Is Your Business Still Showing a Reclusive Behavior?

So what do you want to do with your business? Do you want to make it like a child having no social life? If that is the case, I am sorry you and your business will eventually not survive due to this reclusive behavior. You should be aware of the fact that social media adoption by the U.S. business owners have doubled since 2009, SBSI (Small Business Survival Index) recently found out that one out of every five business owners is using social media for the promotion purposes. 

So ever wondered why?

75% of the companies have their business pages on social media networks like facebook, LinkedIn etc. because today’s business owners prefer not to spend extra money over the traditional media. This is the biggest reason I believe that this marketing phenomenon will stick around for long. Day by day, market is becoming consumer- driven and if the business doesn’t change with the changing marketing trends then it would rather not survive. Yes! It’s the social media that can help you stand head and shoulder above the rest. This holds so true for the current changing market trends:

“One thing is constant, that is change”

It’s high time to decide……

Decide, whether you want to be like a fresher who sits in the corner of the cafeteria hesitating to even talk while others are busy in their conversation or you want to be someone who takes charge and face the challenges in order to enhance the presence of your brand among masses using the viral marketing strategies. Therefore, it’s up to you how you make an optimum use of social media for the promotion of your business.

2010 - Stands as a Challenge to Marketers?

The thing which a marketer likes to adopt is challenge. Marketers have been treating the challenges effectively for years. Still there are various challenges standing in the way of marketers. Those challenges are the major concerns for the marketers to handle in 2010. Challenges that will most likely perturb marketers in 2010 are classified below:

1. Sustainability: After doing all the hard work in the past, marketers would be very desperate in order to make their customers stay with them. They would be planning strategies how to make their customers happy and make them stay for long as clients.

2. How to generate large revenues? Marketers would be focusing high on out of the box thinking to generate large revenues with minimum investment. They would be thinking for a greater ROI with minimum expenses and it would keep them awake at nights.

3. Would it be possible to keep the traffic up at the social media? This challenge would be on top list of the marketers to handle. Marketers would be thinking hard how to make their social media network robust so that more users interact with our social media marketing.

4. Platform to generate output: Marketers would have their eyes pointed at sales. They would be in the hunt for ground breaking ideas rather than cost effective ideas to increase their sales in order to generate a profitable output.

5. Keep up with the change: With the evolution of new marketing models, marketers’ think tank would be planning how to keep their pace up to the market standard so that they can lead the market.

6. Offering U.S.P against the best offer: Marketers would be thinking how to offer U.S.P against the best offer made by the competitor in order to make prospect/customer/client buy marketers product other than the competitor’s product.

7. What should be the plan of action against competitor? Whether the competitor attacks the marketer directly or indirectly or make a pessimistic comment against marketer, marketer would have something in back up to answer the competitor. Therefore, marketers would be thinking real to make some plan of actions against competitor’s attack.

8. Brand Promotion: Marketers would genuinely think how to run their marketing campaigns effectively to promote their brand. They would be in a deep search to make their brand value stand out among their target audience.

9. Planning marketing budgets: Planning marketing budget would be a critical challenge for the marketer as making the wrong decision against your marketing budget can ruin whole marketing business; therefore marketers would be thinking twice whether investing marketing budget to a certain business is beneficial or not.

10. Maintaining the customer’s loyalty: Marketers would be planning to maintain their customer’s loyalty. They would be searching for ideas how to make their loyal customer happy in order to build a robust relation with them.

Conclusion: One thing for sure challenges are meant to be faced and how effortlessly the marketers can handle those challenges no one can.

Social Media – A Road to Ultimate Success

One question i.e. definitely going to push one’s mind who wants to develop social media network is: How my social media will be able to interact global users effectively? Obviously its human nature whenever a question arises, he/she starts seeking the answer. Marketing experts have researched on the remarkable success of Social Media and determined that a planned strategy make a social media successful. Strategic planning to run social media should be as follow:

1. First step to success: You must decide your goal before commencing your network on social media. You should have your target audience in your mind to deliver the best value to your social media; therefore you must have a plan of action to accomplish what you desire through social media marketing.

2. Why social media? After identifying the audience, you must be clear why would users interact with your social media? Would my social media be able to make a strong impact among the audience? Therefore, you must watch your competitors businesses carefully; it will let you develop ideas on how to make your social media marketing successful.

3. Give and Take: Don’t promote your business or service only because social media marketing is not just for you, it’s to deliver fun to all; therefore regardless of your business, you must also give technical support, advice or even free stuffs to your social media users and let them share their views on your social media through blogs, forums or other social media tools.

4. Brand Promotion: Rather than being social, you should market specific items through your social media to make sales in order promote your brand effectively. To achieve brand promotion, you must build your connections with partner websites through banners to make prospects reach your social media network. The more ROI (return on investment) you receive, the more your social media is successful.

5. How to make users feel your presence: You should take a step forward to let your social media generate respect among your business partners, potential customers, customers or friends; therefore you must decide whom will represent your social media and how well he/she will represent your business/service to stand out creative in the market.

6. Participation: Your social media network should provide a platform for users to interact with each other and share their views online.

7. Openness: Your social media network should be open for all users. Resources to make your social media open are polls, contests or message sharing online.

8. Conversation: Social media network should provide a communication source to let the users interact online. A tool used for this purpose commonly is a “shout box” for a live chat.

9. Community: One thing that a social media must have is a community. Community is formed by building good relation with the others. More the users are attached towards your site; more are the chances for your social media community to prosper.

10. Connectedness: Your social media should also have useful videos, articles or online blogs to develop connectivity.

11. Sharing: Once you have established your social media presence, you should connect with social media users either through face book, twitter and LinkedIn and participate in discussion forums to know how they feel about social media marketing. It’s a good idea to attend conferences on social media to generate some ideas for your social media network.

12. Updating the social network You should keep on updating your social media to progress along with your competitors. You can post an interesting fact, an article or a blog to keep users stay towards your social network.

13. Where does social media fit? Social media fits into the marketing channels such that what you want to communicate about your services with the users and how well you use those channels to communicate effectively with the users.

14. Success or Failure: If your social media is good enough to develop strong customer relationship and able to generate large revenues for your social media; it means your social media network is a success. Positive comments and reviews about your social media ensure success while improper plan of action to run your social media will definitely result in a failure.

15. Spend more on social media: It’s a wiser thinking to spend more dollars to promote your social media network rather spending money on other advertisements. It gives you a slight assurance regarding the stability of your network.

Conclusion: Following the preceding steps in a proper sequence will gradually lead your social media to achieve success.

Article Review: 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content

While reading through the social media today forum, I found this article with pretty ordinary title. But when I start reading the article, I found it is challenging the ongoing school of thoughts about blogs and their content.

This article is providing “7 tips for writing engaging content”, but it is actually focusing on what to avoid while writing content for a blog. In the first tip the author is advising to not clutter your articles/content with lot of sharing buttons, widgets and so on. It will only distract the attention of the reader and make it difficult to focus on the content.

Secondly, he talks about the banner blindness that how side rail distract the visitor attention from the content.

Thirdly, he advices to avoid putting your big smiling picture on the blog.

In the fourth advice, he emphasizes to avoid slang words and bad language.

Fifth advice is about the comments on the posts. Author says, not to pull unnecessary comments from the social media. Let the relevant people participate in a neutral manner instead.

Second last advice is about moderation of comments and importance of their replies.

Finally, he advices to avoid unnecessary posts for just filling up the space. Write only when there is something really important, and spread it through RSS and social media.

Read the full article at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/162838

Now, SEO is Social Media

Gone are the days when any back-link to your website ranks you higher in search engines. Now, competition is immense, therefore contemporary search engine algorithms give power to those links only, which come from authority resources. Directory submission, article submission and so on are at one place but social media is going to be the only venue through which you can get authority links. We will see how future of Search Engine Optimization is linked with Social Media.

There used to be a lot other ways to get back-links easily and get higher rankings, but now these back-links don’t have enough juice to take you up on search engine rankings. For instance, directory submission was once a powerful tool to get back links, but if I can submit my website in 500 directories, my competitor can submit in 1000 and the chain goes on. So, who will get the higher position in search engine?

By looking at this matter, algorithms have been changed and now search engines look for quality and authority links only. And the best place to get these authority links is social media.

The question arises here how to get authority links from social media. For Instance, you have a website to sell cell phone accessories.

Identify Needs - You first have to identify needs of your target market. Find what they have been looking for. Listen to their conversation on different portals like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo answers, blogs, and so on.

Create Killer Content - After need identification of your target audience, create killer content in shape of articles, ebooks, podcasts, vodcasts etc. and make it available on your business website or blog for the people around the social networks.

Spread The Content - Now, it’s time to spread the content over social media networks. Submit your content to social networking websites like slideshare, stumble upon, Youtube etc.

If your content is really impressive and has ability to educate, people over social networks will start to read and discuss about it. They will publish it to their websites and blogs for their audience which links back to your website and that eventually takes your website up in the search engine rankings.

Article Review: 10 Tips to Get Re-tweeted On Twitter

Recently, a post published on Social Media Today (originally published on http://citysand.wordpress.com/) provides a comprehensive case study about tweets and retweets. The writer took the facts and figures from Dan Zarrella’s, and written a comprehensive article to figure out why people retweets. A very informative post for the people who are addict of Twitter as well as for those who use Twitter for marketing.
Facts and figures are graphically represented in the original post but you can take the following facts as a brief summary of the full script.

• 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets.

• The use of tinyurl.com has been decreased, and the use of bit.ly has been increased for URLs shortening.

• “you” is the word which is the most retweetable.

• “game” is the word which is the least retweetable.

• “Colon” is the most retweetable punctuation mark.

• “Semicolon” is the least retweetable punctuation mark.

• 5PM is the peak time for retweets.

• 9AM is the nadir time for retweets.

• Friday is the best day for retweets.

• Sunday is the worst day for retweets.

Go to the link to read full article, Click Here

Lots of more informative articles regarding Social Media will be coming on Social Media Extremist so stay tuned....

Three Essential Components of Online Social Media Marketing

A contemporary marketing venue of social media provides an opportunity to market your business to the masses. Yet very cheap (even free) social media marketing activities gives you a powerful hand to directly approach to the potential customer. It even let you know what the people are talking about your business, your industry and your target market. It’s easy but need crafting of successful marketing campaign to develop a complete business brand.

1. Understand you target audience

Before stepping into real marketing activities, you need to know who your target market is. Understanding needs, wants and demands is imperative in order to shoot the right target. If you don’t understand your target market, you would be wandering in the dark and getting nothing in the end. Analyze their demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and so on to be more specific with your offerings.

2. Add Value for the Potential Customer

After understanding your target market, it’s time to identify their problems and add value for them in your offerings. You can simply jot down their problem by interacting over various social networks such as yahoo answers. Start answering these problems in different sharing websites in the form of videos, articles, presentations and so on. Famous social media channels for this purpose are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and of course your own blog.

3. Connect With Your Audience

Now it’s time to connect with your potential customer on a one to one basis. Engage yourself in conversation with them. Have a personal interaction with them. If you give consideration and like what they share, ultimately they will start to like what you will share for them. And whenever they need a product or service you sell, they will obviously contact you for the business.

Your social media marketing activity is totally up to you, if you do it right you will get overwhelming success in minimum cost and time. And if you do it wrong, you will be wasting all your resources.

Social Media Marketing is Not Fad!!

The biggest debate over the internet is going on whether the social media is a revolution or just a fad. Two schools of thoughts have been developed; one says social media will be gone in few years while other says social media is the greatest economic shift since industrial revolution.

If we only talk about marketing and advertising over social media, in contemporary economic times, all businesses (small and large both) are more concern about cost cutting, so they have been shifting their marketing activities to social media channels. Its low cost. For instance, on Facebook page it has a case study of a shelf storage company, which $1.25 CPC delivered $10.25 cost-per-lead.

Number of users and marketers has been rapidly increasing every day. Compete.com shows recent statistics of twitter that the approximate unique visitors in October 2008 were 3,398,972, now in October 2009 it had 23,042,455; it’s a drastic positive increase of 577.92%. Similarly, Compete shows 188.67% of positive increase with 128,940,004 unique visitors in the month of October 2009 on Facebook.

Naturally, fad starts to decline very early, but social media indicators show positive growth of social media culture. Few more facts will hammer the last nail in the coffin that social media marketing is not fad it’s really a revolution.

1. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

2. According to socialnomics, over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

3. $3,000,000 worth of computers sold by Dell on Twitter.

4. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people...

In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

If online social media marketing was a fad, it should have been gone already. But it is still there for several years and increasing. Large businesses have been using it for branding to make their logos more recognized and SMEs entrepreneurs have been using social media for marketing and advertising. So the end note of this article is that, by looking at the facts and trends, social media marketing is here to stay and will thrive in the coming years.

Note: facts and figures are collected from authentic resources over internet.

The Extreme World of Social Media

We are living in the interesting times of new media; we have been captivated in an immersive, confusing and ultimate transition in our DAY JOB thing. If we don’t try to engage in, our competition will surely do. This whole piece of writing will let you know how new media is strengthened by the term of SOCIAL MEDIA.

The question evolved straight away, what do you mean by social media? Is it some kind of a genie which is fulfilling the wishes of the marketing levels or is it some kind of a magic base ball bat, hitting constantly home runs for the batters?

Yes, social media is something more than happening than those given examples. It’s simply to be defined as the world of conversation, communication and relationship. This is the human race of continuous dialogue.

“If a conversation is taking place online and you’re not there to listen to it or see it, did it actually happen? (Indeed. Conversations are happening and proceeding with or without you)”.

If you are a part of that conversation then you are welcoming others to contribute in-terms of question and answers and also providing them the information about everything they want. Whether it’s attacking or persuasive, accurate or correct or incorrect. Or, even worst when you will be leaving the competition to ride on to become the source for the community.

You fill be facing negative comments and you will be provoking the unsolicited feedback. People will start questioning about your intent. Negativity will not leave you simply because you opted for the participation. Negative commentary, at the very least is authentically a true opportunity to change the perception that you did or didn’t know existed.

Social media is breaking new grounds and setting higher standards all over the globe in the field of online marketing by engaging the users on its turf in order to help them solve problems, find the desired information about the product and making them dialogue which is found to be valuable for both the consumer and the brand.

Social media marketing is running on the principle of more and more engagement of the users following these hefty trends to achieve powerful competitive advantages.

Cultivate a more significant and substantial community

Enhance, augment and develop your brand

Build relationships stronger and fastened

And, create evangelists along the way.