Treat Twitter respectfully for the right response

Twitter is also called micro-blogging, because it is an opportunity for you to express yourself and tell the world all the facts about you and your business you are unable to fit into your website. It’s micro-blogging because it is confined to only 140 characters per ‘tweet’, which means you have to be concise with your message. (If you reduce it down to 120 characters that will leave room for any retweets.)

Just go ahead and join up, but make sure you’re careful with your username. Does it truly reflect you or your business? And if you were to change direction, would it continue to be useful? And is it memberable, easy to spell, universal to understand? If you can squeeze in a keyword, so much the better.

Communicate with your followers, don’t just post endless bits about yourself. Also don’t tweet rubbish or uninteresting material. Find out others within your target market and ask them questions, engage them in conversation, just like networking. People react to a lively commentary, and if you want to know something, tweet it in general – some people say Twitter is better than search engines for finding out what you want.

Find all the gurus and experts in your field through Twellow.com. Ask them questions and try and get to know them, but don’t bombard them – they also have a life. It’s best to watch and read their tweets first to learn how to tweet effectively and what line they are taking. Look at their followers and see if there are any you would like to follow too.

Post up some valuable information for your followers to read, and if you’re stuck for content, use Google Alerts to send you material on your chosen subjects, then trawl through and post up the interesting stuff using tinyurls for the links (this facility is incorporated into applications like TweetDeck). But usually the advice that comes direct from you is best because it shows off who you are, unlike those people who tweet endless quotations.

Get fodder for your tweets from the stuff you have already written – any articles, blogs, e-books, old emails or whatever. You’d be surprised what you have already, and it will be all your own material. Feed your new posts from your blog into your Twitter stream, and get retweet widgets for your blog so people can retweet your posts if they like them, and you can also feed your e-newsletters through Aweber.com and articles from EzineArticles.com into Twitter through their automation.

And finally, get a following to follow you, which you can achieve if you continue to post up valuable information, strike up intellectual and humorous conversations, provide relevant input to discussions, regularly retweet stuff you like and acknowledge kind gestures towards you. Then you’ll get to be known as an expert in your field, and can start to achieve more business through your other business media.

3 ways to successfully market your messages

OK, without the multi-million pound marketing budgets the big corporates have, how can SMEs compete? But you can accomplish it just as well within your sphere by using these three simple, common sense marketing techniques that needn’t cost the earth.

First, make your messages regular, repetitive and always upbeat. There are plenty of ways to achieve this: blogging is just one of them, and now with the rise of social networking, Twitter in particular, there are other media where we can bombard our followers (or potential customers) with carefully constructed marketing messages frequently posted to gain maximum effect.

The good thing about Twitter is that is you only use 140 characters (or 120 to leave enough room for, hopefully, retweets) so you have to think about what you are going to say before submitting it. This is a very good practice all marketers should adhere to. The same should apply when posting on your blog, or playing with Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites: keep it short, sharp and sweet, making it obvious what you’re talking about from the beginning, and be appropriate, relevant and newsworthy.

Second, turn your marketing around so you don’t mention the product or service directly, but how it will affect the customer, how they will feel, who it will change their lives for the better, what impact it will have. This is a concept most successful businesses employ, and it works! Customers aren’t interested in your product, they only care how it will affect them: will they get their money’s worth, will they look good, feel good, be the envy of their friends, raise their social status or whatever?

Third, be consistent with your marketing messages by creating a routine. OK, this is difficult for SMEs who may not have enough personnel to spend time on this, but try and make it part of your 40% a week marketing activities; I’m sure you can slot in a few tweets and calendarise a blog post now and again? It will pay dividends, as large successful businesses promote their new products at least 27 times, in the hope that their customers will see it between 7 and 9 times.

Frequent marketing tactics will eventually sink in: this is all part of building your relationships with your customers (which is what marketing is all about), either for immediate effect but definitely for the future. Remember, you don’t want them to forget you, or be seduced away by your competitors, do you?

How social networking can help with your marketing

The power of Web2.0, the interactive side of the internet, opens up a huge potential to publicise and expose your business to a larger audience than ever before. No longer is the world a huge place, with the rise of social networking it seems like it’s just outside your back door!

Social networking for business began with blogging, a medium which enabled organisations to write about their business in other ways, to advertise their expertise, explore new concepts, ask their audience, invite feedback and responses, and publicise their events and activities; and because it was open to all who wanted to view it, especially through the search engines, good blogs could command a wide readership, and using RSS could be followed on a regular basis without unnecessary researching.

Then there were social networking sites, with the ability to collect and make friends and communicate with them in a relaxed and convivial style, even from the other side of the world. My friend in China would be lost without Facebook! There are now a myriad of different websites, each communicating, emulating, competing and evolving as technology moves continuously and rapidly forwards.

Certain sites, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendsFeed and Ecademy (to name but a few) have adapted their services for the business world by seizing this opportunity for business networking, whereas Facebook provides for all kinds of social networkers, and indeed some applicants use their profiles for many different activities. In fact for Facebook it is suggested that you apply as an individual, rather than for other sites in which you would join as your business name. Twitter, the ‘micro-blogger’, has taken the world by storm because it appeals to the quick-fire responses of 140 characters combined with a desire to know what everybody else is doing in ‘real time’.

The need to network for business using Web2.0 should not be seen merely as a trend. Although it may be seen by many as a ‘time waster’, I think it does depend on ‘how you use your time’ to achieve results. Social networking is about increasing your following (aka collecting friends) to find other like-minded or interesting people, learn what each other is doing (this is certainly come to the fore in Twitter), a place to express and publicise your activities, form groups and forums for more interaction, ask questions and receive answers (LinkedIn has excellent facilities for this), publish your blogs and advertise through marketplaces (using Ecademy’s extensive SEO properties), republish your articles for a wider readership (though there are sites designed for this), and learn much more quickly about what’s going on in this ever-increasingly fast world.  If your business is one of the first to hear of a particular subject and is then able to rapidly respond to it, what difference would that be against your competitors?

It is also the concept of RSS and feedburning that has contributed to wide social networking use. Think of the implications if your posts could be automatically reproduced in other social networking sites just by pressing one button, combined with the ability to enable your blog posts, articles, weblinks and other relevant material instantly accessible to a potential huge readership throughout the world. Many businesses have benefited from an increased traffic to their websites and blogs, plus other media such as audio and video, with the chance to explain, educate, publicise, inform, request material, gather information, become established as an expert in your field, and achieve more sales – surely this is a phenomenon of the 21st century we cannot ignore.

How blogging and article writing help market businesses

One way to get attention is to make a big noise. Any child will tell (or show) you that. And making big noises in business are one of the ways of getting your customers to look your way, and finding a method of getting more traffic to your website will certainly be welcome.

But making a big noise without any content is a waste of time. You have to set yourself up as an expert in your particular field. Analyse all the elements of your business that you know: what makes you successful, what special features do you possess, what little bits of information can you share with your customers that demonstrates your expertise?

Forming relationships in business (ie marketing) is all about giving stuff away, as long as it leads towards the ultimate persuasion of getting customers to buy from you. There are easily things you could tell your customers that would be of benefit to them, but would cost you practically nothing. Think of the baker’s dozen idea, when providing that bit extra results in good will and an increased awareness of the provider.

Of course one way of providing information is through writing a business blog.  This versatile piece of software is virtually free to set up, totally self-editable (you don’t need a web-designer), loved by the search engines (they are visited hourly by the spiders), and can be adapted to reflect your corporate image (including creating more pages that contain further information).  Anybody with permission can add content, and all readers are encouraged to provide feedback, which also helps with search engine optimisation.

Another concept of promotion is through links to your website. Blogs are a superb medium for linking back within every post. In fact, why not comment on other people’s blog posts to increase the linkage back to your own blog or website? This will provide more exposure to a wider audience as well as helping the internet spiders.

Ideally a blog post should be short and concise. Blogs are for quick-fire expertise statements, providing the readership with a concept to grasp, information to process or to provide details of an event with a call to action. Some are over-lengthy, but really a blog isn’t the correct medium for essays. In fact once you get more accomplished at writing about your expertise then you should submit your examples as on-line articles, and there are a number of websites that can host your pieces to aid towards further exposure.

And then there’s the added advantage of linking your blog and on-line articles to the social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendsFeed and the like. All this can be automated through RSS feeds, and again this increases your audience, which in turn is passed on virally through the complexities of their RSS feeds, plus referral and recommendation. The more people who read about how good you are and what you company does, the more likely they are to visit your website and be persuaded to make a sale.

If anybody is interested in setting up a blog but want to know how, including personalising it, then I am creating a series of packages “How to Beautify your Blog”, in which customers can pick and choose certain elements to create the perfect blog for their marketing purposes.  Click on the link for more details, or watch this space for further announcements!

Hold a blogging house party!

Recently I’ve been working hard persuading lots of business women to take up the blogging challenge. One in particular took the bull by the horns and has produced the most amazing blog (visually) within hours after I told her how to create one.

But the trouble is, now that she has created this wonderful masterpiece, that’s it. She’s stopped. She’s put up two posts and nothing else.

It’s like moving into a new house. You could spent a lot of time redecorating it and putting in a fabulous kitchen, trendy bathroom and filling the rooms with stylish furniture, and final touches like matching cushions with the curtains and pictures of your family on the mantlepiece.

But then you just sit outside in the garden and look at your new house. You don’t actually live in it!

But you have to get in and start making it your home with your personal knicknacks, mud on the hall carpet, soap scum around the bath, fridge magnets galore. Then you hold a huge house party (after you’ve cleaned up) and invite all your friends to come and enjoy your house with you!

The same is with your blog. You need to go in, live in it for a while (create lots of posts), personalise it, and then invite all your friends in (ask for feedback and comments). This is how you will get used to having a blog, find out its value, enjoy linking to lots of relevant sites, encouraging new readers, feedburning it to social networking, venting your spleen and exploring the reaction from a brand new idea, outrageous statement, superb source of information, or whatever.

Isn’t it depressing to visit a lonely, underused, neglected blog? Don’t let yours become like that!

Baker’s dozen should encourage luck

What is the concept of the baker’s dozen?

For those who don’t know, this is when the baker give you 12 buns or cakes or whatever, and because you are a regular customer and he wants to to keep you happy, he pops another one into the bag as a complimentary gift.

This is his way of adding value to his service to you. It probably doesn’t cost him much to give you the extra bun or cake, but it will mean a lot to you, and a lot to him to keep your custom.

What is your way of adding that extra bun or cake? Offering as much free stuff as you can, especially your expertise in the form of blogging or article writing, will maintain your reputation and help other businesses as well. Altruism should always be encouraged and never abused.

By adding value to your contributions, your status will be increased and this should encourage recipients to remember you later when they need your product or services.