• Advertise it EVERYWHERE – your website, your blog, your email, your business card!
• Make it easy and obvious to find
• Create interesting content, and publish often
• Email everyone you know
• Suggest the page to your friends every few months
• Give incentives for becoming a fan EXCLUSIVELY on your facebook fan page
• Create a competition for whoever helps you get the most fans
• Offer exclusive content on your page
• Promote the page with a Facebook ad
• Offer people value
• Update daily
• Add Facebook badges to your website and blog
• Make your fan page a forum
• Find the right time of day to post

And remember… Facebook is for FRIENDS not selling!!!

Making any idea happen is not about the NUMBER of twitter followers you get, but getting the “RIGHT” followers! (Quality not quantity)

Here are some ideas on getting the “right” twitter followers:

• Customize your twitter profile. Include industry-specific key words that might reach your target market.
• Follow others in your industry and interact with them.
• Follow others in your geographic location or target market, and interact with them.
• Offer good customer service and opportunities for your target marketing EXCLUSIVELY on your twitter account.
• Post your twitter name all over your website, blog, email and on your business cards!
• Give away something for free that your target can ONLY get by following you on twitter.
• Use twellow and some of the other “twitter yellow pages” to find twitterers interested in your field. Click on their profiles and browse through their followers.
• Use Twitter-bait: key words that attract things your target may be searching for!

And always remember, twitter is for building new relationships – NOT for harvesting and advertising to people you do not know.

Scott suggests that ideas are only 1% of what make ideas happen, and the rest is made up of organization, community and leadership. I would highly recommend this book to… almost everyone.

I have been encouraging businesses for years that the best way to approach social media is to add it to their existing marketing plan… to have a weekly checklist of things to do on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Scott makes this easier to grasp by suggesting that we create daily ‘Action Step’ for everything we do – from adding sugar to the grocery list to returning a phone call and following up on your employees. He calls in ‘The Action Method’ and I can tell you first hand, it works. I didn’t know it, but I have been using the action method for years by processing all of my to-do’s on a piece of paper every morning – it helps me to focus during the day and not get side tracked by all of the ideas that randomly pop into my head. (Making me crazy!)

Adding Social Media to Your Action Plan

I come in contact with business owners every day who are afraid of social media. They don’t know what it is, they don’t have time for it, and they are afraid to adapt. If this is you… you aren’t alone!

They key to overcoming this “socialmediobia” is twofold:

1) Start using it. You cannot get past a fear without getting to know the thing you are afraid of. Spend some time on it. Sign up for a Facebook account and invite someone you know to be your friends, then try writing on their wall. Do it!

2) Organize it. Anything can become overwhelming in life (even eating breakfast) if you aren’t organized and prepared. If I don’t have yogurt in the fridge in the morning, I won’t eat anything and starve to death. But if I continue to do my grocery shopping every Sunday and buy my week’s supply of yogurt and granola, it becomes part of my routine.

The same concept works for social media. If you add it to your daily schedule, your action plan, and organize it… you won’t have to be overwhelmed, or afraid of it, anymore.

Now, I am going to go check this article off of my Action Steps checklist…

YOU, go check out the book! >

I know, I am using Spring as an excuse to write to you about all the things you should be doing online. Some of you may be saying, “Oh, gosh, I haven’t even finished getting online right, how can I spring clean it already?!”

Well, this is the perfect opportunity for you, then! Here are some EASY and SIMPLE steps anyone can take to boost their appearance on the web. And trust me, people DO look.

1. Evaluate.

Do you remember all of the places you are listed online? Heck, I don’t! When social media just came out, people signed up for everything. But obviously, we only use just a few online tools like Facebook and Twitter.

So first, start writing down all of the places that you KNOW you are listed in. Then, start searching for those you forgot. Look in your email box for welcome messages from accounts you may have opened. Do a search in Google for your own name, your “handle” (or whatever you may have used to identify yourself) and of course, your business name.

Look for a Google listing, yellowpages and other online phone books. Make sure you write down your website, blog and any other mini-website you may have had at one point, including Yahoo, Godaddy, or (God forbid) Microsoft.

Once you have a complete list:

2. Decide what you want to keep, and throw away what you don’t.

Since our bodies themselves cannot live online, the only thing people are going to know about us in the world wide web is what they see online. So, we want to try and do a good job at representing!

There are some things you may want to throw out… like an old Godaddy website that you don’t use anymore. Please, please throw it out.

But there are other things you may want to hang onto, even if you don’t actively use it. For example, I signed up for a Foursquare account some months ago, but since then decided it was too dangerous to use. So, I have this old Foursquare account hanging out there in cyberspace that I don’t ever use. So what should I do? I am going to hang on to it… I will explain what to do with it in Step 3.

So how do you decide what to keep and what to get rid of?

Use these simple rules. If ALL of them apply, keep the account:

• The account helps you get found on Google
• The account is up to date OR can be updated
• If you don’t plan to be active on the account, it will sustain itself
• It does not conflict with your current brand
• It makes you look good

How do you shut your accounts down? Well, that is the tricky part. A lot of services make it kind of difficult to shut down. Myspace, for example, used to be almost nearly impossible. In fact, for my Spring cleaning I have promised myself that I will find a way to take my old, decrepit, almost non-existent 10 year old Myspace account down.

Once you have a complete list of all the accounts you are keeping:

3. Write a standard bio for you and your company.

Gather the basic information about yourself. You want your accounts to be consistent and correctly branded across the board. What will you need for your standard bio?

• A professional picture (maybe a few versions and one with your family)
• A thumbnail version of your picture (very small copy for microblogging, etc)
• Your bio (who are you, what do you do, why do you do it)
• Your “tagline” (a sentence about what makes you … you)
• A couple of favorite quotes

Once you have all of this information compiled you can go to step 4:

Step 4: Update all of your accounts

Using the information you gathered, you can mix and match it to all of your accounts online. Easy, consistent, clean.

Consider yourself Spring Cleaned! Now… there is just one more thing you need to do:

Step 5: Keep track of all of your accounts.

Write them down with their user names and passwords, and the email address that is assigned to them. Trust me, this will save you a ton of headache in the future.

Check out these other articles on Spring Cleaning:

How to Clean Up Your Facebook >

Twitter Spring Clean Up >

An 8-Step Plan for Social Media Spring Cleaning >

Read more here >

Or Signup:

All of the retail world uses the holidays to heavily push their products and specials. So… why can’t small businesses?

Using social media, here are some things you can do to get some attention:

1. Write a blog article or Facebook note titled, “5 Great Gift Ideas”
2. Elf Yourself and send it out via e-newsletter or Facebook
3. Create a Holiday card through one of Facebook’s holiday apps
4. Create a holiday special or promotion
5. Create a YouTube video and use it as a Christmas e-card

What are YOUR ideas?

LinkedIn is probably the most widely used un-used social media tool out there! In a handful of popular tools, LinkedIn surely takes the award for being the most boring.

Is it because LinkedIn is more of a business networking tool than social? And do people like to be social above all else?

Then why are some professionals more confortable signing up for LinkedIn than Facebook?!

Help me answer the question by commenting below.