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By Michelle Crossley in Featured

With a user base of more than 750 million, Facebook is a viable social media marketing platform which cannot be ignored. Every business has potential customers on Facebook. So, to increase your brand presence, you need to optimize your business Facebook page and generate traffic for more business. To implement your Facebook business strategy effectively, you need to follow a few regulations.

Using Targeted Keywords to Optimize Your Facebook Page

Optimizing your page for keywords is the first step to raise your brand visibility. Use keywords which are sure to draw in customers who may not know the brand name but need your product. In other words, keywords need to be essentially product based. Keep the company name as a keyword too so that those who search the brand name can get to your page easily.

Making Use of Vanity URLs

Vanity URLs on Facebook are the representation of the company name and brand. Build your URL using your brand name as a recognizing factor and for ease in visitors typing it in the browser.

Professional and Well-Thought Out Profile with Relevant Details

A well made profile introduces prospective customers to your brand, the kind of products you are selling and lets them know how they can benefit from it. Having a proper profile gives a professional look to your business and sends out the message that you care about your customers. Include a formal picture too, which represents your company or your product. However, be careful not to reveal details, which may compromise security.

Baiting visitors With On-Page Discussions

Start discussion topics on your page which will get visitors and members involved. Once people start “Liking” your page, you will immediately start getting more visitors to your Facebook page. Allow people to leave a business signature so as to get more exposure.

Creating an Interesting Page

Make your page stand out by customizing it to meet the business requirements of your visitors. Use plenty of images that make your page fun and leave an impression on visitors.

Contest and Events

Create events and contests, which require member participation and keep the page alive. Active pages get more traffic and your brand name gets more recognition.

Attracting Visitors With Freebies and Special Offers

Sales, special offers and deals, as well as freebies are always popular. Let your visitors know that you are trying to give them the best possible deal.

Preference to Video Over Texts

Multimedia integration is very good in capturing visitors’ attention. Remember – videos are more effective than plain text any day.

Using Facebook Tabs to Your Advantage

Facebook tabs can be customized to make them unique and represent your business. Use tabs to make your page stand out.

Using the Facebook Sidebar

The Facebook side bar is the best place to feature testimonials, newsletters and other trivia regarding your company. You can also provide links on the sidebar that direct visitors to the main website.

Poll Section

Visitors to the site will want to air their views and opinions. Provide a poll section where they are free to express themselves.

Once your Facebook page is started, remember to post regularly in order to get public interest going. Social media has a deep impact on marketing and you need to utilize it to the maximum level. Active pages get more visitors and help in spreading the brand name. Use the page to build your brand and watch your business soar.

Article by Michelle Crossley. Unique, custom vector logo design to build your brand for print and web or ONE solution for all your web, marketing and design needs, we have it all. Our strong design and marketing background paired with website development skills offers a unique pairing that gives your projects a unique edge. So relax and focus on what you do best – and we will too! Visit studio 1c

By Amy Porterfield in Featured

Facebook provides businesses with another way to interact with their customers or clients in addition to adding value.

Unfortunately, notwithstanding the potential, I often hear from Facebook Page owners that in spite of their hard work on creating their pages, they are frustrated by the fact that they have few fans, and the ones they have aren’t engaged.

Something that contributes to this problem is inadequate planning and no clear purpose for their Facebook Page. Purpose and planning aren’t the most exciting words out there, but they payoff big time. Once business owners take the time to put a plan, known as an editorial guide, in place, everything else falls into place. As a result of this, their fan base grows, and engagement begins to happen to the point where it no longer feels like work, but fun.

Here are some tips for creating an editorial guide for your Facebook Page.

Define Your Purpose

Ask yourself the following three questions to help you define the purpose of your Facebook Page:

#1: Why Have a Fan Page?

Hint: “everyone else is doing it” is not a good reason! Instead, consider what you hope to accomplish through having a Facebook Page.

By Alice Gibson in Featured

Social network applications are leaving an open door to our most personal of details.

Tending to the crops on your virtual farm, finding out who views your profile and sharing your favourite movie trailers may seem like harmless ways to use social networks but oblivious users are accepting application requests without considering who they
are allowing to access their personal data.

Having ‘apps’ connected to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter profiles provides an open-door for the third party behind the app to access your profile and all of your personal data within.

UKFast technical director Neil Lathwood explained the risks that this security flaw poses for social networkers: “Having all of these apps to entertain us is great, but many people do not realise that by using these apps they are effectively inviting people to use their personal data in whichever way they want. We really need to start considering the consequences of having all of our data readily available to unknown third parties.

“Facebook acts as a narration of our lives and with the introduction of the new Timeline feature, more people are filling the gaps in their profiles, adding illnesses, significant events and employment details to name a few. This information is incredibly valuable to identity thieves and cybercriminals.”

As revealed by UKFast’s security experts last year, the information that we share on social sites provides cybercriminals with the clues that they need to guess passwords and break into online accounts – from social media to online banking.

Lathwood continued: “With Facebook predicted to pass the 1 billion users mark this August, the site is a prime target for criminals to mine data from. Users must be more savvy with whom they are sharing their personal data or risk cybercriminals accessing more than just their Facebook or Twitter accounts.”

Facebook launches its latest innovation this week – Timeline Apps – which has caused further security concerns. The permissions protocol linked to the apps, ‘frictionless sharing’ says that apps only need initial approval to post on your timeline and profile. This means that the app can continue to make posts on your behalf without asking for permission.

UKFast has issued the warnings as part of the build up to European Privacy and Data Protection Day on January 27, an annual event designed to raise awareness of data protection and online security.

Lathwood said: “Data Protection Day is the perfect time to raise awareness of the risks that we inadvertently take online. We can monitor the apps that have access to our profiles using websites such as http://mypermissions.org/ which take you directly to the permissions page of the site where you can manage these apps.”

UKFast is one of Europe’s fastest-growing technical companies as ranked by Deloitte and the Sunday Times Tech Track. In the last year CEO Lawrence Jones has been named North West Entrepreneur of the Year, while his team has collected the Greater Manchester Award for Innovation. In addition to being listed as one of The Sunday Times best companies to work for, UKFast also won the UK IT Awards Employer of the Year in 2010.

Previous accolades include being named the ISPA UK’s Best Hosting Provider four years consecutively. UKFast has over 400,000 web domains on its network and over 4,000 clients across all industries. Clients include Virgin, Microsoft and UKTV. UKFast is a member of the Cloud Industry Forum.

For more information about UKFast visit: http://www.ukfast.co.uk

By Robert Gibson in Featured

It depends on what you are trying to achieve with your site, but for many sites, the answer is increasingly ‘YES’.

Social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter for the purposes of this article) have become increasingly pervasive. Recently I read that one minute of every eight spent on the Internet, is spent on Facebook. If the purpose of a web site is to communicate, then identifying where other people are – is a good start.

A ‘No-Brainer’ for Charities

Charities web site Justgiving tells us that 15% of all people donating via the Justgiving site come via Facebook. Clearly, then, for a charity it should be a ‘no-brainer’ to set up a Facebook page and work on integrating it: both your web site and your Facebook presence should benefit from it. However, one shouldn’t underestimate the work involved in maintaining one’s presence. From my experience, with Tanzania Development Trust, I know that for a voluntary organization, resources can be an issue, particularly if it takes a while to build momentum. Can volunteers maintain the consistency and enthusiasm required to optimize a social media presence?

A ‘Must’ for Band, Gigs and Events

We have all heard stories of teenagers informing the world via Facebook of a planned party, with disastrous results! But it points to a truth: no sensible music event, festival or gig would dream of setting up without a Facebook presence. Bands and performers use social media to build a fan base and keep it informed of their plans and movements. It is fair to say that in these cases, social media leads the way, with the web site complementing its more ‘buzzy’, up-to-the-minute feel.

By Kausik Dutta in Featured

SEO2When most people start planning SEO for their website I can bet you a large proportion of them get stuck when it comes to really understanding what part social media has to play in SEO.

Social media often lags further down the priority list behind SEO for a variety of reasons, mainly a lack of clarity as to what benefits it will actually bring and the fact that it’s often difficult to relate a tweet or Facebook message to a return on investment whereas with SEO, for example, website owners can more easily attribute a growth in sales to new rankings for key-phrases.

However, the way that social media has evolved means that it now plays a much more important role in search engine optimization. Searches are now taking into account the reputation of websites as reflected in social media sites to determine rank.

What Content do Users want to Share?

A more common occurrence nowadays is the placing of social networking buttons alongside pages and various pieces of content within the website.

That’s all fair and well, but it’s only an issue if people actually bother to click on them.

By Chris Bucholtz in Featured

crmThe five steps to developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy are oriented toward the specifics of the social media ecosystem you’ll be working in and the customers you’ll be working with. Your strategy should also fit the time and resources you have. Take an inventory of your staff resources and the budget you have for sentiment monitoring and listening tools.

Step 1: Find Your Customers

You need to learn how your customers relate to social media. Many people connect to the major social media sites, which have broad appeal and large user communities. Facebook, for example, has 750 million users. In 2011, the site’s fastest growing age segment was 55+.

A second class of sites attracts people based on their interests. There are social networking sites for all kinds of people, from schoolteachers and sports fans to parents and programmers. A simple Web search reveals many of these sites.

You also need to keep an eye on sites that might have a peripheral connection to your products and services. For example, the customers of an outdoor equipment company may frequent a site dedicated to adventure travel. You want to be where your customers are and when it comes to social media that means following their interests not just their buying habits.

Step 2: Learn the Language

Once you’ve located the places where customers are either talking about you or about things that relate to your business, don’t jump in right away. Spend some time observing how the group works, who its leaders are, and the kind of language and tone the members use with each other. Your first step is to behave like you deserve to be part of the conversation. Take Mark Twain’s advice, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than it is to speak and remove all doubt.”

Step 3: Listen

Once you’ve located the sites where your customers congregate and spent some time getting a general idea of how they talk with each other, dig a little deeper. If there are subjects that you want to follow and the site has search capability, take a look at what’s been said in the past about those topics. This is listening in the social media world; it should precede participation.

Since you’ve probably identified multiple social media channels to track. How do you listen in on all of these conversations? If you have the resources, consider a staff member dedicated to social media. That person can keep track of the sites you’ve chosen, coordinate responses to conversations, and incorporate data from conversations into your CRM system. Don’t engage in more channels than you can monitor effectively.

Listening is made easier by social media monitoring and sentiment measuring tools. Listening tools can tell you what’s being said and where; sentiment tools can gauge the general tone of the conversations that mention you. Both can increase your social media productivity.

Your company also has great monitoring tools already in place–your employees. Many will use social media outside of work, and they may run across topics that pertain to your business. Employees should be encouraged to report anything they learn to the person you’ve designated to monitor social media.

Step 4: Engage

When your business is ready to engage with customers in a social media conversation, establish clear rules about who does the talking and where they do it. Someone from service could participate in conversations on a site where service issues are discussed. An engineer would be appropriate on a site geared toward developers.

Look for places to engage that will have an impact. If you see the opportunity to make a difference in a conversation, jump in–even if it’s only to say that you don’t know the answer to a question but can find someone who does. Then be sure to follow up. That level of authenticity coupled with tangible assistance builds loyalty with the person you helped. It also establishes you as a reliable participant in the community.

You can also start your own conversations. You could begin with a legitimate question about your customers and what they’re thinking. This approach can deliver actionable intelligence more quickly and inexpensively than a formal survey. Don’t make these the only conversations in which you participate. You’re there to participate as a peer not an interrogator.

Step 5: Make Use Of What You Learn

You can use two types of social media information: the data you uncover in conversations and the data that your customers and potential customers volunteer in setting up their profiles. Don’t focus only on the latter. It ignores the truly social aspects of social media and the richer information that conversations can bring to your attention. It’s also a source that’s likely to diminish as social media users become more sophisticated in their use of privacy controls.

There is no technology that can automatically detect the social media data relevant to your business and sort it by your customers or accounts. People engaged in conversations and monitoring social media sources will need to manually incorporate important information into customer records.

But the use of social media information doesn’t stop there. It also involves careful process design. For example, since a call for help in social media is heard by many people, the transfer of responsibility from social media monitor to designated service contact to the service personnel who can respond is vitally important. The same is true for sales, marketing, and product development.

Finally, make sure your employees know that social CRM can be an all-hands exercise that benefits the entire company, just like traditional CRM.

A recognized influencer in customer relationship management, Chris Bucholtz is Editor in Chief of CRM Outsiders and a founding editor of both InsideCRM and Forecasting Clouds. For more information on how to build your small and medium size business’s customer outreach and empower your employees with Small Business CRM please visit http://www.sugarcrm.com

By Kristina Jaramillo in Featured

linkedin1Online press release distribution has not lost its power to create buzz and brand awareness. In fact, in speaking with many business professionals who have used our distribution partner’s press release services, we’ve been told:

* Their press releases were picked up by 40+ online sites and media news stations.
* Their press release placement brought additional credibility to the launch of their new books, products and services.
* They started to dominate the search engines – and “own” their keywords as search engines love optimized press releases
* They doubled and tripled their website traffic
* Multiple reporters and media professionals contacted them for additional interviews and media opportunities that give them more exposure.
* Their website now ranks higher on Google – because online press release distribution is a powerful link building too.

Here’s an additional benefit of online press release distribution that no one else is talking about…Online press release distribution will help you with your overall LinkedIn marketing efforts.

6 Ways Online Press Release Distribution Can Help You With Your LinkedIn Marketing Efforts

1) The press release generated publicity can provide you with instant credibility with your LinkedIn profile visitors.

For example my client Sara LaForest’s headline reads like this: “Top Management Consultant Featured in Business Week, Fast Company & WomenEntrepreneur.com – Connect and Find Out Why”. This shows readers immediately why they should trust her and why they should trust what she has to say.

Here are some of the other ways you can highlight your publicity on your LinkedIn profile:

* Create a quoted media positions
* Showcase your media mentions within your summary
* Add the publications section to your LinkedIn profile
* Create a media kit on your LinkedIn profile using Box.net

2) Showcasing your press release generated publicity will prove to journalists that you are media worthy.

On LinkedIn you should be looking to connect with journalists, editors, online radio show hosts and other media professionals. Now for those media professionals to accept your invitation, you have to prove you are credible and newsworthy. When your press release is published by a top publication, you have completed half the battle because you have given yourself expert status. Now, you just have to build a relationship with the media professionals you connect with and show them that your information is relevant to their audience.

3) Use press releases to promote your LinkedIn group and community.

We recently created and distributed a press release that promoted Skip Weisman’s Workplace Communication Strategies group – and it was published on CNBC.com. This helped him:

* Increase his LinkedIn group membership by making more people aware of his group.
* Give him a reason to re-announce his group again to his email list as well as any LinkedIn connection that were not already members of his group. Any time you have a success, you should be letting your connections know.
* Give new connections a reason to join his LinkedIn group when we sent out group invites.

4) Your press release placements can position you as a thought leader in your LinkedIn group – and those other groups you belong to.

I like to create discussions around a topic and link the discussion to a press release or article I’ve written that gives more information on the topic and is featured on a top website. This automatically gives me a third party endorsement which offers more credibility than if the information was just placed on my own website or blog.

5) Use your press release placement as a springboard for discussions.

For example, I distributed a press release titled “More Journalist on LinkedIn Than Any Other Social Network, Study Shows”. I then created this discussion within LinkedIn group: “How are you using LinkedIn to get you more publicity?

In the LinkedIn discussion summary I put “In the press release below, I reveal that 82% of journalist are on LinkedIn and that is more than any other social network. So now I am asking you, how are using LinkedIn to build and maintain relationships with media professionals to get you more publicity?”

I then linked the discussion to my press release on Yahoo News.

This helped me:

* Get more exposure for my press release
* Create a discussion among publicity professionals as they provided their insights. I then responded to their feedback with other ideas and explained to them how I can help them with their LinkedIn publicity efforts
* Start a discussion among small business owners and other business professionals who wanted to learn how to get more publicity by using LinkedIn

6) Getting published or featured all over the Web on top websites and blogs will give you access to more people who will want to connect with you on LinkedIn.

You will have people coming to you seeking your advice. They will see your press release and then look you up on LinkedIn wanting to connect with you. For example, as I was writing this article, I received an invitation to connect that said, “Hi Kristina, I just read your tips in Canadian Advisor’s Edge Magazine – I’d like to connect with you and learn more.”

Your Next Steps

Now that I have shown you how online press release distribution can help you with your LinkedIn marketing efforts, it’s time you take action and start writing your press releases. If you need help, check our my Instant Press Release Templates at http://www.40InstantPressReleaseTemplates.com

LinkedIn marketing expert Kristina Jaramillo helps small businesses and organizations get more publicity, prospects and profits using effective LinkedIn. Now, at http://www.HowtoGetMorePublicitywithLinkedIn.com, you can gain full access to her FREE 14-Day LinkedIn Publicity E-course that shows you how to create an expert LinkedIn profile the media will love, how to build relationships with the media plus sneaky ways to get more PR using LinkedIn.

By Kristina Jaramillo in Featured

linkedin1LinkedIn is reportedly the most popular business social networking site used by attorneys. In fact, a recent report shows that 70% of corporate counsel use LinkedIn as a tool, and half rely on it. Executives from every Fortune 500 company are using LinkedIn.

To help law firms attract and retain more clients using LinkedIn, I have identified ten different opportunities attorneys should take advantage of.

10 Ways Law Firms Can Use LinkedIn to Attract and Retain More Business

1. Build relationships with potential clients – If you deal with corporate business, small business or real estate issues then you can use LinkedIn to network with potential clients – and educate them so they will want to come to you with their problems.

2. Build relationships with potential referral sources – For example, an attorney who specializes in social security law can network with partners or employees at general practice firms so they can pass business on to you. Business lawyers can network with accountants and business advisors.

Lawyers that work in the real estate industry can connect with realtors who can refer business to them. Elder care attorneys can network with assisted living homes and care giving service providers and associations who can refer business to them.

3. Create a community of like-minded professionals – For example if you are a real estate attorney educate a group of real estate agent so they can refer business to you or use you if their clients need your advice.

Within this group, you need to create conversations and link prospects, referral sources and the media back to your blog or website where they can get even more information. Notice, your LinkedIn group is part of the lead generation funnel.

4. Build relationships with the media – 92% of all media professionals are on LinkedIn, which is more than any other social networking site. That means editors, journalists and reporters of local, regional and national publications and other media types are available to you on LinkedIn. You can reach out to these individuals and invite them to your group so they can see the type of information you can offer their readers, listeners or viewers.

5. Spread your content and prove you are a thought leader – Placing your content, expertise and messages in front of targeted prospects is the absolute best way to attract new clients and referral sources. That’s why you need to join groups where your prospects are going to for information you can provide and engage in conversations.

6. Nurture relationships with existing clients. Your marketing and relationship building efforts should not stop once someone becomes a client. That’s why attorneys should have a group specifically for providing ongoing, exclusive content and information just for clients where they can answer more specific questions. This will help you with client retention.

7. Perform market research that you can promote with articles and press releases.Recently a client of mine who is a workplace communication expert conducted on LinkedIn a study of CEOs, Presidents, Vice Presidents and manager. From his research he found that 44% of the executives surveyed were unhappy with their employees’ performance and their own communication style. Using his survey questions he was also able to uncover what problems they were encountering.

With this knowledge he then created:

* A report that showcased the results.
* Press release to reveal the results and position him as a thought leader.
* Webinars to discuss solutions to the problems his audience were encountering
* Articles and LinkedIn discussions to promote the study, the report and the event
* A complete marketing and PR plan and strategy based off this study

8. Build an extensive network of connections who can be expert witnesses for your clients. By building a relationship on LinkedIn with connections who can be expert witnesses for issues relating to your law specialty, you give prospects and clients a reason to hire you. Now, you are combining your expert knowledge in the industry with support that other law firms may not be able to offer.

9. Stay up-to-date on what’s happening in your industry – Join groups that your peers, colleagues and competitors belong to. This will help you way stay current on trends, problems, concerns and even cases in your industry. You will be able to see what others are talking about and what they have to share. And, you can use this as an idea bank for articles and press releases that you can write to promote your law firm.

10. Showcase your attorney’s abilities – Every attorney in your practice should have a LinkedIn profile and there should be a link to it on the company website. This will enable clients or prospects to reach out to your practice in another way and on a more personal level. And, the lawyers will be able to update their LinkedIn profiles to showcase their skills, abilities, articles that were published and media mentions without having to pay expensive webmaster fees.

Now, as I said earlier, LinkedIn is reportedly the most popular business social networking site used by attorneys. In fact, a LinkedIn search for the keyword “legal” gave me more than 1 million results. However, only a small percentage of these attorneys are using LinkedIn to its fullest potential for bringing in more clients, referrals and publicity. The question is:

Are you willing to breakthrough the pack – and become part of that small percentage who of attorneys who are using LinkedIn effectively to market their law firms?

LinkedIn Marketing Expert Kristina Jaramillo creates online marketplace opportunities for lawyers and law firms who want to attract more clients.

Now, you can uncover the LinkedIn marketing mistakes you are making the opportunities your law firm is missing by grabbing Kristina’s free special report at: http://www.Free14LinkedInMistakesReport.com <= Get this report for free and start getting more publicity, more clients and more referrals!

By Suzen Pettit in Featured

facebook-logoIf kids, soon-to-be-adults and millions of not-so-young adults are your future audience, then you need to have a Facebook Business Page as you need to be where your audience is. And, today, our children, teens, young adults and even older adults like my former room mates and my ex (who deny they are addicted to Facebook) can be found updating their profile, commenting and changing their status updates regularly.

The New York Times even wrote an article recently that showed kids are finding crafty ways to get around the increasing number of Facebook bans their schools are implementing. One eighth grader, who preferred not to be named, said he coached a school administrator on avoiding the ban last year. “She hated not being able to get on Facebook at work and asked for my help one day in the office,” the boy explained, more than a little sympathetic to her plight. “What could I do?”

It came as no surprise to me, and it’s speaking volumes of the need for small businesses, as much as they want to continue down that stream of FB Denial, to get on board and create a Facebook business page. It is time for them to put themselves in front of this next generation of Facebook addicts.

Need more proof?

5 Reasons Why You Must Setup a Facebook Fan Page Fast!

1) Kids, soon adults, and millions of young and not-so-young adults are your future audience and they are all there, “friending” Justin Bieber under their covers (like my daughter last night) when they should be asleep.

2) With over 600 million users and almost 50% of them on Facebook daily…. stop…. think about it…..AND over 40% of existing businesses already up and running on it, you want your business to be where your customers and potential customers are going, right? If you knew that your customers were passing by one of the huge billboards in Times Square every day and those billboards didn’t cost millions per month to be advertising there, you would want to be up there…wouldn’t you?

3) Your Facebook business page is like the huge billboard in Times Square except for the fact that it’s free. Your customers are there, their friends are there. And you can say a heck of a lot more on a FB page than you can on a billboard.

4) The search engines love a Facebook Business Page. Because a business page is a public URL and not a private one, your site will have a much easier time making it to the top of a Google search than your website. That’s unless you’ve invested a lot of $ into SEO (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

5) As mentioned earlier, your competition already has a Facebook business page, and not because they want to share about their favorite rice and beans recipe. The “like” button has become the new “link.” Many online marketers, myself included now believe that the Facebook “like” button is becoming just as significant as backlinks to a website. In other words, the more “likes” your page has, the greater the chance of it ranking high in the search engines for your specific field and keywords. So think of it as a link and encourage your customers to press it. Every time you update something on your page these customers will now see it as they have been “linked” to it.

There are so many good reasons to create one of these Facebook business pages I could blather on and on about them forever. For now, think about the math. The average Facebook page has 140 friends. When you post to Facebook, your “friends” and all their “friends” will view your post. Can you spell V-I-R-A-L? As insane as it might sound, there’s a reason why Shop Rite wants you to “like” them on Facebook.

Suzen Pettit specializes in designing, building, marketing and maintaining optimized websites and social media profiles for busy small business owners. By using her strategic internet marketing techniques you will ensure your business is being found and that clients are seeing what YOU want them to see on the internet about you. For even more free tips, tools, strategies and resources, read her free articles at: http://www.omaginarium.com/blog/

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

socialmedia2Social media marketing has many myths and untruths surrounding it, usually spread by people who have no knowledge whatsoever of social media marketing and how it works. These are some of the most common myths that abound, and some possible responses to use when faced with them.

The Company’s Customers Do Not Use Social Media

This is a common myth, and one that continues to astonish a lot of social media marketing professionals. Some companies do not use social media at all, yet they profess to have the knowledge of their customers’ social media habits. The best way to find out if customers are on a social network is to join it and upload the customer email list. If no one is truly on there, the company can avoid it and never use it again. But if at least 20% of the list is on the network, the company should use that network and engage in social media marketing.

People Might Say Bad Things About The Company

People are saying bad things about the company already. The only difference is that by not being on social media, the company cannot know how big the problem is. Social media marketing professionals can recite case study after case study about companies that were caught completely unaware about a problem on social media for weeks or months, until the mainstream media called to ask about it. The only way to see if people are saying bad things on social media is to be on social media.

Social Media Is Not Mainstream

There are 170 million Facebook users in the United States – nearly half the population. Very few things have that level of participation, except television, radio, and newspapers (and newspapers are dwindling). By ignoring a social media marketing opportunity like Facebook because of the mistaken belief that it is not mainstream, companies are ignoring a large part of their target market.

Of the 81 million Gen Yers in this country, 96% of them are on a social network of some kind. In fact, many of them do what they can to avoid mainstream advertising, by recording TV shows and skipping the commercials. However, they can be reached via social media marketing methods, like Facebook ads. Furthermore, social media marketing professionals can also specifically target their ads to Facebook users, based on their age, sex, relationship or job status, and even geography. Companies can reach women in their 50s who live in Florida, or single men who are between 18 and 24, living in a large city. Rarely, can mainstream media achieve such targeted results.

Social Media Results Cannot Be Measured

Actually, the advantage social media marketing has over mainstream marketing is that it can be easily measured with different social media monitoring tools. Not only can these analytical tools measure where something is being said about a company, it can measure the sentiment of the message, to see if it is positive, neutral, or negative.

Website analytics can even determine how many people arrive at a website, what steps they followed to get there, what pages they visited while they were at the website, and even if they made a purchase. This means that not only can social media marketing pros monitor the traffic to a particular website, they can determine what online mediums are having an impact on sales. Mainstream advertising cannot do that.

Internet marketing is not a new field – it is more than 20 years old – but there are still plenty of myths that surround it. And until these myths are disproved and social media marketing joins traditional marketing as an accepted and effective marketing channel, social media marketing pros will continue to fight this battle on a daily basis.

Article by Julie Ann Ross. With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Ventures has refined video seo practices for distribution in social media. http://www.rostinventures.com offers video seo, social media marketing and online reputation management services that are affordable and drive search engine ranking through Social Media Optimization, Online Reputation Management, Social Marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources.

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Death of Steve Jobs Fails to Break Twitter Record
We all heard the sad news yesterday that Steve Jobs, founder and visionary at Apple, had died at...
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