tag.
4. Once your website’s been verified, you’ll see a checkmark next to it and will have access to your web analytics when you’re logged in

Add the Pin It button to your site. Make it easy to Pin from your website or blog. Go here business.pinterest.com/pin-it-button

Now that your set-up with a business account, below is a quick guide tips, tricks and best practices on using Pinterest.

1. Get creative. Make your Pinterest board stand out in the crowd. Use high quality .png images. Example, If your a clothing boutique, take digital pics of all your new inventory (clothes) hanging in your store. Images sell. Your selling your store, your style, your products, your design. High quality digital pics drive customers to your store. Think about it being an online mall your walking through. Create a range of boards that showcase your store’s personality and taste, and make sure each board has enough pins to make it feel substantial. Remember that people can choose which boards they want to follow, so not every board has to appeal to everyone. Pinterest users have been more heavily female (about 65%), so keep that in mind as well. If your customer base is mainly men, Pinterest might not be right for you just yet.
2. Make sure you have your Pin logo up on your website that will allow online traffic to click over to your Pinterest page.
3. Use rich pins to automatically include information like prices, availability, ingredients and reviews with your pins. All you need to do is add some meta tags, keywords, and #hashtags.
4. Learn and keep checking your Pinterest Analytics dashboard! Pinterest Analytics dashboard shows you which pins are most popular with pinners and which ones are driving the most traffic to your site. You can also see what boards your stuff appears on, how the pins are described and what people pin along with your stuff. All of these insights will help you make smarter choices about your merchandising, product development and pinning strategy.
5. Motivate people to pin. The more people pin your content, the more discoverable it becomes. To encourage more pinning, make it easy to pin from your website and email marketing, and promote pinning in your social channels Like Twitter & Facebook, packaging and advertising. Push people to your Pinterest website and in turn they will visit your actual business website and store in real life. Be sure to add links to your company website and Twitter page on your Pinterest profile. You can also bring users to specific web pages by adding the URL in the pin description.
6. Pin at least once a day so your followers get fresh content in their home feeds. Just like with boards, thoughtful descriptions will make your pins more inspiring and searchable. Never Pin inappropriate material. Keep your personal Pinterest account separate from your business account. What makes a good pin description? Check out these tips:

Recipes: Describe the main ingredients of the dish and how to cook it
Fashion: Include what kind of clothing, the designer or season to wear it
Travel: Tell people the local on and the kinds of things you can do there
DIY: Describe what it is, how you make it and what materials people need
Photography: Name the photographer, year, subject or publication
Design: Mention the designer, medium, publication, etc

Last tip: Once you are on Pinterest, add the Pinterest follow button to your social media pages and even your printed materials. This is a good way to jump start your Pinterest presence.