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Social Media for Business: A User’s Guide

Business is changing fast. But as technologies come and go, these principles withstand the proverbial test of time: Marketing is about connecting consumers with messages. Find your consumers where it’s convenient for them, and make your message heard.

If you’re still wondering what social media has to do with your business, think for a minute about where you’d start if you were looking for a new TV and needed to compare prices. Or wanted to see what an old college friend was up to. Or were hungry for some Thai food, and were looking for good restaurants nearby. Still wondering?

I didn’t think so.

Create your plan of action

Once you’re on board with social media, the most important thing is to decide—in advance—what exactly you want your social media efforts to do for you. Do you want to provide better customer service? Sell more products? Increase brand awareness? Decide what the goal is, and strategy will follow.

Make your presence known on the social media platforms best suited to your product. If you’re targeting career-minded professionals, be sure your LinkedIn profile is top-notch; if mommy bloggers are your market, try daily posts on a well-maintained Facebook page.

Above all, make sure branding is consistent across platforms, down to the font and images you use. Customers want to feel reassured they’re getting a high-quality, dependable product—no matter where they go looking for it.

Don’t forget to designate a person within your company to take charge of social media efforts—and make sure it’s someone who really gets social media, and who enjoys it (or risk tweets of “I hate my job” going out to your followers).

Track your progress

Once you’ve got a campaign going, take a step back to assess your work. In Web 3.0, success is measured in fans, followers, shares, and clicks, so make sure you’re keeping up.

Advanced analytics tools (I recommend Google Analytics) can tell you how many people viewed your Facebook profile, how many of those viewers followed a link to your home page, and how many of them went on to buy something from your site. A little Big Brother-ish? Maybe. But for companies trying to understand what makes their customers tick, it’s seriously cool.

Assess and adapt

So you’ve launched your campaign, upped your likes, and tallied some results—what’s next?

If you’re reaching your goals, well, by all means keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe reallocate some of your budget toward further social media awesomeness.

On the other hand, if you’re not getting the results you expected, it’s time to reevaluate. Figure out where your strategy is lacking, and adjust accordingly. Maybe your message isn’t consistent from platform to platform. Maybe you’re not reaching the audience you want. Maybe you need to try a different site altogether (are you on Pinterest yet?).

If you’re not sure where you’re going wrong, try A/B testing—test one campaign against another. See which one engages the audience better. Stick with what works, and ditch what doesn’t.

But whatever you do, don’t let fear stop you from breaking into the social media webosphere.

By not giving your customers an easy way to find you (and, in turn, doing some analytic sleuthing to learn about them), you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. And if you’re not getting your message out there, you can bet your competitors are.

Ready to jump on the social media bandwagon? Contact Atomic for help launching a killer social media plan of action.

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Social Media: 3 Tools, 3 Distinct Strategies

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One of our clients asked for advice on approaching different types of social media. She knew in theory that creating new content is good, but she wasn’t sure what content to put where.

“I have a blog, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account,” she asked us. “Should they all have different types of content? How often should I post on each one? Is there an easy way to replicate posts across different media?”

Starting from short content (Twitter) to longer content (blog posts), here’s our answer.

  • Twitter. There’s no real limit to how often you should post on Twitter. Things move quickly there, and it’s easy to miss people’s tweets, so posting frequently will give you a better chance of being seen and heard. In fact, it’s expected. If you’re not interacting pretty much every day, people will lose interest.Also, Twitter is supposed to be for socializing, so keep your posts conversational – people get pissed if you’re salesy. If you write business-related tweets, do it some 20% of the time, and make your tweets as un-pushy as possible.Because you want to tweet frequently, it’s fine to “push” your Facebook posts to Twitter (i.e., every comment you make on Facebook will show up on your Twitter account). However, it’s not a good idea to push your tweets to your Facebook page, because theoretically, you’ll have way too many posts. People get annoyed if you update your Facebook status 10 times a day – it’ll do you more
    harm than good.
  • Facebook. What you’re trying to do with Facebook is build a community around your brand. You want to start a conversation with your followers in the hopes that they’ll eventually use your page as a forum to talk about your company.To get the community started, about once a day, you can post thoughts, questions, polls, surveys, or anything that might get discussions started. If you can get to the point where you just monitor the page and chime in when questions are asked or problems arise, that’s ideal.
  • Blogs. Blogs are a great place to promote yourself and your company. The blog is on your site, and readers are expecting you to write about yourself. So you can be a little more salesy here.You should blog regularly –at least once a month, and ideally once every two weeks. Once a week is great if you have the time and content.Blogs can be used to answer FAQs, to talk about industry trends, or to announce new products, employees, or clients. Most importantly, blogs are great for letting your visitors and Google know that fresh content regularly appears on your site. If you have certain keyword phrases you’re going after, you can write entire articles about them, linking the phrases in the blog to the appropriate
    pages on your site.

    Pushing your blog articles to Facebook is a good idea. The content should be tied to the discussions on your Facebook page anyway, and the posts will sit on your page long enough to let multiple people see them. Pushing blog articles to Twitter is pretty much a waste of time –a one-time mention of a lengthy article will often be lost on Twitter users.

Overall, think of the different mediums as having different communication purposes. You can use Twitter and Facebook to interact with customers on a day-to-day basis, and then use your blog to talk less frequently, but more in depth, about issues that are important to them. With a good strategy in place and a little luck, you should soon have a strong following in each medium.

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Iconic Thinking

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Does anyone surfing the web these days see a blue bird or a chubby aqua “T” and not think of Twitter?

Icons—pictorial representations of brands, products, or people—can be powerful tools to help you stand out in the cyber crowd.

A customized icon set—a group of similarly styled icons, much like a family of fonts—takes iconic branding to the next level by helping you:

  • Differentiate one product, application, or blogger from another.
  • Organize products into like groups—without sacrificing the consistent elements of your brand.
  • Streamline the back-end functionality of your content management system, which makes it easier for staff to navigate and to train new staff on how to use it.
  • Provide a consistent theme for graphic, product, app, and other designers to use for creating new icons.

Here at Atomic, my process for developing icon sets is pretty straightforward. It focuses on upfront preparation, which conserves your time, cuts down on costs, and ensures that we get the best results.

  • Brainstorm. First, I’ll brainstorm with you to learn who and what the icon set is for. What message, position, feeling do you hope to convey? I might just listen to how you talk about your products or brand, take notes, and then jot down some ideas to see what creative concepts emerge.
  • Research. Often, these early brainstorming sessions are augmented with additional research. I want to know what your competition is doing. I also like to check out how other sites use icon sets and to what effect.
  • Sketch. Next, I’ll sketch out some more concrete ideas for you to review—including color schemes that bring the concepts to life. I’ll typically present ideas from a variety of different angles to see which ones you think work best for your goals. And I’ll provide my two cents to help you decide.
  • Refine. Once I get more feedback, I can refine the sketches to create full, polished illustrations.

Soon enough, your customized icon set is ready to be deployed.

Now that’s iconic thinking for your brand and your business.

A Special Network for Special Kids

Customized Websites

We’ve all heard about the dangers of social networking for kids and teens. Sometimes it seems like every day there’s another story about a predator who used MySpace or Facebook to connect with an unknowing youth.

But imagine that you had a special needs child. Someone who wanted to make friends online, but who was even more vulnerable to danger. How would you protect them?

That’s where Therapals.com comes in. Therapals is an online social community for children with special needs. Just like Facebook, Therapals lets children create online profiles where they can update their status, “friend” other people, comment on a friend’s status, and send messages or attachments.

The site is the brainchild of an Ohio-based occupational therapist who works with special needs children. She came to Atomic for help making her vision a reality. After listening to her ideas, we were able to design and build a 100% custom site using PHP, MySQL, and jQuery. Alexis Branham created the cheerful, user-friendly design, and I did the back-end coding. Like all our sites, we used standards-compliant code, and this site had a particular emphasis on accessibility.

In addition to providing a safe social networking space for children, the site has some unique features for parents and therapists:

Parents can:

  • Update their child’s profile and help them find friends with similar interests
  • Monitor all of their child’s activities via a custom activity log
  • Approve or deny their child’s friend requests
  • Set the system to insert “sensory breaks” at defined intervals – a break when the child needs to stop using the computer and perform a physical activity like hopping or skipping

Therapists can:

  • Communicate with parents of children on their caseload, and with other therapists around the country
  • View, with parental permission, a child’s activities, such as how many sensory breaks they complete, who they talk to, and how much they write
  • View a child’s status entries to check keyboarding skills, sentence composition, and social skills

Therapals.com had hundreds of hits on its first day. Now, just three weeks later, dozens of paid and free users are visiting the site to connect and share information.

We enjoy all of our projects, but this site has a special place in our hearts. We can’t wait to see it continue to grow.

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Customizing Social Media

Custom Social Media

Using social media channels is a great way to promote your business. But a lot of companies view social media only as a means to an end – as a way to push people to their own website.

From my perspective, these companies are missing a key point about social media: the fact that most people don’t want to be redirected. They’re on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube for a reason. They want to be entertained. To catch up on the news. To interact, comment, get in on the conversation.

With that in mind, smart companies are focusing less on getting people away from social media sites – and more on establishing a strong brand presence within them.

Here are some great ways to do that.

  • Facebook. Facebook pages aren’t fully customizable, but they do have some strong features. You can create custom tabs on your Facebook page and sell things using PayPal. You can also create custom landing pages. If you search for “Starbucks” on FB, for example, you’ll go straight to their Starbucks Card tab, rather than their Wall. All of this customization is done using FBML, Facebook’s proprietary markup language.And although this isn’t exactly customization, some companies are using FB as a customer service portal. Look at the posts and comments on Best Buy’s page, for example. Best Buy is resolving customer complains within FB – not wasting time redirecting customers to its home page. What a great concept.
  • Twitter. Like Facebook, Twitter also lets you customize your page to reflect your brand. Atomic’s Twitter page, for example, is decked out with our logo, contact information, and brand colors. We’ve also included with headshots of our staff and their Twitter handles.
  • YouTube. YouTube allows for elaborate customization – look how Coca-Cola has designed its YouTube channel to reflect its current “Celebration” campaign. Dr Pepper hasn’t done quite as much work – its “I’m a doctor” campaign videos run on a standard Dr Pepper background. But still, the channel is customized. That means you don’t have to go to these companies’ websites to experience their brand; they’ve brought their brand to you.

Here at Atomic, we’ve been helping lots of companies take their website presence and apply it to social media sites. Ready to do the same?

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Using directory submissions to drive SEO

I won’t give away all our secrets, but I will say that submitting the site to a number of directories was part of our strategy.

For those who don’t know, directories are websites that categorize and list other websites. Business.com, for example, lists business websites in categories such as accounting, construction, and healthcare. Submitting your website to directories helps build links to your site and increase your search rankings.

You can’t submit your site to any old directory, however, and expect to get results. There’s some strategy involved. Here the approach I took for SlickPlan. The same approach can work for you.

  • Submit to niche directories. It’s better to submit your site to a directory that relates to your industry rather than a general directory like Yahoo’s. Doing so increases the chance of your site being accepted by the directory. And, niche directories have a more targeted readership, so you’re more likely to have qualified leads find your site and click over to it. We submitted SlickPlan to makeuseof.com and webappers.com, for example, both of which cater to web designers and developers.
  • Submit to directories with a high Google page rank. Having your site in a highly-ranked directory increases your site’s page rank. It also means that the directory gets lots of visitors, which improves your chances of getting referrals. In addition, sites with a high page rank are generally better made and better respected than sites with a low rank. Being in those directories helps enhance your reputation as well.
  • Include links to your site in the directory’s “description” field. Some directories don’t allow you to do this. But if you can sneak a link in, it provides readers with a quick, easy path to your site and helps your organic SEO.

Remember that it won’t help to submit your site to every directory under the sun; in this case, more really isn’t better. Take a targeted approach to directory submission, and you’ll get better results for less effort.

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Email Marketing

Email marketing

Is email marketing dead?

We recently saw a post on this topic, and it made us stop and think. If you can get Twitter and Facebook updates from your favorite companies, do you really need to get email from them too?

We put our thinking caps on, and we thunk awhile, and we decided . . . yes, yes, you do need email marketing!

Here’s why.

  • Email marketing reaches customers who haven’t jumped into social media. Plenty of boomers get email from their kids and shop online. But not all of them have started using Facebook, let alone Twitter. Email remains a useful way to stay in touch with them and let them know about sales and promotions.
  • It’s a way to establish expertise. Many companies send out email newsletters just like this one on a regular basis. These newsletters aren’t pushing direct sales. Instead, they share information about topics that are important to your customers. This knowledge-sharing can help establish you as an expert in your field – whether you’re a catering firm writing about how to host a great event, or a golf pro offering weekly tips on improving your stroke.
  • It’s a way to get the word out about sales and specials. It’s no big news that putting products on sale is one of the most effective calls to action available. That’s why mega-retailers like J. Crew and Land’s End have aggressive email marketing campaigns. Each company promotes a wide variety of sales throughout the year – sometimes it’s free shipping, sometimes it’s end-of-season discounts, sometimes percent discounts. But the sales are regular, and the emails announcing them can come weekly or even daily.

The rules of conduct governing email marketing are rigorous, and there’s no better way to ruin your reputation and get onto server blacklists than to violate them. But if you follow the rules, email can be a great part of your interactive marketing campaign.

Want to talk about your email strategy? Contact us today.

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Using StumbleUpon to Drive Web Traffic

Wanted to take a minute this week to talk about one of our favorite web tools, StumbleUpon. We like StumbleUpon because, like so many social media tools, it can be good for business. We also like it because it’s a darn fun way to find new websites related to your interests.

When you join StumbleUpon, you get to pick from a list of items that are of interest to you. We chose Web Development, PHP, and Search, for example. (As well as Science Fiction and Action Movies. But that’s another topic.)

After you pick your interests, StumbleUpon displays related sites that other users have rated highly. Each time you look at a site, you can give it a positive or negative rating. Over time, sites that are consistently ranked highly move up in StumbleUpon’s search results. Sites that are ranked poorly move down.

StumbleUpon enthusiasts argue that the site’s search results are more useful than Google’s because they’re based entirely on user rankings – rankings from real human beings, in other words. Google’s results, in contrast, are based on algorithms that can be “tricked” by unscrupulous or overly aggressive webmasters.

That’s why we recommend that our customers incorporate StumbleUpon into their SEO campaigns. Achieving high rankings in StumbleUpon can be a real coup for your site – and can have a serious impact on your web traffic.

So when you have a minute, stumble over to our office. We’ll help you get StumbleUpon working for you .

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Tweeting for business

Google “Twitter for business,” and you’ll instantly find about a zillion articles on why companies, politicians, and nonprofits around the world are using this tiny tool to talk with their customers. Not to jump on the bandwagon . . . but we agree.  Twitter is indeed an easy-to-use,  low-cost way to create a dialogue with your customers . . . let them know what’s going on with your business . . . and hear their concerns, complaints, and cheers.

If you don’t know what Twitter is by now, here’s the deal. Twitter is a social messaging app that lets you post short, 140-character updates about your life or business. Friends and customers can sign up to “follow” you, and get your updates on their phone or computer.

We wrote recently about how lots of companies don’t get how social media relates to their kind of business. We think that when used strategically, social media, and Twitter particularly, can be a great part of just about any company’s marketing program. For example:

  • A manufacturer could Tweet about new technologies they’re checking out at a tradeshow
  • A publisher could Tweet about new titles hitting the market
  • A retailer could Tweet about items on sale that week
  • A restaurant or bar could Tweet about its daily specials
  • A construction firm could Tweet about cool new projects it’s working on

And Twitter isn’t only being used for marketing and PR. Companies like Comcast and Dell are effectively using Twitter to help with customer service . . . finding another way to connect with users and answer their questions quickly and simply.

Once you start thinking about all the ideas, facts, and tips you could share with your customers daily . . . in snippets of only 140 words . . . the possibilities get really exciting really fast.

Want to follow us on Twitter? Go to http://twitter.com/atomicgroup. Promise we’ll follow you back.

(And of course, if you want to talk with us about using Twitter for your business, don’t hesitate to be in touch.)

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Social media for everyone!

Recently, a lot of our customers have been hedging about using social media to promote their business. Many of them have the idea that social media is only for youth-oriented businesses . . . like selling energy drinks to college students. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Traditional companies are using social media like crazy to publicize their business and services. And because it costs so little to use relative to other advertising venues, the ROI can be impressive.

Here are just a few examples we’ve noticed recently:

Youtube – Blendtec, a plain ol’ manufacturer of home and commercial blenders, has been the darling of YouTube for the past few years because of its low-budget, high-impact series of Will It Blend? videos.  Even stodgy medical journals are using YouTube as a venue to publicize their surgical training videos. (We would put a link here, but TRUST US, you don’t want to see this stuff.)

Twitter – Traditional media outlets like NBCNews are using Twitter to push out their headlines quickly and succinctly to their audience. And politicians on both sides of the aisle – folks like Ohio’s John Boehner – are using Twitter to communicate daily with their constituents.

Facebook – Only cutting-edge companies on Facebook? No way. The Washington Post has a Facebook page. The Red Cross does. Here in the Dayton region, the tiny Tipp City Library has a page, and regularly pushes out notes to its fans about library happenings – events like the annual book sale, mystery book club, and storytime for kids.

We think the lesson here is that social media isn’t only for “certain companies.” It’s for finding new ways to interact with your customers . . .  get them information. . . build deeper relationships, and create more meaningful conversations with them.

And that stuff’s good for any business.

Curious about how social media could help your business? Contact us anytime. We’re not here 24/7 . . . but sometimes it feels like it.