Social Media Strategy in 7 Steps

Are you ready to add some “Why” to your “How”? Tired of chasing shiny objects, and setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts with clear direction, or social media metrics?

The 7 Steps to Creating a Social Media Strategy
Before you begin, commit to worrying about social media tools last, not first. Why? Because tools will change. They always do. There was a time when Netscape seemed invincible. Yahoo, too. Myspace also. If you fall in love with tools, you’ll constantly be changing directions, with no real plan to guide your way.
1. What’s Your Pitch?The elevator pitch is dead. Can you describe what your company does in 120 characters or less?
2. What’s the Point?
What type of program is this? Awareness, Sales, or Loyalty? Pick one.
3. What’s Your Relationship with Your Audience?
What does your audience know about you today?

• Nothing
• Aware of you, but never acted
• Acted once
• Repeat actions/enthusiasts
• Advocates

Pick up to two of these segments to focus upon, but make sure they are adjacent on this scale. It’s too confusing to have a social media strategy that targets advocates AND people that have never heard of you. That would be two strategies, not one.
4. How Does Your Audience Use Social Media?Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. If your audience skews older, you may not want to engage in a lot of “make a video” contests, since that segment indexes low on the “Creator” scale.
5. What’s Your One Thing?
What’s the soul of your brand. What’s the one thing that defines you – and it’s not features and benefits. Volvo = Safety. Apple = Innovation. Disney = Magic. What’s on the other side of your = sign?
Note: This is not easy to figure out. You may need to engage in some brand anthropology, and have an agency help you find your one thing.
6. How Will You Be Human?
Social media is about people, not logos. How will you let down your guard? If you’re a small company, congratulations, this should be pretty easy. If you’re a big company, how can you act small again?
7. How Will You Measure Success?Lots of ways to measure social media success, so make sure you determine your social media metrics BEFORE you get started. I recommend picking three social media metrics to track. Appropriate metrics differ based on what your objective is for the program.
Now, you can worry about tools, and outposts, and social media tactics.
To help you figure all this out, you might want to download Baer's free social media strategy worksheet. It will help you define objectives, your audience, how you will be human and your social media metrics.
Social Media Strategy Worksheet from Jay Baer at Convince and Convert
As a social media consultant, He specializes in helping companies create and implement social media strategy. Social media strategy consulting details here.

Build Backlinks – 14 Easy Ways

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Google optimization is based on the premise that the more people that like to your website, the more valuable it must be and the higher ranking it deserves in search results.
And almost two decades since it was devised, beneath the sophisticated mathematics, the hordes of MIT grads swallowed into the research and development department, and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue lies a simple principle: Google optimization works. Popularity is a pretty good indicator of a website’s value.
But what constitutes popularity online? From a search engine’s perspective, backlinks from another site pointing to yours is a meaningful vote of confidence.

We’re not talking here about links you put on your own website, although those “internal links” are indeed important and often underutilized. Let’s focus on how to build backlinks other people use to point attention toward your website via blogs, articles, social media sites, and so on. For example, “Here is my review of the best restaurant in New York (link pointing to your business).” And while tweets, likes, and +1’s are now becoming important ranking factors alongside links, having websites link back to you is very much still a basic requirement for getting search engine fueled website traffic.

There are an infinite number of places you could conceivably build backlinks for your website, and the vastness of the task can be paralyzing. But you have to start Google optimization some where. You shouldn’t wait passively for people to finally decide to link to you. So over the last few weeks my agency has dug up this list of easy-to-build backlinks you can get for any website. These will help get the popularity ball rolling, and even if your site has been around a while, you should go back and make sure you have these link sources covered.

14 Easy Places to Build Backlinks

Why haven’t you heard of these link sources before? You have. But you’ve probably been told they are a waste of time by your Web developer, who claims these big, popular sites aren’t useful for Google optimization.
The reason is that most powerhouse social media sites like Facebook and YouTube put a small piece of code called ‘the no follow’ tag into most areas of their site. As the name implies, the ‘no follow’ tells search engines: if someone tries to build backlinks to their site from here, don’t follow it. Instead, ignore it.
This was and is done to prevent spammers. If you didn’t have the ‘no-follow’ tag, spammers would create thousands of Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, and YouTube accounts just to link those sites back to their website. The ‘no-follow’ breaks the connection you are trying to make between one website and the next, defeating the purpose of a link from the perspective of Google optimization (people can of course still click the link and visit your site directly).
But it’ s a fallacy that all social media sites have no-follows. In fact, many sites provide juicy link opportunities. You just need to find them. And we did.
These are all real links, and are entirely legitimate and approved for optimization by Google.

Google Profiles
We recommend creating profiles for key employees and founders. Be sure to add custom links with anchor text (“anchor text” is the actual words that comprise the link. You want these to be search terms for which you want to be found, not your name or company name. This anchor text helps Google determine what other sites think your site is about) . Your profile link on Google Profiles will be devoid of a no – follow and you can add much additional information along with the link including videos and photos. These profiles are especially important now that Google Plus has launched.
Google Places
Create a local business listing for all of your offices. Use target keywords in the profile and description fields. This is a great source that is devoid of no – follows and has high visibility in the search results. A Powerful, easy, and effective place to build backlinks.
LinkedIn.com
Build a company profile, as well as individual profiles for key employees and founders. Select “Other” when setting your first web site link to create custom anchor text. Also take advantage of the two additional links available, but no custom anchor text is allowed.
Digg
Digg is great for traffic generation, and while not the powerhouse it once was, is still a large community. Plus, you can submit articles you want to promote, and links to those articles are followed by search engines.
Foursquare
Even if you’re not a check-in maniac, you should set up Foursquare profiles, as the link you associate with your account is followed.
Reddit
An article submission site in the Digg vein. Very active with highly engaged users. The links you submit will be devoid of the no – follow attribute.
Squidoo
Create as many Squidoo “lenses” as you like, about any topic. A lens typically consists of a blog post-esque article, with links to other recommended sources.
Stumbleupon
An article discovery site that’s exceedingly busy and popular. Drives significant eyeballs all around the Web. Submitted links are followed.
Yelp
Even if you don’t know a burger from a baba ganoush, create a profile on Yelp. The link in your profile is followed. Links in comments, however, are no-follow.
listings.local.yahoo.com
This local business portal allows you to create a profile for your business and is devoid of the no – follow attribute. Use target keywords in the profile and description fields, and anchor text if possible.
YouTube
Create a custom YouTube channel for your company . While comments and any links you include in your description will have the rel=”nofollow” attribute, YouTube gives you a link in your profile that is devoid of no – follow.
Ezine Articles
Article submission is becoming a bit dated in terms of Google optimization and building backlinks. Large content repositories like this and Hubpages (below) may have been devalued somewhat in Google’s most recent “Panda” overhaul of its algorithm. But you can use this site to recycle blog posts that you have published elsewhere, and pick up an additional link.
Hubpages
Write articles on topics of your choosing, with custom links and anchor text . Significant link potential here. Devalued a bit in Google’s new Panda update.
Dotpoch
Also in the Digg and Reddit category. You get a link in your profile , and you can submit news stories and articles. All article links are followed.

When You Build Backlinks Be Complete

When it comes to Google Places, Local Listings, LinkedIn and basically all your social pages and profiles, a complete profile is much more powerful than an incomplete one. It’s just more information that search engines can use to figure out what you and your website are about. So fill out all the details and include your main keywords in those profiles (for example, ‘we are a landscape company from Dallas specializing in large commercial and educational institution projects’).
All of this takes a bit of time and grunt work, but if you do it Google will have a richer collection of sites pointing back to yours in a consistent, powerful way.

Price Differentiation for Increased Sales And Larger Profit Margins

First, it depends on what kind of estore software you use. Is it your own source or do you use al in one ecommerce solutions such as volusion, bigcommerce, magento... You can imagine it would be definitely better If you have both your own software and development team in house. This will effectively cash on programming the new applications and projects, integrate it to your e-store the way you want it and cost effective. If you are using shopping cart solutions, you will be more limited to put it into practice.
After this individual point of view, the main topic is how customers come to our e-store:
Where they come from;
1)- Price comparison sites: Means they are looking for low prices, so you don't want to offer high prices. If you do, they won't even come and visit your website unless they haven't have any other choices.


2)- Search Engines: Means they were already looking for a specific product and found you. Middle price would be the best fit for your e-store price segmentation strategy.


3)- Direct Visits or Result of Reviews: Means they are already comfortable with you, your site, your customer service, your value and they are high likely to pay your asking price.


It is obvious that you will enjoy increased sales and larger profit margins with the effective use of price differentiation.

notion source: upstreamcommerce.com

Your Pioneers in Social Media? Let's Find Them and than Chase Them Up

I always want to follow top players in the fields of social media, search engines, affiliation, e-store, in a nutshell multi-channel marketing. Today, I will go over the social media with my little research below.I’ve followed many companies and seen their successes over the years. I put together this list of some of the “bigger players” in the social media atmosphere that are doing exceptional jobs with their campaigns. Granted, these companies have budgets that one would only dream to work with, they still can show us a few things that we can all implement into our own social media campaigns.

• Coca Cola
• Facebook Fans: 41,366,566
• Twitter Followers: 522,143
• Google+ Followers: 504,556

My favorite part of Coca Cola’s social media is their Facebook Timeline. They have utilized Timeline to the fullest by adding in all of their history and adding in their assortment of applications. The best way they have captivated Fans though? With visuals. If you go to the Coca Cola Facebook Timeline, you can see that of their recent posts about 90% of them include some sort of picture. They could have used other Facebook tools for some of their posts like questions or even just simple status updates but they used pictures instead. They have figured out how to get the maximum amount of feedback from their Fans and it’s working… well. They do a great job on Twitter by making sure to reply to people talking about them. This is a good way to interact with Followers and encourages them to keep talking about your brand.

• Ford
• Facebook Fans: 1,467,664
• Twitter Followers: 121,529
• Google+ Followers: 428,365

Ford has done a phenomenal job in using social media. They have made sure to integrate their social media campaigns into every aspect of their company. They measure everything that they do on social media all the way through to the purchase of a car by asking customers if their social media efforts influenced them in any way to their purchase. You’d be shocked at the number of customers they get into dealerships as a result of social media. They were also one of the first companies that attacked the Google+, getting on board the second day that the social network opened to the public. With so many followers, they must be doing something right. The biggest benefit to their presence on Google+ is that the followers they have are more valuable and the conversation is richer. They also have an entire website dedicated to social media. It is a way for fans to get involved with Ford socially. Social Media Examiner recently did an interview with the head of social media for Ford, Scott Monty, and he has some valuable things to say about how Ford has used social media to help their brand in big ways.

• Starbucks
• Facebook Fans: 29,643,724
• Twitter Followers: 2,376,361
• Pinterest Followers: 402 total but over 800 on some of their boards.

Starbucks, like Coca Cola, does a great job at utilizing photos. They have been one of the first and most dominant companies on the Pinterest platform. Creating pictures that have their logo in them and that appeal to a variety of users, increasing their Repins tremendously. They also appeal to their Facebook Fans by showing their involvement in community projects and charities. Of course not every company can do this but even if you sponsor an event at a local diner that benefits ANYONE, you should showcase this through all of your social media. Starbucks has documented their support very well which is definitely another great idea that you can use in your own social media efforts.

• Disney
  
• Facebook Fans: 35,023,410
• Twitter Followers: 1,209,606
• YouTube Subscribers: 165,404 (Disney Channel YouTube Channel)

Disney has utilized their history and nostalgia that their brand brings to many users. They create trivia on Twitter, asking questions like, “What was the first Disney animated feature to have an all-animal cast of characters?” By this they create many Retweets and Favorites. With the hashtag #DisneyTrivia, they are sure to keep this up for quite some time. They also post things on Twitter like, “Hakuna matata [ha-koo-nah mah-ta-tah] n. A problem-free philosophy. Means no worries for the rest of your days.” Most everyone knows what this means and they created tons of Retweets, Favorites, and I’m sure tons of new followers by this post alone. Their Facebook Page ties in their brand history and appeals visually to users by posting photos like this and adding in a quote from the movie or something uplifting. If your brand has a lot of history like Disney does then it should be easy to use it to your advantage. You already have the content, you just need to use it!

So let’s take a look back at everything we can learn from these big players in social media. From Coca Cola we know that we need to appeal to our Fans and Followers visually. Ford has shown us that we need to integrate social media into every aspect of our company whether it means creating an entire website or simply surveying your customers if social media had any influence on their decision to be your customer. The utilization of Pinterest and creation of your own photos that subliminally showcase your brand is a great way Starbucks has shown us how to use social media. Finally, Disney has shown us the importance of tying in your brand’s history to bring nostalgia and reminiscence to their fans.

Create Content That Matters

Wacth Bob's and Steve's Story:

Let Your Customer Buy More During Checkout

As a blogger that covers the world of B2B and B2C ecommerce, I find that quite often my personal online shopping experiences drive content for my blog. Today's blog post is no exception although I am a little stunned by the site that frustrated me.

I love Amazon.com. First because I am an avid reader, consummate nerd and I love to learn new things. Second, because Amazon.com is far and away the leader in ecommerce functionality and user experience and is quite often an organization's benchmark when they venture into the world of ecommerce.

Today, Amazon.com threw me for a loop. Stumped me. Did not lead me, instictively without my having to ask, to what I wanted. And what's odder still is that the hiccup happened during the payment process. Here's the scoop.

I was looking to purchase a couple of books. I reviewed my cart and started to check out. I got to the "Review Your Order Screen" and realized that there was a third book that I wanted to purchase. I scanned the page, looking for the helpful "Continue Shopping" button. No dice. All I could find was the "Place Your Order" button.

I clicked on the logo. Nothing.

I tried to click on the bread crumb string at the top of the page. Nope.

I was stumped. I wanted to buy more. I wanted to give Amazon my money and I was frustrated with the prospect that I would have to close my browser window and start over.

As my mouse pointer hovered over the "X" button to close the window, I had a flash of clarity. This was Amazon. The Holy Grail of ecommerce websites. Could there really be such a blatant flaw in their checkout process that would limit my ability to increase my purchase??

I refused to believe it and I returned to the page. I continued clicking and scanning. And then I saw it.

There at the very bottom of the page, in the itty bitty font that follows most every page these days was a tiny link that said "Go to the Amazon.com homepage without completing your order."

I was instantly relieved and then immediately even more concerned. Had I not gone back and looked again, I would have completely missed this link. I would have just recreated the order because I wanted the books and Amazon is my site of choice, but how many customers wouldn't have?

I'm guessing that the super smart people over at Amazon know something that I don't, which probably includes the pull of the Amazon brand and that customers are likely to order again if they can't amend an order during the "Review Your Order" stage. Of course, this is because they are Amazon and people love them. But your site is not Amazon.com, and while that is okay--good even, there is a lesson here.

Make sure that you give your customer the chance to buy more from you by allowing them to go back and add more items to their cart during checkout. This does not have to be an active solicitation to purchase more--outright promotional offers at this juncture would probably derail the sale--but should be clearly labeled so that a customer can go back, add the additional item(s), check out and continue with her day.

The Perfect Customer Lifecycle

The Perfect Custoer Lifecycle:

1. Attract Traffic
2. Capture Leads
3. Nurture Prospects
4. Convert Sales
5. Deliver & Satisffy
6. Upsell Customers
7. Get Referrals