By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director
For the past 15 years TA has updated our audience of 3,800 members by sending out email blasts to them (up to 10 times a day some time.) While email blasting has it's place, many members now like to just "go to the well" of information only when they're "in the mood". Understanding and adapting to this is the whole "secret key" to understanding and succeeding with social media.
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Following is what TA recommends that small businesses do to maximize the revenue opportunities that exist to be had using social media marketing:
1. Blogging - "I think, therefore I blog". Business blogging is the "daily diary" of what your business is doing to support the members of the community that support the business - vendors, customers, future employees, etc. blogging can also be thought of as "thinking out loud". Certainly you want to make sure the business thoughts of your company are appropriate before committing them to cyber print - but you need to show your community that you think enough of them to blog something.
Your blog or blogs show your community that your business has a heart and a soul. Even if a junior PR person writes all the company president's blog posts - at least it suggests someone has a heartbeat and a bit of personality.
TA has three blogs we've just launched because we have three audiences or blogging topics. (Previously we laboriously posted everything at our main website which was slow for us and hard for our audience to find what they were looking for. We use www.TypePad.com for our three blogs and we could not be happier. Here's what the three different blogs do:
A. Selling Telecom Blog - This is the blog for all our members that just want to know which TA vendors are providing the best solutions at the best prices & commissions. We don't "talk about TA" on that blog - it's all about introducing our members and our vendors to each other.
B. Buying Telecom Blog - This blog is like the "Selling Telecom" blog but it's for business end-users and it showcases the solutions our members are bringing to them (via our TA vendors). Because it would be inappropriate to discuss commissions and spiffs to end-user customers, even though the content is basically the same, the posts needed to be rewritten for the customer audience.
C. TA Admin Blog - This blog is for all the admin stuff TA's members and vendors wish to take advantage of through TA like member benefits and such.
Why three different audiences? To prevent "audience fatigue" and the resulting "tune-out" of your messaging to them. This sort of segmentation is critical to keep them engaged. Your agreement with your audience through message segmentation is that you're only going to communicate with them information that will help them.
When you keep this segmentation promise you increase the likelihood that they will bookmark you site, subscribe to your RSS feed or opt-into your email newsletter.
A good blog also allows your audience to immediately communicate back with you and the whole rest of the audience by giving them the ability to post and view comments (that may or may not make you very happy). while you certainly open yourself up to "sucker punches" by allowing comments - you also show that you're confident in your ability to take criticism - not a bad quality for a service provider.
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2. Facebook Fan Pages - FB fan pages are great because it seems like half of the people we do business with are on FB and when they become a fan of your business page they get news about you sprinkled in with news about their aunts and uncles and old high school friends. They also take all of 45 seconds to put up.
A huge benefit of FB fan pages over Twitter is that the audience can post comments and all comments appear under the original post that's being commented about. This is a big advantage over Twitter.
They can be a bit tricky to find though so I strongly recommend getting a direct URL from GoDaddy.com (like www.MeOnFacebook.com) so you can direct people to find your fan page easy in addition to giving them a link.
Following are some of TA's FB fan pages. TA's Fan Page SellingTelecom.com Fan Page BuyingTelecom.com Fan Page
3. Twitter Pages - Twitter was the predecessor to the Facebook fan page. Twitter's also good for people who refuse to get a FB account. Twitter's pretty start though and flooded with SPAM. You should have a Twitter account for the search engines but just set it up to automatically update from your blog postings if you're short on time.
To do Twitter right though, manually input all your Tweets (as opposed to auto tweets from LinkedIn or your blog) so you can max the use of all 160 characters you're alloted. To many people "retweet" other people's posts. To much retweeting suggests you don't have any original thoughts of your own.
ALSO, don't business tweet without putting in a short hyperlink (using http://bit.ly or others). What's the point of saying anything if you don't give them a link to get more information, right? No one really cares that you're "having a great day" - they care about how you can help them have a great day - and that usually means you're giving them a link to a great find or resource.
Here's TA's Twitter page. TA's Twitter Page
4. LinkedIn - I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn profiles of individual people since it's kind of like looking at their resume - you can quickly separate the folks who are legit from the folks who are "posers". I'm not really a fan of LinkedIn groups.
LinkedIn groups are good to allow highly invested and disciplined associates to communicate with one another. Unfortunately, most LinkedIn groups are either full of self promotion or nothing at all. But because your LinkedIn group affiliations appear on your profile, at least the group names suggest to people viewing your profile what kind of interested you have.
Here's our LinkedIn entries: TA's LinkedIn Group Page Dan Baldwin's LinkedIn Profile
Following is an interesting article from a marketing professional I met a month or so ago. She's got a website full of free resources so I strongly suggest following her posts.
Five Ways Facebook Can Boost Your Business
Here's another decent article. It's decent because social media is mostly used to promote "B2C" or consumer awareness where most of us are "B2B" - only interested in selling to businesses.
HOW TO: Make Social Media Work for Non-Consumer Brands
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