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!

A blog is so important to the online success of all small businesses that it can truly be called the real heart

Have we convinced you yet that your blog is important? OK, here’s why it is:

It is the heart or hub of your online presence, and is the bridge between your website and the social networks.

For service business owners especially, a blog is where you can demonstrate your expertise by regularly adding written, audio or video examples of what you do, and provide proof that it works. It also a place to announce new products or services in a non-salesy way.

It’s the place where you can build online relationships with your readers who, if you’ve targeted them correctly, are also prospective clients for your business. Your blog gives them the opportunity to get to ‘know, like & trust’ you much more easily than  short updates of 140 characters.

It’s where you can send social networking connections to learn more about you, somewhere that isn’t just a sales page. It always amazes us when people still do this.

When you publish a new blog post, you instantly create new material to use as informative updates and share on your social networks.

By regularly adding new posts you increase the occasions on which Google & Bing will return to visit your blog. This in turn increases your general online visibility and rankings in the search engines. It’s a vital component of your content marketing strategy as this excellent post by Ardath Albee shows.

If you have chosen a self-hosted blog then your blog is a part of the internet owned by you. Which is more than can be said for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…… even if you do pay for hosting and buy a premium blog theme, setting up a blog is still an extremely cost-effective way to establish a professional presence online for your business. It’s also where you have total control over the content and are free to make as many changes as you wish, as your business develops and grows.

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, here are details of a short guide which may be helpful.

So, how are you treating the real heart of your business online?

If you found this post helpful, please share it by clicking one of the links below.

Every day, through the social networks, millions of people are sharing articles, videos, podcasts, in fact all manner of content by tweeting links to their followers, or sharing updates on Facebook or LinkedIn. From motivating quotes and funny cat videos to more serious information, we all like passing on items we think will be of interest to our contacts. Social Media has made this very easy to do and those who do it well are well thought of.

Sifting through many blog posts and websites to eliminate the dross and only sharing the best is being thoughtful. It also helps to establish your reputation as a reliable source of good, timely information. I tend to leave sharing ‘big name’ news to others, and research a little deeper for articles I believe will be helpful to my social media connections. Their feedback tells me they like my links.

Curation Tools to use

As you might imagine there are a growing number of curation tools available to use, depending on your needs. This post and video from Mari Smith provide an excellent introduction to the subject.

Before content curation became more well known, my favourite sharing tool was delicious – which was simple and effective (but I stopped using it after reading it was to be abandoned by Yahoo! just over a year ago).

I briefly dallied with paper.li as a way to automatically curate by choosing and publishing each day using feeds from my various subscriptions, but I found the stories it included were far too random and so discontinued it.

Alltop is a great source of latest blog posts and top stories that you can personalise for the topics in which you are most interested.

How curation can help your blog

Do you find it a struggle to know what to blog about? I know I do at times. I worry about finding something new and interesting to write about after over 4 years of regular weekly blogging. But somehow a new post is created and shared each week. One of the things I do that helps is to regularly read other people’s blogs, and get inspiration from them. For example, because I knew I’d be writing about content curation this week (from our Blogging Calendar), I had been on the lookout for articles about it and collected several (using Evernote) in readiness. In effect I curated that content.

Content curation can also help you to produce blog posts by using content that isn’t yours! But before you rush off and collect articles & videos with cheerful abandon, there are a few etiquette points to be aware of.

• You will still need to create your own, original content if you want people to take notice of your thoughts & ideas.
• Make sure to give full attribution to the original source.
• Don’t just copy and paste whole blog posts or articles – that’s just lazy and will annoy people.
• Don’t publish posts full of links to influential websites in an attempt to increase your SEO rankings – Google won’t take any notice.

Do you curate content? If so, what sort of content and using which tools? Please share in the comments below.

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.

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?

I was chatting with a fellow business owner over coffee the other day

We went through the need and purpose of having a blog and setting up accounts with the various social networks where his target market were most likely to be, and then I asked him: ‘How big is your list?’

His answer was pretty much what I’d expected: that he had a lot of contacts but they weren’t organized in any way or stored in a central place, for example on an Excel spreadsheet.

The traditional way of collecting business cards at networking events and trade shows often results in a drawer full of cards and very little else. Even if these cards are put into a display folder of some kind, they still won’t be of any use for email marketing until they at least find their way onto a computer.

As I explained to my downcast colleague, in order to make the best use of email marketing, he really needed to have enough people to send his emails to!

We agreed that his best starting point was to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter the contact details. From there it will be easy for him to upload the data to an email service provider (such as MailChimp, AWeber or Constant Contact – and there are many others). When it comes to those drawers full of business cards, his options include various scanning machines & software packages, and he would do well to consider the newer technology Apps for smartphones, such as ScanBizCards.

A common list building mistake 

One of the problems I’ve seen recently with enthusiastic social networking business owners is that they’re so focused on building a following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on, that they seem to have lost sight of the importance of building an email marketing list.

Just think about how quickly those online newstreams, updates and Twitter feeds move down the screen. You have no guarantee that your followers are actually going to see your message, amongst all the other messages vying for their attention, let alone click on a link.

On the other hand, an email is a targeted marketing message arriving in each individual’s inbox. They will have given permission for you to send them such emails and, providing proper opt-in procedures are followed, the recipient has to consciously decide what to do with each message they get from you. While some people may choose to delete without reading, if the campaign has been well put together, your email stands a much better chance of being opened.

By the time we’d finished our coffees, my fellow business owner had written down clear steps to get his email marketing list off the ground and had an understanding why it was urgent and important to keep taking action and build on it.

What would you have recommended he do to build his email marketing list? Please leave your suggestion in the comments below.

Content Marketing is wonderful!

Our post explaining what content marketing is gives you some easy steps to get started with your own campaign. It’s so important that you do.

But we don’t want you to think this is a fast route to riches, or a shortcut to attracting more business. It’s actually quite hard work – just like all the other more traditional marketing you do.

However this can actually be an advantage

When people are searching for helpful information, they’re only really interested in the best, most up to date and accurate information to read, listen to or watch and learn from. Not so long ago they had to sift through a lot of poor content to find the occasional nuggets of good stuff (until Google’s famous panda update in March 2011). This update was bad news for for all the article spinners and ‘me-too’ scammers who were only interested in making a fast buck.

However, the update was great news for bloggers and creators of high quality original content – like you and me! Because the search results are now leading with better content, we have a better chance of being noticed for our areas of expertise and rewarded for our hard work with more leads. No longer are blatant promotions considered good content, whereas informative how-to articles and well-reasoned opinions are.

Good quality content brings other rewards worth having too

When you publish good quality content, the people who read/listen to/watch it will want to share it with their social networking contacts. They will also be more likely to write a comment (on your blog or Facebook page) so you’ll know who is interested in what you do. And of course, the more different platforms you publish on, the wider your reach will be, and the greater number of people will be likely to find out about you and share with their social networking contacts …..

Content marketing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, so settle in for the long haul. You can watch the wimps and the fly by nights fall by the wayside!

If you found this post helpful, we’d appreciate if you would share it with the network of your choice by clicking one of the buttons below!

Normally Sam and I are cautious about signing up to new networks but, because it’s Google, we have. So we’ll be trying it out, exploring all the features, finding out how to get the most out of it and presenting our findings to you in our September Q&A Hour Webinar.

But we know you’ll probably be itching to get started, or at least be curious to know if this latest network is going to be important for your business online. We think it will be, in time.

Get ready to join in

As we have suggested in the past, you need to create a full and professional-looking personal Google Profile. This is even more important now as any connections you make through this network will be able to see everything on it. Google Profiles are public, there is no option to make them private.

Don’t set up a profile in your business name. Google doesn’t like it at all and has been shutting down those it finds, including some big names. There are plans to introduce Business Profiles later this year, and you can be sure we’ll keep you posted about them when they arrive.

When you receive an invitation to join Google+ we suggest you accept it, you can always wait to explore in more detail at a later date. And if you’d like an invitation to join, send us an email to email hidden; JavaScript is required  and we’ll email one back to you.

You can get started with these short how-to videos from Chris Brogan, one of which covers how to check those all-important privacy settings.

Circles are where you can organise your Google Plus connections (a bit like Facebook Lists – but definitely not the same!). Basically you create Circles depending on how you want to interract with people. For example, you may want a circle for Family, for close Friends, for Networking Friends, for Professional Body Members. Google + starts you off with a few suggestions.  Here is a nice easy video that explains circles well.

If you want to connect with us on Google Plus – Louise is here and Sam is here.

We’ll be back with another post very soon to go into what we think of some of the other features, once we’ve test driven them for you! In the meantime, if you want even more info to get started, here’s a collection of helpful articles:

20 of the best guides and tutorials to get freelancers up and running

 Are you on Google+ yet?  We’d love to connect with you so do leave your Profile url below!

With such an overwhelming amount of reading material online to get through every day

How do you keep up with your favourite blogs?

Are you trying to read too much online?

Managing your online reading list

Today, I’d like to revisit Feedly.com and how you can use it with Google Reader to ensure you don’t miss reading anything important. This tool also comes in handy for curating (or collecting) content to share with your social media contacts.

First step is to register for your free Google Reader account.

• It has a rather plain appearance, but we’ll do something about that in a moment.
• If you’ve been using another reader, you can import those feeds to Google Reader.
• You can easily track down blogs of interest to add to your reading list by doing a search within Google Reader. The results will helpfully show the number of subscribers and there’s a one-click button so you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Here’s an example from our recent Google Tools Q&A webinar:

• If you use an iGoogle Page as your ‘home’ page, quite a useful way to be able to see ‘at a glance’ the latest posts as they’re published, is to install the Reader Gadget.

Next step is to go to Feedly.com and sign up for your free account

It will connect you using your Google account and automatically pull in the feeds from Google Reader.

Feedly works well with the main internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) and will enhance the appearance of your online reading list, as it brings in thumbnails of any images the blogger has included in each post. The result is a pleasing magazine-like page.

You can organise feeds into folders or tabs, both in Google Reader and within Feedly. There’s a two-way sync to make it super easy to do. Additionally, in Feedly you can just drag & drop to reorder the different categories (folders) how you want them presented on the page.

There’s a choice of ways to read your feeds – Cover, What’s New, Latest, Category, Saved (by you). I have a ‘must read’ category set up for those extra-busy days when reading time is even more limited than usual.

Feedly is a social sharing tool too

When you set up your Feedly account, do install the mini toolbar (in Preferences). This shows up as a little semi-transparent grey icon on the bottom right of your browser screen and stays there. Clicking on it enables you to share the web page you’re currently browsing with the social network(s) of your choice, email the url as a link, or save it to read later. You’ll need to spend a little time configuring your social networks at the set up stage, but it’s worth doing so you can use this convenient tool.

How do you organise and read your RSS feeds? Please share in the comments below.