Everybody is on social media now. OK, that is a slight exaggeration. Only 2 billion of the planet’s 7.2 billion people have active social media accounts. What is even more incredible is that there are almost 1.7 billion active mobile social users now.

Strictly from a business opportunity standpoint, I would like to say, “wow!” How and where else can you reach almost a third of the earth’s population so easily, so cheaply and so personally? It is a marketer’s dream and, if you are doing it right, you should be using social media marketing to dominate your market.

So, why isn’t social media working for you? The following are five common reasons why I see most people, companies and brands fail at using social media to grow their businesses.

1. You have to “pay to play” on Facebook.

Facebook is still, by far, the largest social media site with 890 million active daily users and 1.35 billion users overall. In 2014, the network earned almost $12.5 billion in revenue almost exclusively from advertising on the site. Coinciding with this massive jump in revenue is the dramatic decrease in the percentage of traffic that reaches fans and followers organically (meaning free).

Facebook has publically admitted that it is systematically decreasing that “free traffic” percentage over time to 1 to 2 percent of all traffic. For you, the business owner, that means if you plan on using Facebook to sell your products and services to your fans, you will need an advertising budget. Even a small budget can create huge return on Facebook.

2. You are “push” marketing when you should be “pull” marketing.

Most business owners make the mistake of thinking that social media is just a quick and easy tool to blast market their products and services out to large numbers of prospects quickly. Then, they are stunned when nobody wants to buy them.

The problem is that it is too easy to click away, ban, or worse, report you as a spammer. To win on marketing with social media you have to attract or “pull” people towards you. People are attracted to you via your message and the content you share on social media.

3. You are not “useful.”

This tip goes hand in hand with the point above. One of the best ways to “pull” market on social media is to be useful to your community on a consistent basis without the expectation of selling them something immediately. I know that seems a little counter-intuitive, but let me explain how that works.

Let's say that you own a landscaping company. What if you wrote an ebook called 10 Ways to Make Your Yard Absolutely Beautiful and used Facebook advertising to target and give it away on social media to people in your city? You are not “pushing” your landscaping service. You are just being “useful." 

Guess what? Some of those people will get your ebook and want you to do the exact same things you told them to do in your ebook but pay you to do it. That is being useful, and that is pull marketing.

If you want more information on being useful in social media, you should read YOUtility by Jay Baer.

4. You are trying to be everywhere.

The top 10 social media sites have an estimated 2.2 billion unique monthly visitors. With that kind of traffic it is hard not to want to want to put your business right in the middle of all of that. However, being on just one site consistently takes a serious commitment of both time and energy.

Figure out which one or two sites you should be on (hint: they are the ones your ideal client is on) and then spend your time finding, creating and sharing great content and engaging with people in a consistent and meaningful way.

In short, in social media it is better to be really good on one site than bad on many.

5. You are not being authentic.

Social media is the easiest place to try and be something you are not. I hear stories and see it every single day. You want to be cool or hip or funny because you think that is what people want. Or worse yet, you want to be all business like.

You look for and share content based on what you think customers' interests are, not yours. You know that cute puppy videos get a lot of traffic so you start borrowing the neighbor’s dog and dressing him up in every kind of crazy costume just hoping that people will watch and share your videos and somehow that will make them want to buy your products and services.

Sorry, that does not work.

Newsflash: People will connect with you around what they care about way before they connect around your business or your product.

The reality is that people buy from people they know, like and trust and authenticity is a huge piece of building that trust. Spend a few minutes thinking about what your real interests are, both personally and professionally, and create five to eight categories around those interests. Then, simply make sure to be yourself and deliver high-quality content consistently around the things you are actually interested in. You will have more and better engagement with people and these people will become your friends, your community members and, eventually, your clients.

Authenticity is the game-changer in social media marketing

Source: Entrepreneurship

Kim Garst

Founder and CEO of Boom! Social

Are you still relying on old fashioned, outdated marketing techniques to get your business the exposure it needs? A better question may be whether you actually think that these traditional forms of marketing are still the most cost effective for your business.

One of the most cost effective forms of marketing these days, no matter what industry your products and services fall under, is online marketing. With the advent of search and online networking, it is absolutely essential that your business have the proper placement and branding on the Internet.

Did you know that over 80% of all transactions start online? Think about it. When you want to buy something or find information on something, where is the first place you go? If your answer was “the library”, then you are either lying or you are one of the few who still even know where their local library is. Our bet, you answered the Internet – more specifically even, Google. Now, think about how much business, or at least increased opportunities for business that your competitors get that do have good exposure on highly frequented websites, like Google.

If you haven’t done so already, we highly recommend that you revisit your marketing plan to make sure that online marketing is mixed into your marketing plan appropriately. If you need assistance developing, or reworking, your marketing plan to include this extremely cost effective form of targeted marketing, then check out our post on How to Create an Online Marketing Plan.

One of the main reasons why online marketing has been so effective is because it is a form of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is like a magnet, it pulls customers into your website, your business. Outbound marketing, such as television commercials, magazine ads, and newspaper ads, are intrusive, interruptive and annoying. Worst of all, outbound marketing channels are less effective and more expensive as these messages are easier to block out and ignore.

One of the top forms of online marketing, more specifically inbound marketing, is social media marketing or social networking. Unless you have had your head in the sand for the past couple of years, then you have probably heard of Facebook , Twitter  or possibly even LinkedIn . Holding common misconceptions, many businesses believe these websites to be for younger audiences only. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook alone has amassed over 250 million users since its startup, with users ranging from ages 18-75. No matter what you are selling, you are bound to have some prospective customers in this demographic somewhere.

Social media and online networking is the newest form of building authority, respect, and popularity. These three things can only help to build your brand and your business and we are going to explain how you too can use inbound marketing through social media to benefit your business.

How to Convert Visitors from Social Marketing

Once your social media efforts gain momentum, you WILL see increases in traffic to your website or other web properties that you are driving social media users to. The important thing now is to make sure that the increased traffic you are receiving is getting exposed to the most beneficial places possible. Here are some effective ways to convert social media visitors:

(STEP 1) Use targeted landing pages

When people get to your website you MUST take advantage of these opportunities. Website visitors will make up their mind about you, your business and whether or not they will buy from you within the first 8 seconds of landing on your website. For this reason alone, you MUST direct social media users to the most relevant, specific pages on your website. This will reinforce their reason for being there in the first place and will also help you to immediately build trust with them right off the bat.

TIP: Landing pages should have limited navigation options (less choices, less distractions), layout and design should be clear and simple, and a contact form that rests above the fold of the web page.

(STEP 2) Implement Strong, Clear Calls to Action

The beauty of driving prospects to a website is that you can control what you want someone to do on your website. If your goal is to get people to sign up for a free trial of your service, then you can, and should, make this very clear and ask visitors to do it.

TIP: Use one strong call to action on each landing page and place them in prominent a place on each landing page. Remember that as English speakers and readers read from left to right so the top left of your landing page may be the best place for your call to action. Make sure to test placement, look and verbiage of your calls to action to find the best combination.

If we could look into a crystal ball and see the future, the word ‘regret’ probably wouldn't feature in the human vocabulary. Because if we had a future perspective on everything we are doing in the now, we simply wouldn't make poor decisions or miss vital opportunities for growth and success thus rendering the feeling of regret impossible. When you think about what this would mean in business, it’s almost surprising that key business decision makers aren’t dabbling in the dark arts and consulting their corporate crystal balls at the beginning of each quarter.

Except they are. These days, business decision makers are becoming more savvy about how best to see into the future and use their visions to adjust their actions in the now. But instead of using a crystal ball, they’re looking through the lens of social media monitoring tools, analyzing behavior online to predict desires, fortune, fate and destiny. Here, we’ll show you four ways you can use social media data to make better business decisions.

1. DESIRES: Predict what your consumer wants

Social media monitoring tools are becoming the norm in companies that want to stay ahead of the competition and anticipate customer demands. With over 2 billion people now documenting and sharing their lives openly on social media, it is becoming easier to identify trends, and with a good social listening tool, brands can quickly access a vast amount of specific online mentions about a certain topic, analyse these mentions and then use them to make predictions. For example, if a mobile phone provider notices a large number of mentions about a certain feature like the battery which have a negative sentiment, they can predict a demand for a better quality battery in smartphones, then respond to this demand by improving their product. However, given the immediacy of social media, businesses must react fast to capitalize on the insight they gain from social media analytics, in order to stay ahead of the demand and meet the desires of their consumers before their competitors.

2. DESTINY: Predict what your consumer will do next

Business intelligence is not just based on what people say, but also what they do. Translating social intelligence into actionable information for your brand involves finding out what your consumer will buy, where they will buy it and how you can target the consumer to get yourself top of mind when they make this purchase. This is where some social media monitoring tools fall short, as brands need to know about the search behavior of their consumer on sites like Google in order to get a true idea of the customer’s next move. This means analyzing what customers are searching for most in relation to their brand and seeing the search results they are presented with, so that they can ensure their online reputation and SEO is good enough to keep their brand or product top of mind. Furthermore, when combined with customer mentions, search engine behavior enables brands to target their marketing content more effectively, resulting in improved ROI, increased sales and greater customer retention.

3. FORTUNE: Predict the success of a product launch, marketing campaign or event

Market forecasts are already an integral part of the business process, as brands constantly strive to stay one step ahead and keep driving their profitability. Social media analytics that focus on sentiment as well as the potential audience of mentions are in fact extremely useful when it comes to anticipating the success and profitability of products, marketing campaigns and events. In the build up to a launch, the higher the number of positive mentions and the larger the audience of said mentions, the more likely a product is to be popular. In the same way, brands can foresee if a product is headed for failure if an overwhelmingly negative sentiment relating to the product is being seen by a vast audience. Brands can react and correct the business decisions already in play in order to improve positivity, therefore ensuring fortune and success.

4. FATE: Predict a downfall

These days, a brand’s fate is dictated by what the majority of people are saying about it online. In a survey conducted by Conversocial,  more than 88% of consumers admitted to being influenced by comments posted by other consumers on social media sites so if a brand is receiving a huge amount of criticism and negativity online they are most likely headed for a fall. With social listening, brands can set alerts if the number of negative mentions about them passes a certain level, in order to be able to react immediately. Social listening tools allow brands to cluster online information by keyword, media type, country, sentiment and influence as soon as it appears online, meaning the most impactful criticisms can be quickly located and dealt with immediately. Social clairvoyance means brands are predicting downfalls before they happen, and unsealing their fate with fully targeted responses.

To learn more about how to make social media work for your business, contact us today for one to one consultation .

This article was written initially from digmind

All types of businesses, but especially startups and smaller businesses, can benefit from these inbound marketing techniques, says contributor Neil Patel.

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Every business needs to do some kind of marketing. But what kind of marketing is the most effective? Most of the conventional marketing approaches are too expensive or unwieldy for smaller businesses and startups to successfully employ. That’s why inbound marketing, and its various techniques, make sense for any business — but especially for startups and smaller businesses.

Inbound marketing is more of an approach than it is a list of tactics. Inbound marketing, at its core, is about attracting prospects to your business rather than going out to find those prospects. Traditional marketing relied on email lists, cold-calling, billboard advertisements, and direct mail.

Modern inbound marketing uses organic search traffic, opt-in email forms, and content publication to attract customers. Inbound marketing is the best approach for today’s businesses, whether B2B, B2C, e-commerce, SaaS, tech, non-tech, brick-and-mortar or otherwise.

Here are the six inbound marketing techniques that I’ve used with amazing success in my startups, and that you can use to grow your business.

1. Give Away A Free Guide That Is Directly Related To Your Business

If you’ve ever seen any of the resources like these I’ve created, you’ll know that I’m a big believer in creating advanced guides.

Each of my guides are thousands of words long, making them a huge source of organic traffic. I didn’t publish them simply to get words out. I published them to provide marketers with rock-solid information. Many marketers I know use this technique to build their email lists, like AudienceBloom, which published The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online.

One of the best publishers of free guides and resources is HubSpot, the grandfather of inbound marketing. HubSpot’s collection of resources deserves to be called a “library” simply due to the sheer volume of resources. If you’re looking for a good model of a company that creates free guides, HubSpot is the exemplar.

Make sure that the guide is relevant to your business. HubSpot can afford to publish a huge variety of guides, because they are a big business that plays in a lot of sandboxes. Keep your guide as specific as possible, because you are using it to gain a certain type of visitor — ideally one who will convert to become a customer.

2. Pick One Or Two Keywords, And Optimize The Heck Out Of Them

Inbound marketing is nearly synonymous with “SEO.” So, how do you “do SEO?”There’s a lot to know. One of the most important features of SEO, however, is the power of keywords.  In order to successfully gain traffic for relevant keywords, you have to use those keywords on your site.

Though some may argue that keywords aren’t as important as they used to be, you still need to be aware of — and use the words — that people might enter into a search engine when they’re looking for content like yours. Many marketers I know try to gain traffic for tons of different keywords. Instead of focusing on a few relevant terms and variants that mean the same thing, they try to do this:

• Gain first-position result for head terms — the most commonly searched terms. But, try as you might, you’re not going to gain the first position on Google for “iphone” or “computer.”
• Simply improve their keyword rank. However, there’s more to SEO than keyword rank. Moving the needle on keyword position is nice, but that’s not going to create better traffic.
• Trying to gain position for a huge variety of keywords. Although, it’s good to have a comprehensive list of keywords that you’re tracking and targeting, it’s a waste of time to try to win all of these keywords at once.

The solution is to focus on a few keywords that are valuable, and create specific pages on your website that are for those keywords specifically. A good example of this is Practical ECommerce, which targeted the keyword “A/B testing tools for small business.” When you eliminate ad results, they rank number one:The company chose a long-tail (less-searched) keyword that was relevant to its business, optimized for that word, and came out on top.

3. Build Your Personal Brand

In order to be a truly successful marketer, you’ll need to build your personal brand. I recommend the personal brand approach for anyone who’s involved in marketing, but especially for startups. Today’s startup culture is dominated by personalities who can successfully advertise themselves as leaders, as much as they advertise their companies as innovators.

Entrepreneurs like Jayson DeMers, Joel Gascoigne, and Hiten Shah are examples of people building businesses by means of building their personal brand. If you start a business, it’s virtually impossible to separate yourself from that business. It only makes sense to use your personal brand to build that business. Many brands such as Tim Ferriss’s and Ramit Sethi’s depend almost exclusively on the power of their personal brand.

Some entrepreneurs build businesses that are founded upon their personality and their advice.

You may choose a different approach. Instead of building the brand upon your personality (like Sethi and Ferriss), you can build your brand then use your personal brand to promote it.

4. Ask And Answer Questions On Social Media

Social media turned inbound marketing into a viral interactive experience. Now, instead of just hearing about companies and going to them, potential customers found companies, followed those companies, and interacted with those companies. In study after study, social media has a very low track record of bringing in conversions.

Image source

Email and organic search are by far the best sources for conversions. Don’t depend upon social for your conversions. But you should engage social as a powerful method of inbound marketing. It may not bring conversions, but it does other things that enhance your brand.

It’s not enough to merely have a presence on the social media platforms. Instead, you need to engage these platforms. Social media is social. That means that there are real people behind every like and follower. In order to connect with those people, you need to ask questions, answer questions, respond to tweets, recognize +1s, and be a presence.

In the case of HubSpot, it is vigilantly monitoring its brand, and scouring the social sphere for mentions. People might hashtag it, tweet at the company or talk about it. Each of these social mentions provide an opportunity for HubSpot to interact with the mention, thereby increasing its brand image and its reach into other social networks.

5. Create An Email Popup

Popups are controversial. Even though some people hate them, they’ve proven to be successful. In every business I’ve built, I’ve used some form of email opt-in to build my email list.

An email list is one of the single most important factors in building a business. I’ve been able to leverage the power of my email list to create compelling subject lines, and grow my businesses even more.If you really want to grow your email list, use a popup opt-in form. You’ll be blown away by the results. ShopifyNation is a great example of using a successful popup opt-in.

Image Source Check out their helpful tutorial on creating a successful email opt-in form.

6. Guest Blog

Guest blogging is an ideal form of marketing for so many reasons.

• Powerful linkbacks
• Bigger audience
• Personal brand building

One great reason that guest blogging is such an awesome form of marketing, is that it gives you the right to do this:

The list of publishing brands on the landing pages lends a sense of prestige and cachet. As the reasoning goes, if you’re mentioned on Marketing Land, New York Times, Huffington Post, etc., you’re probably pretty important. This is just one of the reasons that guest blogging is such an effective inbound strategy.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of ways to use inbound marketing to grow your business. These six are just the start, but I think that they are the best way to start. I wouldn’t suggest them if I haven’t used them myself. They truly work, and I can prove it. The best way to prove it to yourself is to try it yourself. If you aren’t using any of these inbound techniques, pick one, try it for six months, and see what an impact it makes for your business. What inbound marketing technique have you found to be the most successful?

Source:Neil Patel (Quick Sprout)

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As a start-up company or small business, it is no longer an option to ignore social media as a means of communication, promotion and possibly even recruitment or revenue. That’s true for any business new to the internet, as well.

However, diving head-first into an ever-expanding realm of social media networks can feel overwhelming at best. Each platform has not only a unique audience of users, but also its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to usernames, imagery and usage.

Below is a step-by-step guide to establishing business accounts on the top eight social networks. As time and personnel are already stretched thin at many companies, it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to maintain streams of valuable content on each of these networks from the get-go. In fact, there are still plenty of Fortune 500 companies out there who can’t, either.

Establishing Your Business Account

The most crucial first step in entering the social game is securing your brand name, or some standardized variation of it, across all of the networks you can get your hands on. Even if you don’t intend to be an active user of a platform, it is better to own your brand name there just in case, rather than risk someone else taking it.

Once you have set up basic accounts on each top social network, take a step back and focus on the one or two platforms that have relevant audiences for your brand and enable you to sustain meaningful content. Focus all of your team’s energies there for the first 6-12 months of your social campaign, until you have justifiable reasons to expand into new territories.

First Steps

• Enter your brand name on Knowem.com to see if someone has already claimed your name on various social networks. Find one version of your brand name that is available on all of the top networks to ensure consistency.
• Send this “Ridiculously Exhaustive Social Media Design Blueprint” to your designer and have him/her create appropriately sized imagery for each network you plan to have a presence on.

Facebook

Use if: You want to reach a massive audience with a diverse array of content types.

• Create a Facebook page for your business.
• Claim a username for your page so customers can easily find you at Facebook.com/YourBusiness instead of Facebook.com/pages/you/203948203957. (Note: Once set, your username cannot be changed — so pick wisely!)
• Upload a profile image that will still be “readable” in a tiny thumbnail form around the site. Logos or brand stamps work well and allow users to easily identify your content throughout the site.
• Upload a cover image that expands beyond a logo to visually represent your brand. This is the largest piece of real estate you will own on the site and your best opportunity to establish a tone for the profile. See Hubspot’s cover photo dos and don’ts for more tips.
• Ensure all applicable contact and “About” information is completed on the profile, and ensure that the most applicable “Category” is chosen.
• Use your page’s “Short Description” (Settings > Page Info > Short Description) to display your tagline or a one-sentence summary of why your business is great. This description can be automatically displayed when other people share the link to your page, so make sure it’s a good description.
• Authorize page administrators at appropriate access levels so multiple people can contribute content to the page.
• If appropriate, upload historical “milestones” for your company, industry or products by backdating posts. Prevent these posts from flooding the news feed of any existing followers by checking the “Hide from news feed” option.

Twitter

Use if: You have frequent updates or content with a “timeliness” factor.

• Create a Twitter account. (There’s no distinction between personal and business accounts here.)
• Claim a username for the account, which will also become part of your profile URL (twitter.com/username).
• Upload a profile image, header image, and background, ideally all with coordinating color schemes and messaging. Remember that your profile image will display sitewide in a tiny thumbnail, so it should be visually concise.

• Include your website URL in your profile content for easy access.
• Familiarize yourself with Twitter 101 (made by Twitter specifically for businesses!) to learn more about hashtags, @ replies and other network best practices.

Google+

Use if: You have a physical location and want to appear in local search results.

• Visit google.com/+/business/ and click “Create a Google+ page” in the top-right corner.
• Sign in with a Google account that you control, and choose the category that best describes your business.
• List your business’s name and website, and confirm whether your content is appropriate for all age groups.
• Under “Settings,” add a phone number to the page, and confirm that number via an immediate text message or phone call.
• Click on the “Profile” item in the left navigation, then the “About” tab at the top. In the “Links” block below, you should see a “Link website” button. Click this to produce a snippet of code that should be placed on your website in order to link your profile and your website.
• Ensure that all location and contact information on this profile stay up-to-date, as Google uses your profile here to provide your address, phone number and more in local search results.
• Once you have established the page, go to plus.google.com/dashboard and click “Manage this page,” then “Verify this business” underneath your address. Confirm the business’s mailing address, and a postcard containing a unique PIN will be mailed to you. When the postcard arrives, follow the verification instructions on it to complete the process.

YouTube

Use if: Your business could benefit from product demos, testimonials, or putting a human face to your brand.

• Go to YouTube.com and click on “Sign In” in the top-right corner.
• Sign in with an existing Google account (make sure you’ll be comfortable sharing these credentials with anyone else who may need to contribute to YouTube work), or click “Create an Account” and follow the prompts.
• Once signed in, click on the user icon in the top-right corner and from the drop-down menu select “My Channel.” In the next pop-up, click the link at the bottom that reads “To use a business or other name, click here.” In the “Name your channel” field, input your business’s name, or a branded username that people can use to find you.
• In the “About” tab of your new Channel, list “custom links” to your website or other online properties, as well as “social links” to other networks.
• Also in the “About” tab, provide a Channel description, and upload channel artwork to brand your page.

LinkedIn

Use if: You are in a B2B space, or you want to speak to a more professionally-oriented audience.

• Log into a personal LinkedIn profile and in the main menu navigate to Interests > Companies. Then, in the top-right corner, click on “Add a Company.”
• Enter your company name and your business email address. (Note: LinkedIn will only allow you to activate a new company name if you have a company email address like me@companyname.com. If your LinkedIn account was set up with a personal email address, you will need to first add a business email to your profile before moving on.)
• Populate the following fields of LinkedIn’s prompts with general company details and products or services.
• Upload a version of your logo as the page’s profile image. You will need three separate versions sized at 100×60 (displayed on the company page) and 50×50 (displayed throughout the network) pixels to complete the profile.
• Upload a page banner (themed similarly to Facebook cover photo) sized at 646×220 pixels.
• Create unique banners and thumbnail images to highlight your top products and services. Feel free to use these labels liberally if your business has less traditional offerings.

Pinterest

Use if: You want to target a female audience and have great visual content.

• Use http://business.pinterest.com/ to sign up as a business page. (If needed, this page also provides a link to convert a formerly “personal” account to a business one.)
• Provide contact information and establish a username for your profile.
• Upload a 165×165 pixel version of your logo or brand stamp.
• Connect other existing social networks to your profile if you want to push out Pinterest activity to those platforms.
• In your profile settings, enter your website’s URL. Verify your ownership of the site by uploading an HTML snippet.

• Review this cheat sheet to optimized Pinterest image sizes in various post types.

Instagram

Use if: You can create interesting visual content on a regular basis.

• Download Instagram from the App Store or from Google Play to a mobile device.
• Sign up to create a new account.
• Upload a 110×110 pixel logo as the profile image.
• Include your site’s URL in the profile settings.
• Use the “bio” area to provide an overview of your value propositions.
• Review the Instagram for Business blog for tips, trends, and examples of successful brands.

Foursquare

Use if: You have a brick-and-mortar location.

• Search for your business’s name on Foursquare.com to see if a profile already exists. In the likely chance that it does, you can follow Foursquare’s prompts to claim the listing. If your business is not already in their system, opt to create a new location.
• Enter a phone number for Foursquare’s validation system to contact. You will immediately receive a call at that number with an automated system asking you to state your name and the name of your business. A code will then appear on  your computer screen, and you’ll be prompted to enter this code on  your phone.
• Following phone verification, a “final verification” is required, via either a one-time payment or a free postcard mailed to you at the listed business address.
• Once verified, ensure that your business’s address, phone number, operating hours and other details are accurate on the profile.
• Link other social media networks as applicable.
• Post available specials for customers to unlock.

Anything I forgot? Let me know in the comments!