The Top 5 Reasons Why It Makes Great Sense For Small Business

Part one of this article series covers the reasons why any small business or solo entrepreneur should consider creating a Facebook group. The second part addresses the best practices regarding how to start a Facebook group! Stay tuned for part two.

One of the most useful and unique Facebook Training opportunities involves online marketing strategies with Facebook groups. In fact, I just recently sat next to a successful entrepreneur on a plane ride who had seven Facebook groups up and running for her business. This article outlines the top five reasons why it makes sense to start a group for your business; and, it explains precisely how you can benefit!

Reason #1 – Involvement

With an online prospecting campaign for your business, you want to connect, build a relationship and then start adding value that leads prospects to becoming a customer or client further down the path. That “path” may take some time to travel for your prospects. So what is your strategy to keep them involved and interested in your business?

You need an active way to get them and keep them involved with your business. Facebook groups are a great solution. Your groups can be made up of all your best prospects! Each prospect has been identified to have similar needs and you, as a business, can provide a solution(s).

So what happens when you get a bunch of them together into a group? Not only can you start helping them, but they start to help each other! The group turns into a way that your business is supplying value to them, building a relationship with them, and involving them regularly with your business. Sound like a pretty good strategy for your prospects?

Reason #2 – Community

When you build your group, a community forms. Wikipedia states this about communities, “In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common.” This is the special sauce that creates bonds, interactions, and the desire to help one another…all within a branded Facebook group that you created, offered and now oversee. It is quite simple to see how groups can add value on an ongoing basis from within the community itself.

Reason #3 – Targeting

Part of the beauty of these groups is that there can be more than one group or community formed around your business. Remember the small business woman who had seven Facebook groups? You may have unique target markets that should each have their own group. You may want to have a group for customers or clients as an ongoing retention strategy. The opportunities are limitless depending on how you run your business.

Reasons #4 – Learning

You may think that you know everything that you need to know about your business, your prospects, customers and their needs. However, what if you had a live, interacting group of them that you could watch and monitor? You can listen to how they interact, what they struggle with and how they help each other. Then, you can add in lots of questions to help you understand their needs and preferences. Plus, I guarantee you’ll be more in the know for current events around your industry, as well as nuances and updates. You will always learn from your group(s) as long as you have the intent to listen and learn!

Reason #5 – Efficiency

This reason is the one that will get you hooked on Facebook groups! You don’t have to spend a ton of time on them. If created properly, with enough participants, they can run themselves for good stretches of time! Because people love to learn and provide help themselves, most questions get answered by the group itself! You need to stay involved to spur things along now and then or answer a specific question or two. But 95% of the interaction and value should ultimately come from the group members themselves! What a great marketing strategy!

Conclusion

It is pretty hard to find a marketing program that takes such little time to manage, adds so much value to prospects and/or customers, and takes just a few minutes to set up! Be sure that you have enough group members to invite into the community initially. The group dynamics start to really kick in with at least 20-25 people to start. Then, your group can continue to grow from there!

Please click here for the full Facebook Training curriculum within the University.

A Solo Entrepreneur’s Best Place For Getting Started Right With Social Media

This Social Media Training webinar is meant for anyone who is just starting out, has been dipping their toes in the social media waters, or is more advanced…but feeling overwhelmed! Social Media Marketing for your business doesn’t have to be complicated, but there certainly is a recipe for success.

If you have never had an overview of how social media works, the right tools, their unique and individual roles, how they work and integrate together, and how they should each be deployed on behalf of your business…then this is absolutely the right place to get started!

We will explain everything that you need to know in order to have the best chance of succeeding with social media for your business, including a detailed explanation of the “7 Elements of Social Media Success.”

The total length of the Webinar is just over 46 minutes. You may have to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. After watching the webinar, please make sure to review the recommendations below for how to plan out the training for your next two months. And remember, month one is all about setting your social media foundation. Month two is where you actually start prospecting!

Below is a timeline For laying out your first two months of activity. Make sure to follow them in priority order!

Things You Do Once (your first month)

Week #1 – Review the webinar on Branding Strategies. This will show you how to create your brand (even providing templates to fill out), how to identify your target market niche and develop your keyword strategy.

Week #2 – Take the time to refine your brand strategy, target market and keyword strategy!

Week #3 – Watch the webinars and create your Facebook personal profile, YouTube and Twitter accounts. Even if you have these accounts already up and running, you will still want to take the time to review these since they are focused on using these tools for business! Make sure that you are providing the right information on each account so that it is a balanced reflection of both you as the individual and you as the business owner.

Week #4 – Review the two webinars listed below which will help you create a rock solid reputation online, and help bullet proof your credibility as a businesowner that people can trust!

• Google Training Webinar – 20 Minutes To Top Page Google Rankings
• Yelp Training Webinar – The Top 5 Strategic Uses Of Online Reviews You Can’t Ignore

Your Second Month (all about prospecting)

Week #5 – Start reviewing the three Prospecting Training Webinars in the University. This will give you an extremely solid foundation to start generating new business leads!

Week #6-8 (part one) – Continue to refine your prospecting strategies and tactics as you put the University’s lessons into action. Make sure that you have hooked up with an accountability partner during this process. If you need one, we can help!

Week #6-8 (part two) – Start to build your blog. As you will learn in the training, this is the hub of your social media activity! You will find a complete Blog Training series for your review. This may take you past the first two months, but is well worth the effort!

FINAL NOTE: If you spend the time to dedicate to your success through social media marketing, you will find all-new ways to achieve growth for your business that you never even knew existed before. As you will find as you go thru our training…Your personal brand, influence and ability to find and convert prospects from anywhere, anytime will be easier to accomplish than ever before.

Click through to return to the Getting Started series home page.

How Any Small Business Entrepreneur Can Get Started Right In The World Of Social Media Marketing

August 25th from 4-5p PST

[Access protected for members only. If you are a member already, please log in and return to this page. If you are not a member, then please click on any "Enroll Now" links to see current enrollment specials. ]

What You Will Learn From This Social Media Training 101 Webinar

• What should my expectations be to create a successful social media campaign for my business?
• What are the elements that I would need to create?
• What is the priority order?
• How do I create success with limited time?
• What are the few things that will make the biggest difference?
• Success stories?
• Why you can do it, with nothing more than a computer and a good connection to the internet!
• How to do it all, for very, very little out-of-pocket costs!
  

One of the most daunting tasks for most small business entrepreneurs is simply knowing where to start! If this is your situation, or you are already well under way, but don’t feel like you have a game plan…then this is the webinar for you!

This is the webinar where it all comes into one clear picture. And we guarantee that this webinar will include things that you have never hear of before. We don’t stop with the popular social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we dig deeper for things you just can’t miss in your road to success.

You are not going to want to miss out on this webinar!

Member’s Only: Register for Today’s Webinar Now!

Blogging For Business With A Plan

If you are reading this Social Media Training post, then you are to be congratulated! That means you are actively taking an interest in what is one of the most crucial social media tools (blogging) that you have at your disposal. I loved the Fast Company article that came a couple of years ago on The Ten Commandments of Social Media, with #1 being “Though shalt blog, like crazy.” To find out more why blogging is so important to your business, check out our Blog Training series home page.

As much as blogging is so important, it is also one of the most wasted social media tools as well. Too many small business entrepreneurs work extremely hard at their blog, but their blog isn’t working very hard for them. Why? They don’t have some of the fundamentals down!  The fundamentals require that you have a brand strategy, that leads to a target audience definition, which feeds into a content outline and finally your keyword selections. You need a PLAN. If you don’t have a plan worked out (and by the way, you only have to do the plan once), then you are probably working really hard at putting up blog posts that are quite random, and actually confusing Google as to what your site is all about.

I had a good friend that recently just went back into a good portion of his blog posts and started updating them with a well-considered keyword strategy that DOUBLED his blog’s traffic in a matter of days. He is now getting well over a 1,000 more site visitors a day as a result.

Blogging can be crucial to your business, as long as you have your fundamentals in place. Don’t make the mistake of going forward on a social media, a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other marketing effort without having your fundamentals down first. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time on wasted efforts. This is one of the most important social media training tips to remember.

And What You Can Learn

About six months ago, Starbucks held a “Free Pastry Day”, and attracted over one million people to their stores. How? Social media. Twitter and Facebook captured the buzz about the event and people went searching for a free pastry.

Starbucks is a leader in effective social media marketing. Starbucks has over eighteen million fans on Facebook. The company’s MyStarbucks Idea has also generated over 80,000 ideas, and the Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, credits Twitter for the success of the project. Starbucks was also the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal.

So, where did Starbucks get their social media smarts? The company listens to their customers. Starbucks works on engaging a dialogue, and considers social media as a relationship, rather than a one-way promotion. Also, Starbucks uses social media to tell a story about their brand, via stories and videos. During the Haiti disaster, for example, Starbucks used videos as part of the Haiti outreach campaign on both YouTube and Facebook. Customers were able to donate to Red Cross in stores, and learned that Starbucks cared.

Alex Wheeler, Director of Digital Strategy at Starbucks, calls their social media approach “scrappy”.  As one of the first companies to really embrace social media, figuring out what worked and being open to different options was what led to their success.

As a small business entrepreneur, you can learn from the company’s social media activity. You can use social media to start a genuine conversation with your customers. It’s not about marketing as much as it’s about relationships (though, the relationships will lead to sales or clients).  And remember, your relationship is one that constantly gives value, and expects nothing in return.  Your are there to help and tell your story along the way!

This is yet another reminder of just how important your brand is to your social media success.  For more on this subject, please look over our lead article on “The Importance of Your Brand To Your Social Media Success.”

Social Media Training Tip #5

Twitter Places Gives Prospecting A Wake Up Call

A few months ago, the great Twitter machine grew just a little bit larger… but that “little bit” will have a great affect on their overall functionality!

Twitter launched Twitter Places – yet another geo-locational ability, accessible from your dashboard. Similar, in a way to FourSquare and Gowalla, but is Twitter trying to compete? Not exactly… In fact, they’ve partnered with the two location-based web services to help build an overall, central function for all sites to work together.

Now, when you “check-in” on FourSquare, your location can be automatically imported to Twitter – literally allowing you to Tweet from that location. Upon selecting your location in a single Twitter message, you can see the latest Tweets from that specific location – this is a great way for businesses to monitor who their customers are, what they think about the brand and/or products, as well as interact!

It is also a huge opportunity for any of us who are prospecting online everyday! Why? Because where people go identifies their interests and further helps to qualify them as a good prospect or not. Just as conducting keyword searches on what people are saying in their tweets is a means to identify and qualify them.

Since there are so many businesses on FourSquare, Twitter’s integration of FourSquare’s location database will likely ignite even more interest in the geo-location industry. Many, many users utilize FourSquare on a regular basis, but an exponentially larger number use Twitter every day, and that number is constantly growing.

Twitter Places also provides a great way to experiment with creative promotions. Since you can see all those who Tweet from a particular business or location, you can you can reach out to them directly, letting them know about special offers that can be beneficial to them! Streamlining geo-locational services has never been so helpful for any small business.

Today @ 4p PST!

Part of the membership privileges of the Practical Social Media Community include being able to get your questions answered.  And there is no better place to do that than in an open forum like a webinar.  Questions can be submitted in the days leading up to the webinar through info@practicalsocialmedia.com or typed in during the webinar itself.

This will be a format driven 100% by your questions – those that you submit prior to the webinar (info@practicalsocialmedia.com, subject line: webinar question) OR those that you submit during the webinar via the CHAT function that will be available to you when you are in attendance.  The webinar is meant to be a very productive resource for being able to ask questions surrounding the community, our services, or any of the social media training.

Please take full advantage of the opportunity.  Any thoughtful question that has a more immediate need can also be sent into info@practicalsocialmedia.com with a request to be answered as part of the site’s Q&A forum.  This allows everyone else to see, learn from, and add to the conversation in a quick and efficient time frame.

The Q&A Webinar is scheduled for December 14th from 4-5p PST.

Members: REGISTER HERE

Join The University: SPECIAL OFFERS

*NOTE: YOU MUST BE LOGGED IN TO REGISTER!

Non-Members: Not available to non-members.

Features

• All questions submitted in advance to info@practicalsocialmedia.com or typed in live during the webinar.
• The highest volume of similar questions will be addressed live.
• Remaining groupings of questions will be addressed on the Q&A forum.
• Webinar attendees can vote during the webinar by digitally raising their hands on whether or not a question was sufficiently addressed.

Benefits

• Get your questions answered, period.
• Learn from the most popular questions cropping up throughout the community.
• Find new opportunities through Q&A discussion that you may have never considered before.
• Learn the subtle nuances that can always benefit your tactical execution.

YouTube Videos Made Easy!

YouTube Training – YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, which makes it a very important part of any online marketing campaign.  But there is still a general fear factor of what it will take to make a video.  Fear no more!  I make most of my videos by putting a $99 point-and-shoot digital camera on the window ledge in front of my desk (great for lots of natural lighting), reaching over and pressing record.  I then hook up the camera to my computer with a USB cord (came with the camera), and trim the front and back of the video in about 2 minutes.  Then a quick upload onto YouTube and I’m done.  Not too difficult!  You can also upload videos directly to YouTube taken on most all smart phones (trimming software included).

One of the best video ideas is to use screen capture software for your computer.  These can be great for “how-to” style videos, which are extremely popular on YouTube.  The program simply takes a video of what is happening on your screen.  You can use it for creating a demonstration, review a powerpoint, scroll through images or anything that helps convey your business message.  For more info on how to take screen capture videos and other educational opportunities, then check out out YouTube Training for a full set of how-to articles and webinar courses.

New survey has incredible results and news for businesses of any size

In a global study conducted by STUDYLOGIC LLC, surveying 4,204 people, 39% of correspondent’s said they “could not live without” social media sites. Of course, people were living before social media came along less than a decade ago, but they’ve become completely dependent in recent years. Almost half the respondents consider social media a vital component of their lives (somewhere up there with air, food, and water).

What does that mean for small business entrepreneurs? It means that companies can jump into a “vital” form of communication that people have become somewhat addicted to. People are using social media all of the time, according to this study. Four-fifths of respondents said that they checked in on social networking sites multiple times during the day, and one-third of respondents said they checked in several times an hour.

Before meeting a new business contact, more than half of the people surveyed admitted they’d done a little “snooping”. Of course, it’s hardly snooping when you’re looking at public social networking profiles, especially when everyone does it these days. Also, 60% of respondents claimed they had refused to hire a candidate due to a negative impression from a social media profile. As a small business entrepreneur, you’d better be careful what your social networks say about you: they can make or break a deal before it’s even begun.

Also, social media isn’t just in the office or at home anymore, it’s out on the road. 60% of travelers use social media to get in touch with friends or family when they’re traveling. 64% use social media to make their plans, and in the 25-34 age bracket 76% use social media to make their travel plans (um, if you’re a travel company, you’d better be tapping into Twitter and Facebook!). And, regardless of whether or not you’re a travel company, social media travels (literally) far and wide, and you’d better be on deck.

The STUDYLOGIC LLC survey demonstrates how widespread social media has become, and it’s good news for small businesses who know how to effectively harness the power of social media. Think about it: according to this study, social media has become a mainstream form of communication between friends and family (beyond telephone and email!), and if your business makes a genuine, honest effort to use social media well, you can enter this intimate form of communication. And, everybody is already hanging out there, all the time.