networking – Shared Knowledge

The secret to social media success is actually to use it as the start of your sales funnel. However, Social Media isn’t a place for hard selling. Social channels were designed for casual conversation and spontaneous interaction. That’s the main reason why you should pay a lot of attention to your website’s content and focus on your brand storytelling while engaging with your customers.

Network on social media like you’re at a social event

Here’s another piece of advice for a small business entrepreneurs. If you start a conversation on social media by telling people, ‘Hey, go to my website,’ you’re probably not the best networker.
You would never walk up to someone at a networking event and hand them your business card without first striking up a conversation. Social media works the same way.

Social media allows you to connect with people one-on-one without paying for advertising. So connect! Once a follower is confident that there’s a real person on the other side of the keyboard, they’ll respond to your special offers, event invitations, or inquiries about their specific needs. Remember, it takes time to develop these relationships.

Create a landing page to capture contact information

Once you’ve developed a relationship on social media, it’s time to direct your potential customer to a landing page. Think of the most important action a customer can make once they arrive at your website. Is it signing up for your email newsletter? Downloading a free ebook? Registering for an event?

Ask for that one important action on a landing page. It might be the very first page a visitor sees when they arrive at your website, or it could be a prompt that pops up once a visitor has clicked around your site. A prominent landing page keeps your visitor on task and moves them into the sales phase of your funnel.

You don’t need advanced software to create a landing page. Google Forms are free, and services like Wufoo and Jotform offer free starter levels of service. These tools can help you set up a system to capture the most critical information about your leads, like their email addresses or phone numbers.

Remember to keep your landing page simple. Add your landing page URL to your social media profiles to make it easy for people to get more information about your business.

Engage first, sell later

Once you’ve forged connections on social media and captured lead contact information, you can start to think about selling to that potential customer. Thank your customer for their interest and provide value, whether it be in the form of an educational email newsletter, free product download, or consultation offer. Continue to build relationships with consistent communication that will get your customers excited about doing business with you.

Your initial social media interactions can impact how smoothly your entire sales process goes. Don’t ignore these powerful, free tools — use them to your small business advantage!

Social Media and SEO

Social media is one of the main players in the game of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s the seven of the top 10 SEO ranking factors. People are talking about what you do on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. And, if they are linking to an amazing content on your small business website, it works wonders at getting your business listed on search results. That’s why the best small business websites integrate social elements.

How to add social media to your website to help grow your business?

Create shareable content

Keep this question in mind when you create content for your website: Will my visitors want to share this information? Every successful website has a great content – unique, relevant, trustworthy content. Text, video and images of your website and your website pages should exceed the expectations of your visitors. Infographics. White papers. Stuff they can’t find anywhere else and, that they feel compelled to share.

Make social sharing simple

Add a Click to Tweet button to pull quotes and other “tweetables” on a web page.
Embed Pinterest-worthy images.
Add Facebook “Like” and “Share” buttons.

Every small business website can benefit from at least adding a Facebook widget to the home page. But why stop there? You’ve probably seen product “shares” in your feed. That’s because people love to share images of things they think are cool on their favorite social platforms. Make sharing your cool stuff simple by placing social buttons on your product pages.

Showcase social feeds

If you use social networks like Twitter or Facebook to build your business, showcase your social activity on your website by incorporating social feeds. They can give viewers a glimpse of your business’s personality and entice them to connect with you. Embed Twitter timelines and Facebook activity feeds. It will boost your, more integrated, online business presence.

Offer social sign-in and commenting

Make it easy for visitors to sign in and comment on your website. They can simply select to log in via their Facebook account. They might need to enter an email address or similar – but they’ll likely find the more simplified sign-in process appealing. You can also enable visitors to leave comments on your site through social-based comment tools like Disqus and Facebook Comments (it allows users to comment on your content using their Facebook profile and show their comments to their friends in their news feed). If you’d like to learn more – Social Media Examiner provides a helpful overview of how social login works.

Install social media widgets on your website

It’s important to place your contact information in a prominent location on your website. However, you can make it even easier for people to find and follow your social media accounts. Social media widgets and embedded feeds pull your most recent Instagram, Facebook or other social media posts and present them in an area you choose on your website. Visitors can then preview your recent social activity and also like or follow your account right from their browser. These widgets allow you to connect with a potential customer on a second platform (your website plus a social media channel) without directing them away from your business website.

If you use a website host like Squarespace, Wix, or some WordPress setups, adding a social media widget may only require a few clicks. Otherwise, you may need to do some research to determine what HTML code you’ll need and where to place it.

If you’ve got a WordPress website, they have a great social media plugins available. Easy Social Icons plugin are a good option. Here’s a strong Top 20 list to start checking out.

Keep engaging

By adding these social media elements to your small business website, you’ll be well on your way to leveraging the power of social networking to share your awesomeness with the people who matter most – your customers and prospects. Schedule a manageable amount of time each day for meaningful social engagement, be authentic, be creative, and watch your business grow.

Since I enjoy networking and I’m also in the stage of getting known with the city, establishing new connections and figuring out how it all goes here, I’ve decided to start with my new networking adventures.

Last week I attended a gathering of a new networking group in Louisville. It’s established by two young professionals working in the field of real estate. Their vision and goal was to connect with potential prospects, people with similar interests and to hear other people’s opinions and business ideas. Finally, the master mind group is established to give each other support or advice related to our company start-up or a new business adventure.

It was interesting to hear courageous and business minded people from different fields of work. In this session, four people interested in establishing their own real estate business participated, three of us are from the marketing field, one from the field of finance and one was an innovator.

Of course, we all have different reasons why we came to this networking event. One of them, owner of the marketing agency, was really struggling surviving in the market. According to what he said, he is in this business for twenty years now, but he constantly has only one or two clients that keep his business alive and he never knew what will happen to his business after the current client leaves. So, he doesn’t like keeping all of his eggs in the same basket and wants to find a solution. In my opinion, his challenge is that he’s not keeping up with current trends in marketing field. But, I can understand that. World today, in general, is changing very quickly. Therefore, lifelong learning is crucial for success of any of us. Other thing is that some fields of work are changing so rapidly that it has become quite a challenge to follow up with its constant progress. This is especially related to the field of marketing and IT. Actually, these two field have become so much related that today’s marketing guru actually must be almost an IT expert as well. Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing are the core of all marketing campaigns nowadays. I, myself, as a marketing professional, find it, pretty challenging, to follow up with this constant changes. I’m constantly learning new things, but sources from which we can learn are numerous and it’s all time consuming. No wonder that we often feel overwhelmed. This is one of the burdens that professionals in this field must count on. Another issue in today’s world of marketing is that people tend to misinterpret marketing. Nowadays, many think that marketing equals advertising. Others just jump-in in this field although they are technology, and not really marketing, professionals. Marketing is much more than being skilled in new technologies. It’s a science. An IT expert may know all digital tools to market a product but he’s unknown with creation of marketing strategies. And without the right strategy, tactics don’t make much sense.

The way I see this group is the way I’d want it to become… Namely, I read once in on of those business psychology books that it’s very beneficial for professionals to have their own mastermind group, where they will gather regularly and brainstorm on solutions of the problems any of the group member might have. I personally, find it fascinating and a great way to share our knowledge mutually and help each other with advises, ideas, information sharing and similar.

More on this topic is yet come… :). Till then, stay in a good health, happy and prosperous!

Tag: networking

Mastermind Networking