Good Ol’ YouTube

With Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest hogging the social media limelight, it’s easy to forget about Youtube as a valuable tool to promote your business. YouTube allows viewers to get acquainted with your business, employees, products, and services. This tool provides viewers with an authentic experience as they can gain a broader understanding of your business.

All businesses should take advantage of the benefits YouTube provides. Videos are free to post and will create greater visibility for your business on YouTube and the general Internet. YouTube may also assist in SEO and link building for your website, when videos are correctly tagged and linked to your business’s website. All it takes to make and post a YouTube video is a decent camera and time.

YouTube can be used in a variety of ways to inform, educate, and entertain your target audience. Companies selling complicated products may choose to provide tutorials on how to use their products. Companies may also gain publicity by showcasing their usually boring product in an interesting way. For example, one company, Blendtec, has achieved a lot of attention by producing entertaining videos about their blenders. In their videos Blentec’s CEO portrays a quirky host who blends anything from fruit to iPhones, thereby showcasing the blender’s strength and durability. Here is a link to one of their videos: http://www.willitblend.com/videos/view/129.

Incorporating Youtube videos in your company’s social media plan is a great way to interact with the public. Utilizing video enables a company to engage the viewer’s senses in at least two ways: visually and audibly. So don’t forget about YouTube when devising a social media plan for your company.

Social Media: Monitoring, Marketing, Measuring, Testing, for Optimum Result.

A while back I posted a blog with a helpful list for those who were wondering how to find out if their social media was actually helping them or not. Well, I decided to add to the list and here are a few more items to keep an eye on.

1. Brand mentions in online media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company, the company’s brands, your service/product names and maybe even your company url. Measure and track both positive, negative, and neutral mentions, and their quantities for all of them. This is also something that can be done even if you do not have an active social network. Because you are not active does not mean they will not talk about you through online mainstream media, forums, blogs, comments, posts, update, tweets, and reviews. Just remember “Stick and stones may break your bones, but, online, words can last forever.” If you don’t find the negative mentions and rectify them, others will stumble upon and judge for themselves.
2. Measure & Monitor Competitors. Know what your competitors are doing from a social media marketing standpoint, measure and Monitor their mentions, and know their share of voice compared to yours
3. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of a Friend) are re-sharing your links and content?
4. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs are part of a SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interaction with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites

As I said before, if you’re doing social media on your own or if an agency is doing it for you make sure that while they’re Marketing, they are Measuring and Testing for optimum Results.

Social Media: Measuring Gets Result.

We are at the point where almost everyone is doing something social. The question is, are their social media marketing efforts effective. So for those who are wondering how to find out if your social media is actually helping you here are a few items to keep an eye on.

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.). Are your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
3. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members versus total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
4. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time

So if you’re doing social media on your own or if an agency is doing it for you make sure that while they’re Marketing, they are Measuring and Testing for optimum Results.

5 Social Media Tips for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB)

When stepping into the realm of social media as a small business you should have a plan. I suggest that you take your time and generate clear goals and objectives for your social media marketing strategy before you do anything. Once you have done this; check out our social media optimization and marketing tips for SMB’s.

1. Take Advantage of the Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
2. Blog: Create and Participate
3. Make Sharing and Bookmarking Easy
4. Mobile Social Networks and Local Networks
5. Track and Monitor

Social Media is a great marketing tool for small and medium businesses to use and I hope our tips will help you when implementing social media to your business.

Social Media Marketing is Not Free!

I have heard many businesses say that “social media marketing is free”, but that’s not true! There is this little elephant in the room called “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost is the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. In other words, these are the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

This concept is not exclusively applied to social media marketing. It also applies to businesses that allocate resources to Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, or even Web Analytical reporting.