Social Media Marketing Blog

Here is a great article that outlines how to use twitter for public relations:

Using Twitter for Marketing & PR – A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Engage your CEO in social media.  Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers.  But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard.  Especially if you are a larger or global company.  A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook.  I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries.  But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments.  If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool.  Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.
2. Keep in touch with bloggers / media.  It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you’ll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well.  In fact, I have lots of people I consider “famous” in the marketing and PR worlds following me.  In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.
3. Monitor your company / brand on Twitter.  A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter.  Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it?  The result was a blog which drove a good amount of traffic and leads.  (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
4. Announce specials, deals or sales.  If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience.  You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that “Ding” application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights?  Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that.  Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.
5. Live updates on events or conferences.  If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening (“Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am”) and more.  It is a great last minute marketing tool.
6. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more.  Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot.  A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage.  If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.

Getting Started

1. Sign-up and post a profile.  Visit Twitter and click on the “Get Started – Join” button in the middle.  The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
2. Write some updates.  The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer – I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter.  Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner.  Just write something.
3. Make friends.  Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy.  Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people’s Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it.  That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the “Follow” button on the top left and you are now following them.  Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person.    You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
4. How to post URLs.  Twitter is based on 140 character updates.  If you have a really long URL, that doesn’t leave much room for  Most people on Twitter use bit.ly to take a long URL and make it short.  Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
5. Monitor conversations about your company.  Even if you don’t join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand.  This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint.  Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this.    You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated.  Another tip is that you can “follow” all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile).  If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
6. How to “chat”.  Using the @ symbol before someone’s Twitter username is how people have “conversations” in Twitter.  This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of).  For example if you wrote “@alison thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today” that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out.  It’s not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM serviceRead more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4034/How-to-Use-Twitter-for-Marketing-PR.aspx#ixzz13cL1j0i2

Here is a tool for small businesses looking to gather some market research for their social media strategy.  eMarketer, the purveyor of digital intelligence with a free daily newsletter helps small business owners with:

• Research and Analysis on Digital Marketing and Media
• Objective Analysis of Internet Market Trends
• Data from over 4,000 Worldwide Sources

You can check them out here.

About Alison  

 Are you looking for Web Marketing Experts to help your small business with it’s online marketing?   Someone to help you create and implement your social media strategy?  I know what you are up against.  You need to find the right fit that is within your budget and trust that person to know what he/she is doing and to get it done.  You want someone to market your business online.  You want to end each day knowing your online marketing strategy is successful and expanding.  You want to give that worry to someone and spend time on the parts of your business that you enjoy.  You want to tell other internet marketing experts, “thank you, but I already have an amazing internet marketing system in place that is bringing me all the business and money that I need.” 

My name is Alison Elliott and I help small businesses succeed online.  You can read more about me, my internet marketing system and how I use social media strategy and web marketing expertise to create, implement and manage your online marketing and presence, on my local internet marketing experts web site.  

To help move you in a positive direction, I am offering you a free thirty minute consultation to see if my services are the right fit for you.  If nothing else, you will leave the consultation with a clearer idea of what you are wanting and how to attain it.

I recently read an article titled ” The 5 Dangers of a Half-Hearted Social Media Campaign” and I really liked it.  Sometimes, or maybe often actually, businesses will just throw themselves into social media marketing themselves by starting a campaign of some sort but the campaign isn’t adequately planned and the execution is not focused (maybe due to lack of time or staff) and the result is poor results.  Here is a section from the article above regarding social media marketing:

Here are 5 pitfalls you are setting yourself up for by only making a half-hearted foray into social media. 

You can’t respond as fast as you need to
Social media is all about communicating in real-time. And communicating in real-time requires open dialogue and snap decisions – things that the traditional brand – consumer exchange does not involve. If you aren’t ready to have a round-the-clock discussion with your audience, they will take over the conversation, feel like you aren’t interested in participating and either lose interest themselves or become resentful. We see this happen when clients set up a Twitter account and don’t do more than the occasional self-promotional tweet. If you put yourself out there in social media, your audience expects you to have a dialogue with them. Building that expectation and letting them down is worse than never having entered because you’ve damaged your credibility in the process.

Dabbling = obvious lack of enthusiasm
The entire purpose of getting involved in social media is to inspire enthusiastic participation from both your own people and your audience, and half-hearted efforts never inspired anyone. If you have yet to find an enthusiasm for social media that makes you genuinely eager to get out there and meet the people you’re selling things to in cyberspace, and more importantly to really listen to them, you need to do some research and get convinced of how important it is. You’re lack of enthusiasm will only make people feel alienated from you.

You won’t be able to overcome the noise
Your audience is bombarded with messages all day long. Half-way will not get their attention because they tune most brand messaging out and instead focus on listening to each other, not to you. Going in half way will only ensure what resources you do devote to social media come to nothing. If you convinced your boss to give social media a try as a “cheap” option, you’re still expected to show some results at the end of the day, or you can kiss your social media program goodbye. 

It breaks fundamental marketing rules
Deciding to add a little social media to your marketing mix for the sake of doing it is contrary to good marketing. Your basis for all efforts should be solving clients’ problems to create pull, not just to make noise. Start like any other job with all the background research, strategy, targeting and high demands on creative work as you would for any other job. If you’re hearing suggestions that don’t go beyond “let’s start a Twitter account and Facebook fan page,” you should be worried. Start with a need, and from there decide what tools are the best way to solve it. Do not start with Twitter and Facebook and try to figure out how to shoehorn your brand into them. 

Best Buy took the perfect approach with their award winning Twelpforce campaign. They started with their customers’ problem (product support) and found the best way to solve it, which just happened to be Twitter. It ended in happy customers a Cannes Lion.

Failure is an option (when you do it right)
When you’re all in, people are forgiving of mistakes as long as you’re responsive and try to meet them half way.  When you get tyrannical after things don’t go your way, are you ever in for a backlash. Getting into social media means playing by its rules, and those rules do not include conservative policies like censorship and lawsuits. Apple and Nestle have both made costly errors in handling criticism by failing to respect people’s freedom to express themselves through social media. It’s their space, you’re just visiting. Going all in means letting go of control. Or rather, realizing you never had it.  Read The Full Article Here

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Unique, Interesting and Great Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.

You may or may not know that one of the components to successfully growing your network is the quality of your connections – meaning if someone who is a “connector” is following you, chances are he or she is also talking about you or retweeting you or checking in at your location.  Those are your target connections when growing your network.  I found some great tips on social media marketing last Friday, written by the Union Tribune.  Here are the tips:

A step by step guide to grow your network with Twitter (great social media marketing advice):

STEP 1: Complete your Twitter bio. Be sure to include information that will prompt people to follow you, including keywords that appeal to their interests. Don’t forget to display a link to your business’s website, and make the most of your Twitter avatar. It’s a small square shape, so pick a simple, bold image to identify your Tweets.

STEP 2: Use Twitter’s search capabilities

(search.twitter.com) to find, follow and reach out to people already Tweeting on your subject. Twitter’s search function is “real time” so you can find people talking right this instant about where to eat, stay, party, or shop in San Diego and join the conversation.

STEP 3: On Fridays, watch for Tweets containing #FollowFriday (sometimes #FF) for follower recommendations. Check out these recommendations and acknowledge them. Then give some #FollowFriday love to your favorite followers, too.

STEP 4: Search through and list your Twitter handle in directories that organize people’s Twitter accounts by subject area such as beer, clean tech, or running. Examples include

Twellow.com, Twibes.com, TwitterCounter.com, and followfinder.googlelabs.com. Take care to avoid spammy tools that automate the following process as that’s exactly how not to acquire the right kind of followers.

STEP 5: Visit the Twitter profiles of your favorite Tweeps to see if they’ve created any ‘lists’ of their followers that you can poach. Begin building lists of your own.

STEP 6: ReTweet things that you think will be of interest to your followers. ReTweeting is ‘paying it forward’ and the more you give, the more you get in social networks.

STEP 7: Attend a TweetUp or similar event where you can mix with your followers in person to solidify relationships as well as find new connections.

STEP 8: Share your Twitter handle everywhere — in your e-mail signatures, business cards, Linkedin profiles, website, signage, and advertising.

STEP 9: Generate great content.

I was travelling recently and had lunch at this great restaurant.  I should give a shout out to Cocina Mexicana y Tequila Fino in Danville, CA for the wonderful food, amazing atmosphere and great marketing!!!!  We ended up eating there twice during my stay there.  And a small disclaimer, this is not traditional Mexican food.  Think California Cuisine meets West Coast Mexican Food.

Near the hostess bar was a great marketing piece.  A printed custom postcard but very rectangular ( 5 1/2 X 2 in). 

HOW DID THE PIECE ENTICE ME (THE CUSTOMER)?

1.  The size:  a funky unique size with a perforated tear off bottom caught my eye

2.  The pitch:  stay up to date on their happy hours, their live events, parties, wine tastings and more. 

3.   The simplicity:  simply add your name and email, pick what you want to stay up to date on, tear off the bottom and hand it to your server 

HOW DID THE PIECE ENGAGE ME INTO AN ONLINE RELATIONSHIP?

1.  The opt-in:  When I sign up, I am now part of their e-mail list and online e-mail campaign

2.  The social media promotion: on the back,  you could win a dinner on us if you . . .

follow them on Twitter, tweet a specific hash code to them
OR
find them on Facebook and check in at their location through Foursquare.

One marketing suggestion from me to complete the expense and increase your ROI:   If I were the owners, I would have made sure this piece came with every menu.  What a great way to pass the time between ordering and food than by giving my patrons the opportunity to check out how they can be in the know about what is going on at the restaurants and possibly win a free dinner!

Sometimes it isn’t about thinking up the social media marketing idea, but about the time to execute it.  If you need some help with your social media marketing implementation, contact us!

Alison Elliott is a Marketing Expert and founder of Corner Your Market Global Marketing.  To get these tips along with tips on SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing for Small Business, Unique, Interesting and Great Marketing Ideas for Small Business ,  Help Creating Online Marketing Plans for Small Businesses, and Businesses and Software to help Market your Small Business online , you can sign up to our small business marketing e-guide here.