As business owners we have to justify where we spend our time. And with new social media tools like Facebook, we have to be extra cautious about if and how we spend our time online!

One of the most pressing questions that I have received is “How can I measure my social media success?” But I think before any person can answer that question for themselves, a predetermining question must be asked:

“What is the real value of social media for business?”

The real value of social media is not going to be exactly the same for every business. Many marketing professionals claim that the one and only purpose of using social media is to engage others. While I think that is an admirable goal, it is also one that is unrealistic and sets forth an unfair expectation of people in general. Social media has many purposes which includes engagement, but also information sharing, collaboration, customer service, and reputation management, just to name a few.

The real value of social media has to be self-determined based upon two main criteria.

DIRECT RETURN ON INVESTMENT. Your businesses direct ability to use social media as a marketing platform, integrating strategies into your overall business plan; both enhancing and replacing some forms of traditional media.

INDIRECT INFLUENCE. Your individual ability to indirectly influence others through thoughts, social actions and relationships being built, sustained and cultured, while translating that into a business value.
Using Social Media to Have a Direct Impact on Your Target Market

Get instructions on creating measurable social media strategies, and how to position yourself as a trustworthy online niche leader:

Like Twitter, you don’t necessarily need sheer numbers on your Fan page… but the “right” fans on your page. Here are some ways to grow those numbers – and attract your target.

• 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!!!

Think that the goal of twitter is to get the most number of followers possible? Think again!

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.

I’ve been reading this book, ‘Making Ideas Happen‘ by Scott Belsky of Behance. It focuses on the organization behind projects, instead of the actual ideas. It’s a very important book, ok.

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! >

After a biased review of all of the most prominent email marketing memberships out there, I had hoped that MailChimp would win the battle.

MailChimp is a fairly new email list manager that integrates with the best website building software out there (Expression Engine) and the best invoicing software out there (Freshbooks).

Unfortunately, MailChimp lost – not only the battle – but also my support. Although MailChimp rated among the top 10 best email management services out there, it was still missing some of the most basic and important features, like Plain Text emails and Auto Responders.

But enough about MailChimp, let’s talk about what DOES work.

According to Email Marketing Services Review 2010, iContact was rated #1 all around, for feature set, ease of use, campaign creation & reporting, and help and support.

Some of the runner ups were Benchmark, and one we all have heard of, Constant Contact.

Since my review I have gone gung-ho for iContact and am now helping them to give away free trials. Get yours today!

Email Communication Experts – Email Marketing, RSS, Surveys, and Autoresponders. Free Trial of iContact

Here is one of the most relevant search engine marketing questions many small businesses find asking themselves: “How do I get to the top of Google Local Map results?”

This doesn’t take months to do and often can be achieved within a couple of days, if not hours. Some business owners will find themselves struggling with getting a high ranking, because of the competition within their city.

Small businesses now have the opportunity to be seen first before organic search results are displayed, by securing placement and continuously improving psoitioning in the maps section of various search engines. Maps listings include phone numbers, links to the business website and other critical business information that isn’t normally displayed in organic listings.

There are ways that you can improve your Google Local Map listing and here are a few steps that can help in improving your ranking on Google Local.

Step 1: Claim your Google Local Map listing, if you haven’t already.

Step 2: Login to Google Local online.

Step 3: Verify your information and make sure your description is specific with keywords. Use keywords to describe your location and what your business is by as well as search keywords that customers will use to find you.

Step 4: Use keywords in your company and organization name. For example in my Google Local Map listing I used the following as my company and organization name (Keywords are in bold) – Tucker Hosting – Web Hosting and Web Design Don’t be deceptive by changing your company name, but if your keywords are in the extended business name or LLC, make sure this is the name in which you register.

Step 5: Don’t forget to categorize your listing and make sure that you complete all 5 categories. The 1st category is the most important, but the next 4 follow in at a close second when it comes to ranking importance. Try to use Google’s suggested categories.

Step 6: Customer reviews will also help in improving your Google local listing rank. Don’t write your own review, but ask your customers for a recommendation. You can not have too many. Don’t fake them either, it’s easy to see. Just like any other review, people will trust products or services when they have lots reviews, especially if they have kept above three stars.

The secret is that Google focuses rank mostly on the businesses closes to the center of the city. If you are not near the center of the city the prior steps are vital to improving the rank of your Google Local Map listing in order to compete with the businesses that are closer to the center of the city than you.

Here are the other five steps:

Step 7: Add lots of high quality photos – They only recently they allowed this. Add as many photos as you can and a company logo.

Step 8: Add a Coupon – Google allows printable coupons to be added by your listing.

Step 9: Create links to the Google Places Page – Add a link from your homepage to the listing and encourage current customers or website visitors to review your company.

Step 10: Add Videos- If your company already has videos on YouTube you can place them right there on the page.

Step 11: Contact Tucker Hosting to find out more information on how their Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts can provide the highest long-term return on investment of all marketing methods.

As with any local business SEO strategy, your Google Maps listing should be optimized for obtaining the best results. 82% of internet searches are made through Google for local business information. With the right strategy, your small or medium business can get spotted immediately on the front page of local search results. Call Tucker Hosting for a free consultation: 434-515-1573

Phil Tucker is an Internet Marketing Strategist with Tucker Hosting. Being passionate about helping small businesses become more successful online; Phil’s biggest asset is his understanding of the challenges small business face from an owner’s point of view. Phil spends most days monitoring and advising clients on how to improve their online reputations, social media campaigns and performing search engine optimization duties.

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 >

Need to implement social media strategies into your business! Small group coaching is for you!

Read more here >

Or Signup:

In response to “Re: Stop Adding Me to Your Email List”

Justin Owen is director of The Good & The Brave, a digital consultancy company in Bath that creates online solutions to engage, win and retain customers.

“I think that the whole ‘permission email’ area is pretty grey and if it’s not policed properly by us, the implementers / guardians of online marketing, then the whole industry could end up with some serious problems.

“We were recently approached by an award winning PR/Marketing agency to do some email marketing work. Their client had a database of 20K+ contacts but they couldn’t tell us exactly how they’d acquired their details. Some had used their services (and in their admission, often over 2 years ago), some had left business cards at exhibitions / with members of their staff and some had been purchased. We said that LEGALLY they could send to these people, but ETHICALLY we couldn’t / wouldn’t send out to these contacts, as they had not specifically asked to receive email communication from them. We stressed to the agency that:

A) The response rates would undoubtedly be low
B) Unsubscribe rates high
C) Reports of the email as spam – possibly high
D) Damage to the brand likely to occur
E) A majority of email marketing platforms wouldn’t let them send out due to the integrity of the list

The result: The MD stamped her feet (no seriously!) and said that she just wanted the campaigns to be sent to these people. We declined the business and went on our way. They haven’t called back, but that’s the price we were willing to pay.

This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last I’m sure. In the past, I’ve had a client blacklisted by Spamhaus because they were perceived to be spamming by repeatedly sending to contacts that weren’t opening their emails (av. 15% response from 15K database). In the end, so many people reported them for spamming that Spamhaus ordered all our servers be shut down. Our advice had been to properly manage and reduce their list to only openers and permission subscribers to increase response rates and effectiveness – they ignored us but continued to ask us for ways of increasing the open rates. They were so afraid of losing numbers off their database rather than increasing conversions from the people that actually wanted their information. In the end, it bit them on the ass if you’ll excuse my language.

Anyway, I reckon that sums up a fair few of the reasons why I would never ever recommend that people just add people to their newsletters without them asking specifically first.”

Thank you Justin for your honesty and integrity!