Archives : Social Media

Timing Twitter | Scheduling Tweets Ahead of Time

If you are in charge of managing a business Twitter account, you know how time consuming the service can be. Professionals suggested that you tweet several times a day, but every time you log into Twitter, you end up spending time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Frankly, you don’t have the time to stare at Twitter all day. The minutes that you spend on the site are taking away from other important projects, and even though it’s beneficial—it isn’t necessary.

Scheduling Twitter updates is an important aspect of social media marketing. If you don’t have a grasp on how to do it—or a service to help you, you are losing valuable time. We’ve listed a few of the basics below, to help you get started with scheduling Twitter.

Finding a Twitter Scheduler

If you don’t have a Twitter scheduler in use already, than it’s time to start looking into the different options available. There are several great services, and we’ve listed a couple of our favorites here:

Twuffer

This is the tweet scheduling service that we use, because you can simply log in with your Twitter account, and you’re ready to schedule. You don’t have to remember another password! It’s as simple as it gets, though, so you won’t have any other feature but the scheduling.

Hootsuite

This is probably the most popular system for scheduling Twitter updates. It comes with a lot of other features other than scheduling though, so if you’re looking just to schedule, this service might overwhelm you. You can also monitor your other social networks on Hootsuite—so it isn’t strictly Twitter.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck has actually been acquired by Twitter. It’s a program that you can download right to your desktop, program tweets, look at mentions and messages, and monitor other social media platforms, as well.

LaterBro

This service is a lot like Twuffer, but you can also use it for Facebook. We don’t recommend using a scheduling service for Facebook, but it’s an option you have with this website. You can log in straight through your Twitter profile—no extra password to remember—but it’s not the service we chose, because it isn’t as pleasant to look at as Twuffer is. If you’re scheduling tweets as much as we do, you need a site that’s easy on the eyes.

Scheduling Twitter Updates | Putting Together a Twitter Schedule

Once you’re set up with a Twitter scheduler, you’re going to want to figure out a plan:

1. How many times will you tweet a day?
2. How many links, mentions and hashtags?
3. What time of day will you schedule Twitter updates for?
4. How often will you load tweets into your Twitter scheduler?

You can save a lot of time by scheduling twitter updates, and it’s something we suggest for all of our clients. However, sometimes it’s still too overwhelming to put together a Twitter schedule and keep your business Twitter account updated. If you want to save some time and stress, give us a call about our Twitter monitoring services.

Free Marketing For Businesses Through Foursquare

Social Media has advanced a lot during the past ten years, but never so much as when location-based reviews entered the scene—Yelp in 2004, and Foursquare more recently in 2009. In this blog post, we highlight Foursquare’s new platform that is revolutionizing the way businesses use location-based advertising.

On Foursquare, users suggest tips. Instead of offering a review of time spent at a location, something that Yelp provides, customers can offer 200 character tips about what new patrons should try out. It’s all about community on Foursquare, and that’s the draw of the website.

Because Foursquare is a location-based mobile platform, the most important thing that a business owner can do is get their clientele to “check-in” when they walk into the shop. This is free advertising for businesses, because “checking-in” often automatically posts to the consumers’ Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare pages.

Since the “check-in” is the ultimate goal for businesses, you need to offer your customers incentives: as a business owner, you know that patrons won’t stop by unless they have a reason. The new Foursquare platform gives them a reason. To better understand how it can, we offer this step-by-step guide for your business.

1. Sign Up

If you aren’t on Foursquare yet, you will need an account in order to continue.

2. Claim Your Venue

We’ll assume you already have a presence on Foursquare, because most businesses do without knowing it. Find your business on the site, and click “Claim Here” in the upper right hand corner. You will have to verify your business through a phone call.

3. Choose a “Special”

This is how you will get your check-ins. On the Foursquare homepage, in the bottom right hand corner, you’ll see a button that says “merchants.” The second tab is where you can select a “special” to pull in your customers. Passersby will notice the “special” that you’re offering, and stop in to see.

Next, think about your marketing strategy. If you’re going for new customers, you’ll definitely want to use the Newbie Special. Want to keep them coming back? The Check-in Special would be a good choice. The Mayor Special is a fun one, because it not only rewards your most loyal customers, but it creates competition for your other customers to try to gain Mayor status! Be sure to read through all the specials available to pick the perfect one.

4. Tell Your Employees

Make sure that your employees know about the new specials as you add them. You have the option of placing a code into the special, which will let your employees track it correctly.

5. Promote!

Let people know about your new Foursquare specials! Customers will see them if they’re near your shop, but what if they’re at home, browsing Facebook? Let your loyal patrons know that you’ve got something special for Foursquare users through your Facebook, Twitter and any other online marketing vehicle you use.

Another suggestion is to market your Foursquare presence inside your shop. Foursquare sends business owners stickers to put on doors or cash registers, but you can also hang up a sign in your window or even reserve a special seat for the Mayor, as well! The possibilities on how to promote your business within the Foursquare community are endless.

Don’t miss this new opportunity for free online marketing and increased sales—claim your business on Foursquare today!

Five Top Social Media Campaigns to Learn From

1. Gap

The Campaign: Gap teamed up with popular group-buying site, Groupon, to offer a nation-wide deal: $50 worth of apparel for just $25. By the end of the day, 441,000 groupons were sold bringing in a little more than $11 million.

What Worked: This was Groupon’s first nation-wide deal with a major brand. For Gap, the deal brought in a ton of cash and, hopefully, new customers.

What Flopped: Some people commented that the Groupon deal was a bust because Gap doesn’t “need” more word of mouth. He saw it in terms of revenue loss rather than customer gain.

2. Toy Story 3

The Campaign: Pixar and Disney let out a barrage of videos, tie-ins, and ads to promote Toy Story 3. Aside from traditional banner ads and billboards, Disney created viral videos including fake, vintage-style ads featuring the new characters, an iAd featured on the IPhone 4, and a Facebook page complete with a built-in ticket-buying app.

What Worked: The video successfully played on the nostalgia of their entire demographic. Kids could appreciate the fake toy commercials while their parents could reminisce about their own childhood toys; a sentiment entirely in line with the Toy Story brand. The Facebook app was connected to news streams such that you could share when you bought tickets to the movie.

What Flopped: The social media campaign was pretty solid on most counts. The danger of associating with major brands (like the iAd) is that your product can appear too polished or too corporate. It all comes down to knowing your product and knowing your brand. In this case, Disney-Pixar hit a home run.

3. AOL

The Campaign: AOL set out to hire an ambassador for its social aggregation site Lifestream. More than just a mascot, the ambassador position was known as “the best job ever” with bonuses like a cushy apartment and VIP access to concerts and events across the country. The hiring process was a mix of traditional “resume and interview” applications and an extensive social media voting process headed up by the hopeful employees. The eventual ambassador was asked to reach out to their fans with regular updates.

What Worked: AOL is trying to reboot as a “cool” brand. Rather than spend a fortune on commercials with hip people using the product, AOL offered a service that its desired demographic would actually want; namely, a sweet job. Having the position decided by fan vote helped organically spread the word and create a supportive community that was invested in their product.

What Flopped: One let down was the inevitable decrease in hype. The buzz around AOL’s new dream job died down once the spot was filled. No amount of celebrity spottings or updates from the winning ambassador could compete with the initial creativity of the campaign. Planned follow-up campaigns are also suffering from this.

4. Starbucks

The Campaign: Starbucks has been busy with a bunch of successful social media campaigns across a range of networks. The coffee giant offered mayorship deals on foursquare, free goodies for Tax Day via Twitter’s then-new promoted Tweets, and a free pastry day promoted through Twitter and Facebook.

What Worked: If you’re going to offer discounts, make sure they’re on products you want to feature. Rather than setting up blanket deals, Starbucks focused on areas where they wanted to improve sales. Free pastry day got publicity for their non-coffee offerings, the mayor deals often provide discounts on new products, tax day’s free coffee promoted recycling — part of the brand’s greener image. Jumping on Twitter’s promoted tweets early also garnered Starbucks a lot of publicity in the tech and social media worlds — a demographic that generally has money to spend on premium coffee. Essentially, if a news organization wanted to cover promoted tweets as they launched, Starbucks was a major go-to example.

What Flopped: Starbucks is good at promoting things — its social media campaigns seem less concerned, however, with building a vibrant community. Starbucks already has near-religious levels of customer loyalty, so this may be a smart resource allocation rather than oversight.

5. Mountain Dew

The Campaign: When Mountain Dew wanted to create a new flavor, they did it the social media way. DEWmocracy was a multi-part, long-term project aimed at creating a new soda flavor through fan voting. The campaign started by narrowing down a series of fan-made flavors with home-tasting packs. The three were chosen through a country-wide tour complete with voting and video booths. Mountain Dew then created “Flavor Nations” composed of fans, experts, and professional ad agencies. Each flavor nation was responsible for the packaging, graphics, and social marketing of their flavor including viral videos, promotion on Twitter, and professional commercials. The winner was chosen by mass vote.

What Worked: Like AOL, Mountain Dew gained a ton of exposure and loyalty by mobilizing its customers to help grow the brand. The largely grassroots movement built natural buzz around the new flavors with a huge net of social media exposure. Mountain Dew was also able to keep the projects on-brand. Despite having disparate communities working on the flavor nations, the ad agencies and experts helped guide the discussion and create a polished finished product while allowing fans to have a real say on the company’s marketing direction.

What Flopped: The nature of the campaign means that two of the flavors won’t get made. Assuming the voting was close; this means Mountain Dew could alienate a relatively large portion of its fans who worked on the losing, discontinued flavors. This also assumes that Mountain Dew’s fans took the campaign to heart and would be more frustrated at losing the competition rather than excited to be shaping their brand’s future.

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How Yelp Can Help Your Business Grow

Yelp’s purpose is “to connect people with great local businesses.” It was founded in 2004 and as of August 2010, had over 12 million reviews on their site. Around 38 million people visit Yelp in any given 30 days.

Yelp is basically a business review site, a search engine for local businesses and a social network combined into one. Yelp users can rate, provide pictures, write reviews and update information on local businesses.

So that’s the user side of it, what about the business? How would a business profit from using Yelp?

The answer is simple: find out what people think about you. Whether your business is a coffee shop, a hair salon, a fine dining establishment or a dog groomers, Yelp allows users to rate your business and write reviews about what they thought about their experience.

But what can you do to promote your business through Yelp?

Another thing that people do on Yelp is search for services they require, based on customer reviews. They might see your company on Yelp, but they won’t necessarily want to go there unless they see good ratings and reviews.

We suggest getting reviews in the easiest way possible: asking for them. Now, we certainly don’t mean bribing (“Give us a good review on Yelp and we’ll give you a free coffee next time you stop in!”), but rather by shooting out an email to past customers, asking them to tell you what they think… on Yelp.

Every time you go to write a review on Yelp, they’ll tell you the same thing: “Please don’t review this business if you received a freebie for writing this review, or if you’re connected in any way to the owner or employees.” And they mean it. Their tagline says it all: “Real people. Real reviews.”

Don’t give (or give bribes for) fake reviews, no matter how much you need them! A past customer is fine to ask reviews from, but don’t ask your family or employees to review your business.

Here’s what you need to do to get started on Yelp:

1. If you don’t have an account, start one. Review other businesses, establish a following, find people you know and befriend people like you.
2. Claim your business. Head over to https://biz.yelp.com/signup/ and see if your business is already on Yelp. If it is, great! If it isn’t, you’ve got a clean slate to start with.
3. Get all the information you can onto Yelp. Don’t be too wordy, but make sure you include all that your business encompasses.
4. Shoot out that email! Tell your past customers that you’re now on Yelp and that you’d love to hear what they thought of you!

So that’s Yelp in summary, but the site certainly has a lot more to it than what we’ve mentioned here, so we suggest taking some time to get to know the site and what it’s all about!

5 Important Things to Note about Social Media Marketing

Here are a few things you should keep in mind when using internet social media marketing to promote your business.

• Integrate Social Media into your Broader Marketing Strategies:
  Like any marketing campaign, your social media presence needs a strategy, and this strategy cannot work in isolation of your broader marketing strategy. The lifeblood of any successful social media campaign is internal collaboration, where social media objectives and techniques must be integrated into a broader marketing plan.

• Go Global, Stay Local:
  The internet has global reach and can send your brand across the oceans with very few additional costs. However, to attract and more importantly, engage your target audience in discussions, you need to identify their interests, issues and lifestyles. This requires you to have a local perspective.

• Build Your Brand Through Relationship Building:
  First you need to attract readers, friends and followers by creating a buzz around your product or company. People are not interested in being advertised to, so in order to grab their attention, you could initiate discussion around current trends and hot topics. Alternatively, organize competitions, provide humor and offer freebies. Once you have built a fan base, keep them involved – respond to people promptly and regularly; provide helpful information; and continue discussions.

• Use Social Media for Customer Service:
  Good customer service can significantly aid marketing. Follow up with customers, even if there are no complaints. Communicate new offers, schemes and deals to them. Social networking sites can be used to form a client community that can be used to share ideas and educational materials.

• Use Social Media to Identify Gaps:
  A lot of information about your market and competition is available through social media sites. Internet social media marketing should focus on analyzing the information and identifying where your competitors fall short and you can immediately start filling the gap.

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The Facebook Rise and MySpace Demise

Facebook… over 550 million users; over 70 different translations; a movie was born out of its existence; a Dummies Handbook has been written for it; and one out of every dozen people on the planet have a Facebook account.

We don’t need to tell you what Facebook is; everyone has at least heard of it, and as you can tell above, a large portion of the population are frequent users. Alexa ranks Facebook as the number two top site on the web, second only to Google.

But do you remember a time before Facebook? Before this blue site infiltrated every aspect of our lives? There was something else, think hard and you might remember… MySpace.

In this blog post, we’d like to compare and contrast the workings of Facebook and MySpace. Why such a quick growth? Why such a quick fall? And why does my computer recognize “Facebook” as a word, and not “MySpace”?

Things to think about…

• MySpace was launched in January of 2004, by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, ages 37 and 33.
• Facebook was launched in February of 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and three friends, none of them over the age of 23.

• MySpace began with two men who had worked in internet marketing and social media all their lives.
• Facebook began with four guys in a dorm room.

• MySpace founders launched it as a social networking site, and always planned for it to go global. It started out locally though, in Southern California, with local musicians and actors. It reached one million members in a month, near the time that Facebook was first launched.
• Facebook’s founders originally intended it to be a Harvard community website, but by March it had expanded to include Stanford, Columbia and Yale University. It reached one million uisers by December of 2004, ten months after it’s launch.

• It took MySpace a little over three years to reach 150 million members.
• It took Facebook a little less than five years to reach 150 million members.

At this point in the story, it looks like MySpace is coming out ahead. It certainly got moving faster, led by two men who were internet savvy, but Facebook was the tortoise… “Slow and steady wins the race.”

We know for a fact that Facebook is more popular now, but MySpace definitely had the lead in the beginning. So what contributed to its downfall? An article in the New York Times referenced the site’s basic framework as ‘just unattractive’. Because it was bought out by a big company, the ads and overall look of the site became unappealing. Facebook, on the other hand, features advertisements that are relevant to each individual user, based on keywords used most often by each person, as well as thei claimed interests and hobbies.

Another problem is that MySpace focused on the money, while Facebook has been more attentive toward growth. DeWolfe talks about his focus, saying “The paradox in business, especially at a public company, is, when do you focus on growth, and when do you focus on money? We focused on money and Facebook focused on growing the user base and user experience.” It’s working out better for Facebook, we think.

Speeding up to the present, what has happened lately on both fronts?

• Near the end of 2010, MySpace changed their logo to “My___,” promoting their site as a way to now  “Connect with entertainment,” rather than a social network in competition with Facebook.
• Near the end of 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was named the Times’ 2010 Person of the Year, for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them…”

• Mid January 2011, MySpace announced that they would be laying off 47% of their global workforce, impacting “about 500 employees.”
• Mid January 2011, Facebook paid the American Farm Bureau $8.5 million for the domain name FB.com, which simply redirects to facebook.com.

The kicker is this: you can now log on to MySpace through your Facebook account. If that isn’t the ultimate surrender on MySpace’s part, we’re not sure what is.

But what happens now? Is Facebook going to suffer the same death as MySpace? Will Mark Zuckerberg sell out to some big corporation? Only time will tell if Facebook will follow in the footsteps of MySpace and become just another “social networking site of the past,” making way for some other up-and-coming site to follow in its path.

Choosing the Right Business Name – from an Internet Marketing Perspective

What’s in a name?  Frankly, a LOT.  Any marketing and branding agency can go through the important details of naming a new business or one that is renaming from a brand perspective.  It’s fascinating how business naming research is performed, tested and consumer analysis is created – in fact I totally respect it.  However (and this is important), it is essential that this research is embodied from an Internet Marketing perspective.

Here’s how to protect yourself from online blindness when naming your business:

#1 – Make sure the domain name is available or easy to acquire ahead of time.  Domain names, i.e. www.yourbusiness.com are the life force of branding online.  Your domain availability should include these principles:

1. You can “see it, spell it.”  In other words, it’s simple enough to resonate without a lot of possibility for misspellings.
2. Determine that most or all extensions are available.  Everyone thinks of the ‘.com’ but it’s important to grab the important extensions (.net, .org, .us, etc.).  If you’re a larger organization – grab as many as you can.  Brand hijacking – by your competition buying those domains is not a pleasant situation to find yourself in.
3. Misspellings are available.  If there is a possibility of misspelling your domain name, grab all the necessary misspellings too.  A random example would be:  www.smithswarehouse.com – be sure to grab www.smithwarehouse.com and www.smithswearhouse.com.
4. Moderate length.  We get the question, “Is my domain too long?” quite a bit actually.  With domain names at a premium these days, it’s more important to “see it, spell it” than it is to keep it short.  Moderate length of the domain is okay as long as it’s not overwhelming.
5. Domain names (i.e. business names) with search specific keywords have a double advantage.  Although sometimes this is not practical, it is helpful.

#2 – Evaluate the competitive landscape of your business name online.  If it’s competitive, be prepared to have the resources necessary (time and money) to effectively launch an SEO campaign early.  Here are some basic things to check when evaluating the competitiveness of your keyword phrases:

1. Review the total number of Google results for your prospective business name.  (As a very general rule of thumb – If it’s less than a total 250,000 results, and incorporate SEO from the beginning, you’ll be golden).  Any words results over 1 Million – plan ahead for potentially robust ongoing SEO resources.
2. Review PPC bids for your phrase, amount of PPC ads.  You can use Google’s AdWords tool to evaluate the average bid amount for your business name.  Anywhere over $1.00 per click mark may get expensive and is an indicator for the need of a moderately or severely competitive SEO marketplace.
3. Evaluate the number of links/number of pages indexed of top results for your keyword phrases using tools such as the: Bruce Clay Toolbar, SEO Book , Yahoo Site Explorer.  Plan on acquiring the same amount of links and pages of content indexed as the other top 10 listings.  If this will take significant effort, that may be an indicator for a competitive marketplace.
4. Evaluate whether you business name of choice has associations outside of your category.  For example, a recent organization named their business the same name as a popular TV show – their rankings were buried at onset outside of local specific searches.

#3 – Check to see if your Social Media profiles are available.  Social media is essential for business marketing in most all cases, so double check to see if your profiles/usernames are available.  The big three would be Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – but that’s just a start.  Social media profiles, such as:  www.facebook.com/smartsolutions or www.twitter.com/smartsolutions are just as powerful, and just as limited, as domain names.  Check profiles using www.knowem.com.

As you can see, there are many factors to determining a valid, compelling business name at the onset.  Along with your branding, marketing research efforts – don’t shoot yourself in the foot before you get out of the gate by not reviewing the online marketplace of your potential business name F-I-R-S-T.

We welcome comments on example stories – please post!

By: Wendy Roe

Facebook Land Grab – A Guide to Your Facebook Username

Okay, it’s not exactly a land grab but, hear me out. Local business is gaining ground on the Internet everyday through sites that provide ways for local businesses to get worldwide recognition online. Today, let’s focus on what a local business can do on Facebook. You can “grab” http://www.facebook.com/businessname as a unique pointer to your business Facebook Page.

On June 13^th, 2009 Facebook created “usernames”. This is where a Facebook user can select a username that serves as a “web address” for their Facebook profile. For example, you can go directly to my Facebook page by clicking this URL http://www.facebook.com/knowlesmark.

Facebook “Pages” are essentially similar to personal profiles only they are for businesses, bands, and real celebrities to share information and to gather and communicate with their “fans”. Today, a business can claim a username for their Facebook Page and have a unique “web address” in Facebook for their business. For example, you can find Smart Solutions at http://www.facebook.com/smartsolutions.

For all the Smart Solutions out there, there is only one of these available at Facebook and your business name may be waiting for you to grab it. To help prevent squatting, you need to be legitimate and the page must have 25 fans; after that the Facebook username (URL) becomes available for you to claim. That makes sense to me.

How do set your business up with a Facebook Page and a URL?

1) Check to make sure your business name is available (http://www.facebook.com/username)

2) If it is, create a page for your business (http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php)

3) Gather 25 fans (Ask your family, friends, customers, to “Become a Fan” of your business)

4) Claim your username (or URL) (http://www.facebook.com/username)

That’s it. Your business can now be found at http://www.facebook.com/businessname. You can use this URL in your marketing materials, business cards, emails, etc. Your customers and prospective customers can find your business in Facebook with a single click.

There are currently over 300 million active Facebook users and over one million Facebook developers creating new ways for people to interact. There is probably one Facebook username (URL) that is fits best for your business and once it’s gone, you will be settling for second best. You have all seen the domain names like www.business-namenw.com with a hyphen in the middle, and awkward initials added to a URL. These are businesses that were a little late to the domain game and had to settle for their second favorite way to be found online.  Ask me sometime how Smart Solutions ended up with http://www.smartz.com as our domain name and you’ll have one more reason to claim your Facebook username today.

Claiming your business username in Facebook is fairly easy to do yours may be waiting for you but, not forever. Can you rally 25 fans?

By: Mark Knowles

Social Media for Small Business – May SmartGroup Recap

Twitter Background Design Concepts

So, you’re a business and have taken the leap to setup Twitter account, congratulations! One element that often gets overlooked when using Twitter for business is creating a custom background image that speaks to your business objectives.  (See our Smart Solutions Twitter Background…heck, follow us as well!)  If you have questions on the information below or would like us to create a Twitter background for you, just give us a call, we’d be happy to assist!

Consistent with your main marketing brand and messages, your Twitter background should include:

1) Your logo/brand mark (typically set vertically)
2) Your tagline/brand message
3) Main contact information
4) Call to Action
5) Visual Image(s) that connect to your brand and are appealing

Image Considerations:
1) The national standard screen resolution is still 1024 x 768 – develop your image to meet that requirement and beyond (we recommend 1600 x 1200 pixels)
2) For a 1024 x 768 resolution, you have approximately 120 pixels on the left to work with your message (otherwise Twitter window will overlay on top).
3) For your avatar, use a 73 x 73 pixel image
4) Twitter limits background image size to 800k (although for speed, you want to stay away from the upper end of that)

How to implement a Twitter Background

A Reputable Twitter Example….