Social Media Marketing Part 3: Industry Examples

Outline a Strategy and an Objective

In our first post in this series, we discussed the underlying basics of social media marketing.  And in the second post, we covered the avenues you should use when executing a social media marketing strategy.  In this, our third and final post in this series, let’s go through a couple of examples to help spark some more ideas. What follows is a few sample business types with a list of items for them to tweet, post, blog and provide guides and tools about, while also encouraging community comments, photos and participation.

As you’ll see from the examples below, it would be easy to apply these suggestion to virtually any business (particularly any consumer-oriented business), so use your imagination and insert your own company into the examples that follow:

Real Estate Social Marketing

Be the…

Social Media Marketing Part 2: Social Media Avenues

Or: What Goes Where?

In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your…

Baby Steps to Social Media Marketing

Part I: How to Talk and What to Say

Lots of folks are all aflutter about leveraging social media. When you run a business, you will frequently get lots of comments from everyone you talk with (friends, family, neighbors, new acquaintances, employees, partners) about how you should really be using social marketing. Social media advice has become akin to parenting advice – lots of blanket statements from people who you barely know and who may not even be doing it!

Most of the business owners we talk to are game for any form of “free” website traffic and customers, but just don’t know where to start. They’ve all heard about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and community website content, but they don’t understand how their business could use them.

We’ve put together a quick guide to help you take those…

Bing, Google Add Tweets to Results

UPDATE (8:43 a.m. PDT): Microsoft has struck a deal with Facebook to include its news feed updates in Bing’s searches.  Bing powers search on Facebook.

Tweets from users on Twitter have hit the big-time: they’re now going to be featured in search results on Bing and Google.

For those geeks among you who follow news from places like Twitter, Google and Microsoft (maker of Bing) like I do (it’s not a particularly scintillating life I lead…), you were no doubt enthralled with yesterday’s unfolding events.

First there was this blog post by Biz Stone, Twitter’s chief:

…there are already tens of thousands of Twitter apps and more to come because people want the choice to consume and create tweets wherever and whenever they prefer. The folks over at Bing took a keen interest in Twitter and worked fast to establish…

Three Big PPC Mistakes, Part II

. . . And How Newbies Can Avoid Them

In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.

Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.

A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and…

Getting into the Google 10-Pack

SES Show Update and Three 10-Pack Strategies

We’ve been at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose since Tuesday. The themes we’re hearing repeatedly: mobile is going to be huge, review sites are going to be huger, and social media is now part and parcel of the SEO / search fabric.

Because we love you, our small and mid-sized business customers, we attended the session, “Search Engine Optimization on a Dime,” and pricked-up our ears when we heard this stat from David Mihm, Director and COO of GetListed.org: more than 40% of all searches had a local (or geographic) intent.

What was eye-opening was his statement that Google sees potentially 500 million local searches per month! (No one is quite sure of the exact number.)

Local search is when someone uses a search phrase, such as “plumbers” plus a city, region, or…

It’s New to You Series: Setting up PPC Campaigns

Best Practice Tips for Newbies

Whether you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google only or across the three major U.S. search engines (including Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing until the two merge their platforms), setting up a pay-per-click campaign is fairly straight-forward. That is, until you have the campaign up and running and realize you’re shelling out a ton of money for little or no return.

Because we work so often with small and mid-sized businesses just beginning to dip their toes into the PPC waters, we’re introducing a new series — the “It’s New to You” Series — and we’ll be covering how to set up a campaign for the first time, including methods for getting started, making keyword lists, developing your first ads, setting up groups, and how to focus on keywords in each group.

There are a number…

Understanding the Link Economy

…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis,…

Small Business Marketing Series: Thriving In Tough Economic Conditions

Eight Ways to Weather the Storm

We constantly hear from companies of all sizes just how bad the current economy is, and seeking advice for how best to weather the storm.  There are, of course, many ways to answer this question.  And I won’t try to tackle all of them in this blog post.  But in an effort to be helpful, I offer eight strategies you can use to emerge from the economic downturn a better, stronger and more competitive company.

1. Turn Lemons into Lemonade. Times are tough–all over the world.  And almost no one is immune.  So what’s a business to do?  Use this period of slower activity to refine your business strategy and to find ways to serve your customers that meets them where they’re at today.  I recently heard a report on National Public…

Small Business Marketing Series: Basic Twitter Etiquette

Tips and Tricks for Top-Notch Tweeting

Set Up Your Account On Twitter Wisely. When you first set up your account, be sure to pick a user name that is easily / readily associated with your business.  At Yield Software we use “YieldSW” on Twitter and everywhere else.  If your business is named Kathy’s Kupcakes, choose “kathyskupcakes” as your user name.  (Hopefully that’s not a real business! If it is, I swear that was a random choice.)

Remember this formula: Followers = Social Capital; Social Capital = Success. You can begin to build followers by first uploading your address book to Twitter to discover who is already on Twitter.  Follow all those people.  They will get an email saying you’re now following them and will be given the opportunity to follow you in return.  Put a “follow me on Twitter”…