The top benefit of social media marketing: The number-one advantage is
generating exposure for the business, indicated 81% of all marketers, followed
by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.

Business owners were more likely to use
social media marketing (90+%) than
employees working for a business (81%).

About one in two
marketers found social media generated qualified leads

61.62% of marketers
who have been using social media
for years report it has helped them
close business. More than half
who spend 16 or more hours per
week find the same results.

Improved search engine rankings
were most prevalent among those
who’ve been using social media for
years, with nearly 80% reporting a
rise (and most reporting a strong
improvement).

Source: White paper source

The speakers were all employed by different social media agencies talking on what they were doing and the audience was composed of small business owners most with less than 10 employees. By the look on their faces, it was easy to see there was some disconnection in place.

One common strategy to attract Facebook people to like a page was to give something like an Ipad a day as a giveaway. Just on this the investment on the devices alone was around $24 thousand a month. Were there anything in place to convert those Ipad winners into buyers? Not really but the number of people liking your page will be really high.

Lots of people seeking free stuff with no intention of buying now or ever, not necessarily a very targeted audience seems to be a good thing. What is the use of having thousands of people like a page if they are not potential buyers? None. Not for a business.

It seems that is not clear to marketers that every action in business needs to have a clear path to profit since that is what business is all about. Even engagement needs to lead to increased level of trust and at some point to sales.

Another popular strategy is the use of infographics. Don’t get me wrong, I think this one can be very useful, but I couldn’t help but laugh when the speaker pointed out that it does bring a lot of traffic to a site while the bounce rate (number of people that visit that page and leave without doing nothing) goes over 90% and conversion rates are below 1/2 percent.

Again, if it is not going to bring targeted prospects, I’ll not build a list, they will go away without looking at anything else and they won’t ever buy, why would this traffic matter?

For big dumb companies that can afford to spend a lot of money just to be more visible and claim they are popular this makes sense. For the small business owner where money spent needs to bring results in the form of hot prospects and profits, these strategies are a waste of time. They may be cool, but they are not money well spent.

It depends. Companies that need awareness for their brand need a page (even if they are ran by 1 or 2 people like ours)

Facebook pages offer tracking so you can understand your audience better and conversion.

Pages allow multiple admins to update the content.

Facebook pages allow you to customize tabs, create lead capture pages, show products and even sell.

You can use sponsored ads to promote the page and bring more people.

If these factors are not important for you, then the subscribe feature may be better for you. Less work and maybe more interaction.

Here is a comparison chart:

To allow subscribers click on edit profile and then on family and friends.

Below is an article by Mashable showing you how to benefit from the subscription feature:

When Facebook launched its Subscribe button on Wednesday, many were quick to note its implications for journalists, celebrities and other thought leaders. The new feature allows for users to follow public updates, and these are the people most often broadcasting their ideas.

Yet there’s more the average user can get on board with than meets the eye. The release came with a slew of additional features — including a more customizable News Feed and increased privacy — that users have been wanting for years. The trouble is, there are so many moving parts in this product launch. Users are now presented with a number of options, and they’ll need to dig deep to understand which pieces to take and which to leave.

We hope to make that process a little easier for you. Here are some key points you should know based on what type of user you are:

Super Users & Celebrities

If you’re kind of a big deal, you likely already have a Facebook fan page to update your followers on what you’re up to. The launch of the Subscribe button leaves you with two options:

1. Keep the fan page and continue to maintain two separate Facebook presences: profile and page. This strategy’s main pro is that pages are optimized for marketing. Profiles can’t be updated by multiple admins and fans are more acclimated to updates with an on-brand feel. Perhaps more importantly, profiles don’t have Facebook’s analytics tool Insights — and “they probably never will,” says Vadim Lavrusik, journalist program manager at Facebook and former Mashable community manger.
2. Do away with the fan page and merge your page likers into profile subscribers. By deleting your fan page, you will lose all page content. However, your likers will automatically be subscribed to your public updates. The biggest advantages? Profiles are easier to update via mobile than pages and people are prioritized over pages in search.
With either of these methods, you’ll have direct messaging capability (from your profile to your page likers or from your profile to your subscribers) and neither has a limit on the number of people who can follow your content (subscribers or likers — though profiles do have a limit of 5,000 friends).

Journalists & Artists

The Subscribe button is arguably most beneficial for journalists and artists. Though, in a sense, they’re public figures, these types of Facebook users likely aren’t well-known enough to justify a fan page.

If this sounds like you, the first thing you need to do is actively opt-in to allow subscriptions to your profile. You can then choose to allow subscribers to comment on your updates and control your notifications.

Another change to note is that when you unfriend someone, they stay subscribed to your public updates. This is important if you’ve been accepting friend requests from people you don’t know who want to follow your work. It can be uncomfortable to friend someone without knowing them personally. The Subscribe button allows you to unfriend these people and still reach them via public updates.

Finally, when composing updates you want your subscribers to see, be sure to set the privacy to Public. They won’t see it otherwise.

Parents & Teachers

The relationships parents and teachers should have with their kids and students on Facebook has always been a touchy subject. The Subscribe feature can help to make crossing the Facebook connection threshold less awkward.

Users can subscribe to others without enabling others to subscribe to them. This means teachers can allow their students to follow their public updates about school and classes without actually friending them (and accessing more personal information). That way, students can continue to update friends about their lives without worrying what might pop up in their teachers’ News Feeds.

For parents, this feature may work the other way around. Instead of asking your son or daughter what that Jaime So-and-So they used to hang out with is up to, you could subscribe to Jaime, whereas friending her might be uncomfortable. The feature could also be helpful if your kids aren’t OK with you watching their every virtual move. Brace yourself for a sensitive conversation at the dinner table.

Students & Average Users

For the occasional Facebookers who mostly use the service to keep up with friends and post photos, here’s the bottom line: You never have to see your Aunt Suzie’s FarmVille updates ever again. But, you can still see her photos, videos and status updates if you’d like.

Before the Subscribe button launch, it was either all or nothing when it came to blocking a person’s updates from your News Feed. Now you can control what types of updates you see from a person and how often. That means you can skip the virtual sheep without missing out on engagement notifications and puppy albums.

As of now, the feature is only available for tailoring updates from non-friends that you’re subscribed to. The Subscribe button, and this feature, will be rolled out to friend pages in the next few days, Lavrusik says.

Conclusion

As the virtual world grows, relationships and the ways we’re connecting with others are changing. The Subscribe button addresses issues about the depth of connection the term “friend” implies on Facebook.

Some critics say the feature goes against Facebook’s nature — that it was built on “friending,” not “following.” It’s important to note that the News Feed algorithm weights updates from friends as well as private posts more heavily than public ones. In addition, the Close Friends list Facebook rolled out on Tuesday makes the updates from your strongest relationships more prominent in your News Feed, and you can enable notifications specifically from friends in this list.

With the number of new social networks gaining speed, Facebook is and should be making changes to stay competitive. What’s important is that it doesn’t divert too far from its core. In this update, Facebook is only giving its users more options — which the majority may or may not take advantage.

1. Add social networking logos to the header or footer of your e-mail template. A share icon would do.

2. Send solo e-mails promoting your presence on social media sites. You can also offer coupons for those who like your page or create unique promotions.

3. Capture data.

So:

Under 30
Facebook 77%

30-39
Facebook 76%

40-49
Facebook 77%

50-59

Facebook 84%

60 and over

Facebook 84%

Here are some third party social media marketing applications that can make your life a lot easier.

1. Tweetdeck: Easy to manage YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in one view. You can manage people you follow in lists.

2. Ping.fm and Hellotxt; Update your status in several platforms. About 50 of social networks. Post can be made online or mobile.

3. Seesmic: similar to Tweetdeck but allows you to manage multiple profile accounts

4. SocialOimph: Allows you to postdate posts on Twitter and Facebook fan pages. Has many other cool features too.

5. 8hands: This is an aggregator that streams notifications in real time and where you get summaries and statistics on your social networking activities. It covers content from multiple accounts.

6. Chi.mp centralizes content and contacts. Good for people without a website.

See? Small business marketing online just became a lot easier.

First you need to answer if your videos are for general use of the end consumer, like people watching from home or if it is to be watched by a business audience, during work hours.

Second you need to take into consideration where in the world the majority of your audience is and take into consideration the time frame there.

Prime time to post online videos:

For home audience: Between 4pm and 9pm

For a business audience: 7am to 9am, 11am to 1pm, 3pm to 5pm

You should avoid posting outside these frames

77% goes to Youtube while 3.1% goes to Hulu

Did I mentioned all businesses should be using online videos in their social media marketing efforts. Let me say that in different words: Small business marketing needs to contain online videos.

but the point here is that some companies and service professionals put all their coins on Facebook thinking that will be enough as a marketing strategy.

Well, here is some data that will get you thinking:

Gallup data indicates men (42%) are about as likely as women (45%) to have a Facebook page. However, men (63%) are 12.5% more likely than women (56%) to say they visit Google in a given week.
Overall, 40% more US adults say they use Google in a typical week (60%) than have a Facebook page (43%).

As you probably know, online videos is one of the best tools when thinking of social media marketing and all businesses should take advantage of videos.

Listen to the full interview now: Video Velocity

I can tell you how often you should post on social media environments when you are doing it for business. There is no rule on this topic but some tests have been done for optimum results.

The world is not going to end if you cannot follow one of them.
Remember social media marketing is a process and you have to set your goals to get attention from your market, not only visibility.

Also take into consideration that you have to provide good content most of the time and 2% of the time have a call to action. Your audience needs to be educated on the fact that you are doing this for business and they should not expect everything for free.

i know this is a touchy point but remember you are marketing a business and businesses need to have sales in order to have profits. Lead with good content but remind them of your business.

Here it goes:

Twitter: 8 to 18 posts a day. Twitter has a short shelf life.

Facebook: No more than 3 posts.

YouTube: 3 a week (for generic videos, not a Web Show)

Blogs: Once a day.

Here are a few tips on how to use Twitter to generate sales.
It is all about the approach you have while using this social media tool.
Your approach should be to talk in ways that could generate questions that your services answer and to find which conversations happening on Twitter are worth having from a business perspective.
You are looking to discover customers evolving needs.

Ask questions that would reveal details about their need.
Don’t forget to have a call to action to connect prospects with your sales funnel. Do CTA’s only 2% of the time.

Provide a stream of useful content.
Send them to different, useful destinations but include your service among them every now and then.

The client is in a trap because he cannot tell who really has the knowledge to help him, cannot tell if the person really understands marketing a business, ends up making a decision based on price and regrets this decision over time; besides the fact that he never gets the business results he was looking for at the beginning.

The new coach or consultant thinks this is the shiny thing to be in and to make a lot of money fast, focus on learning more and more tools and not marketing concepts and fails to realize that positioning himself as a social media expert will not lead to long lasting prosperity.

Social media is just a small piece of marketing. It is not isolated and will not work as the only form to market a business. Yes, social media marketing is important, can bring amazing results and can be very cost effective but is just one piece of the puzzle.

Besides, focusing only social media tools can turn a consultant into a glorified assistant and not into a solution provider. Failing to understand business and marketing strategies can make this disaster even bigger.

Good coaches and consultants train themselves to see the big picture for their client, a big picture that can be achieved, pin point gaps, bring new forms of revenue and have a structured process to do so. They also understand the need to mix online and offline marketing strategies. When it comes to social media tools, they understand the use of those tools from a marketing perspective, how to generate more awareness, sales and leads. It is way more than telling a company they need to be connected and transparent.

They also need to understand positioning and online optimization.

Unless they love to go from new thing to new thing like a monkey jumps from one tree to another.

Due to rapid uptake of tablets, smartphones and the expected superphones, they predict that mobile video will account for some 4.65 exabytes of traffic per month in 2015.
Video was 49.8% of mobile data at the end of 2010 and Cisco believes it will grow to 52.8% this year and be 66.4% in 2015.

Remember, YouTube delivers over 200 million video views per day to mobile devices. Cisco VNI forecast shows that mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category.

If you’re pushing video content out via the Interwebs and want to keep your audience growing and connected to your content, you will need to make sure that your video is available via all manner of mobile devices. Services like Encoding.com’s new Vid.ly – (which I wrote up) are certainly going to help you keep atop all of that but you are going to make sure that you are ready for the deluge of mobile video demand. Tablets, Android, iOS, iPads, smartphones and superphones are all going to help fuel this growth. Make sure you video is ready to go.

With social media marketing you will get:

More referrals.
more networking
more opportunities
more customers
more sales
more ranking
more branding

Watch BuzzBooster TV right now

Register for the web show webinar right now.

* Facebook – 82%
* LinkedIn – 38%
* Twitter – 30%
Research by digital consultancy Beyond, found that almost a quarter (23%) of consumers would prefer to receive information from brands via Facebook, rather than a brand’s website (21%) or company blog (3%).”

Facebook facts:

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year.
60 million status updates happen oon Facebook daily.
The average user spends more than 55 minutes a day on Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter has 106 million users
Twitter averages 55 million tweets a day

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
The average online viewer watches 12.2 hrs of online video each month
Every minute, ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Blogs

There are over 200 million blogs
54% of bloggers post content daily.
34% of bloggers post opinion about products and brands

You have only a few days. Don’t let this opportunity pass you buy.
You have instant access and plenty of time to go through all modules.

Today I read this post on how experts should behave on Twitter and thought you’d enjoy.

Being an expert on Twitter

It is so disappointing when you believe in one tool, spend time on it to see later no one  is listening. There are two points here that we need to discuss. First like Leo mentioned, he neglected his own  blog for shining tools. This happens with most of us. Neglect our own media channels to waste time with other tools. We should pay a lot of attention to media outlets we can have more control like our blogs, podcasts, videos shows. Use other tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote our channels, not just talk there. Second, the fact that we have thousands of followers and friends does not mean they are paying attention to us. We find ourselves talking to people excited to connect and not interested in paying attention. Goldfish that cannot pay attention over 9 seconds and this is a sad thing.

So, my suggestion is: have media channels where you can control your message and take good care of them. Use other tools with a strategy behind it and as support tools to broadcast your message. Don’t waste time trying to become a popular cheerleader and don’t overvalue tools that might not be here a year from now.

This is actually very common. Here is a list of things you need to know that do not work with social media in order to avoid wasting your time: – Trying to do a million things at the same time – Fail to understand that social media is a process and will not work overnight.

- Fail to see that an advertising approach will not work. – Trying to use social media tools without a strategy. – Not automating most of your social media efforts. – Confusing marketing with social media with becoming a social butterfly. – Using social media as your only marketing effort. – Believing you can make money with no work, no investment and do it overnight. – Buying every new product promising the above. – Join or use every new tool that comes up.

These are facts from the video social Media Revolution

Retweets:

*Retweet serves 2 important functions
allows you to post another user’s tweet to your followers
it makes sure you give credit to the original tweeter

* 2 ways to retweet
Click the retweet button on the original tweet
add RT@ with the Twitter name to your post
DMs

*what is a Dm?

A direct message is a private Twitter message.

*2 ways to send a DM
Click on the Direct Message button on the sidebar of the user’s profile

* D+@username + message in the tweet box

Hashtags:

*Hashtags (#) help categorize tweets. You can add a hashtag to any tweet
*When someone searches for that hashtag, they will see your tweet.

Twitter Lists:

*They allow you to organize your followers into groups
*The lists that you follow show up in your sidebar
*You can create a list by clicking on the “New List” button.

Use Bit.ly to shorten urls.
#FF

#FF stands for “Follow Friday”. On Fridays you can post a tweet that suggests people to follow. This is a way to help your favorite tweeters to gain more followers.

Place the @ symbol before the username so that it will link to the user’s profile.

It is exciting to see how offline businesses can benefit from technology to market their businesses. What is not exciting is looking at all the small businesses that could do the same but just keep waiting to jump and try new ways of promoting their business until it is too late.

Foursquare is one way to bridge an offline business with online technology, but there are other things small business should look into like the QR codes.

These codes are an amazing bridge between offline media and online media and businesses in the US should be using them more. After all they can be easily created, can be free and be very effective. You might not be using it, but remember, you are not your audience.

Here is the post I mentioned earlier:

Facebook may be teaming with McDonald’s, but Foursquare refuses to be outdone in adding big brands to its portfolio. Starbucks is increasing their partnership with Foursquare by offering a mayor special at select locations across the US from May 17 through June 28. Mayors will receive $1 off a Frappuccino beverage by showing the unlock screen on their phone to the barista.

Starbucks is a frequent experimenter in the social media space, with a heavy presence on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Foursquare and Starbucks have previously teamed to offer the Barista badge to users who check in to five or more Starbucks locations. At that time the NY Times’ Bits Blog reported Starbucks was excited about Foursquare because “it’s where the intersection between digital and physical starts to get interesting,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online at Starbucks. “Starbucks loves that, because we’re always looking for that intersection, which we think is the evolution of social networks.”

The biggest problem I see with this initiative is that Starbucks employees are not prevented from holding the mayorship of their stores. For instance, at one local Starbucks the mayor is an employee with 40 checkins over the past two months. It would be almost impossible for an honest-to-goodness customer to become mayor of that venue and unlock the mayor special. Starbucks has claimed most of their stores as the owner, but they haven’t added any of the local employees as staff, which would prevent them from holding the mayorship.

Starbucks becomes the largest major national chain to offer a mayor special nationwide. Partnering with Starbucks will certainly help propel Foursquare use into the mainstream as users at more than 11,000 locations will be exposed to the Foursquare concept for an extended period of time.