Social Media Marketing is still relatively new and we’re all still learning how best to use it for our businesses.

The Profile Photo Faux Pas

Sam recently wrote a very comprehensive post on the importance of completing your social network profiles. I’d like to add a plea to use a profile photograph (also known as an avatar) that gives the message you really want it to. Cute animals and family groups are fine, but only if you don’t intend to use that profile professionally. And while logo avatars are suitable for company pages, owners of small businesses might be better off using a photo of themselves if they are the recognised ‘face’ of their brand.

I’ve been using the same avatar on all my social media profiles since I set them up back in 2007. While I may not look exactly like that photo any more – people still recognise me from it when I meet them at networking events for the first time. Would they recognise you from your avatar?

The Lack of Consistency Clanger

In order to get good results from social media marketing, stay on message and deliver tweets and updates on topics relevant to your audience. While it’s certainly a good idea to voice your opinion on occasion, try to avoid using your blog as a platform to post too many personal rants. We’ve spoken many times on the need to publish blog posts and email newsletters regularly. This can be made easier if you have a plan and use an editorial calendar, not only for blog posts but for all your social media updates.

Having a plan would result in fewer profiles being hastily set up on the latest networks and promptly abandoned. Or perhaps an initial flurry of activity followed by nothing at all for weeks or even months. If you aren’t ready to use a particular social network, then don’t publicise it on your website or blog. That’s almost worse than not setting up a profile in the first place.

However, it’s important not to become too noisy either. Tweeting or updating every few minutes will annoy your followers. No-one has that much good stuff to share, nor do people have that much time to read it all.

Other Assorted Social Media Clangers

Self promotion and little else becomes a turn-off after a while. For example I find that the links shared by some people always go through to a website home page, sales page, an ‘under-construction’ page, or to an error message. Their links don’t lead to content of value to my followers, so I rarely feel inclined to share them.

Tweets which are too long to retweet won’t be retweeted as often. It takes time to carefully edit them down to be within the required character count. If you want people to be able to retweet you, make it easy for them. Keep the character count down to 110-115 to allow for your RT @name and any link to be included.

Too much automation and not enough conversation. While many social media tools are free, that doesn’t mean everything should be set up to run automatically. You still need to work at social media and chat with people if you want to form any kind of relationships online. Being ‘social’ means sharing, liking and commenting on other people’s stuff too. It’s a two-way street.

A lack of social share buttons on a blog can mean missed opportunities. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to read a really good article, want to share it with my online followers, only to find no social sharing buttons to click. Fortunately I have Buffer and Hootlet (from Hootsuite) installed on my Chrome browser, but even the free WordPress.com and Blogger platforms both provide sharing options, so there is no excuse!

What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen small businesses make using social media? 

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdrumthump/3214172131/

No matter how many followers you have on Twitter, friends or fans on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, Email Marketing is still a more direct way to get people’s attention. That isn’t to say you can afford to ignore social networking, because you can’t. But the different media will complement each other and work well together.

There are many ways to build a list of email subscribers, although we would strongly advise against buying a list as we covered in previous posts. Building your own list needs to be a priority objective if you want to take advantage of this very cost effective method of online marketing.

Try different ways to encourage people to subscribe to receive your Email Newsletters and marketing messages

Business Card – Use the reverse of your card to promote the free give-away available when people go to your website and fill out the sign-up form.

Email Signature – Add an invitation to get your free give-away to your standard email signature. This is easy to do both in Microsoft Outlook and if you use a service like WiseStamp (for GMail, Hotmail, etc.) Here’s a screenshot of mine:

Article Marketing – When you submit articles to other sites and to article directories, use the link in your Resource Box to take people to a page that tells them about the benefits of signing up to your list, and has the form there too.

Blog Posts – Within the body of your blog post, occasionally make reference to an article which is only available to subscribers and provide a link to the sign up box. Take care not to overdo this tactic as you don’t want to upset your blog subscribers!

Facebook Page – Don’t forget to provide a sign-up page linked to your Email Service Provider (as we have – see below) for fans to subscribe to receive your email newsletters and messages. If they already like your page, they’ll want to get more of the good stuff you share!

Here are a couple of general points to bear in mind when creating the sign-up forms, that have been proven to increase willingness to subscribe.

Keep your form as short as possible: just email address and first name are really all that’s needed in most cases. If you make the form unnecessarily long with lots of ‘required’ fields, people are less likely to sign up as they may be reluctant to provide too much detailed information about themselves.

Also, reassure them that you will store their contact details securely. State your privacy policy and link to it as well. Here’s a link to ours, feel free to model it.

There are more tips on list building and Email Marketing in our Guide.

Have you noticed how social media sites are giving slide presentations a new lease of life?

Not so long ago PowerPoint (and its Mac equivalent Keynote) had a bad reputation with many presentations rightfully earning the label: “Death by PowerPoint”. Slides were often too busy, too wordy to read, or just too complex to understand. Even worse were those presenters who used them as auto cues, reading word for word and boring their audience to sleep.

But now it seems that a whole new generation of talented presenters are breathing new life into PowerPoint slideshows. The best ones are creating visually pleasing and attention-grabbing images, making text short & snappy and, most importantly, keeping us interested. No mean feat in this much reduced attention span age!

So in addition to using slide presentations at traditional offline events, such as when giving talks or running training workshops, there are now online opportunities for this frequently overlooked medium.

1. Presentations uploaded to Slideshare.net quickly show up in the search engines so it’s worth taking the time to categorise and tag them properly. A basic account is free to set up and very easy to use. Here are the Savvy Marketers presentations we’ve uploaded.
2. YouTube is already known as the second largest search engine and millions of videos are watched every day around the world. Recording your slide presentation, accompanied by audio, and uploading the result to YouTube means you can then embed the video in your website or blog, and share it with your Facebook fans & friends too. Other free video sharing options worth considering include Vimeo and Viddler.
3. Another good place to share your PowerPoint presentation is on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn Company page. You can either add the Slideshare application or embed the video into a Google Docs presentation.
4. Webinars are becoming an increasingly popular way of sharing information online. Depending on the service used, screen-sharing means including a slide presentation is straightforward and adds that important visual element to help get your message across and keep your audience’s attention.

Creating slide presentations is yet another great way to share that all-important content, and one that doesn’t require too much writing.

What new or different ways have you seen PowerPoint used recently? Please share in the comments below.

Having met many business owners over the years who have dabbled in creating or promoting a website themselves

We feel very strongly about this at Savvy Marketers and more recently have found that some people we have met or who are clients of ours have been given a less than satisfactory service by their provider.

We understand that most small business owners are not web experts, but specialise in what they’re good at. Therefore there’s a certain amount of trust that their provider is going to provide a decent service, or at least explain in non-techie terms what the contract they have signed up to involves.

So, to help you, these are some of the questions you really need to be asking before you hire a third party to help you build or promote your website.

1. What does the price for your service include and more importantly,what does it not include?

2. How much do you charge for any extras or extra work I may need now or in the future?

3. How quickly can I expect to see results? If your provider promises high Google rankings in a short space of time, or even guarantees rankings, then be very wary!

4. Will you provide me with regular reports or contact me about how my site is progressing? Will you respond to my questions in a timely manner?

5. Will you freely offer me information about how I can improve my site or any tips & suggestions you may have?

6. How do you bill your clients? 

7. Do you have case studies or testimonials from other clients and can I contact them?

8. Will you find out about my business, my goals, challenges and target market so that you can provide me with the best solution to fit my situation?

9. Is my site secured against hackers? What measures have you put in place to prevent my site from being hacked?

10. Where will my site be hosted? Can I move it if I ever need to? Will you register any domain names in my own name? (this is very important if you’re using a web developer and asking them to buy domain names on your behalf).

It’s very important that many of these questions are answered and you’re satisfied with the answers given, not only so you know what kind of service to expect, but to make sure that your provider really understands your business so they can provide you with the best possible service. It’s also important that you and your provider are on the same wavelength to avoid any problems that may arise once the contracted work starts.

Make sure you really know what you’re paying for. For example, does the new website include any search engine optimisation? Some developers include this and some don’t. If it does, make sure you’re involved in the process so they target the right keywords and you understand what it involves. You should also receive regular feedback on traffic to your site, and how it’s performing in the search engines and know how to access your website analytics (visitor stats).

Most importantly, whoever you use, they should be proactive in helping you make your website the best it can be, and if you don’t hear from them for a couple of months but are still paying them, find out exactly what they’re doing!

We hope this helps you get the best possible service for your website, and if you have any feedback or this raises more questions for you, please get in touch!

What are your experiences of outsourcing web development or marketing? Please share in the comments! 

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!

However, there are things that can really put visitors off websites and over the years, I’ve come across common mistakes time and time again. Here are a few things that you need to check on your own site:

1. Make sure your contact details are easy to find, preferably on each page of your website. On this site, our phone and email address are within the header image, with a separate contact page too. It’s surprising how many sites still have their contact details buried away.

2. Make sure you tell people what you want them to do – lead people through your website, tell them which pages to visit first and make sure you put a call to action on your pages, such as contact us now, buy now, subscribe etc. If you don’t tell your visitors, it may not be obvious to them. If you’re not sure what the point of your site is, then read Louise’s post from last week: Do you expect too much from your website?

3. Equally, don’t give too much choice – you really don’t want to give your visitors half a dozen things to do or look at otherwise they won’t know which way to go either. If you’re promoting your own products, make sure someone else’s aren’t on the same page as yours (for example if you also have affiliate links on your site). You don’t want to steer them away from your own offering when you’ve put time and effort into getting the visitor to your site in the first place!

4. For service providers, explain the outcomes of using your service, how the visitor will benefit from working with you, how you will solve their problem. Don’t explain the process as most people won’t be interested in that, it’s the end result that they want. Case studies are a great way of showing off results you’ve achieved for other businesses.

5. Equally if you sell products, give your products descriptions that will resonate with your target market. A poorly written, bland description probably won’t motivate them to buy from you. Reviews can also help influence buying decisions, and I recently wrote a post on this subject: Product Reviews Increase Conversion Rates.

6. Scatter testimonials around your website, don’t just hide them away on one page. I always tell clients to put their testimonials around the site and on the corresponding product/service page.

7. Check your web stats regularly – check for trends over time and popular pages. If you’ve got a high bounce rate for particular pages on your site it could be that the page is poorly targeted, so look at the keywords you’re targeting and how the information on the page is presented.

8. Finally make sure that you’re writing for your target market and that they understand your terminology. Avoid using jargon that people won’t understand or writing in a very formal style. People scan web pages so highlight important points in bold, use bullet points and a more informal writing style.

What improvements have you made to your site to enhance your visitors experience? How have they worked for you?

If you think you could benefit from an audit of your site and feedback on where improvements could be made, please contact us to see how we can help!

Image: Frank, May 29, 2011 – choice by pat00139, on Flickr

As with many consultants

I expect some of you have watched the latest run of programmes on the TV: Gordon’s Kitchen Nightmares, Hotel Inspector & Country House Rescue. They all have a common theme of businesses needing help. For the most part, the party involved took on the advice of the consultant, whether it was Gordon Ramsay, Alex Polizzi or Ruth Watson. However, there were a few individuals, who despite being in terrible debt with a failing business, refused to accept their advice. This is the first reason not to hire a consultant: if you don’t take any notice of what they say. Keep your money instead and keep doing the things to promote your business that don’t work – you know better after all!

The second reason is if you’re not committed to the project. Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then other things got in the way and slowly but surely, the website got neglected, you don’t have time to follow up the actions recommended by your consultant, you have to stop for a while as other things have taken priority. If you’re not 100% committed to making the project work, then it won’t work. A half-hearted attempt with any marketing campaign is a sure fire way for it to flop. Like any marketing, internet marketing takes just as much hard work, time and commitment.

Finally, you’re desperate! Business isn’t good, you’ve neglected to market your business properly during the good times and now the economy isn’t great, you’re panicking. A cobbled together campaign in a very short time, in the hope of immediate sales and leads isn’t going to help your business. If things have got that bad then it’s professional business help that you need, not internet marketing help!

It can be tempting to think that the internet will bring instant results for your business and you can easily pay for leads and sales which will come flooding in once you get a presence on Google. If only it were that easy! If you’re thinking of hiring some help for any of these wrong reasons then think again and consider what type of help you really need.

Fast forward about 10 years and ‘social media’ is the new darling. Want to be on Twitter and Facebook? Want to learn how to use these sites, learn what message to send and how to interact? You can find plenty of help and lots of tips here on Savvy Marketers.

Let’s face it, SEO has never been the sexiest form of online marketing, having connotations with geeks and technical things that people don’t really want to know about. But however sexy social media has become, SEO still plays a very important part in the online marketing toolbox.

Whatever the message you want to spread through the social media channels, ultimately your audience will come back to a web page, whether it be a blog post (the most popular type of link distributed), a sales page, static web page, report or Facebook page (and no, Facebook pages aren’t a replacement for having a website!).

Once your visitors land on the link you’ve distributed, chances are it will be a page on your website. That’s where the visitor experience of your brand will start and where SEO plays an important part. SEO isn’t just about gaining rankings in the search engines, but making websites ‘search engine friendly’ which goes hand in hand with web usability, the visitor experience. After arriving on your site, your visitors should easily be able to navigate around it. Relevancy is also key. A visitor clicks on a link and expects to land on a page relating to that link. The design of a site is often (at least should be) influenced by SEO. In fact, going one step further, your social media activity should also be ‘optimised’ for relevancy and of course, getting found on the social networks themselves. (You can read my post from last week Have you optimised your Facebook page?)

Sending visitors to a poorly designed or optimised site, or to an irrelevant page from your social media activity isn’t really going to do you any favours and can have a negative impact on the success of your social media marketing. If your site isn’t up to scratch then that should really be addressed before you even begin distributing your message on the social networks. Bear in mind that all your online marketing activity works together, none can be done in isolation, and generally a large part of the interest you gain will go back to your site. Therefore, the better the optimisation of the site, the more successful your online marketing campaigns will be!

I’d be interested in your thoughts on this – perhaps I’m missing something! Even so, I believe that SEO still plays a major part in online marketing and the more popular social media becomes, the closer the ties it has with SEO. Comments below please!

Image: Free Rainbow Sprinkle Ice Cream Cone Creative Commons by Pink Sherbet Photography, on Flickr

“What would be really interesting to know is whether Facebook really can be used in the b2b sector or whether its real value is in retail, consumer driven companies?”
(Joyce Turton - www.marketing2business.co.uk)

Here’s a great question we received from one of our Q&A Hour listeners! While it’s undoubtedly true that there are more B2C companies using Pages and actively attracting ‘fans’ on Facebook, we believe there are some compelling reasons why B2B businesses need to be there too.

As a social network, Facebook is probably the most social of them all. With over 600 million members, it’s highly likely that there will be owners, directors or employees of businesses amongst them, or their families. The numbers are just too big to ignore.

Business buyers are people

The business your business sells to will eventually sell to a consumer at some point down the line. Not to mention that buyers within companies are people who just may be on Facebook.

Certainly the number of small, service-based businesses (marketers, coaches, trainers, web designers, IT companies, and so on) setting up Pages and connecting with fellow local business owners is growing every day, so it makes sense to be a part of those networks.

Hubspot, the all-in-one marketing software platform creators, have some excellent and informative free webinars and downloads – including this Guide to B2B FaceBook Pages.

Pages can like other Pages

In the last big Facebook Pages shake-up (March 2011) one of the major changes was that Pages are now able to ‘like’ other Pages and it also became possible for the Admins of business Pages to post both as themselves and as the Page on walls of both personal profiles and other Pages. It sounds more convoluted than it is! The point is that businesses can support fellow businesses – client and suppliers by joining each others’ networks and sharing each others’ links, industry news, and so on.

A Facebook Page is a valuable internet asset

Just as we learned to claim the web domains of our business (and personal in some cases) names before anyone else could buy and hold them hostage; and more recently our Twitter handles – it’s also vital for businesses to claim their Facebook Page urls for the same reason. (Ours is http://facebook.com/savvymarketers.  Hint – we’d love you to join us an ‘like’ it )

In Social Media Examiner’s 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, results showed that 96% of B2C focused companies used Facebook, compared to 85% B2B companies.  And B2C are more interested in learning about Facebook (74%) and blogging (72%) versus B2B (Facebook and blogging: 65%).

Here’s their short (6:17 mins) video summary of the report with more important information:

Do you have a B2B Facebook Page? Please let us know in the comments below, so we can visit and ‘Like’ it.  :)