Archive for December 2011
Easily Get Restaurant Reviews From Customers
These days, people don’t buy anything without reading reviews first. Amazon.com is the world’s favorite shopping mall. Visitors look for an item that is both heavily reviewed and has a mostly positive rating. There is suspicion of items that have no reviews, as that means to most folks that the business is probably new and the item they’re looking at is of questionable quality. Positive customer reviews weigh in big time within the consumer psyche and the convenience at which reviews can be posted means that every interaction with a customer is a potential opportunity to make or break many future sales. These ideas began with the retail industry, and they’ve spread like wildfire to restaurants.
So, should you ask for reviews or not? Let’s review the pros and cons:
PROS
Incentivizing is a great motivator for everything in the world. If you want reviews from your customers, offer them something of value. Asking for reviews isn’t bad as long as you’re not flat-out paying for them. Put something fun together: drop review submitters’ names into a monthly raffle for a free lunch, pick a top reviewer and send them to an exotic themed vacation (think Olive Garden sending families to Italy), have your top chef prepare dinner for a certain special patron. There are tons of ideas that involve a thematic approach to incentivized rewards versus just handing out cash. Get your patrons involved and excited and reap the benefits of a truly passionate reviewer!
If you choose to nudge patrons in the right direction, make it easy for them. Offering them a comment card is one way to go, and you can put that review up on your website, but how can you get the word out on UrbanSpoon or Yelp, two of the most popular restaurant review sites? You’ve got to tell customers where to submit their feedback. “Search for us on UrbanSpoon!” is a quick, easy and non-pushy way to let people know you’re active on that site. Make sure to develop a way to track your review-submitting patrons so that you can reward them. You’ll generally receive an email notification when a review is submitted to either one of those sites.
Posting restaurant reviews can be fun! Think about the power of mobile Smartphone applications: a patron can take a picture of your menu (or their meal plate) on their phone and post it online instantly, even while they’re still eating their Southwest Quesadilla Special. They can then immediately “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” your business based on their experience. This is incredibly helpful to other customers. PRO TIP: Consider taking clear pictures of your menu and your location and uploading them to review sites before someone else does. Doing so helps potential new customers decide if they want to eat at your establishment by taking the guesswork out of what you’ve got to offer. The more information that’s readily available about your business, the better.
CONS
The first question you need to ask yourself honestly is this: “Is my restaurant ready to be reviewed?” Many restaurant owners get antsy and jump the gun, so to speak, in taking steps to force reviews. They may have had a slow grand opening and think that getting “good press” on sites like UrbanSpoon and Yelp is the only way to stay operative. These sites are dynamite for influencing potential customers, but hard selling reviews is not the way to go. If your restaurant isn’t 100% where you want it to be at, incentivizing reviews could also mean reminding people that they can post negative reviews, too. As many small business owners have learned, one negative review that’s boosted to the front page of Google can spell doom for their business. Just like a positive review can encourage new folks to try an unfamiliar restaurant, a negative review can drive just as many away. Lesson: don’t force reviews if you’re not ready for them.
Positive reviews from non-incentivized customers will almost always feel more “real.” So although it may take longer to get a review, it may be worth your wait.
Have you ever read a restaurant review and just known that it was the owner writing it, or one of the company’s employees? How did that make you feel? Most consumers who feel like they’ve experienced a fake review will immediately go elsewhere, with a permanent sense of distrust in that business.
Some review databases (like Yelp) frown on incentivized/paid reviews. They’ll go as far to delete over-zealous, fake sounding reviews in order to keep their site “honest.” In this case, it may not be worth the investment to reward a reviewer.
If your restaurant is outstanding on both service and menu fronts, you may not have to encourage review submittal at all. A new patron should be so floored after having left your establishment that they want to share their experience with the world. Have you ever been to a restaurant where the server was “on it,” the food was excellent, the wait was nonexistent, and the atmosphere was just fun? I bet you wanted to tell people about it. This same theory applies to restaurant reviews: provide an entirely excellent experience at every point of contact and expect to be rewarded for your hard work.
The answer is up to you. If you can solicit reviews in a fun, creative way, that plan might work out well for your business. Beware of over-incentivizing; remember you want honest reviews, not a bunch of fluff. No doubt, reviews are a superb way to generate new business. You might even say they’ve become essential in today’s world of infinite information. Keep in mind that consistently great service will be rewarded with words of praise, so keep your bar set high, your plates clean, drinks full, food hot, and staff friendly. You’ll eventually get to the point where you don’t need to solicit reviews anymore, they’ll just come naturally.
© 2011 Lorraine Wolfe
Is your restaurant paying too much in credit card processing fees? VMS will guarantee you a lower rate, saving you potentially hundreds of dollars a month! Visit us today to find out how.
Using Facebook’s New Career App To Find a New Career
If you’re actively looking for a new job, and your first instinct is to go on Facebook to procrastinate, you may actually be taking a great first step. Facebook’s growing professional networking application, Branch Out, can be a useful supplement to your medical device job search and turn the process of networking into something as easy as posting on your friends’ walls.
Using Personal Connections in the Professional World
Branch Out matches the professional networking aspect of LinkedIn with the comfort and personal features of your Facebook profile. It’s a third party application that opens up a whole new world of connections that you don’t have access to on LinkedIn with some important differences. Whereas your LinkedIn network is likely made mostly of professional contacts, your Branch Out account taps into your friends’ profiles and lets you see easily where your friends work. It even extends to friends of friends. How does this help you? Your friends are the people rooting for you. They’re on your team. They want you to land a job, and they actively want to help.
Use these personal relationships to your advantage. Search for companies you’d like to work for with Branch Out’s company search feature. It will automatically tell you if any of your friends or their friends work there. You may have connections to these companies that you don’t even know about. Your college roommate may be working for a company that just put up your dream engineering job listing or your coworker’s husband may be looking for someone with exactly your skill set in pacemakers.
Privacy Concerns
Several people have expressed privacy concerns about crossing their personal lives with business. However, in the six months that Branch Out has been live, most of these fears have been put to rest. The application allows you the option to choose what you share on your profile and only pulls from the corporate section of your profile so you don’t need to worry about potential employers seeing that embarrassing picture of you in your college Halloween costume.
If you still feel uncomfortable mixing business and personal, you can always find jobs using Branch Out’s job board and apply for them outside the “empire” of Facebook. Call up your friend and ask about the opportunity you found or go to the company’s job board to lay your fears to rest. If you prove to be a good fit, they’ll probably check your Facebook profile anyway, but if it makes you feel better, go for it.
If you’re not on Branch Out, signup after you read this article. It’s not just a good way for you to search for jobs, but also a good way for you to get discovered by recruiters. Many companies are searching Branch Out for qualified candidates because they value hires who already have company connections. What’s the harm? We know you’re going on Facebook on your lunch break anyway!
Paula Rutledge is the President of Legacy MedSearch, a retained recruitment firm specializing in emerging medical technology. For more resume and interview tips, visit http://www.LegacyMedSearch.com/blog
Our website also has dozens of pages of resources for job hunters. Download our 24 page interview prep guide or company research template at http://www.LegacyMedSearch.com/candidate-services.php
The Quickest and Most Convenient Way to Check the Plagiarisms
Working as a lecturer in the university is certainly not very easy at all since you have to be able to transfer your knowledge to your students and make sure that your students can significantly upgrade their own intelligence. There are hundreds of school assignments that you should review and checked and for sure this can be a lot of hard works for you. It seems impossible to identify whether one of these assignments are perfectly genuine or simply just resulted from copy-paste-work only.
If you’re a lecturer who wants to make the works easier then you can now visit Myplagiarsmchecker.com. This website offers you online plagiarism checker where you can check each school assignments from the others and to identify whether it’s original works or not. The plagiarism checker is perfectly easy to use so you don’t have to be a computer expert to use it. It also help to bring the results very quickly too.
You don’t have to worry about how much money you’ll have to spend for this service since this website offers you plagiarism checker free of charge. You’re very welcomed to visit this website to view and learn a lot more details and features offered.
Can Facebook Help Entrepreneurs Grow Their Business?
Is Facebook The Answer For Entrepreneurs?
One of the great things about Facebook is that it provides so many ways to connect to people on so many levels. Being a Entrepreneur, you have numerous choices for ways to grow your business. A lot of it depends upon your target audience and the way they prefer to receive information. If they’re inside the age range of folks that normally use Facebook and other social media then this is the tool you want to make sure you check out.
If you are willing to take the time you can grow your business around a Facebook marketing campaign and spend little or no capital whatsoever to do it. It doesn’t take much more then a fan page along with a commitment on your part to create updates and find new friends everyday.
Entrepreneurs Can Build A Solid Foundation With Facebook
While I will not get into excruciating details of the how to’s within this article, the basic steps to building your Facebook business are as follows. The first step is to set up a fan page. That is where you’ll send all your new found friends and where you’ll need to add and post some amount of valuable content each day.
The second step is to go out and get friends. This is a vital step and one that you cannot take lightly. There is a reason they describe people in Facebook as friends. For those who remember your marketing and sales 101 stuff, just like in off line business, “people buy from people they, know, like and trust”.
Online relationships aren’t any different. You can’t start out by trying to pitch an item to someone on Facebook, you will not make any friends like that and won’t sell any product. I repeat, you won’t sell any products that way.
What you have to do is find a group, or groups who have members who fit the profile of probable customers for you. Once you have found that group, or hopefully groups, join them and observe what they’re talking about. Here you need to take two steps, take part in their conversations on a light level adding value where possible without pushing your products. You can provide information and propose they take a look at your fan page for more content and information (remember your fan page must add value, not sell).
The other thing that you want to accomplish is to connect with the members within the group. Make sure that you are doing this as a friend without hyping a product or service. Connect with them on a personal level, you already know they’ve got interest within your product area, so don’t over focus on solutions. Take a look at their profile before you get in touch with them, see what their interests are and focus on that.
For example, if they like horses, introduce yourself by saying, Hi Mary, I noticed you’re a horse lover, I grew up around horses and have always liked them too, do you ride Western or English. If you don’t know anything about horses find something else to connect on. But this is where you ought to start. once you have begun to create a relationship you then can discuss the areas associated with your company and invite them to your fan page.
Entrepreneurs Are Consistent With Facebook
So getting people to your fan page is part of the battle. Now comes the true work, it’s essential to build your credibility by providing free and helpful content daily for your fans. This can keep them on your page and can build you up as a credible resource and expert on a subject. When people believe in and trust you they’ll buy from you. That is where constancy and patience come into play.
Nobody will buy from you immediately. This will likely take time, but when you develop a big enough base, you will begin to see steady growth to your business and you will have a reliable base of customers who will continue to grow.
So the two things you’ll want to do everyday are to make a minimum of fifteen new friends daily and add at least one new post to your fan page daily. Once you have developed your credibility through your relationships, you can provide your product or service as an answer for the problem. But never lead with it.
As an entrepreneur, if you are patient and consistent you will be able to grow your business, create great relationships and use little to no money doing it. This is a win, win all the way around.
Scott Schreiber is a retired businessman who has over 30 years of successful management of turn around projects, Mergers & Acquisitions, Venture Capital work and senior sales and marketing management. Scott’s current mission is to help small business owners and entrepreneurs learn how to compete, grow and succeed in our current economy. He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur Success Team.
Learn more about 21st Century Entrepreneurs here
Why Don’t More People Work From Home?
According to a study by the Telework Research Network, almost 40% of Americans have a position that would allow them to work from home. And it’s not the workers who are against this idea. Almost 80% of respondents said that given the opportunity, they would work from home.
The study goes on to show that companies can save $6,500 on average annually per employee if they would allow them to work from home only one day per week. These dollars add up quickly in a struggling economy, so why aren’t more companies jumping on board?
The impacts on society are positive – saved greenhouse emissions with reduced driving and lower amounts of gasoline consumption. But this is not enough to be convincing. Businesses are asking what the benefit is to them.
Telecommuters have shown to be more productive and have lower absenteeism and lower turnover rates. Another study even showed that telecommuters worked on average 1 hour longer each day. Additionally, costs are lowered with less overhead.
So, it is difficult to see why more people don’t work from home.
The idea of telecommuting or working from home is relatively new. Many employers, and especially small businesses, are still timid about releasing their employees and wonder if they are really working when they are not in the office. Small businesses in particular have fewer employees and reduced flexibility. For this reason, they feel they need to be certain their employee’s time is spent well.
Small businesses have the most to gain with telecommuting.
Most small businesses are looking for ways to reduce their costs and retain their most quality employees. And now, with this increase in telecommuting, tools are becoming available that will allow small businesses to do just that.
Online collaboration tools are being used to help businesses provide non-monetary benefits of working from home, while at the same time reducing their own overhead costs. These tools are allowing companies to do live chat, web/video conferencing, document sharing and have online workspaces that will put their office online and be able to monitor the status of each employee’s work.
When telecommuting is setup as a privilege, not a right, employees are more likely to work harder in order to keep that benefit. The burden is put on the employee to report where they are, check in with the boss, and track their accomplishments. Furthermore, they become more accessible to their colleagues and boss. A unique trust is developed that helps build company loyalty and reduce the amount of turnover.
Small businesses looking for ways to cut costs should consider telecommuting as an option to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Kimberly Crossland is the marketing manager for YourOfficeAnywhere.com. She has a passion for small business, entrepreneurship and technology. Check out her blog at http://www.yourofficeanywhere.com/blog to read more.
Share Your Restaurant Experiences on Various Restaurant Reviews Websites
Nowadays people do not buy anything online without reading reviews of that particular item like food, cloths, electronics gazettes and many more other. It has been noticed that people go for an item that is highly reviewed and has large positive comments or ratings. Let us take an example of restaurants, if you would like to know about a particular restaurant, online reviews websites can help you to provide an idea about the restaurant which you are looking for. So, restaurant reviews website are provide you a great help to choose good restaurant in the city which offer good food and excellent services to their clients.
Providing restaurant ratings is a great way or medium to share your thoughts, views and ideas about your experience with the restaurant. You can share your restaurant experiences on various restaurant reviews websites. When you write reviews on a particular restaurant you should have proper knowledge about the restaurant and you should also know, what are the main key points of the restaurant which you included in your review? Before write a review it is important that you know how to frame the review structure, so that you can include all the important things in it and provide enough idea about the restaurant. These reviews also help to increase the business of the restaurants. Writing reviews is personal views so always stress your own writing style. Make sure that you always write on present tense and use your own personality so that your review will look original and unique.
You can include various things in your review like always provide details about the interior decoration or appearance, what color combination are used, lighting and cleanliness of the restaurant. Also explain about the services they provided and write little bit about the staff. Another important thing is that always include about the food served by them, whether it is good or not. Last but not least make a note on the atmosphere of the restaurant. Is it friendly, extremely busy and loud, or relaxing? There are endless restaurant review websites are exists which are dedicated exclusively to helping consumers to discover the best eateries near them. If your restaurant experience was riddled with both pros and cons, then make sure you list both to provide readers with an accurate, well-rounded review. When you provide your reviews about a particular restaurant also write about the menu card of that restaurant. Explain a little bit about the variety of meals choices, any unique dishes, and food are cooked properly or not and taste of the food also. Write about the meal’s presentation, taste and smell.
Always use only descriptive and creative words. In your review you can easily suggest that this particular restaurant is good for family member or couples or friends group or individual people. So, by providing your reviews on restaurants you can easily share your restaurant experience through various restaurant reviews websites.
Restaurant reviews are the best and effective way to find the Top and best restaurants in the particular area.
Finding That Dream Job That Doesn’t Support Your Degree
Many people in this economy know firsthand how it feels to have a college degree but no job to show for it. If you went to school for accounting but your dream was always to work in Hollywood, it doesn’t mean you have to settle for being the Tax Attorney to the Stars, no, you can still pursue that dream job you’ve always wanted, even if you do not have the degree to support it. College graduates are finding themselves in this situation across the country, they did what they were told and got a degree and now they have nothing to do.
So how do you make the best out of this situation? The first thing you do is stop crying. It can be a real bummer to realize that your degree does not hold much weight in the job market, but next time you are rejected from that dream job, remind yourself that you have a dream and that you will fulfill it.
You choose your path, not someone else
You can sit around and feel sorry for yourself that your degree isn’t what you want to do or you can move on and get creative with your job search. Just remember that the U.S. Department of Labor still says that college graduates face shorter periods of unemployment and have an overall higher income through their lives.
Time to get creative
As long as you are willing to work hard, there is always a way to find your dream job, even if you have a liberal arts degree. The first thing you need to find out is: What is your dream job? What are the right steps to get there, what can you do to help you get to that position, just how badly do you want this and how hard are you willing to work for it?
You must figure out these questions if you are going to develop a plan of action. The answers may seem elusive but you can find the answers. Admitting that you do not know what you want to do with your life is not a failure, it just means that you have more time to find yourself and find the thing that makes you happy. Dealing with debt can be a difficult task when you are trying to change paths, so make sure your finances are handled before making a big transition. And it’s much easier to make a change now before you’ve trapped yourself in a career.
Work for free
Sounds awful right, but what if an unpaid internship gets you into the position you wanted? It doesn’t matter if you’re 15, 35 or 65, if you decide to change something and you find a way in, go for it. This could be your only opportunity. Sure it might be hard in the interim but you’re life will be enriched from your personal growth. Besides you can always get a second job to supplement your income. It’s your life, so go live it.
Erin Kennedy, CMRW, CPRW, BS/HR, is a Certified Professional & Executive Resume Writer/Career Consultant and President of Professional Resume Services, Inc. She is a nationally published writer and contributor of 12 best-selling career books. She has achieved international recognition following yearly nominations and wins of the prestigious T.O.R.I. (Toast of the Resume Industry) Award. Erin has written thousands of resumes for executives and professionals. As a proud member of CDI, NRWA, PARW, and AORCP, Erin also sits on CDI’s Credentialing Committee for new certification candidates and serves as a Mentor for CDI’s Member Mentoring Committee. She also is a featured blogger on several well-known career sites. Reuse of this article is encouraged but must include a link to http://exclusive-executive-resumes.com.
Want to know more about Erin Kennedy, CPRW? Read her LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/erinkennedycprw
Three Reasons Entrepreneurs Fail
No Market
While ins the real world there are numerous facts behind the reasons that entrepreneurs fall short. The three I have listed here have a lot to do with it and frankly the third one encompasses the initial two.
What I find fascinating is that I see inventors and business people who would like to be entrepreneurs start with an concept that hasn’t been tested or proven out at any level in the market before they charge off and spends thousands of dollars to develop the next great solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Sadly, they do not know whether they have a large enough marketplace to maintain the cost of developing that product and bringing it to market, let alone just how much competition they have or what the particulars need to be to satisfy industry needs.
With numerous straightforward tools to work with and available today. it is senseless to not perform at the very least some basic homework to better know you marketplace before you invest capital into an idea that may only accomplish one thing, Making You Broke! If all you did was take a look at Google’s keyword tool, you would be able to see how many individuals are looking for a specific keyword (or set of words), and how much competition exists for that keyword. That’s information that a great many marketers in the 70′s and 80′s paid a lot of money to uncover and you can acquire it at no cost in approximately five minutes.
If you do this, some simple arithmetic will tell you pretty fast if you have a shot. If there are 300 people searching for the key terms associated with your product and you take a look at other web sites and see competitive products selling at $4.00 each and you already know it’s going to cost you $3.95 to manufacture your product, it could be time to go back to the drawing board.
No Planning
OK, so let’s say you find that there’s a marketplace for your product, you see that 10,000 people are clicking on a set of key phrases, the competition isn’t too bad, you feel you’ll be able to validate that your product is unique enough to make a difference and you are feeling you’ll be able to manufacture it at a profit. That’s a good foundation (I would still advocate a bunch more research, but that’s just me).
Now you need to be able to determine how to get your product made, where to get your product made, the amount it will cost, how you will market it, how many you think that you can sell with your advertising and marketing program, why you think you’ll sell that many with the competition breathing down your throat. And Last but not least, how much revenue you will make if you hit your goals.
Lack of doing this kind of exercise will move your company from the skill based business to a business driven by luck. With only 1 out of 5 business’s surviving the first year a lack of a very good plan almost seems like you are taking your company on a suicide run. For those investing your hard earned cash, and aren’t willing to take some time to plan, my suggestion would be to offer it to me. I’ll benefit from using it so you’ll get some satisfaction, rather then watching the daily surprises of business take you down.
One additional point on this, lack of planning deals with too little success and too much success as well, either way can damage your business. A restaurant with a fantastic review, gets a lot more customers, but when they get too many and aren’t ready for it, their product quality and service will suffer, making it a not so great restaurant.
No Money
Thinking of trying to build your company on a shoestring, not such a good idea. This is considered probably the most common reasons that companies fall short. When you do create a plan you have to add in a minimum 20% for stuff you didn’t think about. Believe me, you will find out soon enough what that stuff is. It is going to show up on your doorstep about a day after you officially establish your business and will keep coming. As you gain knowledge of and understand your business, you will require less capital to deal with surprises, but in the early days, expect them to show up a lot.
You also should have enough money to deal with errors and bad decision. By the way, in case you are wondering, you will make a few bad decisions, every business owner does, no matter how good they seem to be. The truth is the really smart ones are usually so smart because they learned from their mistakes. The ones that aren’t so swift are the ones that like to repeat the identical mistakes over and over.
But insufficient funds will take you down hard and fast, when your out of money or low on money, you waste more time on#trying to cover your bills then on building your company. Generally it will result in poor decision making. In some cases it leads to unethical practices, which will (and should) lead to the demise of an organization. It is extremely hard to recover and compete when you’re low on cash, and once it’s gone, well the dance is over.
So if you are serious about this entrepreneur thing, make sure you have adequate funds available based on a first rate plan developed around a solid knowledge that there is a marketplace for your product.
Scott Schreiber is a retired businessman who has over 30 years of successful management of turn around projects, Mergers & Acquisitions, Venture Capital work and senior sales and marketing management. Scott’s current mission is to help small business owners and entrepreneurs learn how to compete, grow and succeed in our current economy. He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur Success Team.
Learn more about 21st Century Entrepreneurs here.
The Top Four Lessons You’ll Learn From Warren Buffett
Do you want to be rich? Do you want to be the ultimate money magnet? One of the best techniques is to actually learn important things from the wealthy people themselves. Today, we are going to discover significant lessons from Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world for many years. He is the owner of the mega empire Berkshire Hathaway, with hundreds of subsidiaries. He also holds some shares in multinational companies such as American Express, Procter & Gamble, and The.ola Company. It’s not a surprise to ask, “What makes him very rich?” You’ll be surprised.
1. He never stops selling.
He’s already rich. He doesn’t need to have a lot of money, but that isn’t really the philosophy of Buffett. Selling is a core operation in any business, and he wants everyone-his staff and investors-to always remember that. That’s why every year he doesn’t send his people to a ritzy hotel and have good fun during the annual assembly. Instead, he invites them to a convention center, where all products and services offered by his company are sold and offered. In the process, he encourages all participants to buy or build their own shares. And it doesn’t matter if he’s selling insurance policies from Geico or boots or candies.
2. He has faith in himself.
He has the vision, the money, and the knowledge. He could have been one of the top guns of Wall Street. But he didn’t. Rather than following the traditional investors’ path, he went the other way, retreating to his good-old Omaha. A lot of people criticized his moves, but he had a huge amount of faith in himself that things would definitely work. Well, it definitely did.
Since he grew up in Omaha, he knew the place very well. He didn’t have to adjust to its culture. He knew how to attract the right kind of people for his company. Let’s not forget that the cost of operating a business in the city is a whole lot cheaper than in the other cities all over the country.
3. He doesn’t give a lot of importance of money.
Wealthy people give so much significance to how much they earn they forget to live their life to the fullest. It’s not the same thing with Buffett. For him, the real measure of success is the number of people who you decide to love and love you back.
4. He’s frugal.
Despite his millions, he still lives in his home for several years, which costs no more than a million dollars to maintain. Moreover, he sets aside a fixed income for himself-around a hundred thousand dollars every year.
Here’s the good news, though. You can be a Warren Buffett. It’s all about developing the same kind of attitude about finances and money. Subliminal messages can be helpful at this point. If you need a little boost of confidence, you can listen to affirmations that may contain these lines:
I can be rich like Warren Buffett.
I will practice frugality, faith, and passion in work.
I attract money with a right mind-set on money and finances.
Nelson Berry is the Pioneer of Subliminal Messages Videos and Subliminal MP3s Audio Subliminal Messages Online. Click for 4 Free Subliminal Video Messages Downloads (valued at $160).
5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business
If you have a Facebook or Twitter profile, you are probably thinking that social media marketing is easy. After all, you’ve had a lot of practice with your friends, right? Unfortunately social network marketing for small business is a whole new ball game. While you have become accustomed to the basic functionality of your favored social networks, there are different rules for business.
Running a company profile on Facebook and Twitter is so much different from how you run your personal profile. The people who follow you aren’t friends who will be forgiving of the faux pas you commit online. These are people whose opinions matter when it comes to your brand.
Like you, many other small businesses are still feeling their way through this whole new phenomenon. Not everyone has done so successfully. The good thing is, we can learn from those who have gone before us.
Here is some how-to advice on social media marketing that you can apply to your small business. Some of these suggestions are very practical but it always helps to know the fundamentals before you start diving in thing.
So here is my five basic how-to’s for a successful social network marketing campaign:
1. Don’t be in too many networks at once.
As a multitasking small business owner, you’re probably so excited to start social network marketing on Twitter, Plurk, YouTube or Facebook etc etc that you open an account in each of these and start tweeting, plurking, and posting status updates. Yes, that happens to most of us newbies. However, what we all fail to see is that like in real life, it’s simply impossible to be active in all social networking sites at once. And because you can’t…
2. Focus on only one and strengthen your fan base there.
When we multitask, sometimes the quality of our work is sacrificed. That is also how it’s like when we straddle two social networks at one time. The trick is to focus on only one. Know all the ins and outs of that network. Build your fan base there. Engage your followers, post regular updates, run a contest. Once you have established a strong fan base, you can rest easy and let someone else take over while you build another base in another social network.
3. Get someone to represent your brand.
If you have a brand ambassador, it helps to have that person moderate or manage your social media profile by posting status updates, asking a question, or running a contest. Find a person that your fans can relate to. People don’t easily trust a brand unless they are familiar with the person behind the logo.
4. Let the real you shine.
Don’t be a put-on. Your fans will know if you’re faking it. Social media is all about engaging people, getting to know them, sharing your thoughts-building relationships. You can’t build a relationship based on something that isn’t real.
5. Participate.
Remember that you’re not the only one out there. There are other social media marketers who are working to further their brands. Go and start a conversation with others. Network the way you would offline. Ask questions. You will find that you’ll learn a lot about improving your brand — and not just about social media marketing — by engaging those around you in real conversations.
A social network is also, in some ways, a social situation — and the way we treat other people has an impact on how we are viewed. Being kind, nice, and polite will take you a long way down the social network marketing trail, and maybe you’ll find that by being so, you won’t be trudging down a lonely road.
And I don’t want to scare you, but you need to know that once you write it on social networks, it is out there forever. So be kind and thoughtful in your posts.
Bronwyn delivers a practical and hands on knowledge to deliver basic principles in a format that can be easily understood and adapted to business needs – and more importantly, principals that can improve your business cash flow. Bronwyn has developed a serious of workshops and courses to help small business with marketing using big business principles. Best of all she shows you how to market your small business using little or no money. Get your free report on how to market with little or no money for small businesses at http://www.bronwynwhite.com