We’ve talked a lot about Twitter in the SMEketing Marketing Blog, but that’s just because we love it so much and we know what benefits it can bring to a small business.
So we’ve decided to put down the top 20 business benefits we think Twitter can have on a business (in no particular order):
Engage and converse with your target audience
Create brand awareness
Promote of any new offers, services, products etc
Keep up to date with industry news and developments
Promote your blog content
Find prospects – use the search function and look for people mentioning requirements for services/products you supply
Customer services – keep customers updates with any issues etc
Event management – keep delegates up to date and help them network online
Keep up to date with what your competitors are up to
Market research
Give your company a more personal feel
Online reputation management – find out what people are saying about you and react immediately
A method of gaining feedback
SEO boost/increased online footprint
Q&A tool – have a question? Your Twitter network will have the answers
HR resource – find new employees quickly and cheaply
Internal communication
Help find new suppliers and partners
Promote images via TwitPic and other Twitter based image viewers
Use Twitpolls to help make decisions, undertake research etc
There are so many other great business uses of Twitter – if you can think of anymore add them to the comments below!
Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking
Some LinkedIn statistics (as of April 2010):
More than 65 million registered users
Covers more than 200 countries and territories worldwide
On average 36.5M people visit LinkedIn.com every month
51% male, 49% female
Average age – 35-49
47% college educated, 27% university and above
So how can you use the tools LinkedIn offer to promote your business, your products and services and any offers or events?
Members only groups can be created to provide your customers with a exclusive opportunity to network with other customers
For customers with a particular product or service interest, focused sub-groups can be set-up
You and your customers can upload photos, videos, create online polls, take part in forums, and receive email updates
Groups can be used to communicate news and start online discussion and debate
LinkedIn can also be used to promote events very effectively
Like most free social networking sites, you will get out what you put in. It can be resource intensive in terms of time, but for small businesses on a budget it can be an effective way of promotion.
If you’re interested in using LinkedIn or any other type of social media to promote your business, get in touch. We can help set you up with social media accounts, and can give you training and guidance on making the most of them. Alternatively we can completely manage all your social accounts for you!
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
Some Twitter statistics (from April 2010)
Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
So how can you use Twitter to promote your event?
Depending on the type of event you are holding, choose to either use your main corporate Twitter account, or create a new account – purely focused on just this event (which might be the best choice if you have an event which is reoccuring)
Create a Twitter hashtag unique to each event and use this in each tweet
Encourage delegates to update their own Twitter feeds with tweets about the event using this hashtag
This hashtag measn that anybody at your event, or interested in your event can instantaneously see what you, your delegates and other interested parties are doing and saying
Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one delegates
Use Twitter as a way to inform event participants of the latest event updates/changes
Include tweets containing links to new information, advice, tools and resources on your website
Use Twitter to instantly communicate important messages and ‘calls to action’ to their delegate/customer base
Delegates can subscribe to your Twitter feed or your hashtag search result via mobile or RSS for instant notification
Twitter’s social nature, combined with the ability to create instant updates and announcements makes it a perfect took to keep delegates up to date with the latest event news. Used wisely it can have a real impact on the success of your events.
May is here – the sun has been shining throughout April and it has put us here at SMEketing in a wonderful mood. So because we love the sunshine and because we enjoy helping small businesses succeed in social media, we are launching our Facebook/Twitter offer again.
We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!
Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in May 2010.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now; click on the PayPal logo below:
For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:
Here are two fantastic videos that present some incredible statistics about social media and the Internet in general:
Social Media Revolution
Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
JESS3 – The State of The Internet
JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010
1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
81% of Emails were Spam
126 Million Blogs on the Internet
27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)
If you’re using Twitter you will hopefully be starting to see the benefits. All businesses, large and small can benefit from using Twitter. Broadly speaking, the main benefits from using Twitter for business are:
Promotion
Market research
Networking
Lead generation
Education
So if we’re focusing on the first point of ‘Promotion’, we need to look at one of the key differentiators between you and your competitors – your Twittter background. When people are deciding who they want to follow, they only really have a few things they can use to help them decide – the content of your tweets, your bio and contact details and your wallpaper. If you’re using one of the generic Twitter backgrounds, you’re missing out on a trick! Your background is free advertising space, so use it well.
One of the best ways of using this space is to customise it using an image editor (such as Photoshop). Depending on your business and industry, you could create a radical, jazzy Twitter background, or maybe one with a more corporate, professional feel.
So what key information should you add to your Twitter background?
Synopsis (of your company, your role in the company, your interests – just who you are)
Company logo
Contact details
Email
Telephone
Website
Any other social media sites that are relevant – Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn etc
Other extras you could include are:
Photo of yourself
Interesting details – such as your interests, passions
Contact address
Special offers (you could update these on a regular basis)
Once you’ve got the content you want, you then have to decide on the style of background. Do you want it be be vibrant and colourful, match your corporate colours, be one plain block of colour… the options are really endless.
If you’d like us to create a customised Twitter background for your Twitter account, get in touch today on info@SMEketing.com. With prices starting from £40, there’s bound to be an affordable option for you and your business.
Have you already got a customised Twitter background that you love? Let us know in the comments by leaving your @ Twitter details, and remember to follow SMEketing on @SMEketing.
Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.
If you want to take the step into video, you might be unsure as to what you can create and how you should promote it. This is where we come in! Read on..,
There are many topics that you can create videos on:
How to guides
Demonstrations of your products
Interviews with staff
Interviews with customers
Interviews with leading industry members
Showcasing your office
A summary showing a recent event you attended/hosted
Advice on industry related topics
The list is really as endless as your imagination. Depending on your industry, your videos can be very lighthearted in their approach, or may have to be more serious. However, there really isn’t any company out there who wouldn’t benefit from promoting themselves and their website with videos.
So what are the basics of promoting and making the most of your video? This post doesn’t go into too much detail about the do’s and don’ts of shooting your videos and the content you produce, but focuses on what you should do with your videos once they’re ready to be let loose!
Ideally the video should be hosted on the main website and on other video sites such as YouTube; there are benefits to both, but in order to get full earch engine optimisation (SEO) credit, it must really be on the main site as a stand-alone video.
Making the Video
Make sure that there is a logo/branding on it all the way through so people can’t reuse it without passing on credit to you
Try and keep video length to under five minutes
Make sure there is a strong call to action at the end along with your contact details
Try and make the video thumbnail attractive to convince people to watch
Hosting the Video
Use keywords in the filename of the video, and any titles and descriptions and the URL of the page it sits on
Ideally all videos should sit under one URL on the main site – www.url.com/videos/
Each video should have it’s own URL – www.url.com/videos/video-1
Optimise the page on the website that is hosting/linking to the site, i.e. good title, meta description, good copy (paragraph or two explaining what the video is), good headers, use of bold text etc
If the video is going to be hosted on the main website create video sitemap and submit it to video and content engines. This is quite technical (there isn’t really an easy way of doing this, so someone techie may have to do it. See Google’s advice page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472&ctx=sibling
Create a transcript
This can be used as a blog post, which can be linked to the video
This can also be uploaded on YouTube (under the ‘Captions’ section)
Uploading the Video
When uploading to video sites, make sure the titles, descriptions, tags are keyword rich
Put the main URL at the beginning of the description, i.e. “www.url.co.uk/videos/video-1: This video looks at the produc X. How does it work and how can it help you?”
List of video sites you may want to upload to:
Download.com and CNET TV – www.cnettv.com
Youtube - www.youtube.com
MetaCafe – www.metacafe.com
Revver – www.revver.com
MSN Live Video Search– http://video.msn.com/video.aspx.
BlipTV – www.blip.tv
When you upload to BlipTV, your videos can be syndicated to accounts you have on other Web sites such as blogs, iTunes , Yahoo Video, AOL Video, MySpace, FaceBook, and Feedburner.
Veoh – www.veoh.com
When you submit to Veoh, they syndicate your video to youtube, myspace, and google video.
AOL Video – www. http://video.aol.com/
Myspace Video -http://vids.myspace.com/
Break– www.break.com
DivX’s Stage 6 – http://stage6.divx.com/
Daily Motion – www.dailymotion.com
Vimeo– www.vimeo.com
Sevelload – en.sevenload.com
TubeMogul is a free toolto submit videos to multiple video sharing sites in one go. Currently it works with Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, Blip, and BrightCove
Promoting the Video
Try and make some links to the video – blog post, article, press releases pointing to the source
Promote the video with the standard social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon etc) to build links
You can also visit relevant forums and mention it when appropriate
Tweet about it
Upload to your Facebook business page
Submit the video itself to video engines:
http://www.blinkx.com/
http://en.fooooo.com/
http://video.search.yahoo.com/
http://uk.truveo.com/
http://www.videosurf.com/
http://video.filestube.com/
http://clipta.com/
http://www.pixsy.com/
http://video.aol.com/
If you want any further advice or assistance with your promotional videos, please give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com
If you would like to take advantage of this offer, then get in touch straight away! This offer expires on Friday and once gone, the price will go back up!
If you’re interested in getting stuck in with social media, but aren’t sure how to go about doing it, then this is the offer for you. We’ll not only set you up with a Facebook Business Page and a Twitter account, but we’ll tell you exactly how to manage them and how to use them to boost your business.
So what does the offer include?
What your Facebook Business Page will contain:
We will create your page for you
Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
What your Twitter account will include:
A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
Create up to five Twitter lists for you
A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now!
We all hate January – it’s cold (especially this January! Brrr!!), the festive season is all over and the fun and frolics of Christmas and New Year are now firmly set as a few extra inches round our waistlines. So for this reason, SMEketing have decided to launch a new offer – limited to just January 2010, and the first 10 people that apply!
We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!
What your Twitter account will include:
A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
Create up to five Twitter lists for you
A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively
What your Facebook Business Page will contain:
We will create your page for you
Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in January 2010. If you’ve missed out on this offer, please get in touch anyway and we can arrange to create a Facebook Business page or Twitter account for you at our usual rate.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now!
For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:
Google Alerts are brilliant for keeping up to date with the various things – your business, competitors, keyphrases etc. Basically you tell Google that on a daily, weekly or ‘as it happens’ basis, they will send you a list of all the new entries for a particular term. So for example you can create one (all of ours are set to ‘weekly’ otherwise you get inundated with alerts!), for “SMEketing” and it will send you a list of links of where the word “SMEketing” has cropped up online that week.
They’re also a great way of keeping an eye on your competitors, as it shows information that you might not normally be able to find. Since they inform you of when they’re name has popped up online, you can get access to a host of information that isn’t kept on their website; for example, in the past I’ve found online price lists and competitor strategies which is always a good thing to find!
We also create them Google Alerts for keyphrases, such as ’small business marketing’ so that we get a long list of new articles and other things that contain that phrase – then if there are any good ones in there, we tweet about them! It just makes it a bit easier to do research as it’s all delivered to your inbox and it’s a useful way of providing content to your Twitter community.
It’s very easy to set up – just go to ‘Google Alerts’ and enter your email and the alerts you want. I recommend putting any phrases into quotes, otherwise you’ll get a mismatch of alerts. Also set it to ‘Comprehensive’, which means you’ll get information on everything on the web (blogs, videos, articles etc), rather than just web articles and copy.
If you’ve got any questions about creating Google Alerts, give us an email - we’re more than happy to help!
Engage and converse with your target audience
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.
Our January offer of a 
We all hate January – it’s cold (especially this January! Brrr!!), the festive season is all over and the fun and frolics of Christmas and New Year are now firmly set as a few extra inches round our waistlines. So for this reason, SMEketing have decided to launch a new offer – limited to just January 2010, and the first 10 people that apply!
