Social Media Integration With Email Marketing

by Nicole Munoz

If you run an autoresponder, chances are you’re going to spend quite a bit of time writing and refining your autoresponder messages. Instead of having to then take the time to re-post it to your social networks, why not have that reposting done automatically instead?

Most autoresponder services allow you to automatically post your emails to your social networks. This can help you save a lot of time, while automatically giving your subscribers a whole lot more content.

Here’s how to setup your email systems to automatically send emails to your social media sites.

Mailchimp

Log into your Mailchimp account. Click on “Integrations.”

Choose the service that you want to automatically post to.

Click “Log In” to authorize your social media account to be posted to by Mailchimp.

Once your social media accounts are setup, go and create a campaign as you normally would. Now in the campaign setup process, you’ll be given the option to automatically post that autoresponder to your social media sites.

If you check the checkbox, the auto-tweeting or auto-posting will go into effect effective immediately.

iContact

To automatically send your autoresponder emails to your social media accounts in iContact, just follow these steps.

First, click on “Social” along the top navigation.

Click “Get Started” to continue.

Select which service you want to post to.

You’ll be taken through the authorization process. Once your social media account is authorized, you’ll see the “post to” check box on the bottom of your send messages box. Check that box whenever you want to send a message to your social network(s).

ConstantContact

ConstantContact is one of the best autoresponders to use if you want to send visual HTML emails. ConstantContact’s “Simple Share” makes it easy to share your content with your social network(s).

First, start by creating and editing a message as you normally would.

Then save your draft and go to “Schedule”. Under “Social Sharing,” click “Simple Share.”

Choose which social network you want to share your message on.

ConstantContact will take you through the authorization process. Once your account is authorized, you’ll be taken to a share screen.

Customize the message by clicking on it and editing the text.

Click “Schedule” once you’re ready for the world to see your message!

Aweber

To share your message via Aweber, go to “Messages” then “Broadcast” and setup a message as you normally would. Then on step 2 “Sharing” select the Facebook / Twitter account you want to share the post with.

Click “Connect to a new account” if this is your first time.

Follow through with the account authorization. Once your account is successfully added, you’ll see this notification:

Now whenever you want to share a message, all you need to do is check the box at the bottom and change the subject line.

That’s how to post to social media automatically using your autoresponder service. We’ve covered all four of the major small business email services today. If you want to regularly give more value to your users without having to spend a lot of time creating links and uploading content, this is one easy way to have your email service do it all for you.

Adding Social Media Updates to Your Blog

by Nicole Munoz

One of the best ways to add some spice to your website is to add in a social media feed. Your social media feed will help feed the content and updates that you’re posting through social media into your main blog.

The feed will appear as a widget that displays on the side of your screen. You can generally choose how big or small you want the feed to be, so you can customize how much attention to direct to the feed.

Here’s how to add social media updates to your blog.

Twitter Widget

To get started, go to the Twitter widget section.

https://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets

Click on “Create new.”

Then choose the “User Timeline”.

Enter the username that you want to generate a feed for. This can be your own username or someone else’s.

A preview of the feed will appear on the right. Once the feed looks right to you, just click “Create Widget” to copy and paste the code onto your website.

Facebook Widget

To access Facebook’s activity feed, go to:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/

Then click on “Activity Feed.”

Scroll down, then type in the domain of the site whose feed you want to display. The feed on the right will show you what your feed will look like.

Click “Get Code” on the bottom once you’re ready to post it to your website.

Google+

Google+ doesn’t have a built-in widget creator. However, there are several outside tools you can use to add this functionality.

These options include:
Widgetplus.com
Widgplus.com
Wordpress Plugin

Here’s how Widgplus widget looks. You can access it here:

http://widgplus.com/

Start by entering your Google ID. This is the string of numbers you see in your URL when you access your own profile.

Then specify the settings you want to use to generate the Widget’s feed.

The embed code will be displayed above the customization box. Copy and paste it onto your server.

Adding a Pinterest Widget

Pinterest doesn’t have a built-in widget system. However, there are a number of different WordPress plugins you can use to create a Pinterest widget on your WordPress blog.

To get started, go to your plugins search field and type in “Pinterest widget.”

The most popular and highly rated one at the time of writing is the “Pinterest Pinboard Widget.” Choose one plugin and install then activate it.

Then go into your WordPress widgets (under “Appearance”) and drag and drop the widget. Then configure the widget to look exactly as you want it to.

Your Pinterest widget will now appear in your sidebar!

Adding a social media widget to your site can really help add interactivity and help cultivate a sense of consistency within your brand. It’ll help join your social media site and your website together into one community. If you’re going to take the time to build up content in social media, why not link it up to your main site?

Social Media Cross-Posting Tools

by Nicole Munoz

Most social media networks have gone out of their way to make it easy for you to share content to and from their networks. Posting from LinkedIn to Twitter is easy and viceversa. Pinterest makes it easy to share your pins with both Facebook and Twitter. So on and so forth.

Cross-posting your social media content will allow you to really maximize the power of each of your pieces of content. Instead of just getting the benefit of one exposure, you can get the benefit of exposing every single social network you’re a part of to your new content.

Here’s how to use the various cross-posting tools on the different social networks.

Posting from Twitter to Facebook

The best way to post from Twitter to Facebook is through the “Selective Tweets” app. The way it works is very simple. First, you install the app. Then, just append the hashtag #fb to any post that you want to also post on Facebook. Facebook will automatically recognize the tag and post the tweet as a status update.

To begin, find the app by searching for “Selective Tweets.”

Enter your username. Facebook will watch this username for tagged posts.

Then, whenever you write your Twitter posts, all you need to do is tag it with #fb and it’ll automatically cross-post. That’s as simple as it gets!

Posting from Google+

By default, Google+ can’t share posts to other social networks. Fortunately, the “Extended Share for Google Plus” plugin makes sharing posts to other social networks easy as pie.

Start by searching for the Google+ extension in your Chrome browser or in Google. Find the “Extended Share for Google Plus” plugin and install it.

Now a new share button will be added to your Google Plus posts. Just click the “Share” button and choose which network you want to share to.

The extension will automatically populate a share box with the Google Plus post that you want to share.

To post to and from LinkedIn, you first need to add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn account. You can do this by clicking here:

http://www.linkedin.com/settings/?modal=nsettings-twitter-accounts

To share from your LinkedIn to your Twitter, just check the LinkedIn + Twitter option in the lower menu of the share box.

To post to your LinkedIn account from your Twitter account, just tag your twitter post with the #li hashtag. Make sure your LinkedIn account is linked to your Twitter account before doing this.

Sharing from YouTube

Sharing from YouTube is quite simple. First, click “Share” under your video. YouTube will then bring up the logos from Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If you click on the arrow in the end, more social networks like Tumblr and Digg will appear. You can even choose what minute you want to share the video at. Click one of these logos to share to these social networks.

Pinterest Sharing

Start by clicking “Settings” in the upper right hand corner of your Pinterest account. Move the sliders to activate the Facebook and/or Twitter relationships.

Once you’ve linked your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, you can simply click the Facebook and Twitter buttons under any one of your pins to share them with your social networks.

That’s how you can share between the various different social networks. If you really want to get the most traction possible, make sure you share every bit of content across as many social networks as you can.

Postling for Monitoring, Analytics and Easy Updates

by Nicole Munoz

Postling is a social media integration service that ties in reputation monitoring, blog updating, analytics and traditional social media networks all in one easy to use package.

Through Postling, you can update your status or see who’s talking about you. You can track how many posts you’ve made in a certain time period and how many comments those posts have gotten. You can post to all your social networks in one easy to use interface.

Postling was co-founded by Chris Maguire, the co-founder of the popular art marketplace Etsy. It’s raised $700,000 in venture funding, according to TechCrunch.

Unlike other social media integration services, Postling is a paid service. The monthly rate is astoundingly low: $5. If you only want to use social media integration, then Postling might not be worth it. However, if you want to tie in reputation management, analytics and blog posting all in one easy to use interface, then Postling could be the perfect solution.

Here’s how to use Postling to integrate all these different areas of your internet business.

Step 1: Begin Registration

Start by entering your email, name and password

Step 2: Setup Payment

Setup the credit card you’ll use to get your $1 trial. You’ll be billed $5 a month automatically if you don’t cancel.

Step 3: Choose How You’ll Use Postling

Choose how you plan on using Postling. Specifying the type of business you own will help Postling locate reviews for your business on sites like Yelp or Citysearch.

If you select “business,” you’ll be asked for your business’ name and your business type.

Step 4: Add Your Social Networks

Select which kind of social media account you want to add.

Then choose to grant access to Postling when the social media permission box pops up.

Repeat this for each social media account that you’d like to add.

Step 5: Add a Blog

Adding a blog to Postling will allow you to post to your blog from Postling and monitor your results from Postling’s analytics systems.

To add a blog, click the blogging platform you use.

Then give Postling the login credentials needed to log in and post to your blog.

Step 6: Setup Tracking

Setup your tracking here. Postling will automatically monitor social media and search engines for mentions of you and your brand. They’ll also monitor Yelp and Citysearch to help you find new reviews about your business.

Select any one of the tracking options available. You’ll need to give Postling the exact keyword(s) or business name(s) that you want to track.

You can use Boolean search operators in these trackers. For example, you can use a search phrase like “Fishing rod review OR recommendation” to track either people who’re looking for reviews or recommendations.

You can learn about all the search operators you can use here:

http://www.googleguide.com/category/query-input/
Once you’ve setup all your trackers, click “Done! Start Using Postling Now” to continue.

Step 7: Tracking Screen

The main screen of Postling is your tracking screen. Here you’ll see all the latest results from the keywords you’re tracking.

You can change what kind of content you want to view in this feed through the drop-down “view” menu at the top.

Step 8: Publish a Status Update

To update your social media status, click “Update your Status” under “Publish” on the left hand navigation.

You’ll be taken to the status update box.

To shorten a URL, just put the URL in the URL shortener. It’ll automatically generate a bitly link for you.

Type in the message you want to send to your social network. Check the social network(s) you want to post to on the right hand side. Then either click “Publish” or “schedule for later” to post your update.

There’s a character count in the upper right corner to help with Twitter posts.

Step 9: Create a Blog Post

To create a new blog post, click “Create a Blog Post.”

A WYSIWYG editor will pop up. Use this editor to create your blog post.

Once you’re ready to post your message, check the boxes next to the blog(s) you want to post to. If you want to post the blog post to your social media networks as well, you can check those boxes too.

Step 10: Analytics

To access your analytics, click “Analytics” in the left hand side navigation bar.

Select the time period you want to see data for, as well as the account you want to see data for. Then use the checkboxes to check which data points you want to see.

The data will be graphed out at the top of the page. You can also scroll down to see the data laid out in text.

That’s how to use Postling to integrate social media, blog posting, analytics and reputation management. If you’re just using social media, Postling may not be the best integration solution. However, if you want to integrate a whole suite of web management tools all in one place, Postling should absolutely be one of your top choices.

Hootsuite Essentials For Your Small Business

by Nicole Munoz

Set Up Your Account and Add Your Various Profiles

The setup process for Hootsuite involves adding profiles for each of the sites you want to use with Hootsuite. Here’s how to sign up for and setup Hootsuite.

Step 1: Creating Your Account

Start by clicking on “Sign up” in the home screen.

Then select which plan you want to sign up with.

Then create your account.

Step 2: Adding Your First Social Network

Upon landing on your home screen, you’ll be presented asked whether you want to add a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account.

Hootsuite supports several more network than these three, but the first time around Hootsuite assumes you’ll want to add an account from one of the bigger networks. You can also click “Add a different social network” at the bottom to add a different network.

Choose the network you want to add. For this tutorial, we’ll start with Twitter.

A box will popup asking for authorization. Click “Submit.”

Then enter your username and password to your Twitter account.

Upon authorizing the app, Hootsuite will then be able to connect your account to their system.

Step 3: Adding More Accounts

To add more accounts, click on the “Getting Started” screen.

Select “Add a Social Network.”

Choose from the list of social networks.

Then follow that social network’s specific setup procedure.
Follow this procedure, you’ll be able to add just about every major social network to your Hootsuite.

How to Use Hootsuite: Reading Updates, Posting & Scheduling Updates and More

Hootsuite is essentially an improved way of viewing and posting to your social networks, all in one place.

Using Hootsuite, you can schedule messages to be posted at different intervals. That means that you don’t have to spend time every day posting messages if you want to post messages every day. Just set it up once and Hootsuite will do the rest of the work for you.

You can also monitor all your social media activity from one place. All your feeds, customer feedback, responses from your posts and so on can be monitored in one place.

Here’s how to use Hootsuite.

Step 1: Select Your Social Media Account

If you have multiple accounts setup, start by selecting which account you want to view.

Step 2: Viewing Streams

The first screen you’ll be presented with is your streams screen. Each panel consists of a different stream of information.

In Twitter, your Home Feed is the tweets of the people you’re following. You’ll also have panels of direct messages, mentions and sent tweets.

In Facebook, your News Feed is the main feed, followed by a photos feed, your wall posts and an events feed.

Each social network has a few different kinds of streams.

Step 3: Adding a Stream

Adding streams allows you to customize how your Hootsuite dashboard looks. To add a stream, click the “+Add Stream” button in the top navigation bar.

Then select which social network you want to add a stream for. Finally, select what kind of stream you want to add and click “Create Stream.”

Step 4: Posting a Message

To post a message, click “Compose Message.”

Type your message in the expanded message box.

To add a link to your posting, click “Add a Link.”

To schedule your message to be sent at a later time, click the scheduling button.

A scheduling menu box will appear. Schedule the time you want to send your message and click “Schedule.”

To choose which profile(s) to send your message out to, click the “Click to select profile” box.

Then choose one or more profiles that you want to send your messages to.

Congratulations! You now know how to view updates, view different streams, add streams, post messages, schedule messages and send messages to multiple social media accounts at once.

Top 10 Benefits to Integrating Your Social Media

by Nicole Munoz

If you’re serious about social media, you need to be using social media integration tools. If you’re not using these tools, you’ll be wasting a lot of time while inefficiently managing your social media. You’ll have a harder time connecting with your followers and won’t be able to build your connections as easily.

The reality is, using the default settings on tools like Twitter and Facebook work for the majority of social media users, but aren’t terribly effective for a business with a strong social media strategy.

For example, Twitter and Google’s tools won’t natively allow you to schedule your posts. Instead, you can only post only the moment you post a status update. That makes it impossible to “pre-send” your messages for the next few days at one time.

Still not convinced? Here are the top 10 benefits to integrating your social media.

Benefit #1: Post across Multiple Social Sites at Once

Instead of having to log into your various Twitter accounts, your Facebook pages, your Facebook accounts, your LinkedIn accounts and so on to post status updates individually, with social media integration you can just post to all of them in one place.

This can literally save you dozens or even hundreds of hours over the course of a year.

With social media integration, posting one status update to 5 different social media sites takes just 30 seconds. Without integration, just loading up and posting that update to 5 different sites will take a few minutes. However, if you have to log out of Twitter and into a different account every time, it could easily result in 5 to 15 minutes wasted per update.

If you’re updating several times a day, or even just several times a week, this very quickly turns into a lot of time saved.

Benefit #2: See Your @Replies, Direct Messages and FB Messages in One Place

With social media management, you get to see all your messages in one place. You can then reply to all your messages in one place as well.

If you had all your messages scattered over numerous Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, chances are responding to all the messages would simply take far too long.

Furthermore, they would weigh on you psychologically. You won’t ever really know if your inboxes are empty, because it’s too much effort to log into all your accounts to check.

With an integrated social media strategy however, you’ll know exactly how many messages you have at any given time. They’ll be visible from your feeds.

You’ll be able to respond to messages faster, which creates more of the impression that you really care about the people who communicate with you.

Benefit #3: Schedule Posts

With just about every social media website, you can’t schedule posts. You can’t tell Twitter to post tweets every two hours. Instead, you have to log into the site and post your tweets exactly when they want to go out.

This is fine for the casual user, but terrible for a serious social media marketer with a lot on his plate. One strategy you’ll often want to use is to sit down for 30 minutes and hammer out all your posts for the next few days.

With an integrated social media strategy, all you need to do is go into your tools and create the new posts. You can drip-feed your content at any rate you choose. You can schedule posts for multiple social media accounts all at once.

This capability alone is really enough for any serious social media marketer to use social media integration.

Benefit #4: Integrate Blogging and Email Marketing

Your social media strategy should be integrated with your blogging and email marketing strategies.

That means that whenever you post a new blog post, you should send out a tweet about it. Whenever you send out a new email, if there’s high quality content in that email, you should probably post a status update or send out a tweet as well.

This also works as a two-way street. If you regularly post valuable content to your social media communities, you should try to find a way to bring that content to your blog. For example, you might use widgets to put your Twitter feed on your website so your website visitors can see your latest 10 tweets.

Treat your whole social media, blogging and email marketing audience as one whole community, rather than segregated marketing tactics. Using social media integration will allow you to integrate blogging, email marketing and social media into one seamless strategy.

Benefit #5: Manage Social Media as a Team

Trying to manage social media as a team and execute a complex, multi-tiered strategy without social media integration is extremely difficult.

With integration tools, you can easily all stay on the same page about your social media strategies.

Various team members can schedule posts ahead of time and other team members can see what’s going to be posted in the future and adjust accordingly. Reports and analytics can inform a whole team’s decisions and the team can work as a whole to respond to follower inquiries.

Without social media integration, the time wasted on logging in and out of various sites is compounded. Each team member wastes a few minutes here and there logging in, which at the end of the day translates to massive wasted time for the company.

Furthermore, there’s no inherent way to work together in native social media platforms. Facebook isn’t really built for a team to execute a strategy together; but most social media integration tools are.

Benefit #6: Competitive Research & Feed Management

Social media integration tools will allow you to track a number of different feeds in a very simple manner. This is a fantastic way to stay on top of what’s going on in an industry.

For example, let’s say you’re in the electronics industry. You might want to regularly follow a couple different feeds about the latest electronics discoveries. You also want to follow feeds from your competitors to see what they’re offering.

You want to follow these feeds across Twitter and Facebook. If you had to use just Twitter and Facebook, you’d have to visit the individual pages or hashtags every time you wanted to check up on these companies or technologies.

That takes a lot of time. Chances are, you just won’t be able to keep up that level of research on a regular basis.

On the other hand, with social media integration tools, you’ll be able to keep those feeds all on a dashboard for easy viewing. You can easily observe new trends and see when new big topics are being discussed.

Social media integration makes competitive research and staying on top of an industry much, much easier.

Benefit #7: Unique Analytics and Reporting Capabilities

Different social media integration tools offer different reporting capabilities. These reporting tools can often report cross platform, giving you unique data that none of the sites couple independently give you.

For example, let’s say you wanted to explore the clickthrough data from your Facebook page. You want to know what kind of posts and what kind of media generates the highest clickthrough.

That’s something that Facebook’s insights can give you. However, what Facebook’s insights can’t give you is data on how those customers then behave once they’re on your website. They can’t tell you if they stay for longer or shorter than the typical browser.

Social media integration tools can give you this kind of data and more.

Furthermore, if you’re managing social media for clients, you can even brand the reports so it looks like it was generated internally rather than through external tools.

Benefit #8: Share Relevant News and Breakthroughs Quickly

Sometimes getting the edge in business truly is time sensitive. If you run a financial advisory firm and Google’s stock suddenly takes a 10% nosedive, the very first firm to be able to put out a comprehensive analysis is probably going to get a whole lot of traffic and backlinks.

With something like this, the difference of just 30 minutes can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Often time’s responding to big news can be crucial to your business. If you’re in the music business, Michael Jackson’s death should have been considered big news that you should have responded to. It would have generated a lot of discussion and connection with your audience.

Sharing these kinds of news responses and big breakthroughs is extremely difficult if you had to log into and post manually to all your social media connections. On the other hand, if you’ve integrated your social media platforms, you’ll be able to quickly and easily respond to urgent situations all in one place.

Benefit #9: Discover New People to Follow

Using social media integration is a great way to find new people to follow. There are both formal and informal ways to do this.

Some tools, such as Sprout Social, actually have deliberate tools designed to help you find new people to follow. They’ll explore feeds of people who you’ve interacted with in the past, as well as feeds of influencers. Then they’ll determine what kind of topics you tend to be interested in and make recommendations if there’s a match.

This is great for finding new sources of advice, news and interaction. It’s also a great way to find new influencers to reach out to, in order to see if there’s a way you can work together.

Even if you don’t use these deliberate tools, social media integration can still help you find new people to follow. By integrating your feeds, you’ll be able to spot “super fans” who’re interacting with you across multiple media.

You’ll also start to recognize names that are showing up across different feeds frequently. For example, if people are regularly talking about the ideas of Joe Smith, you might want to check out Joe Smith’s feed to see what he has to offer.

Benefit #10: Updates by Email

What if you don’t want to spend ages on social media? What if social media is only part of your overall business plan and you don’t want to dedicate too much time to it?

Social media integration can definitely help there. Instead of having to log into your various social media platforms to make sure your networks are alive and healthy, you can use email updates instead.

Tools like Nutshell Mail will mail you reports about how your social media networks are performing. If problems arise or if your engagement levels are trending downwards rather than upwards, you’ll be able to quickly spot it. If they’re going up however, you don’t need to spend too much time checking on it. Instead, you just receive a quick email daily.

These are some of the many benefits of integrating your social media. The message is clear: If you run a business and plan on using social media as part of your strategy, you’ll probably want to seriously think about integrating your social media. There are immense benefits and very few drawbacks.

Top 10 Benefits to Integrating Your Social Media from Nicole Munoz

Social Media Automation: The Good & Bad

by Nicole Munoz

This week at Search Marketing Expo West 2013 I am speaking on the topic of “Social Media Automation: The Good & Bad”. Instead of boring the audience with 45 minutes of 150 social media tools, I decided to focus the session more on going into detail on how we use some of the tools and provide a list of the rest here!

Enjoy!

Content Curation Tools

Twitter Tools

Bufferapp – Basic tweets scheduling for heavy users

Listorious – Build up a followers list by targeting top users

Twilert – Email alerts

Tweet Reach – Did you know that tweets travel?

Refollow – Helps manage Twitter relationships

Tweet Level – Twitter buzz measurement tools

Twellow – Twitter profiles categorized by profession or expertise

Manage Flitter – Followers management tools

Tweeted Times – Aggregates news in twitter stream and ranks them by followers popularity

Twitter Counter – Most popular Twitter users

Social Oomph – Oldie, but goldie. Clean up Twitter followers list by deleting inactive users, fake accounts (no picture, no bio, no updates) and a lot more

Plume – Twitter mobile management app for Android

Tweriod – Check when all the fun is on Twitter and make sure to schedule some tweeting time on ‘rush hours’

Contaxio – Manage Twitter followers

Post Post – Twitter search engine

Social Scope, MarketMeSuite – One inbox for all the social media accounts

Nutshell Mail – One summary e-mail for the entire social wilderness’

Amplicate – Love or hate? Find it out

Group Tweet – Teams manage better business accounts

Conversocial – Never miss a comment or a Tweet again

Tweet Archivist – Twitter analytics

Post Acumen – Who said that spying cannot be fun?

Facebook Tools

IFTTT – It’s time to ‘bake’ some social media recipes and share what’s important

GroSocial – Creates Facebook contents in minutes

Punchtab – Loyal fans can now be rewarded

North Social – Apps for managing Facebook pages

Graph Science – Optimize marketing spend on Facebook

Hy.ly – Building and analyzing Facebook ad campaigns

Memelabs – Facebook contests

Google+ Tool

Socialba – Two way sync between Google+ and other social media networks

Pinterest Tools

Rafflecopter – When it’s time for a giveaway, Raflecopter is easy to use and looooves Pinterest

Reachli – Easy way to market visual content

Pingraphy – Pinterest management tool to schedule pins and engage with followers

Repinly – Find everything that is popular on Pinterest

Social Sharing Tools

Hootsuite – Popular dashboard for social media management

Cadence9 – Enterprise social media marketing platform

Net Vibes – Social media dashboard

Dlvr.it – Use it to post RSS-feed social media updates to multiple accounts

Postling – Social media managing tool

Social Flow – Optimizing social media engagement

Engage121 – Social media marketing software

Sendible – Monitor brand popularity across all social media accounts

Argyle Social – Never lose any social media lead again

Wildfire – Now everyone can create custom made Facebook tabs

Check Social Media Popularity With

Stay on top of who’s talking about your business, keywords or favorite topics

Analyze Social Media Reach

Social Media Promotion

Triberr – Blog amplification platform

Social Buzz Club – Social media marketing community

Blog Tools

WordPress – Blogging platform

Disqus – Global comment system

Poll Daddy – Question your audience

Inbox Q – Get content ideas from what people are buzzing on Twitter

Flickr – Incorporate images with creative commons that allow commercial use for visually appealing blog posts

Why Do Small Business Owners Need To Be On Social Media?

by Nicole Munoz

Many small business owners even in 2013 are reluctant to jump on the social media wagon. Many still think that they don’t need social media or that they don’t have time to do social media. The truth is, if you want to be in business and generate income from the internet, you have to be involved with social media. The trend for social media has gone up exponentially and it is only going to grow more in the coming years.

Increase Brand Visibility

The first reason why small business owners need to do social media is to increase brand visibility. If you don’t have a presence on the social media platforms it is like you don’t exist. If you are a major company, it is expected that you will have a social presence. Your fans are searching for you. If they don’t find you, they will find your competitors.

Increase Client Communication

The second reason is to increase client communication. The fastest way to communicate with your customers if you have a service outage or a hot item just came in stock.. is through social media. Your customers are also looking to communicate with you online. They are tired of waiting on hold for hours to talk to someone. They want instant communication. Companies used to have to spend thousands of dollars a year on live chat.. and some still do. But social media makes it easy to quickly communicate with your customers.

Answer Questions

Your customers have questions. And they don’t want to wait for answers. Social media enables you to quickly and easily answer questions. Many times a customer is on the point of purchase but they have that one last question. They don’t want to call and talk to a live person.. that would take too long. So they look for a live chat.. which usually also has a wait time! They then tweet out their question on Twitter.. and get an answer moments later! That is how it is supposed to work!

Increase Client Retention

When your customers have problems they want instant solutions. Many projects have been saved by a few simple touches. When a client signs on for a 12 month contract and the only time they talk to you is when the project renews… that gives your competitors 12 months to come in and build up a relationship with them to take them from you. Don’t let that happen! Use social media as a way to develop long term relationships with your customers. Social media is not another sales channel. It is a customer care and client care channel!

Drive Traffic To Offers and Promotions

Social media if done correctly is a great way to drive traffic to your offers. When setting up promotions, be sure to have specific, measurable goals in mind. Maybe the goal is 100 opt-ins to a webinar. Or 50 new sign-ups to the newsletter. Whatever it is, be clear in your expectation and design campaigns that get results.

If you are not yet on social media, start today! At www.StartRankingNow.com we can help get you setup on social media in just a few days. Or consider joining my Inner Circle class where I walk you through it!

How To Add Social Networks

How To Add/Schedule Messages

Mailchimp

iContact

ConstantContact

Aweber

Twitter Widget

Facebook Widget

Google+

Adding a Pinterest Widget

Posting from Twitter to Facebook

Posting from Google+

LinkedIn

Sharing from YouTube

Pinterest Sharing

Step 1: Begin Registration

Step 2: Setup Payment

Step 3: Choose How You’ll Use Postling

Step 4: Add Your Social Networks

Step 5: Add a Blog

Step 6: Setup Tracking

Step 7: Tracking Screen

Step 8: Publish a Status Update

Step 9: Create a Blog Post

Step 10: Analytics

Set Up Your Account and Add Your Various Profiles

Step 1: Creating Your Account

Step 2: Adding Your First Social Network

Step 3: Adding More Accounts

How to Use Hootsuite: Reading Updates, Posting & Scheduling Updates and More

Step 1: Select Your Social Media Account

Step 2: Viewing Streams

Step 3: Adding a Stream

Step 4: Posting a Message

Benefit #1: Post across Multiple Social Sites at Once

Benefit #2: See Your @Replies, Direct Messages and FB Messages in One Place

Benefit #3: Schedule Posts

Benefit #4: Integrate Blogging and Email Marketing

Benefit #5: Manage Social Media as a Team

Benefit #6: Competitive Research & Feed Management

Benefit #7: Unique Analytics and Reporting Capabilities

Benefit #8: Share Relevant News and Breakthroughs Quickly

Benefit #9: Discover New People to Follow

Benefit #10: Updates by Email

Content Curation Tools

Twitter Tools

Facebook Tools

Google+ Tool

Pinterest Tools

Social Sharing Tools

Check Social Media Popularity With

Stay on top of who’s talking about your business, keywords or favorite topics

Analyze Social Media Reach

Social Media Promotion

Blog Tools

When I logged in to Facebook tonight I saw a really cool new feature! Check it out!

All in all pretty cool and VERY easy to use! Enjoy your gift Michelle!