Creating A Buzz on Google Buzz
Move over Facebook and Twitter, there’s a new service in town. And with the Google name attached to it, you know its going to bring on pretty stiff competition over the coming months.
Like everything with Google, Google Buzz is associated with your global Google account. If you already have a gmail account, login and you’ll have immediate access to Buzz. Simply click on the Buzz link in your navigation, and activate your Buzz account.
Buzz is a similar in concept to Twitter, though it has a platform that offers you a lot more ways to connect. Add a link, and the content is instantly pulled in for you to use. You can add your own comments, or send it out the way it feeds in. It also pulls the images from the page, allowing you to select which images to showcase in your feed.
It’s also easy to add friends. You can connect with the people you’re connected through gmail with. Or search based on your keywords. Then click the add button and you’re following them.
The feed is similar in concept to Twitter, you’ll be able to browse through the latest posts from all you’re following. But with the expanded space for words, photos and graphics, its a pleasure to read.
Will it catch Twitter soon? Only time will tell.
How To Use Foursquare For Business
Think your behind the times if you’re not using Facebook or Twitter for your business?
Now you can add another social site to that list as well.
Foursquare is a social site that’s just celebrating its first birthday, and already has tens of thousands of users, and businesses adding their name to the lineup everyday.
Foursquare combines a friend finder and a social city guide, along with game mechanics that allow users to earn points and received special prizes along the way.
To join the Foursquare network, you start by downloading either the iPhone app or the Android app, or using a mobile website with other phones (a Blackberry app is in the works.) Don’t have a web browser? Not a problem – you can check in by sending text messages. Then when your out at a restaurant, bar, café, park – someplace you may want to connect up with friends, you simply check in via Foursquare. Every time you check in, you’ll be awarded points. There are different badges for a variety of things, such as discovering new places, and spending too much time in one location.
As a business, where do you fit in? By watching who’s visiting of course.
Foursquare offers a mayor badge to a person that has visited a location more than anyone else. When the mayor enters your business, you can offer them deals and enticements – how about a free drink or a free appetizer?
You can even combine your social campaigns. Announce on Twitter a special for the first person to become the official mayor of your restaurant.
It’s all about having fun, playing the game, and attracting a whole new crowd to your location.
Social Media Is Just A Fad
Think Social Media is just a fad? Better think again. This video will share with you some amazing trends of how information flows -Social Media Revolution
The Difference Between A Good Profile And A Great Profile
Every social site gives you the opportunity to become a writer. Not just to write up a resume, and provide a little bit of information on yourself. But to actually write in such a way that you attract the attention of the people looking for you.
Yet most people are missing the opportunity of a lifetime.
Let’s start with LinkedIn.com. When you fill out your bio, Most think from a resume standpoint, and put something like this:
Jane Doe
Director of Recruiting at ABC Company
What does that really tell you about the person? When they are out answering questions in the Q&A section, or inviting you to be a friend, that’s how you make an initial decision. Compare that to:
Lori Osterberg
Small business online marketing expert and coach, author, trainer, social networking expert and photographer
When that shows up, it tells you my specialties – what you can expect out of building a relationship with me. It tells you my knowledge base, and more importantly, what I’m hoping to capture by building relationships. Oh yes. It also provides a ton of keywords so if anyone is searching for a photographer and a social networking expert, I’m more apt to place high in the search results.
Compare that to the Director of Recruiting at ABC Company. I guarantee most people will never search for those keywords.
And it doesn’t stop with LinkedIn. Head over to Twitter and you’ll see the same thing. Instead of putting a title in your bio, put in your keywords. It makes it easier for people to find you based on your common interests, not based on your job description.
In the new economy, it’s not about what job you have or what title you use. It’s about your skills – your keywords. If I want someone with your level of expertise, how can I find you?
Which Social Site Should You Spend Your Time On?
As a business owner or professional, you only have so many hours in the day. While the promise of what social media can do for you is great, how do you really know where you should be spending your time? Which site is truly the best for you?
During this past July, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., up 14 percent from June. Compare that with Twitter, which saw 21.2 million unique visitors during July, up 6 percent from June. (full stats here)
In either case, the numbers look great. Where else can you head out and interact with millions of unique visitors all in one month?
So of course you should jump on to both Facebook and Twitter, and enjoy the ride.
While that’s a great strategy, you may be overlooking something that will work far better for your business. First ask yourself a series of questions.
- Who is my ideal client?
- Where can I connect with them?
- Where are they most likely to hand out online?
- Is there a way to restructure what I do to reach out to more people?
- Can I niche my business, and reach out to individual groups in different ways?
The whole idea behind social is it allows you to connect with prospects and customers, and provide them with more information in your area of expertise. The more expertise you can provide, the more clients you’ll find by being in tune with them.
Start by listing out your ideal clients. Be specific, thinking of individual clients when you create your list. Then categorize them. As a massage therapist, your list may look like this:
1. people recovering from auto injuries
2. people referred by chiropractors
3. people who work out at a gym regularly
Now you have three distinct categories of people you can connect with. You can look for people that list this in their bios on places like Facebook and Twitter, and you can also look for specific social groups that target these specific areas.
Keep up your postings on the main sites, but spend more of your time connecting on the niche sites as well. With smaller sites, you may not have to post as option to have a big impact. And you can also pull out from the crowd as an expert quicker, giving your business an even bigger boost.
Creating A Social Strategy Within Your Business Plan
Do you have a business plan? What about a marketing plan? Do you have a social networking strategy somewhere within those plans?
Most people don’t. They have never put down on paper exactly why they are using Facebook, or how Twitter will help grow their businesses.
But just because it’s a free tool doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan of action for what you are doing. Like all other forms of marketing, you should give some thought to why you are doing it, and how you will implement it over a long period of time.
1. Don’t use social networking for marketing your business unless you understand how it will impact your overall business.
Too many business owners start using Twitter or Facebook without having a plan and understanding how it will impact their business models. Sure they are free tools. Yes you can reach out to a ton of people. But statistics show almost 95% of all people on Twitter have 100 or less followers, and rarely post more than a few times.
That’s not a strategy. There are no checks and balances to make sure you are on target. And you probably won’t have any results because there is little effort in a strategy like this.
2. There’s a cost to everything.
Whenever I meet with people and they find out I help people develop social networking strategies, the questions pour in.
How often should I post on Twitter?
Can you really build business relationships with Facebook?
Is LinkedIn a successful tool?
Sure, all of these are free resources for you. But the trouble with each of them is they take time to fully put to use, and to see the results.
I’ve been on Twitter for 1 ½ years, and have only had measurable results since January. Is it a significant part of my business? No. I have different streams coming in from all over. But Twitter is bringing me in income every single week.
My goal is to make it a stream of income, and to use it effectively. Which I’m doing fairly well.
The cost to me is my time. It takes time every day to build up the relationships, and to understand how and when to promote each piece of my business.
When you are developing your own strategy, its important to understand that just because its free, doesn’t mean you will see instant results and have it work for you with your limited knowledge on the subject matter.
You have to be willing to learn how to use it better, not just use it knowing what you know.
Start developing your own strategy and find out what’s truly possible with social marketing.
Why Social Is Changing Our World
Do you remember the simple life? For most of us it wasn’t that long ago.
When you did something crazy in high school, people talked about you for a week at school and then it disappeared. Now it makes for great high school reunion conversations.
Ah, the good ol’ days. 
Thanks to blogging and social media, your business is everyone else’s business forever. If you do something crazy, it will circulate online forever. If you do something embarrassing, the photos will be around forever to prove it.
A recent report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling says that one fourth of colleges surveyed indicated they use web searches or social networking technology to dive deeper into prospective students backgrounds.
More than half monitor the online social buzz for their school.
And one third maintain a blog for their college.
In short, they know how to use social media and they aren’t afraid to use it.
And it’s not just colleges. Employers are taking the same action. Want to find a date? Find a wealth of information on a person before you ever meet face to face.
I’ve been speaking to a lot of PTCO groups at local schools, and have been amazed at the questions and concerns.
Is it important to protect our kids? Definitely. But more important is to teach them to use these new tools the right way.
What you say CAN have an impact on you for the rest of your life.
The best way to do that is to take an active voice and learn the technology yourself.
You’re not a Twitter expert if you just signed up and have 20 followers. But using Twitter and finding out how to grow your business with it is a step in the right direction.
You’re not a blogging expert by having a few posts on a blog. But building your own blog, posting regularly, and finding out how it can change your business is the action you need.
We’ll never take a step backwards. The tools we have today will only be modified and improved in the future.
Take action now, and be ready for what the future brings.