Created by Voltier Digital for ScottMonty.com

Many marketers fail to see what the big deal is regarding Twitter. They read Tweets about what someone ate for breakfast or what color shirt they’re wearing. They might sign up only to stare at a bare, lonely screen with zero followers.

Initially, it might be difficult to see the potential. But once you get started, Twitter has a tendency to “snowball” into a HUGE deal for marketers – one that is absolutely essential for the growth of their business and their exposure on the internet.

How Can You Use Twitter?

Here are just a few of the ways Twitter can help to benefit your online business:

Establishing repertoire with your customers / readers

Twitter allows for a bit more personal, less formal, more fun mode of communication. It allows them to catch a glimpse of you just as a regular person sending SMS texts from Wal-Mart, rather than as a serious, detached blogger or business owner.

Why is this useful? It allows people to connect and relate to you on a personal level – it makes you look just like a “regular Joe”, especially if you include random/fun tweets among the more serious, business-driven tweets.

Keeping your customers / readers updated

With a blog, you might only update once or twice per week. With Twitter, you might send a handful of tweets per day, keeping your followers “in the loop” and reminding them of your existence.

Of course, it’s not recommended to send a million tweets per day. This will only serve to annoy people and they will likely unfollow you.

Building a loyal, steady customer-base

“BUILD A LIST!” As a marketer, I’m sure you’ve heard this refrain many times over. Building a list is one of the most vital steps you can take in the advancement of your online business. Twitter is pretty much the same as building a list – although it might be even more effective in the long run.

When it comes to an email list, a large portion of your subscribers won’t even glance at the emails you send. Their eyes will glaze over and they may even send it to the trash. With Twitter, your followers will see all of your Tweets. They’ll digest its information in about half a second and if you include a link, they probably won’t get offended.

Chances are, if you included an eye-catching description, they’ll probably click it! Additionally, it won’t SEEM like you are marketing to them, because you’re just another Twitter user tweeting about random stuff!

Building up excitement for a product launch

Just like with an email list, Twitter can be used to build up excitement about an upcoming product launch. It can start with occasional Tweets about your “new project”, and by keeping your followers up to date and offering freebies and cool stuff that they’ll appreciate, you’ll build trust and anticipation. When your product launches, a well-timed Tweet may likely be just as effective as a blast to your email list.

Driving traffic to your website

Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly notify hundreds or thousands of people every time you update your blog? Twitter makes this possible. It essentially acts as an RSS feed. By building a sizable list of followers, you pretty much have access to an instant source of traffic to your website or blog.

People who would otherwise not be aware of updates and new content will be notified, giving them a chance to check it out. If your blog is high-quality, people will keep an eye out for more of your Tweets.

Building relationships with business contacts.

Twitter makes it easy to keep in touch with business partners and contacts. Traditional instant messaging is on its way out, and you’ll find that most savvy internet marketers use Twitter as their primary social networking tool. So take advantage of this fact! Hook up with your contacts so you can work on building a closer relationship.

Crowd-sourcing

Crowd-sourcing is a unique form of outsourcing. It works by calling on your friends, fans, followers, email subscribers, etc. to contribute ideas and solutions. Basically, it is a form of “group intelligence”.

By listening to the crowd, marketers and business owners can figure out the exact thoughts, needs, and wants of their customer base. In this way, innovative new ideas and strategies are born that are guaranteed to fall in line with the desires of the consumer.

By directly asking your followers what type of new software they’d like to see developed, or what their biggest setbacks are, or what they liked/disliked most about your last ebook, you can gain an incredibly amount of insight about your business!

Twitter provides a perfect platform for crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing is a unique form of outsourcing. It works by calling on your friends, fans, followers, email subscribers, etc. to contribute ideas and solutions. Basically, it is a form of “group intelligence”.

By listening to the crowd, marketers and business owners can figure out the exact thoughts, needs, and wants of their customer base. In this way, innovative new ideas and strategies are born that are guaranteed to fall in line with the desires of the consumer.

Going viral

Social networking sites give us a great opportunity to ‘go viral’. This means that you Tweet about something that really catches people’s attention. Your followers are impressed, so they re-Tweet it.

In turn, each of their followers re-Tweet it, and so on and so on, and soon your little Tweet spreads like wildfire, snowballing into a huge storm of clicks and traffic.

Of course, TRYING to make something go viral probably won’t work. It tends to just happen on its own. Tweeting “Hey guys buy my new ebook click here” will never go viral, obviously. But if you find something really interesting, little-known, valuable, funny, etc., you might have a chance.

Very often, Tweets go viral without anyone really expecting or planning on it. This is just one of the many amazing benefits of social networking.

Twitter won’t do you much good if no one bothers to click your links. Writing eye-catching, interesting tweets involves the same general concept as writing strong e-mail headlines. You must pique their interest and make them curious to see what you have to offer.

• Ask a provocative question. “Will’s Obama’s new tax reforms bring your small business to its knees?”

• Write a headline that sounds like news. “New Twitter software revolutionizes social networking!”

• Lists. “Ten Reasons Why You Need To Trash Your Iphone”

• How-to tweets. “How to get 1000 visitors to your blog – overnight!”

As you can see, it’s not really rocket science. Just be creative. Instead of tweeting, “New SEO Ebook released today! Get it now!”, think of all the different ways you could say roughly the same thing in a more interesting fashion.

• “Revolutionary New SEO System Kicks Google’s Ass!”

• “How much would you pay to kick Google’s ass?”

• “What if I told you that everything you know about Google – IS WRONG?”

• “Tired of crap? Get the system that ACTUALLY WORKS.”

• “10 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Ranking – And How To Fix It”

You get the idea.

If you’re using bit.ly to shorten your URLs, you can actually track your links. This way, you can find out which headline is bringing in the most clicks, and replicate it again and again.

Of course, as I mentioned before, these “eye-catching” headline tweets should only be tossed in here and there. Keep the majority of your tweets free of advertising altogether, or people will quickly become fed up with your blatant, desperate marketing attempts.

Your social media marketing plan must do more than just say what you want to happen. It must describe each step required to make sure that it happens.

Define Key Tasks and who will be involved

The plan should therefore include a schedule of key tasks. This sets out what will be done, by whom, and by when. Refer to the schedule as often as possible to avoid losing sight of your objectives under the daily workload.

Resources

It should also assess what resources you need. Decide if you need to assign tasks to third parties and how to source them. You might also need to look at how much time it takes to prepare the designs and extra materials that will be needed.

Budget

The cost of everything in the plan needs to be included in a budget. If your finances are limited, your plan will need to take that into account. Don’t spread your marketing activities too thinly – it is better to concentrate your resources to make the most of your budget.

Management

As well as setting out the schedule, the plan needs to say how it will be controlled. You need an individual who takes responsibility for pushing things along. A good schedule and budget should make it easy to monitor progress. When things fall behind schedule, or costs overrun, you need to be ready to do something about it and to adapt your plan accordingly.

The plan must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound). This means you must decide exactly what you expect to create, and how you will recognize it when you are done.

Define the marketing methods and tactics

Marketing online requires different methods and tactics.  These tactics should be used in line with the “terms and conditions” of the social media sites. You might want to organize social events, provide giveaways and use online video to promote your business.  At this stage you will need to specify these methods and fully understand how to implement them or have someone to implement them for you.

Plan how to Monitor Social Media activities

Although, the monitoring phase is a different phase entirely, the planning of what needs to be done during monitoring. A least, provide the framework for the monitoring, the cost, and who should be responsible to lead the monitoring phase.

Plan how to Measure & Report.

A clear plan to measure and report needs to be defined. The important reason why you should plan this here is to be able to have a budget estimate of what the entire operation is going to cost the company.

No matter the business you are, facebook has become the main gathering place of your customers. The question is, how can you reach these people on facebook? There are five things you can do right now to improve your facebook presence and grow your business.

1. Create a facebook fanpage. A fanpage helps you market your business. You can have as many facebook pages as you want. However, you can only have one profile. You will need to create your pages while logging in from facebook with your personal profile.

1. If you already have a facebook page you will need to claim your facebook vanity URL. You can have https://www.facebook.com/AboutSocialMediaMarketing . This is better for your business, instead of the long url name you get when you create a facebook page.
2. Increase the number of your fans on facebook using any means you can think of and drive customers to your facebook page by constantly posting updates to your wall. This will be seen by yours fans and their friends, and could translate to more business.
3. Integrate your site with facebook and allow visitors to share information about your business with their friends. Words of mouth, is very powerful.

If you are at odd at implementing any of the above you can contact me to help you. I will provide you a free 30 minutes consultation for contacting me.

To get your free consultation please fill out the form below and I will get back to you within 12 hours to discuss

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How To Succeed In Social Media Marketing Without Being Eaten.

Marketing online even for large companies can be a huge challenge. Now, Social Media has added to the marketing confusion online.

From the start, facebook has allowed users to link fan pages with external websites hosted on other servers without SSL. Up till now this connection was done using unsecure connection which makes it possible for someone to intercept and modify the communication between your server and your facebook page.

Facebook has now made it mandatory to use secured channel communication for communication between your facebook application i.e fan pages with other sites. This is called Secured Socket Layer (SSL). It is required from 1st October 2011. From this date onward, if your server, where your facebook custom page is located does not have SSL installed, users will get the dreaded “secure browsing error” when they visit your facebook page.

This error can be seen from The Simpsons fan page below. This is a page with over 34 million fans. Think about what it means to upset over 30 million people.

facebook ssl error

We can help you solve this problem. Just fill out the form on our contact page and we will get back to you to discuss our solution with you.

When such a message is seen, people tend to conclude that your page is not secured. Most people will prefer to go away from your page immediately.

To solve this problem, we will provide you with a turnkey, rapid solution that will fix the facebook SSL problem. This enables you to go ahead with your normal business of making money and leave the technical details to us.

Our two facebook SSL Solutions

We have two solutions tailored to your need. The hosted facebook SSL service, and the non hosted facebook SSL service. The service we recommend depends on whether you are starting a new facebook page or you have existing facebook page and whether your existing page is on server where SSL certificate can be installed or not.

Hosted facebook SSL Service

Hosted SSL service is good for small businesses and individuals who have facebook fan pages and do not want to go through the hassle of setting up SSL and maintaining it themselves. In fact, this service is for you if you do not know what SSL is?

We provide you a a secured place to to host your Facebook pages in a wordpress environment. We use wordpress for this because it is one of the most secured solutions out there and, secondly, it provides you a turnkey environment to do whatever you want to have on your facebook page. If you can think it, you can do it with wordpress powered fan page. Just take a look at some of our best facebook pages powered by wordpress.

The hosted facebook SSL service is recommended for anyone building a new facebook page. The page will be built on our hosted solutions using WordPress. This means you will be able to take your facebook page to a new level of interaction with your clients. This is also suitable for pages that are on existing shared servers where you are not able to setup SSL and needs to move the pages to a secured SSL location.

Non Hosted facebook SSL Service

Our non hosted facebook SSL is simple. We provide you the facebook SSL fix using your own SSL certificate which we will help you to get from your hosting company.

If you are building a custom facebook page with us, you will have the option of choosing the hosted facebook SSL service or the non hosted facebool SSL service. We do recommend the hosted facebook SSL service because it means you will not need to worry anymore about your SSL needs as it is taken care of right from the start.

The non hosted facebook SSL service is ideal for pages that are already hosted on other servers where SSL can be installed easily. We will leverage existing solution to provide the SSL solution.

What you get

1. You will get a sub domains on our server with SSL installed already such as www.yourname.domain.com. This name is never visible to facebook users, so it does not really matter where the page is hosted as long as it is secured.
2. Already installed WordPress blog to setup your page. The best way to setup your page is to use WordPress because you will get all the tools you need in a secured environment.
3. Access to the best WordPress plugins to setup your page. You can have freedom to add rich content to your facebook page.
4. Full admin rights to your subdomain WordPress. This means you have full editing power to your setup to allow you to make changes whenever you need it.

There are many benefits of Facebook marketing that we need to talk about and all moves around the fact that Facebook is currently the most popular social network in the world. Even if it started with just teenagers creating accounts, it now has a huge population base that covers people of all ages and interests. Let us talk about some of the most important benefits of Facebook Marketing.

The Viral Aspect

Facebook is one way to send messages to your clients, colleagues and friends. You can send messages in an open manner, with the use of a private message or you can even use live chatting. Most Internet marketers are going to use Facebook in order to network with other people. You can even use it in order to easily communicate with affiliates, downline members or just people that you have to contact.

One of the main benefits of Facebook marketing is the fact that users are going to market your products for you. This happens as they share your articles or tell others about the services that you offer. This viral aspect of Facebook makes it possible for a marketer to reach a much bigger audience than just using a simple website.

Brand Credibility

One of the benefits of Facebook marketing that few people consider is the possibility of establishing a stronger brand. You can choose to share as much information as you want to on a profile page. You can easily post logos and pictures that are going to help in branding. As more people know about your brand you are to gain the potential to get more customers.

Free Advertising

Facebook offers you the possibility to advertise for free. You basically get free business exposure. When you combine this with the viral aspect you will reach a huge number of people. You can even opt for paid advertising if you have the budget for it and this can bring in even more clients to your business. All is focused on the fact that there is a huge number of Facebook accounts that can be reached.

Announce Important Events

With the use of Facebook marketing you can post different schedules, announce conferences and other events. You can easily create a new event and invite your friends. If they decide to attend they might also recommend the new event to friends and this will create an even bigger exposure for what you are organizing.

To sum up, there are many benefits of Facebook marketing that we can consider. Those above are just the most obvious but the bottom line is that the exposure is much higher when using social networking as compared with regular SEO based marketing techniques. Any Internet marketer needs to also think about focusing on Facebook Marketing.

When you ask “what is Facebook Marketing” we can simply reply that it is the use of marketing techniques in a combination with the Facebook social network. While this is a very simple definition, there are many factors that we have to consider whenever thinking about facebook marketing.

What is Facebook Marketing or Why use Facebook Marketing ?

The truth is that Facebook marketing is a great way to reach potential customers. We are talking about a highly active social network where people are open about what they like and what they do not like. The conversations are visible and we can reach clients that are interested in what we are offering.

Most people are going to create special pages for the websites that they build and believe that this is Facebook Marketing. The truth is that there is much more than that. In order to create a good Facebook marketing campaign you will need to focus on creating a solid link between your site and Facebook and to have a viral approach on everything involved. The great thing about Facebook is the fact that people are going to share what they like and their friends might also share what some liked. This will create a chain reaction that can be very beneficial as the exposure potential is endless.

Whenever starting any marketing campaign you need to really know what you are doing. You only need to work with professionals that know what facebook marketing is and how to properly launch a good campaign. You want to be able to have website visitors share your articles on Facebook and you want to get them involved in promoting your products without them even realizing it. This is usually done by offering high quality content that people find useful. If they are going to find the information that you offer useful you will quickly notice that your site will be recommended.

Another highly important factor that we need to consider is the fact that through Facebook marketing you can get access to people that fit under your needs. We basically mean that the people that you can reach are exactly the targeted audience that you need. For instance, if you are selling bodybuilding equipment, you can focus on people that have an expressed interest in bodybuilding expressed in their profile page. They are much more likely to purchase something instead of those that are not interested in the sport.

To sum up, facebook marketing might just be marketing that is done with the use of Facebook and for Facebook users but the entire campaign is going to be much more than that. A good Facebook marketing campaign is also going to include other marketing forms like affiliate marketing, Twitter marketing or Youtube marketing.