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. 

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.

We’re definitely in favour of making life easier by using some of the great automation tools available online

Twitterfeed is great for automatically tweeting the RSS feeds of your and other peoples’ blogs and articles and it isn’t hard to do. Once you’ve set up your account you type in the blog feed URL including the http://www.blogname.com/feed (you can find the feed URL by hovering over the orange RSS button on the site). Each time a new post is published by that blogger, Twitterfeed sends out a tweet from your Twitter account. You can personalise tweets by prefacing with, for example: ‘Latest post: …’.

Social Oomph (formerly Tweet Later) has many useful features. We use it to ‘vet’ or check out latest followers on Twitter, decide if we want to follow them back (or sometimes block any undesirables!), and then assign them to a list. Another great use for this tool is to write & store draft tweets and preschedule them to go out at specified times and dates in the future.

Unlike many people we think an automated welcome message to new followers can be OK, provided it is just a welcome – and doesn’t include a pitch, or even a link to a free report (that’s just tacky!).

Twitter clients TweetDeck and Hootsuite both allow you to manage your twitter accounts, lists and followers as well as to connect with other social networks. This means you can update your Facebook and LinkedIn status with just a single tweet. One of the main differences between the two clients is that TweetDeck requires you to download software onto your computer (this can slow things down a bit for older PCs), whereas Hootsuite has a web-based option so just needs an internet connection to run.

Setting up and personalising an iGoogle page with some of the many available ‘gadgets’ lets you each of your social media networks, preview your Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs – all on the same page . This makes it easy to quickly glance and catch up with what’s going on in your online world whenever you have a few moments, without the need to log into each individual account.

It’s tempting to get carried away with all this available automation, but if you set up every tweet to also automatically update your status on LinkedIn and Facebook, it will get very irritating for your connections on those sites. Do you really want everyone to see every tweet you send? Twitter is the best place to contain the chatter, so we recommend you use the appropriate tools and be selective.

As a final thought for today, while these automated tools are great at saving time it’s a good idea to occasionally check they’re still doing what you intended when you set them up. If you plan to use social media marketing regularly to help promote your business, it’s well worth automating some broadcasts to save time and effort. But people will notice if you try to automate too much, so make sure you stop and ‘chat’ with your connections, even if only for a few minutes a day – and be ‘sociable’!

What’s your favourite social media marketing automation tool? We’d love you to share it here!

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.

In this post, I want to go into a little more detail as to why using URL shorteners are really important to track your social media activity and how you can make them work for you if you use them consistently.

There’s an array of popular url shorteners out there which include Bitly, goo.gl, Twitter’s own http://t.co which you can read more about here: http://support.twitter.com/entries/109623 and if you use Hootsuite, you may use the http://ow.ly url shortner.

When you first start using the social networks, you may just use the default url shortener of the service provided, e.g Tweetdeck, which will automatically shorten a link for you. However, in order to track your social media activity more effectively, it’s a good idea to choose which url shortener provider you want to use and stick with it.

Louise uses Hootsuite for her social networking activities and with that, has her own Hootsuite account. This means that all the shortened Hootsuite urls she shares across the social networks, (e.g on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) are recorded within her account and she can download reports telling her which of her links have been clicked on and where.

I have a bit.ly account which I’ve set up. When you set up a bit.ly account you get what is called an ‘API key’ which is a bit like your personal account number. This means you can use your bit.ly account with applications such as Tweetdeck (you can insert your bit.ly API key into your Tweedeck software), I also use it on our WordPress blog with one of the plugins which automatically ‘tweets’ new blog posts, I use it with our Buffer account and have a plugin in my browser so I can shorten links within my bit.ly account before sharing them.

This means when I log into my bit.ly account I can see which links have been clicked on, whether it was a link to a Savvy Marketers blog posts or a link to a blog post or article on another site. It makes it much easier for me to track all the links I share within the social networks, which ones are clicked on and ultimately track those links in Google analytics to see the number of overall visits to our website from the link shortner.

This is just one way of tracking your social networking activity across the web and of course, there are much more advanced ways of doing this. For more information on tracking online marketing activities, check out our new online marketing measurement guide.

How do you track your social networking activity? Do you use url shorteners or do you use any more sophisticated tools?

This post is long overdue as I’ve been using Buffer for several months now

You’ll already know that between us, Sam and I read an awful lot of blog posts and visit many websites during the course of each day. When we come across articles or websites we think will be of interest to our Twitter followers, we like to share with them.

Now, we could use the sharing buttons already on the website, the Feedly ‘mini’ button or the ‘Hootlet’ bookmarking tool from Hootsuite, but here’s why we sometimes prefer to use Buffer.

If you’re anything like us, you probably do most of your online reading in the morning or perhaps wait until the evening. Tweeting out everything you want to share means that your followers will see lots of tweets sent out very close together, followed by a long gap with none.

Fortunately Buffer changes all that

Within your account settings you can specify exactly when you want the next tweet you place in your buffer to go out. Let’s say you want a buffer tweet to be sent out every hour, you can preschedule the exact time for each one (provided you have something saved in your buffer of course!).

You can arrange your settings to reflect the appropriate time zone and also select which days you want to tweet. I prefer not to send out buffer tweets over the weekend (a purely personal choice).

How do you add tweets to your buffer?

You simply install a little ‘add on’ icon in your browser bookmark toolbar (from the ‘Goodies’ page). Then, when you come across something you want to share, just click on the icon and Buffer will write the tweet for you (usually article title, website name plus a trackable link). Each tweet is fully customisable. I like to prefix mine with ‘Reading:’ ‘Great Post:’, ‘Interesting:’, or something similar. When you’re happy with the wording, click ‘Add to Buffer’ and that’s all there is to it! If you want to rearrange the schedule, it’s a simple case of dragging & dropping the relevant tweets to your liking.

Once you sign up for your own free Buffer account you automatically have 10 tweets you can place in your buffer. By referring friends to also sign up (using the special link Buffer gives you, like this one: http://bufferapp.com/r/8b44f ), you can ‘earn’ an extra tweet for each person who does.

Not only have I been impressed by the functionality of Buffer, the customer service has been excellent too. Soon after I first signed up for my free account, I had a few problems getting it to work properly. The automated welcome email invited me to contact co-founder @JoelGasgoigne with any feedback, so I hit reply and let him know about the problem. The speed of response and resolution of my query were a customer service delight! In fact, I think I was probably more impressed than if Buffer had worked perfectly first time

Do you use Buffer? If so, what’s your favourite feature? Please share!