Making Use of Twitter’s Hashtag #
Making Use of Twitter’s Hashtag ‘ # ‘
Hashtag…sounds like something out of the 60’s that a certain group of people may have been overly familiar with. Today, however, the # — hashtag is a very important Twitter trending tool.
When you tweet about something important to your business, using a hashtag in that tweet will take you beyond your followers to the Twitterverse where other Tweeps search for content, connections and trending topics.
For instance, I went up to the search bar in Twitter and put #leadgeneration and a page worth of tweets popped up for me to review where other put in their tweet #leadgeneration. Because I want to follow that hashtag, I saved it as a search. Now all I have to do is go to my saved searches and click on that when I want to see what is trending in lead generation.
There are free apps that will do this too. A simple one that I have saved to my bookmark bar is www.hashtags.org. What I like about Hashtags.org is that they have a trending graph attached to the page so you can see how that topic is trending within a span of time.
Hashtag Tips:
- Don’t go hashtag crazy, tweeps! A couple of hashtags in a tweet will be fine, but tagging every word is just annoying.
- Hashtags make an excellent event tracker. Come up with a unique hashtag for your meeting or event then encourage people to tweet with that tag. At the end of the event you will see how your event trended with the participants. Very cool!
- Twitter has a great tutorial on their site for hashtag use: https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-what-are-hashtags-symbols
So, if you are looking for content ideas, or scouring the web for competitive data or just really interested in a topic within the Twitterverse, hashtags are the way to go. Simple, useful and maybe a great way to connect with thought leaders on the topics that interest you most.
Tips and Tools You Can Use: Rapportive Social CRM Google App
I started using a truly functional app with my gmail account that I want to share with you. If you haven’t heard of Rapportive, then listen up because I’m in love. Really, I want to date Rapportive. In testing a few new apps, I installed Rapportive to my gmail account and now I feel like gmail has become 1000% more functional for me and my business.
Rapportive is a simple to use social CRM add on to your existing gmail accounts. It allows you to see the social connections that people have made public directly on the email template of the opened email. It is a seamless add on that will increase your ability to connect and communicate with your contacts.
CrunchBase gives a very simple overview of the app:
Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.
Why I love it: the functionality of growing my community and connecting immediately.
When I open an email the app instantly connects that email address to any publically shared information that has been associated with it. Here’s a copy of my email synced with Rapportive.
It shows my tweets, posts, info synced from LinkedIn and so much more. When someone receives an email from me, if they have the app, this is what they see. If we aren’t connected via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other sites, right from the email screen they can follow or connect with me. Brilliant!
Thank you Rapportive, for creating a free social CRM app that works seamlessly. You have made my life better.
Image: kanate / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
3 Must Haves for a New Media Plan: Engaging prospects and customers with new media
3 Must Haves for a New Media Plan: Engaging prospects and customers with new media
New media may not be so new anymore. It is really a comprehensive approach to creating rich content and strategic use and placement of that content for prospects and customers alike. Where are you and how easy is it for your prospects and customers to find you? The granddaddy of media locations is a website, but a website alone will not engage you with you prospects and customers. In order to choose which media outlets you should actively participate in, you need a strategy that is broader than ‘build it and they will come’.
Just because you build it, they will NOT come! Many companies believe their investment in a flashy website will instantly drive traffic to their website and convert browsers to shoppers but that is most definitely not the case. While an appropriately laid out website is a substantial part of the plan, the ‘design’ of the site isn’t what Google, Yahoo and Bing are crawling. When was the last time you did a website audit to determine the effective nature of your design, content and accessibility of your site? A website is the red door on your community. It is not just a corporate portfolio and online brochure. Web designers often attract their customers by their design skill, but design elements are secondary to the strategy.
Here are 3 Must Haves for a New Media Plan
1. Dynamic SEO
The underlying strategy for your online presence should include ONGOING search engine optimization. Browsers often search for informative terms where as a buyer has already performed the informative search and is moving toward decision focused searches. This customer maturity will adjust keyword phrases and your strategy should provide both levels of research to better accommodate the position your prospects and customers are in. As a customer segment becomes more educated their search terms change and so should your keyword profiles.
2. Dynamic Marketing Content Strategy
In the same way you keyword phrases may change, so will your new media strategy. A foundational marketing plan will have the ability to flux as media opportunities arise. You may not need video at the onset of a project but as you move further through the funnel, it may become necessary to implement a video component. The key to a dynamic marketing strategy is to tie your products, overall business objectives and specialties to a comprehensive content development and production plan.
3. Active Customer Engagement Strategy
With solid SEO and dynamic content you have two pieces of your media plan that tie into an over arching customer engagement strategy that will guide and direct all aspects of your new media involvement.
The content and customer engagement strategy will include placement and participation in the appropriate social media sites, metrics and evaluations for change and adoption of relevant material and finally a comprehensive customer touchpoint strategy. Without the above strategies, your involvement in social media is just noise, and unfortunately that is all most businesses are today.
In our next series of posts we will take a deep dive into each of these factors as they relate to specific verticals. Thanks for reading and as always, your comments are welcomed.
Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Stop Being Lazy: 3 Ways to Rev Up Your Content
Stop Being Lazy: 3 Ways to Rev Up Your Content
I confess. I am guilty. I have been a lazy blogger. I have been lax. I have highlighted a subject and not given it a deep dive in to meaningful content. I have written for my pleasure, not always for the benefit of my audience. How about you? Have you fallen prey to the lazy writing habits of a busy professional? Here are 3 ways to rev up your content (and your business) and write like you mean it.
1. Imagine you have one hour to solve your customer’s biggest problem. Create a list of strategies, tasks, must-do’s. What will it take for you to make this problem go away? What do you need to research? What do you need to read? What is the bottom line issue? Now go find the supportive material to solve the problem. Get your Google on.
2. Write like you are in a writing bootcamp. When I watch shows like the Biggest Loser, I am always impressed with the focus and intensity of the participants and trainers. You are not allowed to slack off because there is someone always looking over your shoulder PUSHING you to keep going. To rev up your writing and create more demanding content, set a timer. Give yourself 30 minutes to complete 3 paragraphs of content. You cannot get up. You cannot look out the window. You cannot get a snack, answer a call, check email or lolly gag on Facebook or Twitter. You must write. [As a side note, that's how I'm writing this post.]
3. Do this EVERYDAY. I just read a very simple, but profound little book by Jeff Olsen titled The Slight Edge. Bottom line, the difference between successful people and those who are not comes down to the fact that successful people do ‘just that much more’ than everyone else and they do it daily. The small, compounded effects of those changes over time lead to life changing breakthroughs. You cannot expect to break the lazy writing habit if you don’t do something different.
We can all rev up our content with a focused concentration on producing valuable, usable, business changing information. Sometimes we just need to hyper focus to break the habit. Sometimes we need to enter a self mandated bootcamp to regain focus. Remember: you only have 1 hour to solve your customer’s biggest problem, so get busy.
Customer Engagement for Restaurants: 4 Quick Tips
One of the toughest industries in the US? Yep. Lot’s of competition? Yep. Will you be successful without a customer engagement strategy using social media? Maybe. Can social media help you? Absolutely.
Today a restaurant without a social media presence is missing a huge opportunity to engage with its customers. But that doesn’t mean that you should just plop up a Facebook page and hope for the best. It is not ‘build it and they will come’ with regards to social media and customer engagement. You must have a strategy for engaging with your customers. Here are 4 tips to engage with your customers:
- At a minimum, sign up for and monitor your Yelp and Foursquare accounts. Location based services or social check-in platforms are becoming even more popular with diners. Not so much for discounts and coupons but to be seen as socially active and hip by your friends. Every time a diner checks into one of these services, the check-in is posted to their social profiles notifying their friends of their location. In addition, socially active diners will write their own reviews and comments, which further encourage their friends and followers to check that place out.
- Establish a Twitter account and tweet out your daily specials. You can also give your followers Twitter Only deals. This is a fun way to engage and track the effectiveness of your participation on Twitter. It’s also very effective with your regulars.
- Set up a Facebook Page and do weekly reviews of your favorite food items. If possible, take current photos of those dishes and upload them with your comments. A great way to entice your diners on Facebook is to highlight special ingredients, unique flavors and special preparations. Highlight the friendly atmosphere, or ambiance, or excellent staff. If you have a bar, make sure to feature a cocktail and promote your bartenders. Whatever you do, don’t ignore your page. Post daily, every couple of days or weekly as a last option.
- Short YouTube clips of how your chef prepares an item can also be a huge draw for your restaurant. People love cooking shows and how to segments. Take one of your special items and film a short how to about it. Don’t worry; you don’t have to be Spielberg. A flip cam or your IPhone will work just fine. Most important thing is to feature the food, steady the camera and speak slowly and clearly.
These four ways to use social media will engage your customers, connect them to your restaurant and keep you at the front of the list next time they are deciding where to eat.
Oh, and make sure your website, your menu’s, table signs etc. have your social media contact information on them so customers start connecting right away.
Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Tips and Tools You Can Use: Plancast
Tips and Tools You Can Use: Plancast
Do you ever wonder what events and conferences are worth attending? One way to evaluate what event you may want to attend is to look at your collective friends and followers to see what they have going on. A cool search tool called Plancast allows you to connect your existing social media profiles and search upcoming events based upon keyword searches that you define.
Check them out at www.plancast.com
Are You Crunching The Right Numbers? Measuring Growth Opportunities
Are You Crunching The Right Numbers? Measuring Growth Opportunities
Today, it seems like a lot of small businesses are fixated on their social media pages and image. While that is very important, it’s not necessarily the number of fans/follower/circles/zebras or whatever else you are measuring that matters most. When it comes to crunching numbers, make sure you include the following:
- Since the launch of new media, what is the increase in COMMUNICATION with your existing customers? If you aren’t measuring the increase in current customer contact, you are missing a key metric.
- How many of your existing customers have followed/friended you on your social networks? Are you targeting your current customers in social media? The old adage is still true — takes more to get a new customer than keep an old one — so make sure you integrate your new media marketing with your existing customer base.
- With the advent of social media integration, what has been the increase in UP SELLING or CROSS SELLING to your existing customers? Is your content and communication clearly leading your current customers to added services and products? Are you tracking that?
Word Up! 3 Free Listening Tools To Track Buzz
Word Up! 3 Free Listening Tools to Track Buzz About Your Business
Are people talking about your business? Do you even care if people are talking about your business? You should. Since we specialize in using social media and branding as part of a ccomprehensive customer engagement program, we believe listening for buzz is crucial. Here are 3 free tools and a few tips on how to use the data you collect to boost buzz, build your brand and connect with your customers.
1. Addictomatic –Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. This is one of my favorite sites because I get a quick snapshot. We use it often to highlight what type of buzz is happening around our clients.
2. Google Alerts — Google Alerts Monitor the Web for interesting new content. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. I set up alerts for all my brand specifics (customer engagement) as well as all of our trade and intellectual property terms. This way I can see who is talking about us but also determine if our brand and property are being used inappropriately.
3. Social Mention –It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. I LOVE this site, ‘nough said!
How to do it:
1. Set a block of time aside daily to review your results.
2. Respond to at least 50% of all positive and negative comments. (Ideally you would respond to 100%, but shoot for half at first until you get a plan in place.)
That’s it! Connecting and listening are two crucial steps in customer engagement and these tools help you do both.
If You Liked It You Should Have Put a Ring On It: 4 Reasons Why You NEED a Customer Engagement Program
If You Liked It You Should Have Put A Ring On It!
4 Reasons Why You NEED a Customer Engagement Program
Customer engagement is a term that’s generating buzz in marketing, public relations and social media circles. A simple definition is that CE is the total of all interactions with a potential customer or existing customer and the subsequent interactions, relationship building and measurements of those interactions. Wikipedia defines Online CE as:
Online customer engagement refers to:
- A social phenomenon enabled by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and taking off with the technical developments in connection speed (broadband) in the decade that followed. Online CE is qualitatively different from the engagement of consumers offline.
- The behaviour of customers that engage in online communities revolving, directly or indirectly, around product categories (cycling, sailing) and other consumption topics. It details the process that leads to a customer’s positive engagement with the company or offering, as well as the behaviours associated with different degrees of customer engagement.
- Marketing practices that aim to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour. Although CE-marketing efforts must be consistent both online and offline, the internet is the basis of CE-marketing.(Eisenberg & Eisenberg 2006:72,81)
- Metrics that measure the effectiveness of the marketing practices which seek to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour.
The key here is that a systematic CE program is designed influence customer behavior and increase customer engagement. There are 4 main reasons why your business needs a CE program.
1. Increase Customer Retention 
When it comes to customer love, nothing says I Love You like sticking around. Customer retention is the foundation of building a business today and increasing retention has been hard to do, until now. A 58% increase in customer retention based upon a CE process utilizing social media gives a business tangible reasons to actively integrate their own CE program. Gallup shows that world-class organizations can see significant increase with actively engaged customers by utilizing a CE program.
Gallup’s customer engagement ratio is a macro-level indicator of an organization’s health that allows executives to track the proportion of fully engaged to actively disengaged customers.
In average organizations, the ratio of fully engaged customers to actively disengaged customers is 0.8:1.
In world-class organizations, the engagement ratio is 8:1.
Business units that score above Gallup’s database median on both customer and employee engagement significantly outperform units that rank in the bottom half on both measures.When you consider the premium that fully engaged customers deliver to your organization, isn’t it vitally important that you understand, develop, and sustain optimized customer relationships?
http://www.gallup.com/consulting/49/customer-engagement.aspx
2. Increase Sales
Having a vibrant CE program is like having a money dance at a wedding reception that never stops. With a 44% increase in sales, you can definitely say that CE is a hit. Actively engaged customers are social megaphones for your brand. Think of a CE program as a way to put social media on steroids for your brand, and it can be done for a fraction of the cost of traditional media marketing. Certain types of businesses can see greater benefit by using a CE program, like service based businesses, experience focused businesses, restaurants, personal services and community driven businesses. Increasing sales provides reason enough for most businesses to engage in a CE program.
At Success Coaching Group we have created CE plans that cost a business less than $35 per day. It can be that affordable.
3. Increase Revenue Per Customer
Getting someone to spend money on your product or service can be a challenge, getting them to continue to spend money AND spend more of it each time they purchase, well, that’s like a honeymoon that never ends! A fully engaged customer will continue to seek ways to interact and spend money with your business and they will spend more each time they purchase.
4. Increase in Repeat Purchases
Repeat purchases are like anniversaries. A 33% increase in repeat business is a clear indicator the there is still plenty of love to go around. Each time your customer purchases, your business has an opportunity to proclaim undying affection and love. With an active CE program you ensure repeat purchases and referrals. Yet another reason to invest in a CE program.
Bottom line: Get down on your knee and put a ring on it, or rather invest in a comprehensive CE program if you want to engage your customers and increase your revenue. The businesses that use an active CE program will reap the rewards of relationship building. Let us know if we can help. Check out our services and process, then give us a call.
