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/

Just as we think we’ve seen all the Email Marketing mistakes

Spelling & punctuation clangers. You’d think having built-in spell checkers would mean better spelling, punctuation and grammar, unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case (as Sam found out recently). A well written email marketing message is more likely to be read and speaks volumes for the professionalism of the sender.

Boring Subject Lines. These are so often treated as an after thought and written in a hurry before hitting ‘Send’ – big mistake! The Subject Line is the text that is seen in a list of unread emails and can be what prompts the recipient to open your message. It can also be the only thing that stops them from pressing the ‘Delete’ button.

Mystery ‘From’ Field. If I don’t recognise who an email is from, the likelihood of clicking to open it and find out is much reduced. For example, contact@ or info@ aren’t very friendly are they? As for noreply@ – personally I find this most off-putting!

Lack of or Confusing Call to Action. Every piece of your marketing needs to have a purpose and a clearly defined ‘Call to Action’ (CTA). Email Marketing is no different. Not including a CTA is a waste of your time and effort. Almost as bad is to provide so many options of things to click on or look at that your reader becomes confused – and does nothing as a result. That’s a waste too.

Collecting Email addresses and then not making contact until you want to sell something. This is a crazy phenomenon I’ve noticed recently. I signed up to receive updates on a couple of blogsites and weeks later was still waiting (I did check my spam filters). Then suddenly, BAM! Email after Email promoting a webinar or product launch. No thank you. This practice is just plain bad manners and, as I’m likely to have forgotten who the sender is after such an interval, their messages run the risk of being reported as spam.

We’re certainly not immune when it comes to making mistakes in our Email Marketing campaigns, but we do try our best to keep them to a minimum.

Further reading:

How not to do Emails

7 Basic Email Newsletter Mistakes (and how to avoid them) 

How not to send out Email Promotions

What Email howlers have you come across? Please share in the comments below.

When you go to all the trouble of crafting word perfect, interesting articles for your newsletter

With so many beautiful templates available from popular Email Service Providers such as MailChimp (aff), Vertical Response, Constant Contact, AWeber, et al, it can be difficult to know which to choose. Especially as, with most providers including the free ones, you can easily customise colours to your brand and add your business logo.

It can be tempting to go for every bell and whistle – just because you can! But depending on your audience, that might be a step too far, and leave you lamenting a trail of unsubscribes. While a more technically savvy audience will happily explore as many new bells & whistles as you can throw at them, a more traditional reader will be happier to simply find familiar features in each issue.

The complexity of design of your email newsletter is also going to depend to some extent on what device your audience is using. You’ll need to consider the growing number of people who will be reading on their mobile phones for example; their needs will be different to someone reading on their desktop, laptop or tablet. Fortunately the professional providers take care of that for you by offering a mobile friendly subscription option.

But no matter what device your readers are using, or their level of tech savvy-ness, there are a few basic design considerations which will make reading your newsletters a good experience for them, and so that they look forward to future issues.

Design Checklist

Your Email Newsletter is not the same as your website so it shouldn’t look like a web page. This style of template shows too many options, some of which look like tabs to click, and are generally too busy and confusing.

Should you use one column or two? Think about how you read on the screen – one column is easiest without a doubt. But two columns do look attractive and can be useful. Just make sure your most important messages are in the left hand (fatter) column, and keep items short in the right hand (skinny) column.

Provide a brief list of contents. This lets readers see at a glance what is included in each issue and gives them a chance to go straight to the content that piques their interest. Otherwise they may well consign your email to the ‘read later’ folder – which is basically a staging post to the delete folder….

Divide your newsletter into clear sections and keep these consistent in every issue as readers will have their favourites. Some will look out for your ‘Quick Tips’ to take away and apply immediately, or book recommendations, events, etc.

Use their first name two or three times in the newsletter. This is a good relationship building tactic, but don’t over-use the personalisation feature to the point that it comes across as smarmy and false. Inject a little of your personality by uploading one or two of your own photos in each issue; your readers will enjoy seeing them and learning about the person behind the newsletter.

The template and design should reflect the visual elements of your brand (logo, fonts and colours), in other words be easily associated with your business. While refreshing the design periodically is a good idea, changing it out of all recognition every month probably isn’t.

Make your page easy for your readers to navigate and keep the overall appearance simple, with lots of white space between columns, sections and paragraphs.

Consider font size and overall readability. Larger headlines will help to clearly define the sections, keep those fun and funky fonts to use as section headers. As a rule of thumb, don’t use anything smaller than 10 point font (HTML Size 2), and 12 point (HMTML size 3) is even easier to read.

Be sure to include graphics because they will enhance your publication, be pleasing on the eye and help break up the text. As I already mentioned, do consider including your own photos which are easy to take and upload using your smartphone.

What design features do you like to see in your favourite Email Newsletters? Please share them in the comments below.

Email Marketing is one of the cornerstones of online relationship building

Things have moved on a bit (about a million miles actually) since the days of rainbow coloured text emails and using the BCC field for your list while sending the message to yourself, although unbelievably some of these still occasionally drop into my inbox (bless!).

There are many excellent Email Service Providers (ESPs), including Mailchimp (we are fans & affiliates), Constant Contact, Vertical Response and AWeber. Which provider you choose is down to personal preference, but there are compelling reasons why you need to choose and use a professional ESP for your business Email Marketing.

Get More of Your Emails Delivered

Many people think that pressing ‘Send’ is all that’s needed to get their email message to its various destinations. Not necessarily so. For people still using their computer email packages, deliverability is unknown and open & click-through rates are unmeasurable.

Using your web domain host or shopping cart email service isn’t a guarantee of getting delivered either. These are OK for occasional mailings but messages are less likely to get through spam filters, so it isn’t a good idea to use as your main ESP, if you’re serious about Email Marketing.

The number of people reading their emails on SmartPhones is growing rapidly, so making sure your Emails are mobile friendly is becoming increasingly important. The main ESPs have this covered with special templates for the publisher to use and options to receive emails in a mobile friendly format for the reader.

Benefit from their Good Reputation

The best providers have a good reputation they’ve worked hard to establish. Not only for deliverability (over 99% is their proud claim), but also, importantly, for their adherence to the CAN-Spam Act, which they take very seriously.

I was chatting with an Email Marketing colleague recently and he told me the sad story of two clients who had their email accounts suspended as a result of using their computers to send out campaigns. This could have been as a result of the large number of emails going out, or because they fell foul of the Spam filters.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of being without email in my business sends icy shivers down my spine. It’s one of my primary communication channels and I’d really struggle without it.

Professional ESPs use a ‘double optin’ process to further protect their reputation – and yours by association! This process replaces the practice back in the ‘bad old days’ when you simply added all your contacts’ email addresses to a spreadsheet and sent out uninvited and unexpected promotional emails to them. “But wait,” I hear you say, “I still have some of those emails arriving in my inbox.” Yep, me too – and I report them as ‘Spam’ because that’s what they are. I didn’t ask for them.

A Double Opt-In is when you enter your details (usually just Name & Email address) onto a web based form, press Enter and are then taken to another screen with a message telling you to look out for an email which you need to act on. The email usually arrives within seconds and has a link you have to click in order to confirm that you really did fill out that form and want to receive the emails from that person.

The above are just a couple of reasons why using a professional Email Service Provider is so important for the small business owner. Check out our Guide for more information on Email Marketing, and please ask your questions in the comment box below.

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!

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.

QR Code Generator – what you need to create your own QR code. Here’s a post with a useful list of code generators to choose from. (I’ve just used QRMobilize to set up my personal QR code and found it quite easy to use.)

We’re also experimenting with Goo.gl which is a URL shortener combined with a QR code generator. The benefits of this is that it lets you track the number of visits to the page where the QR code was read. Make sure you’re logged into Google and just type the URL of the page you want to direct people to. You’ll then see your newly shortened URL. Once you have your shortened URL, click on “details” and you’ll see your very own QR code has been automatically generated for you. You can then right click and save it as a JPEG (for best resolution) or take a screen shot of it. Then you can use it on any of the materials listed below AND you’ll be able to see clicks generated from the QR code and track what’s working for you.

QR Code Reader – which one you choose depends on which smartphone you have. For my BlackBerry, I’ve downloaded the free lynkee.com which was quite straightforward to do, and seems to work well. However I do find that you have to be very precise (and have a steady hand) when capturing the code to enable it to be read.

QR Code Applications for Small Businesses – While some TV ads are sporting QR Codes, personally, I’d struggle to snap the code in the very few seconds it was on-screen!

Perhaps their best applications are to be found offline, on printed media, such as:

• Business Cards
• Trade Show Literature
• Posters
• Direct Mail Postcards
• Take-away Menus
• Magazines and Newspapers
• Product Instructions
• and many more!

The QR code you can see at the top of this post is for our own Savvy Marketing Tips! In this case, we’re using it to encourage people to subscribe to our newsletter, and the link will take you to a sign up box.

If you’re using QR Codes, what’s the best application you’ve seen so far? Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know!

We’re all for creating lots of different streams of income,

You don’t want to dilute the expertise you’ve spent a lot of time, energy and money building up. Being a Jack (or Jill) of all trades may be useful, but people prefer to deal with a specialist when they have a problem they need help with.

You do want people to remember what you do. If you have a long and diverse list it will be harder to make your message clear and succinct, especially when you’re out networking.

You will have to work so much harder!

If you’re effectively running several different businesses, you’ll need to market each of them separately. Imagine the plate spinner who has to keep checking and adjusting to keep each plate from falling.

Your website will be a mess if you use it for several unrelated products or services. I remember visiting a life coach’s site a while back and being surprised and confused to see a page about candle-making! Even a hobby deserves to be separate and there are many completely free ways to do this.

It’s perfectly possible to have more than one business provided you take care with their organisation, presentation and with your time. The alternative is to ensure your additional revenue streams are clearly related to your existing business in some way, so you don’t confuse your prospects!

Have you come across a website that confused you with unrelated offerings? Please let us know in the comments below…

I love learning, and am fascinated by all the possibilities the internet provides for small businesses.

The internet provides more information than I can possibly take in. Not even a lifetime will give me enough hours to read all the blog posts, articles, and eBooks that attract my attention and cause me to lose track of time!

When I fall behind with other work because I’ve been reading, watching or listening to yet another great piece of content, I make excuses (mostly to myself) that it’s research to help clients

While the information was available just to read, I was largely able to contain it by downloading and storing until I had finished my working day, and then read it in my ‘free’ time. That worked, and continued to work reasonably well even when audio information came along.

But my self-discipline seems to desert me when it comes to how-to videos and I find myself irresistibly drawn to watch them. Even when I know they’re ultimately trying to sell me something!

So now, I’m not only falling behind with work, I’m also putting off launching my own products! What a crazy situation! And that’s before I own up to the time spent on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ …….

I’m not blaming anyone here – this overwhelm is totally a problem of my own making. So what’s the solution?

Well, just as email was once the enemy of business productivity and needed to be put in its place, now the overload of available information has become my personal ‘bête noire’.

One of the problems with digital information is that storage is not a problem. If I had to find space in my office for physical products, I’d be much more aware of just how much was accumulating! So, another step could be to have to cancel a subscription, or delete one product, before ordering or subscribing to anything new.

Because I’ve been falling behind on business building tasks (shame on me!), finding out which projects need immediate attention and focusing on getting them completed makes a lot of sense.

So here’s a summary of the first three steps I’m going to implement immediately

1. Clean up subscriptions to online newsletters and blogs
2. Put into place a ‘one out before another one in’ policy
3. Make a list of all current & proposed projects, and prioritise them by ROI, in other words those that will bring in the money the quickest!

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? What has worked well for you? We’d love to know!

In our never-ending search for efficient working online and increasing productivity

It may seem as if we’re always recommending Google, but they really do offer some really impressive and useful cloud-based tools. Today, we’d like to bring your attention to Google Calendars, a few of the functions to explore, and some possible ways to apply them in your business.

As with many Google Tools, Calendars have recently undergone a bit of a makeover and do look much smarter in appearance on the screen. Here are some of the features we’ve been using, although they are far from being the only ones available!

Multiple Calendars

If you’ve ever tried keeping track of appointments, ‘to-do’ actions and different projects you’re working on in one diary, you’ll know how messy-looking and confusing that can look. With Google Calendars you can have different calendars for each type of activity, and easily identify which is which by changing the colour of each one (as in the screenshot above). I’ve added in a US time bar beside the GMT so I can easily make the conversion when booking appointments.

Sharing Calendars

As with Google Docs, sharing Calendars with a colleague means both parties can edit and add appointments. Handy when you’re trying to allocate time to work on a joint project or two, and fit them in with your individual busy diaries.

Using Tasks

Not everything you want to do warrants setting up a timed appointment on a calendar, although by adding but not specifying a time to an appointment, it will show the activity above the timed slots on the calendar. Using Tasks is more flexible and mean you can set up activities like ‘Follow up Jim’ in a specific calendar, and allocate a day or deadline to complete it, depending on your preference.

Tasks will show up on your calendar screen in a small area of the screen at the top of the relevant day and as a list to the side of the calendar. As well as being able to edit task details, rescheduling is easy to do by simply ‘dragging & dropping’ to where you want them. When you complete a task, there’s a little tick-box which crosses through and fades the task to differentiate it from the unfinished variety. You can clear/delete all the completed tasks to tidy things up on the screen, but I like to save doing that until the end of the day so I can watch the completed tasks adding up

Installing the Calendar Checker (a neat little Google Chrome extension) in the toolbar, shows at a glance when the next appointment is due, changing to red as the time gets closer. Hovering over the icon reveals details of that appointment, and clicking on it opens up the full calendar.

Synchronise with other calendars and devices

Google calendars will synchronise with Microsoft and Apple calendars, although we haven’t tried that function. I (Louise) successfully use it in conjunction with my BlackBerry and online appointment scheduler, Tungle.me. Because of this, I can have access to the calendar wherever I happen to be, and avoid double-booking myself.

If you already use Google Calendar – what’s the most useful function to you? We’d love to know!