Business Loan Option Blog

If you’re having trouble getting people to your site, maybe you just need to create a better online strategy. Online marketing does take some small business funding, but not as much as you think. You can outsource many of the activities of creating large streams of traffic to your site. However, you want to know what you are paying for and what quality your traffic is, and create a strategy that drives the right traffic to your door.

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Odds are, if you’re looking to hire a social media expert, it’s because your recognize the power of social networking, but haven’t any idea how to get your social media presence working for your business. While most business owners are used to hiring talent in areas that they don’t know themselves, this type of hire needs a bit more understanding to make sure you get someone who can perform and produce the results you want for your business.

Just like you wouldn’t go ask for a business loan, without first figuring the requirements, you will want to find out what the right requirements are for a social media expert. If all anyone needs to proclaim themselves a social media expert is a few online articles, and a Twitter account, then everyone in the world can be hired as a social media expert. That doesn’t mean they can create a social networking campaign and media exposure that you want to create sales leads, and convert those leads to customers. When looking for a social media expert, create a checklist and verify the performance of the person, before you consider hiring them.

What To Look For In A Social Media Expert

Their social media profile should include:

Completed Social Media Campaigns – What other projects have they done? Where is their social media resume? Do they have references for companies that they’ve worked for doing social media campaigns, or are they self-taught? What is the extend of their experience?

Facebook Profile – They should have a presence on Facebook, with at minimum 200 friends. Check to see how often their status is updated and the level of comments and how they interact with others on this social networking site. It will give you an idea of the quality of service they can provide for you on Facebook.

Twitter Account – Check to see if they have other profiles, on Twitter. Their website should list their social networking profiles and be easy to friend or follow. On Twitter, most social media experts will have at least 2000 followers.

Website(s) – Check out their website(s) to see what types of services they offer. Pay close attention to how their website looks and functions. If they really are social media experts, their site should be easy to navigate and comment. They might include social media techniques like video blogging. Their specialty should be implementing social media campaigns, not writing content. If they’re selling services for content, it’ll conflict with the social media tasks that need to be done first.

Search For Industry Keywords – Within the content of the site, see if they know the jargon of social media experts or if they are over-using it in an attempt pass over insufficient credentials. This can include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Technorati, StumbleUpon, and all manner of sites and tools that they should be familiar with, on a personal level. Take a look at what they’ve done for prior customers and if it matches the keywords they’re using to explain their services.

How They Track Performance – They should be able to tell you how to track performance of your social media campaign to see if you’re getting the amount of traffic and conversions you’d hope for by paying an expert. The bottom line is you’re seeking traffic and conversions. It’s not enough just to have friends and followers, you need to see conversions and how that relates to your sales.

Business Integration – Can they integrate your offline business activities with your online presence? When you have a sales event in a retail brick-and-mortar store, how do they get the word out and make the traffic come directly to your physical store? Are they only capable of running a business online, and have no concept of how to integrate your offline activities. You need social experts with both sets of skills.

Recommends Tools for Automation – Social media experts should help you get started managing your own campaigns by recommending automation tools that people in-house can use to update their social media campaigns. If they’re not forthcoming on tools and educating your staff, you can bet they’re hoping you’ll be tied to them forever, or they’re not doing it in an efficient manner.

Provides Training – A social media expert company should be able to train one or two of your employees in the proper way to maintain the level of interaction necessary to keep your profiles active and your audience engaged. That includes training on the tools to use, how to behave, and how to automate multiple updates at once. It can even include more technical information like how to become SEO-optimized and keep that in mind when posting content to the site.

Telemarketers may have stringent regulations that don’t allow them to bother you without your permission, and that’s a start. As a business owner, every minute that you spend meeting or talking with someone who is only wasting your time is also reducing your efficiency and impacting your bottom line. That’s why, even though they want to generate exposure for our businesses, they don’t want to spend so much time answering spam emails, fielding unimportant phone calls, or simply updating their social networking profiles. Business owners want to be available to their customers. Businesses want to maintain an online presence, creating massive exposure, but owners don’t want to spend their entire day hooked to an ear piece in our head, and a keyboard at our fingertips. There will not be enough time to do that and also run a growing business. To take control, they often hire others to field their communications, even acquiring a business loan, to fund the outsource with the idea of saving money in the long run.

Put In Spam Filters

There are a number of ways to make sure your blog and your email addresses aren’t harvested and spammed by email robots. SpamArrest is a popular online service that allows you to verify people before giving them access to your email account. This works well for an email address that you’ve reserved for particular clients or employees. The best way to keep people out is not to advertise that email address online, and not to subscribe to anything with it. That may not be possible, so the next best thing is to only offer permission via verification. Keep in mind that this can keep automated newsletters and other types of mass emailings from hitting your inbox too.

Outsource Your Communications

Just like people hire a receptionist to field phone calls, you can hire virtual assistants who will field calls, read email, forward important issues to you, even post on social networking sites to maintain and online presence. The problem is too many people are always trying to contact business owners as they are trying to sell them something new, ask for job, or provide information. It might be helpful for businesses, but it’s not necessary to look at that minute. Hire someone to handle these types of interactions and file them for later review.

In a way social networking has turned the rule of 100 to 1 response rate upside down. Now, you can log online, put in a social networking site, and get 100 followers or friends pretty easily just through online networking. They are contacting you, not you them. Instead of sending out 100 anonymous mailings, and receiving one response to follow up, you now have 100 follow ups to figure out the one that matters. It’s up to you to figure out which one is going to be a customer. In order to do that, they all expect some level of interaction, and if you’re stuck sitting in front of the computer to maintain a social networking presence, you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. You can hire social media experts or ask your virtual assistant to keep track of people who friend or follow you and give them a plan to follow to market these people. At the point they want to convert, that’s the point where you might want to be involved, or have a higher level of contact established.

Set Up Some Automatic Follow Up

There is a great deal of controversy over what to automate when following up with people and what not to do. No one likes the automated menu systems that businesses put in place, instead of a live person, but the reason they’re there is that they are cost-effective and generally get the job done. The same is true of tools that can automate Twitter and Facebook updating, return emails, deliver information products automatically upon payment, and autorespond to people via planned email campaigns. These tools exist because they work. They still have to be programmed and managed, and that can be part of the duties of your virtual assistant to help you manage a growing number of contacts, with less stress on your part. Every time someone joins you online or contacts you, the expectation is that you’ll respond fairly quickly, and automatic responders allow you to do just that. It may seem unrealistic, but those people that wait a day to respond can lose credibility in the eyes of the person contacting them. In this age of instant communication, a day of delay means you’re not as connected or with it as everyone else and that impacts your professional image. Sending an instant message confirming receipt and automating follow up is what most people expect these days.

The internet evolves daily as large companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google find new ways to expand their hold on the masses. Google is the most used and the most popular of the search engines available today. With such a large market share, it is easy to see how they make money. Their main source of income is through advertising on the pages of their search engine. You can pay to have your website visible to those searching for certain keywords or terms that are relevant to what you do. If you sell diamonds or watches online or are a provider of business loans for merchants, your website link can be in the sponsored section of the search page for those terms by paying Google for the placement. It may also show up naturally at the top of the page if you have enough traffic going to and from your website, which will not cost you any money payable to Google, but the efforts needed to place high on a search will require many hours of manpower specifically on that endeavor.

Twitter is a new, very popular website that allows people and companies to tweet about anything they want. These tweets are quick statements or information, similar to a text message that anyone can read. Twitter has recently instituted an advertising program where a company can post a sponsored tweet that will be at the top of twitter pages for all to see. The ads will be related to searches done by those who use Twitter and they must resonate to all of the followers. If they are intrusive or irrelevant, they will eventually drop off due to lack of popularity, which makes them different than sponsored Google ads that are there because the company paid for them to be there and do not need to be popular to be effective. The effectiveness of the advertisements will truly show if Twitter is worth the billions it may be worth or if the advertising just simply turns people off from the service in general.

It may be hard to believe, but you can make money on Twitter even if your business has nothing to do with social networking. It gives your business credit for what you do and offers your customers a way to stay in contact with what’s new. If you manage to build a very large followers list, one tweet to thousands of followers can literally reach millions. If you happen to end up going viral, you will have hit marketing gold. Finally, if you decide you can also share your twitter feed with other advertisers, you stand to make money from sponsors who will pay to tweet from accounts with large numbers of followers.

How to Reach Millions

You don’t have to build a list of millions to actually reach millions. The reason for that is that every 140 character tweet you do may only go out to thousands, but those thousands may also have hundreds or thousands of followers. When you tweet a status update, if someone sees something really interesting, they retweet it, which automatically exposes it to their network too. If enough people do that, your list of thousands easily expands to millions.

You Can Put Links In Your Tweets

You can add a hyperlink to your tweet, and unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t mind if they go to your business products or promotions. There are some limits on how often you can tweet, but you’re unlikely to reach it for the most part. The links can be commercial, they can be to other content that is not yours, or they can go to carefully crafted advertising that first entertains and educates, and then seeks to bring massive traffic back to a website where it’s converted to orders.  If you link to some content you created on Youtube, for instance, that has a link back to your business and people find it so fascinating the retweet it endlessly, you have the opportunity to go viral and take your business message to the entire world.

You Can Do Limited Time Promotions

Since tweets are real time microblogs that may stay in your profile, but are very time-sensitive, and read at the time they’re published, they make the perfect vehicle for limited time promotions. Maybe you want to advertise your special giveaway at a retail store from 1 pm to 1:30 pm for anyone that shows up at your store and gives them the tweet code “TweetDollars” or some other phrase you choose. This type of promotion creates a sense of urgency and makes people want to drop everything and visit your store just to get in on your special deal.

Sharing Tweets

Many celebrities will get sponsors for their Twitter feeds and be paid per tweet. These people have 10s of thousands of followers, and they’re a very targeted demographic. You probably can’t get the same sweet deals they do, but you might find one or two sponsors who want to share your feed for some ready cash.

Having an active online presence can help drive traffic to your website, but how do you get it to drive actual feet to your door? Business owners should look at integrating their offline activities with their online social media activities, to create buzz before an event, help non-profits attract volunteers, or to direct customers to storefront businesses that rely on foot traffic to make most of their money. It’s not as hard as it sounds, as people are using the Internet like a directory or online phone book these days. You can even just piggy back ride on someone else’s event and save the cost of getting merchant funding to host the event. The key is to start with a particular strategy in mind, and develop useful techniques that will make people want to look up your business and visit you in person, when they’re in town.

Create Online Events To Advertise Offline Events

Are you holding a special event at your place of business, like a wine tasting, or an educational series of speakers? There’s no reason you can’t advertise this online on Facebook and Twitter, long before the event actually takes place. The nice thing about setting up a registration area online in Facebook, is that you can get a good idea of the number of people who might be attending your event, especially if you offer a link to an area where they can get a discount  for registering early. People will be more likely to register ahead of time, if they know they’re getting a discount and/or a freebie, rather than wait until the last minute.

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