Client Magnets Official Blog

Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Social media is a fantastic way to promote events, your business, your services or anything that might be relevant to your followers. You can use social media to help promote existing events, plan new events or as a supplement for other methods of promotion. With the right techniques, you can spread the word quickly via social media and reach far more people than you would with traditional promotion techniques.

Using Social Media as a Supplement to Other Advertising Avenues
Social media works great as an advertising technique by itself, or as a supplement to other advertising avenues. When you use social media, you can instantly reach out to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people via instant social media “lists.” This enables you to reach users via various social networking techniques, but it doesn’t capture people who don’t use social media.

Social media promotion works best in conjunction with other advertising avenues. Social media is a great follow-up to an email list or physical mailing. In this way, using a multi-faceted approach, you can reach the maximum number of people via their preferred avenues. This enables you to reach out to people who use email but not social media, or people who will follow you via social media but are uncomfortable distributing their email addresses.

Rules for Promoting via Social Media
Promoting via social media is generally acceptable, but you should follow a few general etiquette rules when you promote. Don’t promote constantly, and spam your followers with nothing but promotions. You need to provide value in your social media updates to your followers, and if your use of social media is entirely self-serving, you’ll lose followers who see through your techniques.

Mix your promotions with useful information and other updates to avoid overwhelming your social media contacts. For example, you might want to promote calls no more than 10 percent of the time when you’re using social media, and make sure you’re contributing to conversations and providing useful information the rest of the time.

When you do promote, avoid doing it in a self-serving manner.  Find ways to work your promotion into conversation, and it will seem less self-serving and can actually help convey your personality to your followers.

Send Great Quotes to Twitter
One great technique for promotion is to Tweet great quotes. If you have a fantastic quote from an event or a call, Tweet it to your followers. If the people on your list like the quote, they will re-Tweet it to their followers. You could reach hundreds or thousands of people who aren’t on your call if you send great quotes to Twitter, and your followers re-Tweet them.

Social media is a great promotion tool, but if you use it poorly, it can actually harm your marketing efforts. Remember, social media promotion works best in conjunction with other tools, so you can capture the maximum possible audience for your events, products or services.  Confine your promotions to a small percentage of your social media content, and avoid overwhelming your followers with self-serving promotion. Send great quotes to Twitter for your followers to re-Tweet, and you will grow interest about your product or business.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. If you’d like to learn more about her amazing Mastermind group, click here: http://www.clientmagnets.com/marketingmastermind/

Register free to join her on her upcoming free Masterclass: http://www.clientmagnets.com/corporate/

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Have you ever wondered what your clients are saying about your business? Would you love a direct line into your clients’ minds; to know what they really want and what they’re willing to buy?

Social media is a place where you can really get into the mind of your buyer.  You can dialogue with your clients and listen to what they are saying -  not only to you, but to each other. It’s the perfect place for you to find out what your client’s REALLY want.  And when you discover that, you can go to it – providing it to them!

1.  Identify “Hot Topics”
By listening and engaging in social media conversations you will quickly identify the “hot topics”.  What are your prospects asking?  What do they need help with?

2.  Respond to Demand
Once you have the “hot topics” in mind, it’s time to showcase how you can help your prospects.  Use these hot topics to create the content for your blog and social media updates.   Give your prospects the answers they’re looking for.  Position yourself as someone who is in-the-know who understands popular concerns. Demonstrate your expertise in a way that inspires people to use your business or services.  Give your prospects what they want, when they want it!

3.  Create a “BUZZ”
Social media gives you a ready-made channel to generate buzz about your new content and offerings.  With platforms like Twitter, you can use “hashtags” to incite and track conversations about specific subjects and groups.  There are also search tools available that will enable you to easily track what people are saying about you, your “hot topics” and your content and offerings.

4.  Track and Evaluate Market Response
By tuning into the various social media platforms you make it easy to evaluate the response to your new product, content and business presence.  You can use the information to review the effectiveness of your offerings and continue to craft better-tailored content in the future.  It’s also a way to determine what formats and delivery methods work best to reach your prospects and clients.

Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media networks are ready-made tools to help you in the quest to get inside the mind of your buyers. Use social media tools to track what people are talking about, and create timely content to demonstrate your expertise and the fact that you’re ‘in-the-know.’

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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Social media provides a way for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and other people in your industry. When you establish genuine relationships with clients and prospects, you become more than just a business; you become a friend and a partner. To fully utilize social networking and skyrocket your business, don’t just provide a product or service; become integral to the lives of your clients and colleagues. This translates directly to business success in ways you can’t duplicate through other techniques.

Over-Deliver to the Value of Ten
When you use social media to communicate with clients and represent your business, you can’t just put in the minimum effort. To be truly successful in social media, my friend, Carrie Wilkerson recommends over-delivering to the value of ten. Invest in people. Pour value into their lives. Make your clients feel like they’d never dream of doing business with anyone else. Become so invested in your clients’ personal and business success that you establish yourself as an irreplaceable resource.

Offer information, helpful advice and genuine caring. People can tell when you’re being genuine or whether you’re just saying what they want to hear. Providing genuine value to people – over-delivering that value – is the fastest way to win them as lifetime customers. Provide your clients with connections, resources and information. Don’t just meet expectations and deliver the bare minimum. Over-deliver to the value of ten to really get people in your camp and build a loyal, reliable customer and colleague base.

The Law of Reciprocity
The Law of Reciprocity all depends on attitude. Under the Law of Reciprocity, you provide a ton of value to potential clients and business colleagues. When you do it in a way that feels genuinely connected, your clients and business colleagues will reciprocate. They’ll come to you when they have something they can offer, or when they need something you offer.

The Law of Reciprocity is the spirit of giving. It isn’t about asking “how can I make this work for me?” or “what will you give me if I give you this?” Instead, it’s about giving to others, because this sort of genuine giving will inspire others to give back to you.

Over-Delivering Leads to Developing Business
When you firmly entrench yourself in someone’s life and business, it becomes a natural next step for them to look to you when business opportunities arise. If you’re already providing value to people, they’ll naturally turn to you when they have an opportunity related to your field. It isn’t because you’ve been asking them for their business. It’s because you’re proving that you’re invested in their success, and people like to help people with whom they have a good relationship.

Over-delivering in social media is a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and from the other people in your industry. Build a personal relationship with prospects and colleagues; become indispensable to their lives; and watch your business success skyrocket!

When you become the go-to person in your clients’ lives, you’ve created a successful business that will translate to new opportunities for you. Provide useful information, make connections and give to your clients selflessly, and you’ll find them giving back to you!

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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Effectively utilizing social media is about more than knowing the ‘rules’ and how to effectively talk to people in your networks. Different types of social media networks are better suited to different tasks. Think of social media networks as tools in your toolbox. You wouldn’t use a hammer when you need a wrench, and you shouldn’t use Twitter when you need YouTube or a blog post. Learn the different types of social media so you can choose the right tool for the job.

Twitter is Conversational
Twitter is a very conversational and immediate form of social networking. When you use Twitter, you share limited bursts of text up to 140 characters in length with your followers.

Think of the things you post on Twitter as being fairly temporary. People who follow a large number of individuals may only see your post for a few minutes before it gets buried under an avalanche of other data. Additionally, every reply you make drives your own replies farther down your page.

Twitter is great for back-and-forth between yourself and your clients or prospects, and for conversational types of interactions. Twitter is also one of the best tools for you to establish your personality in social networking.

Facebook Provides More Permanent Real Estate
Facebook is many times larger than Twitter as a social media network, so you have the potential to reach far more people via Facebook than Twitter. However, Facebook doesn’t provide the easy back-and-forth interactions of Twitter; it’s better as a one-way conversation. Facebook is great to share information, such as updates about things your business is doing or links to useful information. You can also use it to establish your business through photos, video or events.

YouTube and Video in Social Networking
YouTube is a video sharing site. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a YouTube video conveys what hundreds of pictures can’t capture. Video is the hot space in social media at the moment, and you can use video to provide a real face for yourself with your clients. You can also convey a lot of information in video without overwhelming your followers with too much text. Creative video can go viral practically overnight, and build a real reputation for your company.

Blogging as a Complement to Social Media
Blogging is a good complement to social media. Social media is a great way to share information in short bursts, and blogging is a good way to share articles and longer chunks of information with your clients. You can share 300-500 word articles and convey helpful information via your blog. That gives you information to share via social media to spread the word about your content and what you have to offer clients. Good blog content inspires conversation, and gives your clients and prospects something to share to spread information about your business.

Select the Right Tool or Combination of Tools
Social media works best when you use the right tool, or combination of tools, to create an online space for yourself and your business. Be a real person to your clients. When you’re warm and caring, you create a presence that people will want to share and interact with. Use Twitter for conversation and immediate impact, and Facebook to share information about your business. YouTube is the hot space and a great way to convey lots of information, and blog posts can establish you as an expert. Select the right tools and create your business success.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients www.clientmagnets.com. Register FREE for access to her Stepping Up teleseminar series

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Social media platforms provide a great opportunity to build a rapport with potential clients or business partners online, even when you can’t communicate regularly in person. You can use Twitter to build a rapport with people you’ve never met, or to stay in contact with people you meet at an event or conference. Twitter, in particular, makes it easy to have low-pressure conversations, get to know people, and expand the networking you can do at conferences and conventions.

Build a Rapport Before You Meet
One of the best things about Twitter is that it provides you with an easy way to build a rapport with potential clients or business contacts before you ever meet. You can network with people via Twitter weeks or months before an event, and you may even schedule an event because of your connections via Twitter. When you do meet at an event, you don’t have to go through the awkward “getting to know you” phase – you already have an established relationship with the person you’ve been chatting with via Twitter.

If you’re meeting a potential client, Twitter provides you with a great advantage over your competition because you can establish yourself as a person and an expert in your field via social media before you ever meet your client. With prior association, clients and potential business partners are more likely to make a decision to do business with you.

Use Twitter to Follow Up with Contacts
Twitter is also a great way for you to follow up with contacts you meet at conferences and events. These networking events can be challenging because you’re trying to meet and talk to as many people as possible, and you have a limited amount of time to spend with each person. The people you meet are also trying to meet people, and they, too, have a limited amount of time to spend with you. In the past, this has meant that you sometimes miss out on valuable networking opportunities because you spent too long with someone, and didn’t have enough time to spend with someone else.

You can meet and talk to someone for a few minutes, and then follow up via Twitter. You can send a message the next day or days later, and continue your conversation online. This enables you to build a deeper relationship with people than you typically can at a conference, and it also gives you an opportunity to talk with more people.

Twitter is a Great Low-Pressure Networking Tool
Because Twitter consists of sending short messages, it’s a great low-pressure networking tool. You can send short messages to everyone on your list, or even have conversations with an individual via Twitter. Most Twitter exchanges are one or two sentences long due to the character limitation. This means you don’t have to be brilliant to shine in a Twitter conversation, and you don’t have to worry about carrying on lengthy exchanges.

So starting today.  Let me encourage you to devote a few minutes per day to Twitter.  Start building relationships with twitter conversations and I promise you, you will see a reward for your time investment.

Twitter is just one of the methods I use to attract a steady stream of new clients.   If you’d like to know more about attracting new clients and achieving real business success I invite you to join me for my upcoming free teleseminar series – “7 Secrets for Attracting New Clients”.  Register for FREE here:   “7 Secrets For Attracting New Clients”.

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Have you ever wondered what your clients are saying about your business? Would you love a direct line into your clients’ minds; to know what they really want and what they’re willing to buy?

Social media is a place where you can really get into the mind of your buyer.  You can dialogue with your clients and listen to what they are saying -  not only to you, but to each other.  It’s the perfect place for you to find out what your clients REALLY want.    And when you discover that, you can go to it – providing it to them!

Here’s my four step formula for using social media to “get into the mind” of your prospect…

1.  Identify “Hot Topics”
By listening and engaging in social media conversations, you will quickly identify the “hot topics”.

The key here is to listen and learn. What are your prospects asking? What do they need help with?
What topics are the most popular?

2.  Respond to Demand
Once you have the “hot topics” in mind, it’s time to showcase how you can help your prospects.  Use these hot topics to create the content for your blog and social media updates.   Give your prospects the answers they’re looking for.   Position yourself as someone who is in-the-know, who understands popular concerns. Demonstrate your expertise in a way that inspires people to use your business or services.   Give your prospects what they want, when they want it!

3.  Create a “BUZZ”
Social media gives you a ready-made channel to generate buzz about your new content and offerings.  With platforms like Twitter, you can use “hashtags” to incite and track conversations about specific subjects and groups.  There are also search tools available that will enable you to easily track what people are saying about you, your “hot topics” and your content and offerings.

4.  Track and Evaluate Market Response
Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media networks are ready-made tools to help you in the quest to get inside the mind of your buyers. By tuning into the various social media platforms you make it easy to evaluate the response to your new product, content and business presence.  You can use the information to review the effectiveness of your offerings and continue to craft better-tailored content in the future.  It’s also a way to determine what formats and delivery methods work best to reach your prospects and clients.

I encourage you TODAY to start “tuning in” to what your customers REALLY want!  If you listen to their conversations through the various social media platforms, they’ll tell you.  You can then use that information to give them what they want – and then everyone wins!

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As a business marketing tool, you’ll only get out of social networking what you put into it. If you only put a few minutes per day into your social networking efforts and aren’t particularly invested in the platform, you won’t get a lot of return. However, if you put a genuine effort into your social networking, and work to help your associates and contacts, you can get a real return on your investment. One of the best ways to succeed via social networking is to become a great relationship builder.

Building Connections Helps the Relationship Bank Account
Building connections among your social networking community puts a lot into your relationship bank account. You might connect two people who would be great for one another because of a business venture or shared interest, and that might have no direct impact at all on your business. But both of those people will appreciate you connecting them, and that puts a lot into your relationship bank account. The next time one of those people sees something they can do for you, they will, and that can make a great difference to your business.

The Secret to Relationship Building
Relationship building is about paying attention to what people say and do, what they have to offer and what they’re looking for. If you know that John owns a plumbing business and Sally had a pipe burst, you can connect John and Sally and they both benefit. Sally gets her pipe fixed, and John gets some business. They’re both grateful for you because they both benefited, and if they can do something to help you or your business, they’ve got a personal reason to do it.

You don’t just have to connect people who have overlapping niches or a business interest in one another. You can also connect people who have something in common faith-wise, or family-wise; people who have shared interests but don’t know one another. This helps them because it gives them someone else who shares their interest, and it also makes them like you more because you paid attention and noticed this about them. Again, this puts a lot of money in the relationship bank account, even if it doesn’t impact you directly.

To practice good relationship-building skills, try introducing at least four people per day to one another via Twitter or some other social networking platform. If the connection is helpful to them, it puts a lot into the relationship bank account in terms of gratitude to you for connecting them. Even if the connection isn’t helpful, people will appreciate the effort and it will put some money into the relationship bank account because you went out of your way to make an effort on their behalf.

Relationship-building doesn’t have to be a monumental effort. You can do it via Twitter or another social networking platform. All you have to do is pay attention to what people say, and match people who have similar interests or might benefit from knowing one another. It’s a simple process that can yield big benefits for you and your business.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube

Does your new business really need a presence there? That question may make you cringe, if you’re afraid of falling behind when it comes to social media.  Step back and relax; you may be experiencing “social networking envy” unnecessarily. While social media sites can be marvelous marketing tools, there’s more work to be done first to build the business of your dreams.

Distraction or Smart Strategy?

Spending a lot of time on Facebook lately? Used correctly, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for marketing. Many online entrepreneurs are mining real gold from social networking. But those same social networking sites can be a huge distraction if you’re not careful. The key is in finding the proper balance.

Those “tweets”, Facebook status updates and LinkedIn requests, if not part of a deliberate marketing strategy, are just one more thing that pulls you away from the groundwork that supports a successful business.

What Is Your Strategy?

Before you devote a lot of time to creating a social media presence, you must first focus your efforts on building a solid business strategy. Spend the time necessary to create your unique business proposition. Why should someone want to do business with you, specifically?

Being able to hone your offer down to two or three sentences can have tremendous impact on your marketing success. As a new business owner, the time you spend clarifying what you’re offering and why it’s unique will be the foundation of all future marketing.

Once you’ve created your most succinct offer, begin to strategize how you’ll find customers. Lending your focus to tasks like these will result in long-term success. It’s possible you’ll incorporate social networking somewhere along the way, but a well-rounded marketing plan that includes many ways to attract customers is smart business.

Creating a comprehensive business strategy is your best possible use of time. By all means, stay abreast of current marketing trends, but focus first on building a sturdy foundation for that marketing. Spend less time worrying about what everyone else is doing and more time investing the hard work all successful business owners do when growing a business.

Make a Plan

There are several things you can do to keep social media and other “shiny objects” from sabotaging your success:

• Set a deadline for developing your offer and marketing strategy.
• Never work without a schedule to keep yourself on track.
• Set short-term goals for implementing new marketing ideas.
• Set aside time each day to review your progress.
• Plan a set time each day to work with social media as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Social networking sites are a wonderful way to stay connected to potential clients near and far. They are also, unfortunately, a major distraction for new business owners working without a plan. The temptation to dive into social media marketing prematurely can be avoided by recognizing its role in your overall marketing plan.

Make the decision to focus your time on developing your unique business proposition. Set goals and monitor your progress regularly. Implement new marketing ideas, which may include a presence in social networking, once you’ve clarified your unique business proposition. In that way, you’ll develop a genuine business network that will sustain your company long-term.

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