by Kimberly | Jan 8, 2017 | Blog, small business, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Virtual Assistant
As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you probably know that it’s a good idea to get started using social media but may be wondering where and how to get started. In this article, I’ll be going four steps that will help you establish your business with a social media presence and get a good, solid start reaching your target market, creating a community and engaging with your customers. It’s important to plan out how you want to approach social media to ensure that your efforts are efficient and effective. STEP 1: Goals, Branding and Target Audience Your business has goals and your social plan should too. It’s also a good idea to identify your branding objectives to help guide you in creating your social media plan. Tie your branding objectives to your business goals. If your goal is to gain more customers, then one of your social media goals would be to increase your visibility (let people know you exist). Another goal would be to use social media to engage with your customers to give them a sense of who you are, what you do and what your business offers. Your social media presence will be a reflection of your business so it’s important to think about the tone you want to use for your social media posts, the images you use and the ad campaigns that you run. These will be the parts of your social media presence that will leave an impression with your audience so you want to have some planning and strategy behind. Your social media channels should also work together with your other...
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 | 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 | Feb 23, 2010 | Blog, Featured, Social Media, social media marketing
Social media and the internet make it easier than ever to reach other people, other markets and other businesses anywhere in the world. So sometimes, it seems as though what is most often overlooked is how easy it is to use social media to connect with local people and businesses. As a Virtual Assistant, my business model is built around being able to work with virtually anyone, anywhere. When I first started using social media for marketing, I did not focus too much on networking locally either online or in person. However, when my husband and I started an e-commerce business, OTC Sports, part of our business model for was centrally built around reaching the local market. Around this same time, I made the acquaintance of Gary Powell with ImageWear Solutions on Twitter (@imagewear). Gary and I exchanged a few emails as I helped him figure out some of the inner workings of using Twitter and Facebook for business. He also reached out to my husband, Jeff, on Twitter (@OTCsports), communicating back and forth about different sports related topics. Gary is a great example of what a local business can do with social media. He reached out to other locals on Twitter and Facebook, offered a helping hand, and was always willing to help spread the word about other local businesses. Gary doesn’t use social media to be self-promoting, he uses it for connecting with people. When the time came for us to order promotional apparel for OTC Sports, Gary was the first person we called upon. Completely knowledgeable about promotional products and apparel, Gary made the process easy...
by Kimberly | Aug 26, 2009 | Blog, social media marketing
If you’ve been thinking at all that maybe, just maybe, you need to figure out if you and your business should be getting involved is this whole “social media” thing, you should watch this video. It really makes the point about how social media is here to stay. What are your thoughts about the necessity of having a strong social media/ social networking...
by Kimberly | Jul 27, 2009 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing
A new report out by Wetpaint and the Alitmeter Group showed that companies with the greatest engagement in social media in the past year grew their revenues by 18% while companies that were the least engage showed about a 6% decrease in revenue. The study included the top 100 brands and include such social media channels as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook and discussion forums. Not surprisingly, the top three brands with the highest levels of engagement included Starbucks, Dell and Google. Where it gets interesting is that the analysis revealed that these companies had dedicated teams of people who were actively engaged in using the variety of social media channels. WebProNews reports that: Basically, it shows that it pays (literally) to have a team working full time on engaging with customers via social media. Even if that team consists of one person, it means they will not be distracted by other tasks and can give the social channel the attention required for it to make a significant impact. What this means for the small business owner who may not be able to afford nor need a “dedicated” staff of employees to help them engage with their customers using social media, but they do have the ability to work with a Social Media Virtual Assistant and make an impact on their overall online visibility and more importantly, their bottom line. Social media becomes an effective marketing channel when it is used as part of a strategy and with continuous and ongoing efforts. The small business owner or entrepreneur who may not have the time or the capacity to get started...
