It’s almost 4 years since I started blogging, using social media and other “technology” apps and tools to further my business. I’ve been thinking about it as Sam asked me to write a blog about my experiences with social media and I pondered about a variety of things.

It’s not just at New Year that one should revise their strategy, update their thoughts and perhaps even change their game plan – business wise. I do it on a regular basis – and with the help of social media and all the applications I have come to use, rather quickly. I guess that’s the beauty of all of this – as a small business I can change my marketing, change my strategy or update my website in the blink of an eye! Or can I?

Well yes, it means I am more in charge than ever before, instead of relying on people to do something for me, pay them and hope to god they do it right, I can now just get on with it myself. But of course this all takes time – nothing ever gets done with NO effort – people seem to forget that! And I have had to spend time learning about the technological ins and outs – and as time goes on brain cells do struggle! But I do enjoy it and I feel very good that at the ripe old age of 45 I was an “early adopter”!

I do think that people do think this takes no effort – and when they find out this does work they still think it’s a waste of time.

On one side you have the “twitter scorners” as I call them. They know nothing about it or might have just tried it for a few weeks and just don’t get it. On the other side you have the “new evangelists” – the ones that have tried it, stuck with it and now feel it’s their confessor and best friend rolled into one.

I went through both those stages – I think we all do. I thought I was way too old to mess with the kids on Twitter until someone explained the business strategy behind it and gave me a case study. The same with Facebook and LinkedIn – didn’t know how to really use them although had been on them for years and years, but I was sceptical and thought them a waste of time. But I have always prided myself on being open minded, so the case studies gave me a light bulb moment. That’s how I function, I need examples. Many people aren’t shown examples, so they become “Twitter scorners” forever. Some people of course use social media purely for fun and that’s ok.

I did not quite get into being an evangelist – I always thought telling the world your troubles and being negative was never a good thing for anyone, least of all me. But I did wax lyrical about social media because I did have some rather early wins with it – I was introduced to famous people in my industry, I even blog for one now. And I got £37,350 (T/O) worth of business in my first 6 months. Rather exact right? That’s because even though these are “newish” technologies, applications and business tools, it doesn’t mean you should not apply old world style business processes – like measuring ROI.

So almost four years into it and I have made some strategic changes to how I put myself out there.

For me, social media is part of my business toolbox – it’s marketing, PR and strategy rolled into a bundle that gives me direction to develop my business. It takes time, it takes effort and it takes dedication. But then if you want your business to succeed – doesn’t everything? I still don’t know it all, no-one ever does. The best part though and the one thing that makes me chuckle, is that I get approached by “Twitter Gurus”, “Social Media Supremos” and people that I met 6 months ago who knew nothing about it then and all of a sudden are giving social media workshops for £500/day and would I like to come along?! These people want to help me develop my social media – but first things first – check me out and see what work I do and how active I am before you start promising a myriad of wonders for me. And can I just say that most of these people did not even start out as marketing professionals. You can tell I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this!

Well I do, because it’s a learning process that takes time, and to begin with you really need to understand business and business development, marketing and brand development. Old fashioned business adages, but they do apply – they are the foundation to your business. It’s not about just sending out a few tweets and a few blogs out into the ether. I come from a business background and so feel very comfortable with all that stuff and having nearly 4 years of active non-stop social media work behind me, I feel rather confident about the things I have learnt. The good and the bad.

So a few tips and they’re FREE by the way!

Do not broadcast non-stop about what you do. It’s boring, it’s arrogant. Who wants to listen to anyone drone on about how good they are or about their products and services.

You want to be seen as THE voice of honest good reputation on your speciality – so share industry information you have found with others, showcase other people’s work. This makes you look like an authority – people start to trust you.

Meet the people (for real!) you have formed a good relationship with – collaboration is exponential, it feels good, it brings money in and gets your name out there.

Do show off your work or share your blog, but not every 5 minutes. For every one of your own work share 5 others. It’s a good balance.

Do create a strategy – what do you want to achieve in social media? Brand recognition? Get more clients? Meet other industry professionals? Whatever the goal is – develop it as you would offline.

Never ever comment on a client’s work – as sure as night follows day, they will read it and they may not like it! So keep negative comments to yourself.

Enjoy yourself – stay focused – stay positive – because oddly, online chats give people a very good idea of what you are like!

Lastly, remember – think twice about what you put out there – if you hesitate, don’t post it. A thoughtless or nasty comment will get out there and stay there!

Françoise Murat is a degree qualified Architectural Interior Designer and Garden Designer. Eco but not Loco! She specialises in: Architectural interior design for domestic clients, bars and restaurants and a garden design service for the domestic market, property developments and urban landscapes. Visit Françoise’s blog, Rendez-Vous Deco & Jardin. 

Although Facebook introduced the Subscriber feature last September,

Intended primarily for ‘public figures’ like celebrities, journalists and political figures, the Subscriber feature is also a boon for those small business owners who ‘are’ their brand. Indeed when I joined Facebook back in 2007, I used my personal profile for business as well as private contacts because there wasn’t another option. Until Pages came along.

I believe one of the reasons for business owners’ understandable reluctance to set up and manage a Business Page is the extra task of keeping it regularly updated, attracting people to ‘Like’ it and the effort involved in building a community. This is all additional time to try and find in an already full day.

In the past we’ve always advised against using a personal profile as a business marketing channel, not only because Facebook frowns on it, but also because using a Business Page provides so much more visibility (as a unique web address which can be easily found by the search engines as well as on the newsfeed of all ‘Likers’).

Another advantage of having a Business Page is that you can have multiple ‘Admins’ to help maintain the page, post updates and respond to comments, so for our Savvy Marketers page this is the best option.

However now, while a personal profile should still be set up as a personal account, enabling the Subscriber function means you can be more selective about who you connect with as a ‘friend’, keeping to only close friends and family. What’s new is that you can now also connect with more casual business acquaintances, for example fellow networkers, by inviting them to become Subscribers to your personal profile instead. One benefit of this is the increased reach of your profile updates which can be seen by all subscribers in their newsfeed (and on the ticker).

You do have to turn the Subscriber button ‘on’, the default is ‘off’.

So, should you enable ‘Subscribe’?

It’s certainly worth considering if you’re nearing or over the 5000 friend limit, because there is no limit to the number of Subscribers you can have.

It may be a good alternative to a Page if you are the only person in your business, and have already connected with other businesses via your personal profile.

A few points to consider before you click to allow the feature

Subscribers will be able to see everything you share as ‘public’ or to ‘everyone’ so it’s important to check your privacy settings BEFORE turning the feature on. Make sure you’re happy for all your photos (or albums) to be seen by everyone and make any changes if you aren’t.

Look through the privacy settings of your contact details carefully. For example, is your mobile phone number set to public? That may be fine for close friends, but do you really want everyone to know it? I don’t mind who contacts me on Facebook but deliberately keep my other email addresses and phone numbers private, as you can see by the little padlock symbols in the screenshot below.

Once you enable ‘Subscribers’ you will automatically be subscribed to all your friends as well. You can choose between receiving ‘all’,‘most’ (the default setting) or ‘only important’ updates to avoid being bombarded with too many.

Anything you post as ‘public’ on your personal profile wall will be seen by your Subscribers in their news feed. The screenshot below shows that ‘public’ is my default for sharing updates but you can opt for ‘friends’ or ‘custom’ by clicking through and changing your privacy settings. You also have the option of selecting who you share individual updates with too.

Do you have the Subscriber option turned on? Do share your experience or opinion in the comments below – we’d love to know what you think of it!

Last week saw another major change in Google search

In my opinion, this recent move seems to be a double edged sword, which I’ll explain.

It’s no wonder many small business owners hesitate to get started with social media marketing

Social Media Marketing is not a replacement for traditional ‘offline’ marketing – but it is an excellent addition. Here’s why:

Connect

Social Media helps you to reach out to and connect with many more interesting & influential people than if you don’t take part. At a time when the majority of phone calls end up in the voicemail zone, using the social networks can be a more successful way to make that initial contact.

It’s surprising to find that quite senior decision makers and buyers are personally involved. You will find big business thought leaders, early adopters and big brands on Twitter or with Facebook Pages. OK, so they probably don’t send out every tweet themselves, but they will be kept informed of trending topics and notice people of interest.

Communicate

An important factor to remember with Social Media marketing is that it replaces the one-way message of the old, static, brochure-type website and enables you to communicate two-way and even multi-ways with your clients and prospective clients. You can find out what they really want, instead of merely guessing. Many large brands are discovering a whole new box of customer service tools in the social networks (those who get it are anyway).

You can send out your message to reach hundreds or thousands of people in an instant at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising or direct mail, and receive a response just as quickly. Your customers and prospective customers are getting used to having their say.

Consistent

With traditional marketing activities, you wouldn’t expect to do something only once or twice for it to bring you good results, would you? That would be like going to one networking meeting or mailing out one letter, and then sitting back waiting for the phone to ring. Instead you’d plan out a campaign of activities to take place over a few months or more. You would visit the networking groups regularly and send out a series of mailings – and follow them up too.

With Social Media marketing you need to commit to doing it consistently & correctly for it to work for your business. If you’re going to be on Twitter or any of the other online networks, you have to show up often to see any return. And if you have a blog, you need to post something at least once a week, every week.

Whether your prospective clients are parents, students, young mums, the retired or redundant or they are sole-traders or business tycoons, there is a way to connect and communicate with them using social media marketing.

What would you add? Please share in the comments below.

One of our most popular Q&A Calls was about Facebook

They’re using a Personal Profile instead of a Page

This used to happen more than it does now. The standard introduction to Facebook is signing up for a personal profile. Before you know it, you’re connecting with business contacts and prospective clients as ‘friends’. So you figure you might as well get on and promote your business to them anyway. This will never be totally satisfactory as you’ll miss out on all the brilliant features of having a Page – for example anyone can access your Page like a normal web url, even without a Facebook account, whereas if you use your personal profile, only people who are Facebook members will be able to find you.

They set up a Page – and then forget about it

Let’s say you do get around to creating a Page for your business. You upload a logo, put a few words on the info page with a link to your website and then ….. so many people run out of steam at this point and leave their pages unfinished. Because they don’t know what to do next, they do nothing and it starts gathering virtual dust. Unfortunately there are many abandoned Pages on Facebook.

They believe their clients aren’t on Facebook

With over 800 million users (at the end of 2011), it certainly makes sense to leverage the might of this social network to get your message in front of potential customers, whether you’re a B2B or B2C business. Of course there are some target markets who don’t belong to Facebook, but make your decision based on solid research rather than ‘just a feeling’. After all, if 9 in 10 marketers are using Facebook, they’re doing so for a reason!

They don’t tell anyone about their Page

Just as you need to help people find your website, you have to direct people to your Facebook Page and ask them to ‘like’ it. And it’s an ongoing process, so while a big splash when you launch the page will quickly get you plenty of initial likes, numbers will soon stagnate if you stop telling people about your Page. Keep numbers climbing by making it part of your overall marketing campaign to take regular, consistent action to build your community.

They don’t engage with their Facebook community

We’ll admit to not always being very good at this ourselves – but we are trying! It isn’t enough to automatically pull in your blog posts and do nothing else. And don’t be tempted to duplicate your tweets by the way, because your Facebook ‘likers’ often aren’t the same as your Twitter followers so you can’t treat them as if they were. Engaging with your community means chatting with them on the wall, asking questions, sharing other people’s stuff as well as your own. Here’s an excellent article from Denise Wakeman with some more ideas to try out.

What would you add? Please share your tips below.

We hear a lot of people say

This question assumes that social media is something you can do once and not have to return to. Sorry to disappoint but Social Media marketing is a bit like a huge jigsaw puzzle and, because social media keeps on changing and growing, the jigsaw is never completely finished.

As an eternal ‘tweaker’ I can honestly say that there are so many little pieces, it takes forever to put them all in the right place on the picture that is social media.

What we find is that it’s often the little pieces of the puzzle that can make the biggest difference and have the most impact on business.

Here are just 15 little pieces that you may want to use for your own social media marketing puzzle:

Twitter

• Check that you have included a up to date live link back to your website in your bio.
• If you’re using automation tools, make sure the scheduled tweets are still relevant.
• Have you cleared out inactive or spammy followers lately?

Facebook

• On your Personal Profile, check you have included links to your Facebook Business Page, Twitter account and website(s) in the Contact Information section of the Info tab.
• Engage with friends and family on your Personal profile, but gradually move business acquaintances over to the Business Page.
• On your Facebook Business Page, set up a routine to add interesting content every day (auto-linking Twitter doesn’t count ).

LinkedIn

• Check that your profile is up to date – current employer & summary
• Have you selected your specialist areas yet?
• Create a Company page for your business and start promoting your products & services.

Blog

• Is your Sign-up box to collect visitor details and build your list prominently displayed?
• Check that the RSS feed link works (clicking on it should open a selection of readers, not a page of code)
• Give readers plenty of opportunities to share your articles around the internet.

Google+

• Create and complete your profile (with photograph) and include relevant links to your other online homes
• Create a Google+ Business Page and add your information to the About Page.
• Add a Google+ Profile Badge to your website and blog. (If you’re on WordPress here’s a plugin: http://plusdevs.com/google-wordpress-plugin/)

As with all marketing activities you will need to try, test and monitor to find out which social media pieces work best for your business.

Over to you – what jigsaw pieces would you include?

Inspired by yet another great post from Debra Collins at Pennsylvania based B2B and professional services marketing specialists, Marketri, I am encouraged to give my own view on the plethora of social media that now competes for our attention every day of the week. What works and what doesn’t work? What should we invest our time in and what should we leave alone? What is social and what is for business?….And where do we stand on the greatest challenge of all for marketers, ROI?

In her post (and I really do encourage you to read it for yourself), Debra classifies each of the main platforms as either a necessity or a luxury. In summary, Debra concludes:

• LinkedIn: Necessity
• Twitter: Luxury
• Google+: Necessity
• Facebook: Luxury

My experience and perspective from this side of the pond is slightly different.

LinkedIn: Necessity

A LinkedIn profile is, I agree, essential. Finding and maintaining contact with former colleagues is LinkedIn’s most useful purpose, swiftly followed by the ability to find a contact in a target organisation and identify any common connections.

One should also not fail to note that a potential client is likely to look at one’s profile in advance of a meeting or first contact. A profile that does not adequately communicate one’s skills and experience could be the difference between success and failure.

To date, however, I have found little benefit in contributing to LinkedIn discussions, or updating my status (other than via an autofeed from Twitter) or having a company profile or group. People’s time to contribute and engage in these discussions seems to be too limited. My personal view is that time dedicated to these activities should be allocated sparingly.

Twitter: Necessity

I find Twitter essential as a source of information. Many times I’ve used it for insight on industry news that I’ve then shared with clients and prospects to impress them with how ‘in touch’ I am! My colleagues have spotted PR opportunities for clients by following journalists and The Marketing Eye has clients who have created leads for themselves by spotting buying signals in the tweets of prospects who they strategically follow.

Can one be a user of Twitter and not a contributor? Possibly, at the conscious expense of forsaking brand profile with a like-minded audience. The indiscriminate pursuit of followers for the sake of status is, however, clearly misplaced. There is little more mindless than users who are following, and being followed by, thousands.

Facebook: Necessity

I am a late, but now enthusiastic, adopter of Facebook for business- it is the 3rd most important source of leads to our website and generates 7 times more visitors than LinkedIn.

I don’t believe any marketer can afford to ignore a platform that has 600m users and rising. There are some who say that businesses won’t bother with traditional websites in five year’s time, instead they will rely entirely on Facebook. I am not sure if I subscribe to this view entirely, but I can see their point.

Facebook is very searchable, allows for quick and informal updates and allows marketers to communicate with a target audience when it is at its most relaxed and therefore most amenable to suggestion. The demographic targeting capabilities of Facebook advertising are another significant advantage for the savvy operator.

Google+: Luxury (for now)

I will no doubt be as late an adopter of Google+ as I was of Facebook. I have taken a look at Google+ out of professional interest and created a personal profile (Google is discouraging the creation of business profiles at the time of writing (edit: Google has now introduced business pages on Google+)), but in common with many, I am daunted by thought of monitoring and maintaining yet another presence. Google’s dominance in search will, no doubt, make it compulsory at some point.

The great ROI debate

So, when push comes to shove, is it all worth it? Is social media a critical part of any business’s marketing activity or is it the greatest confidence trick since the King’s New Clothes?

The whole premise of the debate is flawed in my view. To view social media in ROI terms is misplaced. Social media platforms are tools and not campaigns – they should be learned and used for the benefits they bring, be they as marketing communications or as sources of information. To paraphrase another favourite commentator of mine, Ian Brodie: “In the social media age, it is no more necessary to measure the ROI of social media than it is to measure the ROI of the computer or telephone”.

What do you think?

Neil is a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with many years’ experience in marketing, brand and communications. His experience includes being a Director of Marketing in The Royal Bank of Scotland Group where he was responsible for brands in the UK, Ireland and US. Those brands include: Lombard, Jamjarcars.com, Angel Trains and Dixon Motors. Entrepreneurial, creative and energetic, Neil’s success has come from a pragmatic and intelligent approach to combining marketing with business needs. You can find out more about Neil on The Marketing Eye’s website.  

It’s also a useful tool for monitoring and following conversations on Twitter, as well as for keeping up to date with latest happenings and trends.

How do you follow the conversations on Twitter? Do share what works best for you in the comments below

This short video shows you how you can update your status, whether to share with your Twitter followers, and how to restrict sharing to just those people you’re connected to.

We also take a look at what happens when you click on a LinkedIn share button on a website or blog.  (We hope you’ll be tempted to click on ours at the bottom of this post ).

Can’t see the video? Click here.

So if you have a blog, make sure you give your visitors and readers the opportunity to share your posts with their LinkedIn connections by installing a LinkedIn share button too.

Facebook Insights are free and available to Page Admins once you have 30 ‘likes’.  They provide data that is easy to read and useful without being overwhelming.

What sort of data might be useful?

There are many questions that the Insights reports can answer about your Facebook Page, here is a small selection we hope you find helpful:

Q.  Where do new ‘likers’ come from? 

2 new ‘likers’ came to our Facebook Page via the ‘Like’ box on the website in September.

Q. How do they find your page? 

This table shows the Page tabs that people have clicked on and the different sites from which visitors arrived on the page.

Q. Which type of media do ‘fans’ prefer?

Knowing whether your ‘fans’ like video, photos or audio means you can provide what they want to encourage them to return to visit the page.

Q. What are the visitor demographics?

It’s always interesting to know who your Page is attracting

Q. How active are they with your page?

This also shows the different ways people interact with your page.

Q. How interesting do they find your content?

At a glance feedback!

Download the reports

You can download Insights data about your Facebook Page, for whatever time period you specify, as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. Also, as Page Admin, you will automatically receive a weekly email summary update:

Facebook is always changing, or so it seems lately, and a new metric for Pages, called ‘People Talking About This’, is being introduced this week. We’ll let you know what we think about it once the dust has settled, but here’s a link to an article so you can read about it now: http://searchengineland.com/facebook-launches-people-talking-about-this-metric-premium-ad-unit-more-95342

Do you find Facebook Insights useful? Have they influenced what you post on your Page? Please share in the comments!