by Kimberly | Feb 27, 2011 | Blog, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Virtual Assistant
As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur you are faced with the on-going challenge of how to market your business. Very few small businesses have unlimited budgets available so any funds spent on marketing really need to be effective in landing additional sales or leads or ultimately have some value to the overall growth of the business. Right now using social media for marketing is on fire. Everywhere you go, people are talking about how your business MUST be using social media to get the word out. Just recently, leading social media professionals have said that businesses and companies who are not using social media within the next 3 to 5 years will not survive. So how do you figure out what’s the best way to spend any of your budget on social media marketing for your business? There have been many times that I have spoken with potential clients who want to know how I can help them. They know that they want to use social media (or at least they have heard that they should be using social media) but they are not quite sure how to do that so they do a search for a social media assistant. But then, they aren’t quite sure what to say about what they need help with other than they want to be active with social media. Here are my top five tips for how to determine what you want help with and how much help you will need to do it. 1) What are your goals for using social media? This is usually the first question I ask...
by Kimberly | Jan 31, 2011 | Blog, Featured, How to, Online Resources, Social Media
This post is just a quick overview of some free tools out there to help measure some of your social media efforts. 1) Facebook Insights will provide some good in-depth information for a fan page. You can download these date into Excel or you can snapshot the graphs they offer. (keep in mind though that FB data aren’t always that accurate but can provide a good overview). You will need to do a bit of analysis with these data but they can help you determine what types of content your community likes and interacts with. You can access the insights for all of your Facebook pages here: http://www.facebook.com/insights/ 2) Twitter Counter will show the growth of followers for your Twitter account the past week, month, 3 months and 6 months. This site will also graph the number of tweets per day. 3) Tweetreach will show the reach of a twitter ID, a hashtag or a phrase. The free version only offers data for the most recent 50 tweets. This is important to remember so that you run a report right after a campaign or after a certain event. 4) Wildfire has a pretty cool social monitoring tool that allows you to track your Facebook page or Twitter against competitor accounts. You can find it here: http://monitor.wildfireapp.com/ 5) Socialmention.com is a great social media search engine that will track mentions of your company, brand or a specific phrase and also provides feedback on overall sentiment of those mentions. 6) I also recommend bit.ly as a URL shortner. It is good for tracking link clicks. These are just a few of...
by Kimberly | Nov 8, 2010 | Blog, Featured, How to, Social Media, Twitter
As a Social Media Virtual Assistant, I’ve set up many, many Twitter accounts. Some for myself (I think I have 5 of them…) and many for my clients. So, it’s really second nature to me and most of the time, I don’t think twice about how to do it. However, for many small business owners and entrepreneurs who many just be jumping into using Twitter and social media marketing, it can be a bit of a daunting task. Now, setting up a Twitter account is not really that hard and most people can easily walk through the steps to get going in a matter of minutes. However, there are some important considerations to take into account when setting up a Twitter account to help your account appear professional and optimized. 1. Got to http://twitter.com and click on the big, yellow “Sign Up” button. 2. On the sign up page, it’s recommended that you put in your real name or alternatively, you can put in the name of your business. It just depends on how you’ll be using the account. If you are a solo entrepreneur or you are the person who will be tweeting, then it is generally a good idea to put in your real name. If you plan to use the account to tweet as a “business” or if multiple people might be tweeting from the account then put in a business name. Whichever, you chose, you can always change it at anytime, so it’s not set it stone. Keep in mind that this field is indexed and picked up by the search engines, so that’s something...
by Kimberly | Nov 6, 2010 | Blog, Facebook, Featured, Social Media
Facebook announced this week the launch of Facebook Deals for local business which ties in directly with their Facebook Places feature. Sounds remarkably similar to Foursquare but Facebook has a much, much larger user base. Will this blow Foursquare and other geo-location services out of the game? This is yet another feature that local businesses need to be on top of and figure out how to use it to their advantage. Foursquare and Yelp already have proven track records of helping driving customers to businesses. Now, the biggest player of them all has stepped into the ring. Most business have heard or know that they really should have a presence on Facebook with a Business Fan Page. How Facebook Places and Deals Help Local Business Build loyal customers Visibility- when someone checks in at your Facebook Place, it shows up on their profile and in the News Feed for all their friends to see. In order for a business to be able to create a deal in Facebook, they will need to have claimed their Facebook Place first. Then you can create a Facebook deal, wait to get it approved by Facebook and then promote it. Users can find Facebook Deals when they check in at different locations using Facebook Places for Android or the Facebook iPhone App. There are four kinds of deals currently available. Individual Deals- Discounts, freebies and coupons for individual users that check in Friend Deals- You and other friends check in together to claim a deal. Loyalty Deals- Earn a deal or a discount based on checking in a certain number of times. Charity...
by Kimberly | Aug 10, 2010 | Blog, Featured, How to, Social Media, social media marketing, Twitter
There are several different options available to help you manage multiple social media accounts at once. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs and desire for access, then you might consider each one of these for different reasons. All of them have a web version and apps for iPhone. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have downloadable desktop versions. For everyday non-mobile use, I have found Hootsuite to be my preferred social media management tool. Hootsuite provides you with a comprehensive social media dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms all in once place. First built as a Twitter management tool, Hootsuite has grown to include the ability to post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and importing RSS feeds. With Hootsuite, you can pull in multiple Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook profiles, multiple LinkedIn accounts, etc. For Twitter accounts, you can quickly and easily view your Home Feed, your @ mentions, your sent tweets, your direct messages, plus add columns for any of your Twitter lists, columns to monitor keywords or key phrases, and a pending tweets column for any scheduled tweets. You can have up to 10 columns for each twitter account showing at one time. I typically add a few columns for monitoring keywords and a few more columns for lists of specific twitterers for different purposes. For example, I might like to keep up on the tweets of my colleagues, social media people and local friends. Hootsuite makes it easy to reply, re-tweet, send a direct message, add a tweet as a favorite, reply all (for tweets...
by Kimberly | May 12, 2010 | Blog, Featured, Social Media, Twitter
Last week, Twitter launched Blackbird Pie where you can post the link to a specific tweet and it will automatically generate code to embed that tweet into your blog post. Previously, most folks were mostly using screenshots to show a tweet or a series of tweets. While the code generate does seem rather long just for one tweet, it does become a pretty handy tool as it includes that Twitter account’s avatar and part of their background. To get the code you need to grab the link for that particular tweet which can be found by clicking on the time stamp listed below in small font underneath a tweet. Usually it says something like “about 2 hours ago.” If you click on that it will take you to a page for that specific tweet and you just need to copy the URL for the page. It usually looks something like this: “http://twitter.com/jkvirtualoffice/status/13878799371” And when you enter it into Blackbird Pie, click “Bake” and it will generate the code for that tweet which you can then paste into your blog post. @TR_Founder a-hem…I think you meant “SaWheeeet!”less than a minute ago via HootSuiteKimberly LeRiche jkvirtualoffice What’s also nice about this feature is that it will generate links to Twitter account of the person who tweeted it as well as to the Twitter accounts of any Twitter folks who might be mentioned in the tweet. Related articles by Zemanta What is Twitter really up to with ‘Blackbird Pie’? (socialmediatoday.com) Twitter Cooks Up The Blackbird Pie Tool To Bake Tweets Into Your Website (techcrunch.com) Twitter Launches Blackbird Pie Tool To...
