Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

The amount of information that is now available at our fingertips is overwhelming. For small business owners, this boon is a great thing. At the same time, it can cause problems.

Improved Access

Almost anything you do as a small business owner can be done faster, better, and cheaper today. This includes all areas of running your business, things like scheduling, sales, paying bills, getting paid, marketing, and accounting. When you need to find a new market, research a product, or cut costs, there are answers available all over the internet.

One of the biggest, and fastest growing, areas of information is data about your customers. Thanks to social media, web sites, blogs, and more, you can gain a vast amount of intel on current and prospective customers. All of that information can help you better serve your customers and book more sales.

Staying On Top of Information

All of this is good, but what if you are already struggling to stay afloat? Chances are, you have a hard time keeping your email inbox clear and responding to phone calls. What business do you have wading into the sea of information on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn?

The thing is, you almost have to. Not because its cool or anything. Communication simply must follow the customer. And if you have customers using online tools to communicate, you better be right there with them engaging with them in conversation.

Two Tools that Help

The problem is simply overload. What small business owners need is a way to sort information and stay on top of it. I am not sure if there is already a great solution for this. Two companies come to mind who are making it easier. The first is Batchbook, which is the company I use for CRM. It is possible to keep track of things like Twitter and Facebook feeds right within the contact window on Batchbook. They need to make it a little easier, but they have a great start.

The other company is Gist. Gist lets you search for your contact’s online feeds and activities. It can automatically collect some information on a contact, such as their Twitter account, and then feed it into a communication page for that person. What Gist lacks is a robust contact management system.

More Features

If Gist and Batchbook got married, it might be the perfect answer for all of our information channeling needs. I would add some more key features, such as being able to search your contact feeds for certain keywords and then highlighting that information in a dashboard. That way, when a customer or contact is talking about a need you can fulfill, you can reach out to them. Another ideal feature would be a conversation scheduler. Say you wanted to reach out to a certain customer once a month. You could receive a reminder along with a recap of what they have been saying on social networks, along with news about them or their company. You might also receive links to blogs or news stories that relate in some way to what they have been talking about. In this way, you could reach out very personally to your contacts.

The point here is simple. We, as small business owners, need better ways to manage all of this information. The company that gets information management right will win in the end. That means understanding how relationships work. All of these new apps and networks are great, but for us business owners, its all about the sorting and staying on top of the relationships.

-

Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I spend a lot of time thinking, studying, and living small business. You can hire me for youronline marketing needs at www.BroadRiverCreative.com. Be sure to check out the podcast here at All Business Answers.

photo credit: Blyzz

What are social networks? They are, in their simplest form, places where people keep contact information and then communicate with those contacts. They are communication platforms.

While social networks like Facebook and Twitter make communication easy, they don’t make you good at it. If you want to grow your contacts and get business via social networks, you need to learn how to effectively use them to communicate.

Make it Past the Threshold

Before you can become the Cicero of social media, you first need to learn the tools. Each new social network has a learning curve. Some, like Twitter, have easy entry but still take lots of use to master. Others, such as LinkedIn, are a little more difficult to get going on.

It is essential that you learn how to use your social network(s) of choice. Without knowledge of how the tool works, you won’t be able to use it properly. A tool misused can cause more damage than good. So, before you try to use social networks to get sales, use them for fun. Play around in the sandbox until you have the feel of things.

Remember, each social network is a little different. What is appropriate on one may not be appropriate on another. As communicator, it is up to you to figure out what is accepted where. If you are talking in a crowded bar, it is perfectly fine to raise your voice and even shout. In fact, this is probably necessary just so the person next to you can hear you. But you wouldn’t use that same voice in the library. Social networks are different venues with different rules as well. The best way to learn them is to get active on the network, primarily as a listener at first.

Get a Focus

Once you find a social network of choice and get a feel for how it works, you can start using it to communicate with potential customers. In order to cultivate a group of appropriate listeners, you need to gain a focus.

There are two main things to focus on. The first is what you are going to talk about. If you want to sell washing machines, you should spend the larger percentage of your time talking about washing machines. This will attract people who are also interested in washing machines, and you can start to build a focused audience.

The second area of focus is who you are going to talk to. When you first get started, you will probably be happy add anyone to your network. But as you start to think about how to communicate effectively, you’ll realize that you need a group of active listeners. These are the people who will be interested in what you have to say.

You can attract some of these listeners just by talking about your focus subject. Others, you will have to go out and find. Use tools likes Search.Twitter.com and Twellow.com to find people on Twitter who are interested in your topic. On other social networks, you can join groups and forums to find people with an interest in your topic.

Once you start to develop a group, you need to learn to focus on them. Its not just having them that is important. You need to talk to them.

Engage the Audience

Social communication is two-way communication. If you think its just about pushing out your message and hoping it will be heard, you didn’t spend enough time learning the platform. The beauty of social networks are that they make personal communication possible on a large scale.

If you want to communicate effectively on social networks, you need to learn the importance of listening and responding. In fact, you should spend as much time responding as you do starting conversations. You can do this whether or not you have people asking you direct questions. On LinkedIn, for example, there is a whole section devoted to questions and answers. On a feed oriented network, like Facebook and Twitter, just pay attention to what people are saying and asking, and then respond.

When you do put out content, try to word it in such a way that it will start conversations. For instance, I see a lot of quotes on Twitter. Why not add a “what do you think about that?” type of question at the end of the quote. The goal when you push content is to get people to respond in some way. Sometimes, you’ll want them to visit your site and buy your product. Other times, you’ll just want to start conversations by asking questions.

Conversations

The beauty of social networks is that they make conversations easy. Conversations can lead to many things. You can have a conversation with a customer in which you solve an issue they are having. They can then have a conversation with a friend about how helpful you were. That friend could have a conversation with her spouse about how they should hire you. And then it comes back to you in the form of a sale and a new relationship.

The power of social networks is that these conversations are happening on an expansive scale. Its not one on one anymore. Instead, many people can listen in and hear what a good job you did. You can engage with a large number of customers and future customers all at once. The word can spread faster and farther than ever. Don’t doubt the power of conversation in helping you get and keep customers.

It all starts with you learning how to effectively communicate on social networks. Have any questions?

I hear this question a lot. When a small business starts getting involved in social networks, such as Twitter, the owner wants to know if they should allow any personality to show or not. The question is a valid one, and my opinion comes down pretty heavily on one side. However, before I give that to you, I want to walk through the process that a small business goes through when its first dipping its foot into social media.

Why Do You Get Involved?

As a small business owner, there is really only one reason to get involved in social media. You want to get sales. If you are moving into social media for this, congratulations, you are still ahead of the curve.

Its possible that you were involved in social media on a personal level before you decided to bring your business into the mix. Most of us have Facebook pages and LinkedIn accounts. However, you probably didn’t spend that much of your personal time on these sites. As a small business owner, you simply don’t have all that much personal time.

So when you decided to bring your business into social networks, you probably didn’t already have a huge personal presence. You have to build something from scratch for your business. You think, and rightly so, that social networking can drive sales to your business. But you may be mistaken in how you think that will happen. Lets look at where most small businesses are coming from in terms of marketing driven sales.

Where Are You Coming From?

As a small business, the truth is, you probably don’t do a whole lot of marketing. You are probably considering social media because you have heard its effective and, just as importantly, its free. There is no shame in this. Free marketing can be just as effective as paid.

When a small business does market in the offline world, it is usually in the form of newspaper ads, yellow pages, and post cards. And because all of these things get expensive, you probably don’t do these as consistently as you would like. With social networks, you will be able to be very consistent. In fact, it is a necessity.

When you market now, you probably spend a fair amount of time talking about your business and hoping your message will reach people who are ready to buy. This traditional form of marketing could also be called interruption marketing.

So, it would make sense if you tried the same tactics on social media. You may think that the best thing you can do on Twitter and in your newsletter is to provide deals and advertisements for your business. When you first start out, you will likely want to talk about your business all of the time. That is what you are used to doing. You get sales by telling people what you do.

Let me intervene right here. If there was a television station that was all commercials, all of the time, would you watch it? No, you would not. Likewise, people will not pay attention to you online if you are a 24/7 commercial. Its okay to make some mistakes when you get started. But in order to make social media worthwhile for your business, you need to get a feel for what it is all about.

How Long Does it Take to Get Comfortable?

Getting comfortable with social media tools is an important aspect of your success. If you don’t “get it”, you will never make a dime and will be wasting your time.

“Getting it” involves more than learning the technology. You also need to learn the people. Your prospective customers don’t log in to Facebook with the hopes that they will see a promotion from your business. People aren’t interacting looking to buy. Instead, they are looking for entertainment, education, and answers to their problems.

What you need to do is take enough time building relationships so that you can get a feel for your prospects and how they use social media. Then you can position yourself to be an entertainer, and educator, or a problem-solver.

This takes buying in to the power of online relationships. If you think its all a gimmick, please feel free to stay away. If you don’t spend time on social networks yourself, you aren’t going to be able to find the perfect voice for your business. If you learn how to interact, on the other hand, you will be turning up all kinds of new opportunities for your business.

Should You Be Yourself or Not?

Making the decision about whether you should let your personality shine through on social networks needs to be informed by your own usage of these tools. The  question is whether  your business is interesting without your personality. Also, you need to recognize how important you are to your business’s brand.

Think about this. The most popular people on Twitter are, well, people.  Businesses get follows, but there is less of a personal connection. If you are going to be interacting and building relationships on social networks, it is much easier to do it as a person. And as a person, you can build trust and point people back to your business.

My answer to whether you should be yourself on social networks is a resounding yes. It starts with you taking a different view of social media than you take with your traditional marketing. In a way, social media is more about sales than marketing. This is because its about personal connections. When you are on Twitter or Facebook, your big goal should be to build a network. It is only later that you can tap that network to drive sales. And when you are ready to, you will already have a good understanding of what your prospects will respond to.

In the end, it does all come down to sales. But its not a numbers game. Social media allows you to build a group of qualified prospects that respect you first, and then buy from you second. It is hard to build this kind of network as a faceless business.

Don’t be afraid to be a person. You are a person when you make a sales call, or when you talk to a customer on the phone. Be the same person online. Join social networks as yourself and contribute to the conversations. You will have plenty of opportunities to talk about your business. And if you do decide to send out a special offer, at least there will be people listening.

photo credit: We-Present: Travel-UggBoy-The-Photographer!

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

Get Unique Content Weekly with The All Biz Answers Insider Newsletter

–

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

Twitter is good for marketing. Yes, its a great place to connect and build followers and get your message out. But its great in another way to. It forces you to boil your message down into short sentences. On Twitter, you have to tell you story quickly, succinctly, and without a lot of fluff.

This is important. The world’s attention span is shrinking, at least when it comes to advertising. You need to know what message you want to get across and be able to do it simply. If you can, people will still listen. If not, they will just be annoyed by your marketing efforts.

Can I Have Your Attention for a Few Milliseconds?

Everyone is saying that the human attention span is shrinking. People have less time and just won’t give you the time you need to make your sales/marketing pitch. Well, we all actually have the same amount of time.

The thing is, from a marketing standpoint, you just can’t get as far with traditional methods. Thus, marketers blame people for short attention spans. But from the people side of things, we are actually just fine, thank you very much. People are still capable of giving attention to things that they care about. There are just more sophisticated ways of connecting with what we care about, so we are able to focus on them more and tune the rest out. Yes, this does have some negative consequences, especially if we become insular and don’t listen to other points of view. But from an advertising standpoint, who needs it?

Well, we are still influenced by marketing, just in different ways. One of the big shifts is that people will not spend a whole lot of time considering an option before moving on. When a Google search brings back thousands of sites, people will scroll through several quickly until finding one that appeals to them. The ones that catch the most attention are able communicate their message quickly, both visually and with its content.

Your job as a small business owner is simple. Keep things simple. The more focused and clear your message is, the better. If you can’t put your entire marketing message in one simple 140 characters or less post on Twitter, you have too much fluff.

Master the format of short and quick, and you have a much better chance of someone hearing out the rest of your story. Make your introduction your message, and elaborate if you need to. Its even better if you can boil down your message so that it needs no elaboration.

Here’s a hint. Every time you look at your marketing message, don’t think of what you can add to it, but rather what you can cut out of it.

Refine Your Message to its Core Truth

You probably know what an elevator pitch is. Its your sales pitch boiled down into a very short message. You should be able to be compelling in a very short time window, say the length of an elevator ride.

The elevator pitch isn’t just for the go-getter salesman and the super busy CEO. Normal people are just as busy and guard their time just as closely as any CEO.

Think of it this way. If you want to show respect, package your message in such a way that it can be consumed quickly by your target audience. Chances are, it will be consumed while the prospect is in the middle of something else. If its just fluff, it will be skipped. If its compelling, you have a chance to grab the attention of that prospect for a few more seconds.

Here is where you marketing message needs to fit. It needs to fit in a voice mail. It needs to fit in a Google text ad. It needs to fit in a Twitter update. It needs to fit on a business card.

Some businesses hold to the idea that they can just sit down with someone and then they can sell them. Yes, but its getting harder and harder to get people to sit down with you. If you need a lot of time to sell a prospect, you could be in trouble. My suggestion would be to switch to educational marketing. Even then, you need to bait the hook and get people interested in listening to you with short messages.

Here’s a hint. To refine your marketing message, write it up. Take as many words as you think you need. Now, delete all but the most important words. Start by cutting out your ifs, ands, and buts. Then move to your fluffy adjectives and verbs. Cut down to the core words, and then try to craft them into one or two sentences.

Say More, Annoy Less

The holy grail of marketing, in my book anyway, is to be able to talk openly with prospects without them being annoyed by you. There are a lot of aspects to this, like getting permission and providing value. One of the biggest parts is saying more when you do communicate.

Wait, didn’t I just tell you to cut down your marketing message to its barest essentials? Yes, that was me. I don’t want you to say more as in more words. I want you to say more as in make every single word count.

If you can have people hanging on every word you write or say, you won’t be thought of as annoying. This means limiting your sales pitches and making them count when you do make them.

If your words matter to the people that hear them, you are going to win. If they are seen as annoying dribble, you are going to lose.

You decide what you want to do. Either take the time to craft a concise and powerful marketing message, and build an information and education campaign around it, or don’t. As the options for people continue to increase, they will be tuning more and more noise out. Don’t be the noise. Instead, be the trusted insider. And when you are, never waste people’s time with excess. Get to the point, and stay there.

Here’s a hint. Disguise your marketing message as a public service announcement. You can inform and sell at the same time. If people digest your marketing message as information, they are more likely to be predisposed to buy.

So, I’ve just taken over a thousand words to tell you to keep it short. See, its a process to learn to be brief and get to the point. You won’t be able to do it right away, but with time and practice, you will be an expert at marketing zingers that speak volumes. Good luck!

Recommended Reading

I am constantly on the prowl for good business books. Right now, I am reading Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk. I love Gary’s take on passion and business. This book will give you a kick in the butt to get up and get moving as you pursue your passions and your business.

If you are interested in Crush It, you can get it through Amazon by clicking here or by visiting your local bookstore.

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

Get Unique Content Weekly with The All Biz Answers Insider Newsletter

–

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

When you look at where marketing is moving, you realize that it is slowly coming out of the blast and shout phase, and moving toward more personal interactions. Facebook realizes this. That’s why it tried to introduce Beacon, which told your friends what you were buying. Users didn’t like the idea of a third party doing that, so the initiative was pulled. But the reasoning behind it and other marketing pushes these days is simple. People buy what friends suggest. Marketing is happening through conversations.

If conversations between friends is replacing mass marketing, there is a danger that your message is going to be muscled out. Why would someone buy your brand of TV over the brand that their friends recommend? They won’t, unless they know that they can trust you as much as they trust their friends.

The best tactic to get and maintain marketing influence with prospects is this; gain their trust. I’ve talked earlier about becoming friends with your customers. Now, I want to talk about how to engage them in your marketing by holding two-way conversations.

Start By Listening

If you are going to be good at conversation, you know that you need to be good at listening. This is the inverse of traditional mass marketing. However, it is the way in which you will gain trust and hone your message so that it speaks right to the hearts of your prospects.

Of course, listening is no good if you don’t have anyone to listen to. Start with your customers. Set up meetings where you can just listen to what they have to say about their issues, their likes and dislikes, and more. Ask them questions via email. And just pay better attention during each interaction, learning to listen to both things said and things unsaid.

You can also listen in on conversations that take place on social networks. Pick some key words from you industry or niche and type them in at search.twitter.com. Find out what people are saying about these topics. Here are some more thoughts on how to do that here.

Perhaps the biggest thing you can do is to stop talking. When you do talk, respond rather than promote. Your words will have far greater meaning if they are in response to a customer need or a prospect’s question. You can be sure that other people will be in the same place and will find your response helpful.

Gain Permission

To move your marketing from sporadic conversations to a steady stream, you will need to develop a system. This new marketing system will take into account the people that you are marketing to. You will need to be as personal as possible, and this may mean segmenting your email list by certain interests or tastes. I, for one, like it when a clothing company sends me ads just for men’s clothes.

In order to be able to have any kind of personal conversation with prospects, you first need to gain their permission to talk to them. You do this by inviting them to join your newsletter or to attend your educational event. To get people to want to join, you need to get out there and join conversations on Twitter, in forums, on blogs, etc. Show that you are a listener and that you provide solid content. You also can hold free events and give stuff of value away to get people to notice and sign up.

When you do get permission, make sure you also get information. This kind of personal marketing relies on you knowing your audience and speaking specifically to it. If you do a broad campaign and bring in all types of people to your newsletter, you are going to quickly loose some people by talking about things they do not care about.

You can get some of the information you need up front. But also use your newsletter to better define who you are talking to. Once you get permission, keep it personal in your newsletter. Find out what your readers want by asking them.

Throw the Ball Back

There is an analogy for conversation that has something to do with a ball and throwing it back and forth. If you start a conversation with someone, saying hello, how are you?, the ball is now their’s to throw back to you.

You’re goal with conversation marketing is to make sure the ball keeps moving. On your end, you do this by staying in touch. Send out regular emails, make frequent phone calls, and participate in conversation on social networks and blogs.

You also need to make it easy for people to throw the ball back to you. This is as simple as making sure your contact information is on everything and that there are multiple ways for people to reach you. It is also as complex as reaching out to key people and engaging them in deeper conversation. This might be a blogger who can help promote you or a customer with a complaint. I won’t quiz you on which of the two is a priority, because I know you already know its the customer.

Get the ball rolling by becoming an active listener, online and in every communication you have. Then, invite people to your game by providing quality insight and being helpful. After that, you can put much of your focus on keeping the conversation going. If you do a good job of this, more and more people will seek you out to join in. Thats because a good thing never stays hidden for long.

photo credit: kamshots

Recommended Reading

I am constantly on the prowl for good business books. Right now, I am reading Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk. I love Gary’s take on passion and business. This book will give you a kick in the butt to get up and get moving as you pursue your passions and your business.

If you are interested in Crush It, you can get it through Amazon by clicking here or by visiting your local bookstore.

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

Get Unique Content Weekly with The Letter

–

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com