Who is the best person to manage your day-to-day social media content? Many small businesses turn the responsibility over to someone on the team who is young and hip, roughly between the ages of 18 to 25, also known as the Millennial or Generation Y crowd. This demographic grew up with technology and social media integrated into their lives. They take to technology and all things on the Internet quickly, so why not hand over your business’s social media content to them, right? Here’s why you may want to rethink that strategy.

Social media may be fun, but it’s serious business.

Yes, social media is conversational in tone, giving it a lighter air of fun. However, it is serious business. It’s a touch point of your brand. The content you post, the tone of your conversation, the frequency in which you engage your audience, all say something about who you are as a company or organization. You need someone who is organized and understands how you want your brand conveyed. Say the wrong thing on the internet and suddenly it goes viral. Don’t follow up with a customer who posts a comment and they feel left out. You need someone who has the maturity to understand that although social media content and interaction may be fun, it is all business.

Think of it this way, if you have a dream prospect that you want to land as a customer, and you have the chance to connect with them, whom would you want as your spokesperson? What would you want them to say about your business and its benefits? You need to look at your social media engagement in the same way. If you would want your best salesperson to be your spokesperson, you probably don’t have the luxury of giving them the responsibility of managing your social media profiles. Nor should you. But you need to view your social media content and strategies in the same way because if you do it right, you will be building relationships with ideal prospects and customers, and not just a random group of people.

Don’t forget to train them.

Once you’ve selected the right people to manage your social media content, you need to train them. While many Millennials learn their social media skills organically through their own personal use, you must have a strategy to succeed. Part of your strategy needs to include training. Social media, your market, and your business evolve. You can’t hope that someone young, who may lack business experience, will take the initiative to further their training. Here are three primary areas you need to consider.

1. Train them on the benefits, the personality, and the culture of your organization.

2. Teach them about your goals with social media and how you want certain situations handled. What rules would you like them to follow regarding content, tone, language, frequency of engagement? If a customer has an issue and addresses it in public on your Facebook wall, how should your social media person respond? If one of your followers sends a direct message via Twitter that they are interested in learning more about your products or services or they are ready to buy, who should your person direct them to?

3. Give your marketing person the opportunity to stay educated about the evolutions of social media. Not all social media platforms are the same. What works on one platform, may not work on another. For example, how you engage your audience on LinkedIn is very different than the culture on Pinterest. Hire a social media marketing company to perform training with your staff.

If you don’t have a qualified social media person in-house, you can outsource it. However, if you do, don’t assume that you can simply turn the task over to a social media firm without any interaction on your part. While a talented firm will know why social media makes a difference for your business and the best practices to accomplish your goals, they still need to get insight from you as to the top two items above. As a matter of fact, if you are interviewing companies and they don’t ask you questions about similar questions to those above, run the other way.

For more information about developing a social media program that produces results, contact me at SmallBizMedia.tv.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

If you’ve paid any attention to the changes within the marketing world, especially online, you’ve seen ongoing stories of new and emerging social media networks and new and updated search engine algorithms. How are you adjusting your marketing strategies and tactics to take advantage of these changes?

Google Updates

Google continues to update its algorithms, Panda and Penguin. The Panda algorithm primarily focuses on filtering low quality content, while its cousin the Penguin algorithm focuses on reducing web spam. On September 27th, Google announced its 20th update to Panda to reduce the number of low-quality exact domain matches. What does this mean? Let’s say that you offer SEO services and your domain name was www.seoservices.com. If someone were to enter “SEO services” into Google your website should rank highly. Google looks to filter out sites that purchase domain names using keywords that have little page content matching the domain or reduce the number of other organic listing returns on URLs that don’t match the user’s search intent. Then on October 5th, Google announced its third update to Penguin having little impact on English language sites. Additionally, on October 9th, Google made changes to further impact spammy ‘top heavy’ sites. Basically, any sites that have a significant amount of ads above the fold will have their rankings penalized.

How should these updates impact your marketing?

You have to pay attention to your tactics. If you are purchasing keyword rich domains to drive people towards sites that offer little of valuable content that matches the keywords, stop. If you are loading the above-the-fold portion of your website (the section viewers see when landing on the page without having to scroll down), make some changes.

YouTube Updates

YouTube, the Google owned online video directory, has evolved from ranking videos by clicks to length of video viewings and engagement. While we all want viewers, there are various marketing strategies and tactics you can use to just get your views for your YouTube videos and thus improving your popularity ranking. However, ultimately, you need viewers who find value in your videos and take a predetermined action after they finishing watching.

What changes should you make to your YouTube videos based upon this update?

First, make videos with content that is of interest and value for a specific audience. Second, consider the length of time of each video. It’s best to record videos that are 5 minutes or less, with 2 minutes or less being optimal. If you have content that last longer, break up your content into a series. This will give you shorter videos that more people are likely to view until the end, plus it gives you a reason to market the other videos in the series bringing viewers back to your YouTube channel more frequently and increasing the likelihood of engagement. Third, market your video to a specific market. You can create enticing marketing to bring viewers to your videos, but if they are the wrong audience, you will increase the number of people who bounce back out of the video quickly, diminishing your rankings on YouTube.

Stay Focused

If you don’t have an online marketing plan, you should. And if you do, it needs to be a flexible, living plan like any business plan. There are going to be changes in the marketplace. You need addresses how your marketing team will stay abreast of these updates and how they will react to them while remaining dedicated to your goals.

If you need help developing and managing an online marketing plan, contact me at SmallBizMedia.tv.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

The population in the virtual nation of Facebook is approaching the 1 billion mark. Even with some recent news where Facebook admitted that some of these profiles were fake there still is a sizeable population on the social network. In a recent survey posted on Hubspot, it turns out that 50% of the population prefers Facebook fan pages to the customary branding sites (a company’s or organizations primary website).

Looking at the infographic on the page provided by Lab42, let’s pull out some interesting details:

• 87% of people like brands on Facebook
• 75% feel more connected to brands on Facebook
• #1 way brands could get more likes: more giveaways

Click on the infographic to enlarge the image.

Are you spending money building out your branding site and foregoing connecting with your target audience on Facebook? If so, you’re likely making a big mistake. For help to strategize, optimize, and socialize your brand on Facebook, leave your questions in the comments or contact me at SmallBizMedia.tv.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

Frequency and consistency are keys to creating successful marketing campaigns. If you want the market to get to know you, you have to “touch” them regularly with quality content. This can be very difficult for solopreneurs, and small and medium-sized businesses who struggle with finding the time to churn out a consistent flow of marketing content while they’re working hard to service their customers. Here are six ways to you can generate enough content to keep your pipeline filled.

1. Bundle your blog content.

If you’re already writing a blog on a regular basis (and if you aren’t, you should), why not repurpose the content and get a new marketing content source without having to create it from scratch? Can you take a series of your blog posts and turn them into an ebook to use as a lead generator? How about repurposing them into an instructional series? The point were making is you should go back and look at the posts you’ve created. Identify posts that discuss a particular subject from a variety of angles. Bundle them together to create new content.

2. Include guest bloggers.

Why come up with the content on your own when others are willing to create it? Put the word out there that you’re interested in receiving submissions from other bloggers who focus on your target audience. You will still be the editor-in-chief, but let others put their expertise to work for you. Plus, your readers may enjoy the blend of personalities and perspectives. It helps if you create an editorial calendar ahead of time so the guest bloggers know what topics they should focus on.

3. Review comments on blogs and forums.

Do you ever wonder what kind of information, problems or solutions your audience is most interested to receive? Check out industry blogs and forums to see what comments are there. Their comments give you multiple clues into their perceptions and the language they use. This will help you create marketing content that speaks to them.

4. Shoot a video.

Most business owners and executives can have a hard time “turning it off”. We’re flooded with information and experiences that get us thinking. Why waste those thoughts. Today’s technology means you don’t have to spend a Hollywood blockbuster budget to produce quality content. Your target audience cares more about the value of your marketing content than what you spend on the production. It helps if you can find a quiet space with good ambient lighting. Other than that, you simply need a pocket camcorder or the video camera on your computer, your personality, and your insight.

5. Ask your sales and support teams.

Your frontline people should have a good pulse on what’s going on in the industry. They will tell you what customers like and dislike, what their problems are, and so forth. Poll your people or create a suggestion box as to the marketing content they think you should create.

6. Interview experts.

Similar to the guest bloggers, interview experts serves multiple purposes. It allows you to provide an alternative insight to a problem or situation while someone else creates the content. Interviewing an expert brings additional prestige to your content and can attract a new audience that follows the expert.

Creating compelling marketing content doesn’t have to be a difficult process. It just takes a plan.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

Sure, Facebook is the king of the social media hill now, but just a few years ago, many business owners thought it was another fad for business use. Do you still feel the same way? Let’s take a look at five recent Facebook stats included in HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing (unless where otherwise noted) to help you decide how important of role it can play in marketing your business.

1. 42% of marketers say Facebook is critical or important to their business.

Back in 2009, this number was just 24% according to HubSpot. So in the last three years there’s been a 75% increase in marketers creating their marketing strategies around Facebook and not simply including it as a line item on a plan.

2. 77% of B2C and 43% of B2B companies acquire customers from Facebook.

While Facebook can help many businesses in a variety of industries, it is a particularly strong network for B2C companies. The key take-away here is that it works for both kinds of companies. So what kinds of businesses are currently tops for converting customers on Facebook?

• Retail / Wholesale
• Education
• Tech / Software
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing

3. 80% of social network users prefer to connect to brands through Facebook.

If this stat doesn’t wake you up, I’m not sure what will. Marketing your business works best when put your company in front of the right people where they spend time and communicate with them using their preferred method. If 80% of people using social networks prefer Facebook, don’t you think you should be using it?

4. Facebook has a 9:1 ratio of views to shares.

This stat was provided by BuzzFeed. Is this ratio good? It isn’t great for people who have the expectation that everything they post will go viral. We included this Facebook stat to help set some appropriate expectations when marketing your business on the network. Don’t let this ratio discourage you. Simply use it to as an appropriate marker. Realize that this isn’t the total number of people who are your fans, but who see your posts. For example, you may have 500 fans, but if only 120 people see a particular post, then the ratio applies to the 120 views, not the 500 fans.

You can increase your numbers by posting visual content which captures peoples’ attention over just links and/or text. As more people engage with your posts, you will show up more in peoples’ News Feed. The more you show up there, the higher likelihood that they will leave a comment or share the content. As you increase your reach, you can start adding in more posts with the goal of increasing lead generation.

5. Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%.

This stat comes to us via Digital Buzz Blog. Yes, you can save time by automating your content, but Facebook users like connecting with real people and not machines. If you content comes off as stilted or as auto updates from say Twitter, then your followers are going to shy away from your posts. There are things you can do to organize your social media strategies that will help minimize your time, like creating an editorial calendar and setting up your Google Alerts. However, is saving time by automating your social media worth seeing a 70% decrease in the likes and comments on your content?

So if these Facebook stats have you wishing you were doing a better job of marketing your business on this top social network, and you need help creating an optimized profile and a lead generation strategy, contact me at SmallBizMeda.tv for help.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide