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Is Social Media Marketing Helping Your Offline Business – Or Killing It?

Offline businesses the world over are embracing social media marketing as an important part of marketing offline businesses online. Done right, social media and social networking can create a huge jump in foot-falls and bottom-line profits – but mishandled, social media can be the death of your offline business as well.

No longer something businesses can simply choose to ignore, sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook and the myriad of industry-specific forums and directories now represent ever-increasing market share influence. And unlike earlier methods of advertising your offline businesses, social media sites offer free ways for small businesses and home-based businesses to compete with global corporations on an almost-level playing field.

But it also represents pitfalls that most businesses haven’t had to face before too – pitfalls that can irreparably impact your business and, in extreme cases, ruin your brand, product or even the business itself. Reputation management has become a vital part of both local businesses and global corporations now that the Internet has so heavily affected the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces.

How Effective Social Media Marketing Helps Offline Businesses

Well over a billion people use social media these days – many of them using multiple platforms daily or at least weekly. This presents a quickly- and easily-accessed global market comprised of a great number of subsets representing both local markets and niche-specific markets. Never before have businesses had instant access to such large numbers of targeted prospects, nor to free ways to access those prospects.

This scenario offers a number of advantages to businesses using social media effectively: announcing new product rollouts, ease of customer service, brand management, reputation management, customer involvement and interaction, notifications of sales and other events, building goodwill and announcing charitable affiliations, real-time competitor marketing analysis, community-building within your target market and positioning your business to be found by those looking for your products or services. This last point is especially important when promoting local businesses online, as more and more consumers are using the Internet to find local services and stores, especially when on mobile devices.

How Ineffective Social Media Marketing Hurts Offline Businesses

The biggest potential disaster for offline businesses vis-a-vis social media marketing is not having a presence on at least the big sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc – even more specialized sites like YouTube and Pinterest. Your competition will be keeping their name and brands front-and-center in your target market’s minds, while you’ll be out of sight and out of mind.

Second most harmful is not paying attention to your online reputation. Not responding to customer enquiries or complaints, not dealing with negative concerns regarding your company, brands or even your industry in general can erode your customers’ and prospects’ trust – and trust is a huge factor in today’s commerce and business worlds.

Publicly discussing contentious issues on your business pages will also alienate portions of your audience. Leave topics like religion and politics for the dinner parties and focus your online activities around your company, brands, industry and related organizations important to your audience. Mentioning that you made a donation to a local charity can be beneficial, but discussing the conditions in your community that led to the need for that charity is best left to the local newspaper and television editors and columnists.

Social media marketing is just one aspect of promoting local businesses online, albeit a very important one. Get familiar with both the huge popular sites and those specific to your niche or your local area and start building your presence and reputation on each of those. If you feel you lack the necessary skills or the time to handle your online presence effectively then hire social media marketing specialists to handle it for you – and if you’re a local business, be sure they have recent relevant experience in marketing local businesses online as well.

How Is Social Media Marketing Useful?

Experimentation with social media marketing has for long given great results. To some entrepreneurs, however, it is the “next big thing,” a temporary yet powerful fad that must be taken advantage of while it’s still in the spotlight. Social media marketing has become one of most beneficial ways in which B2B or B2C companies can make the most out of advertising all over the world. The companies who take care of the needs of their community or targeted audience are the ones who rule the digital world.

Online services should know about the needs of their targeted audience and cater to them. Starting from customer discovery to their conversion a good online agency fulfils its responsibility. The service providers should emphasize on the quality of the item rather than quantity to attract customers and transform them. A successful social media marketing aims at reaching out to different prospects with the business goals that are already set and they also have a great platform for that where people belonging to diverse communities are connected.

A company specialising in online services provide customers with many marketing strategies which are as follows:

· MEDIA STRATEGY: It is a milestone in creating awareness on social networking sites. The agency might customize the approach making some necessary implementation on the existing profiles after a comprehensive study of the existent aims, goals and objectives and target audience.

· LISTENING SERVICES WITH REAL-TIME MONITORING: Listening is always a great way to understand and getting to know better about the customers and target audience. By talking and exchange of ideas you can come to know which change of approach is clicking for betterment and which strategy is not.

· MANAGING COMMUNITY SERVICES: The success of your website does not only depend on the number of visits in your profile. Getting to know more about your customers and the challenges that they pose are the ways in which one can achieve success. Agencies should understand this and make amends to grow closer to your audience.

· DEVELOPMENT THROUGH SOCIAL CONTENT: Social media marketing wants participation of audiences for the betterment of the products or services. It is a great way to generate user driven products which makes the company profitable.

· CAMPAIGN SERVICES: It is the most commonly overlooked feature and the most important. There is a need for campaigning online. It ensures that the brand and the targeted audience go hand in hand for better results.

· DEVELOPMENT OF CONTENT AND ONLINE MEDIA MEASURES: The first and the most important thing is the development of the content of the website because that is what makes it catchy and attractive. These are some important measures because it is only through this that contingency plans can be applied to keep all the workings in check.

SMO services are the most important part of media marketing because it helps highlighting a company’s website online.

Online Business Opportunities – Social Media Marketing And Article Copywriting

Online business opportunities have been made more popular by social media marketing. It all began as a social initiative that has progressed into a viable tool in promoting business companies, products and services. Corporate organizations are gradually moving towards the use of social media and benefitting from its positive effects. As a refresher, social media focuses on more valuable interaction with business associates, prospective clients and existing customers.

Both major and minor players should strive to understand the crucial responsibility of social media in marketing. Indeed, it plays an essential function in marketing which depends on the business and how it best matches the requirements of that venture. It also depends on the effort that an entrepreneur is willing to contribute in the aspect of social media.

Strategies to Consider for Social Media

One of the questions that should be answered is can companies ignore social media marketing strategies as an effective way to advertise their products and services? This cannot be answered right away and it would be advisable to see the results or developments in the coming year.

Networking in business has never been more expedient than it is now, thanks to the concept of social media marketing. As it is aptly described by some experts in search engine optimization, business prospects are just a click away. Social networks continue to attract so many people who can end up in becoming your future contacts.

Article Copywriting as an Online Opportunity

Among the online business opportunities that are currently increasing in terms of demand is online copywriting. It is different from conventional copywriting although the objective of properly-implemented marketing copywriting is to heighten the online presence of business ventures. It aims to foster exposure and trust among the target publics.

In copywriting, these are the factors that should always be considered:

The content must be able to catch the interest of the target audience through the title of the article.
The headline should be motivating and engage the fascination of readers.
The content must be relevant and provide practical information to the readers.
The primary objective of copywriting is to win over readers to become loyal customers and patronize your goods or services.

Keep in mind that it is not the design of the website and advanced technologies that matter but the fact that the web page copy should be persuasive enough. The site must be able to generate substantial traffic for the business to be successful. SEO copywriting can enhance the ranking of websites by putting keywords at the proper places and in the midst of tabs on the web pages. Of course, the web pages must be appropriate and capable of connecting to readers as well as persuading both the readers and search engine spiders.

The first pointer about SEO copywriting is that it concentrates on generating content that is valuable for online users and at the same time to achieve better rankings in search engines. The next suggestion is to avoid cramming the web page with keywords and keyword phrases that do not work. These websites may be blocked because of irrelevant content. The content can be made relevant with the help of search engine optimization.

Understanding SMO Or Social Media Optimization

To survive and compete in the marketplace every business should know and use the latest technologies and methods. And the same is valid in the area of promotion and advertising. However a solution has been found to tackle this problem and it is named as SMO.

SMO basically stands for social media optimization. You may have known about SEO but SMO is a new word in the online dictionary. To start with, it’s important to understand what are these social media platforms? Sites that are not strictly trade oriented but their actual focus is on social interactivity are said to be social media sites. They indeed help in exchange of thoughts and ideas. Some of the popular and well known social media sites are YouTube, Digg and MySpace.

SEO and SMO are inter-related but remember they are two different terms. SEO provides your website a firm, long term place in the ranking list while SMO helps to boost up small based business by creating a viral buzz. The main motive of SMO is to make your website popular and easy to locate by the custom search engines like Technorati. It can be done in many ways maybe with the use of blogs or podcasts; but remember that your main motive here is to make the website easily linkable.

SMO rules

Here are some important rules that govern the Social Media Optimization:-

Give ability for quick and easy linking.

Put Book-marking and Tagging.

Should have Social Networking.

Let the comments and views to get posted on your lively contents.

Make blog for your website.

Reward the inbound links.

Your website can also get extra traffic from different other channels by the use of SMO strategies. In this way popularity of your website gets increased amongst people. Moreover it will help you understand what’s in the trend, actual requirement of your customers, their feedbacks, consequently improving your services.

SMO is a very new method designed to match up with the rapid innovation and advancement in online business. Therefore in order to get more and better publicity use SMO. If you want to be successful in social media optimization then it’s important to secure the usernames to be used in emails and sites like hotmail, gmail etc.

How to excel at SMO

Basically there are three important ways in which you can successfully excel at SMO and they are as follows:-

It should contain active and interesting content. Try to write what you actually feel as people love to know about your feelings.

It’s very important to know about your target audience and then plan things according to it.

Your content should have the capacity to attract and persuade more people towards the site. An essential factor of SMO is linkage.

Hence, SMO or Social Media Optimization is an effectual tool of promoting a website. Also it is said to be a complete and perfect method of promoting products or services, in the most suitable way. No doubt, there are a number of benefits if you advertise your products or services with SMO.

5 Ideas to Use Social Media Marketing for Small Business

According to the statistics published by Nielson, a leading company facilitating global view of market trends in specific industries, social networking and blogging are the 4th popular online activity. In fact, the Nielson reports claim that these are better liked than emailing. In the present competitive world, online presence is a must for any business. Social media marketing for small business is a new revolutionary concept that takes advantage of online advertising campaigns to promote a brand name. All you need to succeed in this campaign is the knowledge about the right kind of marketing strategies and tactics.

How to Leverage Social Media Marketing for Small Business Promotion

An entrepreneur can get a large number of visitors by leveraging social media marketing for small business. In order to convert these visitors into sales, you can do the following:

Create videos: People often search YouTube for quick information on products. Create interesting video clips demonstrating your products, their usage and customer testimonials. Post these videos on YouTube with a link to your original website. If people find your videos interesting, they are sure to follow the link. These people might end up getting converted to your customers.

Use Facebook profile: Whenever you launch a new product or undertake a specific business activity, make a relevant wall post on your Facebook profile. For instance, you own a business of energy boost drinks and you have recently launched a new product in the same category for people aged above 50. Catch the attention of your target audience with a crisp wall post, such as, ‘Feel like 30 with our new Re-vital 50+ health drink!’ Do not forget to add your website link for driving interested audience to the product page.

Use Twitter: Tweet links of your product videos, articles, blogs and press releases on Twitter. A large follower base on Twitter is likely to click the links and visit your website. If a customer posts feedback regarding a product, make sure you retweet. This will engage more followers into your business.

Get involved in online discussions: Online forums are a great place to spread your brand name. Get involved in online discussions and tell people about your products. This is also a platform where you can get to hear about your customers’ likings, grievances, appreciations and rejections. Whether positive or negative, you should handle every customer reaction wisely as it may affect the mindset of other people on the forum.

Post search engine optimized content: Driving traffic to your website is all about employing the right keywords. So, never undermine the importance of SEO techniques and employ highly searched keywords. However, never misuse the power of optimization while doing this

Beginners’ Guide – Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

We all are beginners at some point. For the beginners the biggest challenge is to know the advantages and disadvantages of Social Media. Today we are going to talk about the Social Media – Advantages and Disadvantages. Many small business owners have not yet taken advantage of social media to help grow their business. It has become so vital for us to stay connected and convey the right message. To get the best out of this platform here are some tips and guidance for the beginners to know.

First of all some facts and figures of social media sites:

One in every nine people on earth is on Facebook
Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users everyday
One in four Americans watches a video online everyday
During the second half of 2010, LinkedIn membership base grew, on average, by 1 million new members every ten days

Connect: Facebook helps you connect and share with people in your life. Just think what was your life before Facebook invented? Was it more relax, exiting, boring or challenging? In Facebook we can create a personal profile, add other users as friends & exchange messages. If we talk about LinkedIn, it gives us the opportunity to connect with professionals across the globe. Whether you are using it for personal growth or spreading your business. It also gives you the opportunity to connect with business minded people like you. If we talk about Twitter, it is simply amazing! Twitter is a real time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas what you find interesting. It gives you an opportunity to know what’s happening around the world in 140 characters long tweet!

Interact: With your connections Facebook gives you an opportunity to let people know about you. You can share your photos, stories and create fan page. As a business, Facebook pages are a good source of feedback on your product/services. In LinkedIn you can interact with professionals on one single platform. You can discuss business, resources, ideas, learning opportunities and lot more. In Twitter, tweets are text based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the followers. On a personal level Twitters allows one to communicate with friends and families. On business level it connects your current & potential customers with your product & service.

Exchange: With the use of Facebook, we exchange joy, fun, sorrows, help and many more things at one place! Facebook slowly also being used like email. So this is one of the cost-effective ways to connected. With the use of LinkedIn we exchange professional expertise along with useful information which eventually enhances our professional brand. It also exchanges stronger business ideas with each other. On a business level, it helps us to exchange feedback, comments which eventually lead to increase business. On a personal level, it helps you in personal development. Twitter is a powerful tool for exchanging information and news as Twitter user often link to useful sites or articles & can be source of alternative news.

Disadvantages: As we discussed the Advantages of Social Media but we cannot ignore the Disadvantages just to be more secure on online platform.

Think about the viral potential of media. When news are negative and bad in taste, the same will happen with that brand. It is hard to undertake damage control when you are dealing with social media. Your name might get spoiled within hours. The best example is MacDonald’s Twitter promotion. According to Mail Online news article – Mac Fail! MacDonald’s Twitter promotion backfires as users highjack hash tag MacD stories to share fast food horror stories. Opponents accused the burger franchise of making customer vomit, serving pig meat from gestation crates and dishing up a burger containing a finger nail. Another disadvantage is to face threat from fake profile and ID. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of Facebook. People often use fake profile to insult or harassing someone. Students who are Facebook addicted do a bad result on his or her exams. One of the major risks of social networking and the Internet in general is breaches in privacy. These sites collect considerable amounts of personal information, with email addresses being one of the most collected pieces of personal data. Also these social networking sites possibly reduce persons’ compassion. You can check Twitter updates from your phone and send messages from anywhere. Social networking sites have the potential of having spreading negative or Anti-social messages. Amongst

As discussed above there are both Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Networking. One thing is clear; it is up to the person how he/she wants to get benefit from Social Media platform. In life we are often subjected to good and bad choices it is only we ourselves, who can decide what we want.