Social Networking Twitter Tips For Businesses
0 comments Posted by Charles Brown at Saturday, February 07, 2009I wanted to pass along some really interesting advice about using social networking and how powerful it is in today's business world.
First, I found this on the social networking site LinkedIn under a question Michael Stelzner posed for an article he is writing, "What should businesses understand BEFORE using Twitter as a marketing tool?"
Now this, in itself, is an example of how to use Social Networking. When Michael posed this question he received many responses from all sorts of people who use LinkedIn (LinkedIn, I should explain, is a business person's alternative to sites like MySpace and Facebook). So he was getting feedback and, just as importantly, exposure, for this single question.
One of the many really insightful answers he got was from Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad and Build a Better Business Blog. Candidly, I had never heard of Denise before or her two sites, but I am now reading both of them with considerable interest and finding them to be a wealth of top notch information.
I took you down that pathway to show you how Social Networking, whether you are using LinkedIn , Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or regular blogs, can create massive exposure. Michael got exposure (and some really good answers to his question) by posting on LinkedIn, and Denise got a new reader and a reference on my blog today.
The grease that keeps all these mechanisms moving is the willingness of people to offer good advice and ideas to others without expectation of immediate gain. Denise Wakeman's generosity has added one more link to her websites because I found her response to Michael to be so valuable.
Now I don't want to test your patience any further, so here is the advice from Denise Wakeman regarding using Twitter as a marketing tool:
1. Everything you tweet is seachable on the web. Every tweet creates a new page. This can be good and bad. Good if you're strategically using key words for which you want to be found; and bad if you aren't mindful that if you're not nice, it can come back to bite you!
2. Remember that what you tweet is visible to the public and may get retweeted. If you don't want it to be public, don't tweet it.
3. Once you get beyond a few followers, you may not know everyone who is following you. There are no secrets. I guess #1, 2 and 3 are all related.
4. Though twitter can be a time suck, it can also massively increase your exposure to influencers in your niche and be well worth the time you spend cultivating relationships and sharing relevant, useful content.
What is your opinion? Do you have any more ideas about how to use social networking as a marketing tool?
COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
Get More Clients Through Micro Blogging
0 comments Posted by Charles Brown at Monday, January 19, 2009Brian Carroll’s “B2B Lead Generation Blog” is always a source of really good information to anyone who needs customers and sales (do any of you fit this category?). But his recent article, Can a social media like Twitter boost your lead generation results? Is especially enlightening.
I have dabbled on and off with Twitter for about a year now, without actually going all in (to use the famous poker term). But Carroll’s thoughts have me taking a new look at the popular social media site.
For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is sort of like a blog that limits your posts (called “Tweets” in the Twitter world) to 140 characters. It is precisely because they are so short and sweet that has spurred Twitter’s popularity. People who would not read blog posts of the length typically found on sites like my own, avidly read tweets from many people on Twitter.
Brian Carroll describes some of the lead generation uses he has discovered for Twitter:
Well, I’ve started to use my Twitter account a lot more, and I’ve found some productive uses for the application:
To these uses, let me also add one of my own. I constantly encourage my clients to start blogging as a way to get the work out about their businesses. But as you can well imagine, most business people or professionals are short on time.
Now, thanks to Brian’s thoughts, I can encourage them to start posting on Twitter.
Anyone, no matter how busy, can write 140 characters.
COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
One of the things I want to do this year is to pass along some of the most outstanding marketing ideas I am able to find. One very important idea is to use blogging as a marketing tool.
Case in point: Back in December 2006 I wrote about Grant Griffiths, a Kansas Family Lawyer, who had stopped all of his traditional advertising because his marketing efforts using his blog was bringing in all the business he needed.
I was thinking about Mr. Griffiths because I was explaining to an other professional why blogging was such a great way to market just about any business. So today I did a number of Google searches to see where his blog is ranked by the world’s most popular search engine. Here are the results:
Grant Griffiths dominates almost every keyword or search term I could think of related to "Kansas Family Law." The only term I looked up that listed his blog on the second page was “Kansas Child Visitation.”
All the other searches I did had him on Google’s first page. The results listed below are all for Google’s non-paid listings. (In other words, the paid ads Google sells may be higher, but Mr. Griffiths’ blog outranks all the others on the "organic," or earned, search results.)
- Kansas Family Law, #2 on page one
- Kansas Family Lawyer, #1 on on page onepage one
- Kansas Family Attorney, #1 on page one
- Kansas Divorce Law, #6 on page one
- Kansas Child Custody Law, #1 on page one
- Kansas Child Custody Lawyer, #2 on page one
- Kansas Divorce Lawyer, #2 on page one
- Kansas Divorce Attorney, #2 on page one
- Kansas Divorce Mediation, #4 on page one
- Kansas Divorce Mediator, #6 on page one
- Kansas Fathers Rights, #1 on page one
- Kansas Dads rights, #5 on page one
Think about it. Almost anyone who searches for information about Kansas family law or Kansas family lawyers is going to find Mr. Griffiths’ site. And when they get to this site, they will find a wealth of information on the topic.
Do you think he has to convince people that he knows what he is talking about when they have read a site like his? Do you think he gets to be choosy about which clients he wants to work with? (or do you think he has to settle for the lowest paying, most disagreeable clients because he is desperate for business?)
And my personal favorite, how many clients do you think try to "negotiate" his fee down to rock bottom?
Now also take a look at the length or complexity of his articles. For the most part they are surprisingly short or easy to write.
Some are fairly long, but there is a fair amount of short articles in there as well. Many of his articles simply cite and comment on information he gleans from other sources. Some of his articles are list articles (such as ten ways to cooperatively seek the best interests of your child).
What I am getting at here is that Mr.Griffiths has achieved marketing success with blogging by simply communicating information to his readers on their level. He updates his blog regularly and he uses important keywords that he knows will correspond to the search queries his prospective clients will use when they go into Google.
And he did all this in a relatively short period of time. I wrote my original article in Deccember 2006 and he started his blog sometime in 2005 (I'm not sure exactly when in 2005). That means he started dominating the Google rankings in at least 24 months.
Something else. Griffiths has aparently taken a sabatical because his blog has not been updated since late 2007. Nevertheless, that blog still dominates all those keywords even without additional writing on his part.
How can you or your firm imitate what he is doing? Simply create a blog and update it regularly. Use the keywords the customers you are targeting will also use when they use search engines in both the titles of your articles and repeated in the bodies of the articles themselves.
Within a few months, you should see your site climbing the search engine ranks for the keywords you are focusing on.
COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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