Small Business Marketing | Marketing for Entrepreneurs | Realtor Marketing » social networking

What Social Media Marketing Is Not!

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:08:47 +0000

Social media has become the buzz word for small business marketing. Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and get a piece of this new media channel, without realizing that there is a huge amount of time that needs to go into their efforts.

At first, when small biz owners decide to use the Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to grow their customers and prospects, they are all shiney and happy. They are going to get a piece of those 600 million people, all ready to buy their product or service TODAY and all it takes is a little tweeting, right?

They set up their profiles, but don’t want to give TOO much personal information because, really, what does it matter, they are just here to SELL, SELL, SELL! Then they wait for the orders to roll in. Tick, tock, tick, tock. No orders.

What happened? Social media marketing is the promise that all you have to do is show up and great things will happen, right?

The Real World of Social Media Marketing

I liked when social media marketing was originally called social networking. That is truly a more descriptive term for what happens on the different internet properties. I KNOW, you have heard that it is like a real-life networking event and you get it, BUT…

There are no buts about social networking, it is JUST like real world networking. You “meet” someone through Twitter or Facebook, say something nice about what they are doing, talk back and forth with them and establish a connection that will hopefully lead to a sale or referral somewhere down the line.

You would not attend your first networking event with new people and start by handing out credit card signup forms, would you? Not if you want to be invited back! When you are getting started with social media marketing, dip a toe into the waters and offer something of value to the people who are considering increasing your relationship.

Setting Up A Social Media Strategy

So what exactly SHOULD you do to increase your likability on social media? Here are some of the things that small biz owners can do:

Post relevant industry information that would be interesting to readers (for a painter, this could mean posting the new colors for the season with a comment about how that translates to their geographic location)
Make Friends, Likes, Followers and Connections in your geographic area and share interesting events and information (for Realtors, this could mean posting area happenings, links to attractions and only then, open house events and new listings)
Find complementary links (for an exercise guru, posting healthy recipes makes sense)
Share your clients and prospects triumphs (if someone has something great that they post, share it or retweet it to your following!)

What Is A Good Sales To Information Ratio

We get this question A LOT! A good sales to information ratio on social media is at least 5 to 1. Five non-sales, non-selfish posts to one salesy, or self serving posts. Again, this goes back to real-world networking! If you are at an event and introducing a friend around to everyone, talking her up to the crowd and generally helping her business, when you do slide in a request to sit down and talk business, she is more receptive to hearing what you have to say.

Some Final Tips

First, don’t try to be fake on social media. If you are a nerdy, engineer type in person, your online friends will like you for that on Social Media. Outgoing and crazy in real-life, you have much more latitude to cut it up online. Remember, at the end of the day, if you are successful at getting a sale, you are still the one that will show up to work with them!

Second, unless you are truly passionate about politics or religion, keep it off your Social Media radar. Talking too much about left or right wing politics can turn off roughly 50% of the people who might have wanted to work with you. Having EVERY post reference your religious preference can be off-putting to the online people you connect with. That having been said, if you live and breathe these topics, it will show up when you do anyways and being fake won’t change that!

Third, get ready for changes. It used to be that we could buy a yellow page ad once a year and be done with marketing. Now-a-days, you have to be willing to roll with the changes that happen, sometimes on a daily basis. Something that works great for you on Facebook may change overnight and you must be willing to adapt. Accounts get frozen or canceled, groups come and go, but once you have the ability to build big networks, you just move on and start building again. The one company that I always think of when I start to get complacent is AOL. If I had told you in 2001 that AOL would out of the picture by the middle of the decade, you would have been astounded. Networks change, sites change and it is the bold marketer who takes those changes and makes a great impact!

Why You Should Outsource Your Social Media Marketing

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:27:10 +0000

Huge Disclaimer, it is no wonder that I say you SHOULD outsource your social media, I have a social media marketing company! But in all fairness, I took quite a bit of time researching this post and will try to offer a fair and balanced outlook!

What Is A Social Media Marketing Expert

A true social media marketing expert is actually a marketing expert who is using social media as ONE of the tools in their marketing arsenal. Every bit of marketing touches the social media platform including branding, sending a cohesive message, targeting the correct prospect, lead followup and more, all the way through the sales cycle and onto a sale.

Okay, so a social media guru is actually an expert marketer. What makes an expert? Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Outliers: A Story Of Success, is the closest thing I have ever found to explain what a true expert is. In it, he talks about becoming an overnight success AFTER spending 10,000 hours learning your trade or craft. So, if you are looking for a social media marketing expert, ask them how long they have loved marketing AND how long they have been working in the field. Just FYI, 10,000 hours is 20 hours a week for 10 years or 40 hours a week for 5 years.

Who Is NOT A Social Media Marketing Expert?

I am on A LOT of mailing lists and get all kinds of come-ons from people wanting to sell me get rich quick schemes. One of the biggies right now is to sell either social media marketing or local marketing and start raking in the dough. An expert has NOT taken a class called anything like this:

New Webinar! Become a Local Marketing Expert
10-no-4 Days to Become a Social Media Expert
Make money as a social media strategist
How to become an internet marketing expert in a short time…
This came in when I was writing this post, “The real kicker is that: most of your revenue is pure profit! Stuff we consider “basic” is mind blowing to most, if not all, local business owners.”

Should You Outsource Your Social Media Marketing Or Keep In In House?

So now we have established what a social media marketing expert is, the next question is should you outsource it to an agency or company or keep it in-house? Here are some of the reasons I feel that you should NOT keep it in house, based on our experiences coming in AFTER a company has fired the in-house guy or gal.

To hire a true expert you are going to have spend BIG bucks. If you are not looking at hiring someone who has just left college, the kid who types really fast or a 10-no-4 day “expert”, you are looking at paying that person between 60K and 80K a year. We have some great horror stories from the trenches about how “the kid” set up the whole business network under his own name, left the company and reeked havoc for the next few months. Hiring a reputable company to do your social media eliminates this problem.
You are going to have to provide benefits and taxes for that employee which would not be necessary if you outsource.
If you are hiring a marketing guru, you are still probably going to have to get them some admin help. I can tell you this from experience, the person who is creative and has a brilliant marketing mind DOES NOT possess the “do the same thing every day and make sure all the boxes are checked” gene. We hire great “elves” who implement the marketing plans that we work out with our customers. Our elves are super organized and LIKE to make sure that all the tasks get done!
There are economies of scale for a business to buy the latest software and attend the high level trainings needed to stay up-to-date. When you are spreading the cost of these items over multiple clients, it makes sense to keep to the cutting edge! We spend about 12K in training each year and could spend more if time and budgets were not at a premium!
We have programmers and others on notice to help when the Social Networks change what we need to do. The easiest example of this is Facebook eliminating the FBML capabilities that we used to use to make pages. I got our programmer on it and he sent over the two page document on how we should do it now!

Okay, Why SHOULD You Keep Your Social Media Marketing In House?

I can hear you now, but we want to have control over what that person is doing and how they are spending our money and time! That is a valid point and will have to be taken into consideration. I CAN tell you that with frequent communication with your marketing company, you can stay on top of this easily.

No one loves my company like I do – If you are a small company or a start up, the owner or manager can probably do a bit of social media marketing. My question to you is, I KNOW you love your company, but do you love marketing? Having the best intentions in the world doesn’t help if you do not have the technical and education chops to back them up.

I can get an intern to do it for free – I have tried interns, you teach them, they work for a bit and then leave. Walking back the cat to figure out what they did can take your next marketing person hours or days to figure out! Additionally, you get what you pay for and when you are paying nothing it is hard to expect the kind of dedication that you can get from a real business.

I am in a super niche market – Now, I am the first to say that social media marketing is not for every company. If you are a manufacturer who makes a product that only 10 companies in the country purchase, social media may not be the way to go. Our suggestion for this type of company is to have the most techy person who talks go on LinkedIn and target those 10 companies (this could also be done by the CEO if she has time). Attaining the level of technical knowledge for this type of work can counter-productive to outsourcing. That having been said, we have found very few companies that cannot benefit from social media and marketing in general.

What Types Of Business Should Outsource Their Social Media Marketing?

Business to consumer businesses do well on Social Media as they have a product that people would be interested when they are just surfing around having fun on Facebook or Twitter. Additionally there are neat ways to bring items to market that consumers look on favorably if done right.
Business to business marketing is trickier, as you need to position yourself correctly to find comparable areas to market in and be very careful to make sure that your offerings are social, not salesy. I see this done wrong all the time!
Local companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the power of social media because of the ability to target geographic regions in friending and following. These types of businesses fair VERY well in the social media realm.
Businesses with lots of “stuff” are great to promote. If you hold meetings with different topics, sell a million kinds of shoes or have a ton of different product offerings (like pawn shops and ebayers, social media can be a great way to get the word out!
Highly regulated industries. Okay I know that I am going to take heat on this one, BUT I have to say that a financial services guy who positions himself correctly would have a very bare playing field to compete on. This takes finesse and should work within the bounds of your state or federal licensing.
Restaurants and bars have fun people doing fun things. We have a couple of restaurants that we work with and they are the neatest peeps because of the activity and the fact that they are inherently social anyways!

There you have it, multiple reasons to outsource your social media marketing. If you are interested in finding out more about social media marketing, give us a call at (727) 505-5384 or request a free small biz marketing quote!

Do Not Get Taken By Social Media Snake Oil

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:06:54 +0000

It is easy to get taken by social media snake oil. We all want to find the “easy button” for getting our Facebook and Twitter done and out the door, but sadly I have found that most things I or my clients try tends to be little more than pouring money down the drain.

So what IS social media snake oil? It is the promise that if you add your name to a list you will get 1,000 followers or pay $49.95 you will get more business page fans. It is the promise that setting up a million accounts will get you a million customers.

I have the unhappy prospect of telling you that there is no real easy solution to social media success. The best things that I have found to work are just plain boring and involve working every day towards a focused goal. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you this!

Some of the recent Social Media Scams that we have seen:

Pay just $49.95 and we will get you 500 Facebook Business Page Followers in two weeks – We had a client who decided that slow and steady was not so fulfilling and he decided to try this out and see if he could get a “jump start” on his “likes” by buying them. Well, he has about 100 new people over the two week period so they SURELY didn’t hit the mark they promised. AND when we look at who they are, every one of them is a made up person. There is no information at all about them except for a stock photography picture and their sex. I am VERY sad that this one didn’t work as I would have liked to have more people on my business page too!
Set up 1,000 Facebook Accounts with the push of a button – You may see where this one is going, I am sure that the people selling the “get 500 fans” service have done something like this. From a small business point of view there is ABSOLUTELY no benefit to you to have 1,000 dummy Facebook accounts. You cannot possibly post on them and people are not fooled by seeing these hooked to your business.
Join this list and get 10,000 Twitter Followers in a week – Twitter has very strict rules about the ratios you must maintain to increase your followers. The chances that you could get 10,000 followers in a week are slim. Additionally, what they typically do is put you on a list that then gets sent out to other schmucks who are supposed to send it out to….well you get the picture. Ponzi schemes only work for the people at the top, never the people who buy them.
Join this list and get 10,000 Twitter Followers in a week PART 2 – Another way that you get scammed by Twitter meanies is that they get you followers by autoposting to your account frequently. Anyone who has been on Twitter lately has seen the “I got 10,000 Twitter Followers by using… I was horrified when I signed up for one of these and they started spamming my account. We always check out these things BEFORE we sign up our clients for them!!!!
Find out who has been searching for you on Facebook Apps - There are A LOT of apps on Facebook that do nothing more than propagate themselves and some are even spreading viruses. Be very careful about using an app that requires you to sign up or give authorization before seeing what you are doing. I have seen numerous friends fall for this one recently and then feel bad because they are spamming their Facebook friends.

In general you can look at online hype with the same jaundiced eye you would use if someone walked up to you in the street and said they could get you 1,000 business cards to put in your rolodex. Do you think that there would be any benefit to having those cards? Especially if you had to pay for them!

From our work with our accounts and client accounts, the best way to use social media for business is to be honest and thoughtful, doing things the way that the terms of service require and staying inside the lines. By doing this we are growing our client accounts daily and have had great success from ALL sorts of places.

Facebook Groups, Friend Lists and Business Pages

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:33:51 +0000

Facebook Groups, Friend Lists and Business Pages are hot questions for small business owners in my inbox right now. Since Facebook launched Groups Version 2.0 last week my peeps have all wanted to know what the difference are between the three.

Here is a screen capture of your groups, you find them on the left hand side under your name (if they are not there, click the “see more” to find them). Once there you can see your groups, your friends groups and the groups other people have invited you to.

From reading about where why FB may have implemented these new groups, I get the impression that the 5% of people using the Friend Lists was not enough of a adoption rate for the gang over at Facebook so they decided to make it easier for normal humans to categorize people. Also, the privacy settings that could accomplish this same thing are REALLY onerous to use. In a bit I will break down what seems to be the best uses of the different types of Facebook applications for business.

Making A New Facebook Group

To add a Facebook Group go to www.Facebook.com/Groups (while you are logged in) and then click “create group”. Once there you get a dropdown with the choices of Open, Closed or Secret. I cannot begin to tell you how much I do not believe ANYTHING on Facebook is ultimately secret so I highly recommend you do not pick secret. To add people, click in the big white box and start typing their name. Once you have added people, the normal Facebook box comes up and you have the option to post a link, photo, video, event or document. You can also add a picture to your group or chat with them all at the same time through the group interface.

Adding a message to my group (which I set as open) did not post that message on MY profile but my buddy Deb Ward DID get this message the next time she logged in, “Tara Jacbosen added you to a group”. This is one of the big grouchy things that I have heard A LOT online, ANYONE who is your “friend” can add you to a group – it is more of an opt out than an opt in kind of gig.

Here is a Facebook Groups overview video from the FB gang.

Facebook Groups, Friend Lists and Business Pages

Because my readership is comprised of small business owners, if you are a mega business and have tens of thousands of “fans” or “likes” on your business page, this is not the post for you, nothing to see here, move along. If you are a small business person, I will reiterate what I tell everyone – FRIENDS are the lifeblood of Facebook. Friends are necessary for the new groups AND for making lists of people. I have about 3,000 friends and have added them this pretty aggressively so worrying that you will run out friends fast is an unwarranted fear for most small business owners.

If you watched the FB video, you will see that you can also make an email address to contact all the members of your group offline. I STRONGLY recommend that you use your email database (like Constant Contact or Ace Of Sales) for this instead of Facebook.

Uses for Facebook Groups

Here are some suggestions that I have heard for using groups. As my primary use for FB is business related, most of them have no real draw for me, BUT they could be useful for you!

Contact your family – if you are hesitant to post pictures of your children that everyone on your friends list has access to, this may be a GREAT way to avoid unwanted viewing of your family.
MLMers or businesses with a sales team – you may want to share certain things with your team only. I have to say for this function I use GoToMeeting ($50 a month) or Webex (Free) instead as I can do real time screen captures and also save them for future viewing.
Have a “special” group that you send messages to – I made a marketing peeps group and invited people who were REALLY interested in marketing. Within an hour I had someone request to join the group!
Here is an article from Duct Tape Marketing with some more good uses!

Uses for Facebook Business Pages

As far as I can tell, Facebook business pages are still the only area that FB has designated a “sell” zone. It violates the terms of service to sell aggressively on your profile and I can’t imagine that people on your groups are going to love getting daily sales message emails either. We are seeing great results from our clients who have gotten a custom Facebook page and recommend this for any small business owner.

Online Events – We always make our events attached to the business pages. For online events like webinars and teleseminars, you can notify the people who like your page AND your friends.
In Person Events – We also add our events to the business page as we generally charge for admission. This way I do not even put a toe over the line to violate those terms of service.
Videos – We have handy dandy videos on the pages that help people AND make them more likely to “like” our page.
Notes – Notes are a BRILLIANT way to get some SEO love from Google – they index fast and stay up about a month or so before dropping down in the rankings.
Paid Advertising – It is REALLY easy to advertise with Facebooks paid advertising using your business page.

Overall, I can say that we are still going to be focusing on business pages for our clients. There is no sense in building up a great group when that functionality is so easy already in the business page.

Uses for Facebook Friend Lists

Okay, here is my pitch for why friends are so important to small business owners. I KNOW you can get THOUSANDS of likes for your business page, but have yet to see anyone but celebrities, big companies, hard-core internet marketers or silly things gain that kind of following. For business building, I find that having “just” 5,000 raving fan friends will trump having gagillions of people liking something that is inane and not at all related to generating actual sales.

Friend lists allow you to laser target geographic areas – there is a dropdown box at the top of the Friends page where you can select cities. Because I speak in Colorado AND Florida, I have a Tampa Friends list and a Denver Friends list. Just do a search and then add your friends who live in proximity to that list.
Likes on my business page are stuck there – when I do a new business page I can invite my friends by suggesting it. I have yet to find a way to cross promote my business pages to each other.
Events – adding an event to any of my pages allows me to “suggest to friends”!
New Facebook Groups – even your new groups rely on having friends to invite.

All in all, I use a business page to conduct business, I use my friend lists to laser target messages about events and sales opportunities and I am not sure that I am going to jump on the groups bandwagon just yet. If you have some great ideas about how you are using any of these Facebook features, please leave a comment and I will add it to the post with a rocking keyword linkback!

Using Facebook For Non Profit Fundraising

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:49:22 +0000

Using Facebook for Non-Profit Fundraising is a great way to get your message out to numerous people quickly. The added bonus is that Facebook, like all social media is FREE!

So WHY is Facebook so good for helping to raise money for non profit organizations? Mostly it is because the viral nature of Facebook encourages sharing your passions, both personal and business. This positions non profits in a great way to help make more money for their organization online!

Using Facebook For Non Profit Fundraising Case Study

So I was trolling around on FB today and BAM I saw where my Father-In-Law, Wally McGuire, is trying to raise money for a video about his unique brand of teaching at the Storm King Art Center. Now just let me tell you, he is an accomplished artist and teacher who has worked with Storm King for years so he has the teaching chops to be featured in a video. That is the first thing you MUST have – a REALLY good, believable cause.

Next I realized that he had accidentally done a GREAT job of posting it because he used a Facebook Note. These are visible outside of the Facebook framework and are not limited to Facebook users. Here is the note about Wallys Excellent Video Adventure!

Some things he did right:

He shared the note with all his friends
He posted it more than once
He put a way for people to donate by check (more about that later)

Now for what he could have done better…

Facebook For Non Profit Fundraising Tips and Tricks

Facebook Causes – Facebook has a really neat built in application called Causes which is great to use for fundraising. BUT there is no way you can set-it-and-forget-it with your cause. You MUST tend and nurture it or it will not be a huge fundraising source for your charity as show in this Washington Post article about To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Is Not So Green Here are some of the best articles I have found about using Facebook Causes:

Facebook Custom Business Pages – Having a business page is standard fair now, non profits who want to stand out need to step it up a notch and get noticed need to have a custom facebook business page! Here are my top reasons why this is so important:

With a business page, you can control all aspects of your message, AND you can invite people to be “fans” of your page
You can keep people engaged with updates about how your projects are going and what their money is being used for, creating an ongoing stream of donations
You can easily add a PayPal button to your page and people can make immediate donations. The people raising money for my father-in-law decided that they did not want to give PayPal the %5 or so cut that any credit card company takes, but we are working to get that button on there. More people will pop into PayPal than will walk downstairs, write a check, find an envelope, get a stamp and run to the post office. There are TOO many points of failure there to make me feel good!

Well there you have it – some quick down and dirty tips for using facebook for non profit fundraising! If you have any other tips, let me know in the comment section OR if you have great links to helpful info, they are welcome too!

Facebook Classified Ads Check Out Marketplace

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:32:55 +0000

Facebook classified ads are as simple and hard as the rest of Facebook! We choose to use the Facebook Marketplace for our services clients to post their listings. The photo is showing Joy Phelan, Lakewood CO Bookkeeper, two ads for her services.

The marketplace was pretty easy to set up. Simply go to the search bar at the top, type in Marketplace and add the application to your page. Once you have that set up you will instructed to set up an account on OOdle.com which is where your listings actually live. Once you have set up your listings, they will automatically share on your profile page’s “My Listings” tab.

Some drawbacks and pluses…I try and keep my business sales info on my business page. To date I have not figured out how to make my listings show up on my business page, they live on my Tara Jacobsen profile. That seems to be good and bad. Since I do not have an IN-YOUR-FACE link to my business page, I worry that people will not be able to easily find out about Marketing Artfully. The plus was the ease of setting it up and coordinating it with my Facebook business page.

There is an oodle pro service that starts at $30 per month and seems to target Realtors, Car Sales, Recruiters and Items For Sale. Not sure that my services clients will benefit from this enhanced service. For realtors and others, oodle only allows one listing to be posted at a time so this may be a good fit for you if you want to post your listings on your profile page. Using a link to your postlets still is the free way to do this!

If you are interested in detailed videos on how to do this and many other social media marketing tasks, check out our social media videos!

Facebook Business Pages How To Have A Custom Page

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:57:03 +0000

Facebook Business Pages have come a long way and having a custom page is starting to be as important as having a website or blog! Custom business page design can be hard or easy depending on your level of technical ability. Here are a couple of different ways to make a custom page from easy to hard!

There are all kinds of little bits and pieces of a custom facebook page that add up to a great look and feel.

To start, let’s talk about why a custom facebook page is so important. As you know, facebook is closed system that is not indexed by Google (one of the reason I like Twitter so much, but that is for another post). Two places on Facebook ARE indexed by Google though, custom landing pages made using the FBML application and Notes. Notes are a great way to make a quicky, keyword rich post that will rank well for a little while. Custom pages have the ability to contain much more information and perform multiple functions.

Facebook Business Page Picture

We are going to start by looking at a Facebook Business Page Picture. There do not seem to be any limits on how big these can be and you can use a thumbnail picker to decide which bits represent your page when you are posting or commenting. Generally we make clients pictures 180 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall. This leaves plenty of room to put a picture, logo, contact information and even a stock photo if we like.

As with everything else about your page, it is super important to have clear branding and to make sure that there is cohesive feel between your picture and your other websites and offline materials. This is a SUPER easy way to make your page look more important, even if you never touch a bit of FBML code.

Facebook Custom Page Using A JPG

The next easiest way to make a Facebook custom page is to create one image that you can use as a the entire page. You will need to access the FBML application within Facebook and then write a little bit of code to show the picture. If you do not know how to use FTP to upload a picture, you can always store it on Flickr.

The easiest way to make a picture like this is to use a software like Photoshop or Illustrator, BUT if you do not have access to those, I have it on good authority you can use something like PowerPoint and then just Export it as a .jpg file. This picture should be no wider than 520 pixels and can pretty much be as long as you like. Remember that your load time will be affected by how big the file is so make sure to “save for web” which will make it 72dpi (dots per inch).

The drawback to using a picture instead of FBML code is that there is not much for Google to index, which leads me to…

Facebook Custom HTML Pages

This is my favorite type of custom Facebook pages and is the one that we use for clients and the Marketing Artfully page. There are a number of great parts to it including:

A message to “like” the page at the very top which encourages participation
Actual navigation links which we use to send people to our “real” website
Links to our social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
A newsletter signup form so that people can be added to our database
LOTS of great text for Google to index

Now building one of these pages is not for the faint at heart. There is CSS, FBML and HTML involved which make it a little difficult for the average bear (I had my in-house programmer make this one!) I would recommend buying one of the templates out there or else having a web design company handle it for you (hint hint). If you do have a bit of HTML knowledge and want to do it yourself, do a Google search for free business page templates. I found a couple out there that were okay BUT they didn’t have all the bells and whistles I wanted for Marketing Artfully or our peeps.

Well there you have it. Easy-peasy to hard core programming. I am not a huge jump on the bandwagon kind of gal BUT I can see these pages serving us for at least a year so decided to bite the bullet and get them going! If you would like to see the examples in action, click on the pictures. If you would like to see a couple more check out How To Buy USA Real Estate and Magical Bookkeeping Solutions!

If that seems like too much WORK! Have Marketing Artfully create your custom Facebook Business Page Design!

How To Get More Twitter Followers 2010

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:27:56 +0000

Twitter marketing IS easier with lots of followers. The more people who are on your Twitter list, the more chance you have of one of them doing something you want! So here it is, how to get more Twitter followers.

Yesterday I was cruising through my email and saw one from a client. She was forwarding a message from a guy with 140K plus Twitter followers and I assume that she wanted me to get her that many. Well I have been doing this for a while and I have about 7K. So I thought that I would check twitdir.com and see where that many followers would place him….in the top 1,000 of 75 MILLION according to RJ Metrics.

So if I have so few compared to some other people, what am I to do? Get more Twitter followers of course! Now I am not trying to get hundreds of thousands, just shooting to beat the guy ahead of me in Westminster, CO! It is much easier to attain manageable goals than to shoot for the moon so I am going to have to hit about 15K by the end of the year.

This is not a post about how to get thousands of followers overnight. I have tried all of those “add your twitter name here and get 5,000 followers” scams in case they would help our clients. None of them actually worked and one of them even auto-posted spam to my Twitter account daily…argg. I never got many followers from them AND most that I got were porn or robots.

How To Get Twitter Followers

Here are my top ways to get more Twitter followers in no particular order with a note on the paid service.

Follow people and they will follow you back. Some even use an automatic service like SocialOomph.com to do so (we do) which makes the process seamless.
Add a “follow me on twitter” link to your outgoing email messages
Add your twitter name to your business cards
Add a “follow me on twitter” to your Facebook Profile
Add a twitter button to the sidebar of your blog
Use a service like TweetAdder to increase the ease of getting new followers – PAID. This is one that we use for our clients.
Sign up and use Twellow.com to find new followers in your area or an industry that you are interested in targeting
Add #FF (Follow Friday) tags to your posts and recommend your friends on Twitter
Provide useful information in your posts – this sounds stupid but if you do get someone to pop by and consider following you, they will probably take a pass if you only have one or two things posted OR if your links are all hard sell spam.
Target the people you want to follow – not everyone is going to like my marketing schtick so I make sure to target small biz owners, mlms, entrepreneurs and Realtors.

Expensive ways to get Twitter followers

While researching this article I found some REALLY expensive suggestions and nothing new that I would try but if you are so inclined you could (1) offer to $1 to charity for every new follower for a week, (2) buy an existing twitter account that already has lots of followers – probably violates the terms of service or (3) pay for followers from a company – I saw one that would sell you 100K followers for $3,500 but that also seems to be a violation.

In general, marketing on Twitter is much like marketing on other media. You need to offer a great product, get the word out and then build a following. On Twitter your product is NOT what you sell, it is providing information about your industry, suggesting other resources that might be helpful AND selling your goods or service. NO ONE is going to want to follow you on Twitter if you are just one big spammy mess.

My twitter handle is www.Twitter.com/Taradactyl for small business and www.Twitter.com/TweetingHomes for Realtors.

If you would like more help with Social Media Marketing check out our DIY Social Media Videos.

If you would like to leave your twitter name so that we can follow you, please feel free to list your industry and a link (I do monitor this and will not post you if you are a bad neighborhood like porn, gambling or pharmaceuticals).

Facebook Marketing Making Lists

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:05:29 +0000

Facebook marketing becomes MUCH easier for small business owners when you have lists of your friends segregated. These are all practical working suggestions for what to do on Facebook!

Super basic Facebook Friend Management Overview

Once you have added your friends to Facebook, getting them sorted out can be an overwhelming task. I can tell you that it takes about 2 hours when you have a couple of thousand as I did last night. To get started, log into Facebook and on the top right hand side select account and then “edit friends”. There you can see your current lists of Friends, which ones you have recently added, who in what list and more general information.

How to make lists of Facebook friends and sort them the easy way

This to me is one of the most powerful pieces of having Facebook friend lists. At the top you will click on “create new list”. Then you will want to add people. You will only have to do this one time for your current friends, then after that you will be able to add new friends to the lists a few at a time.

To find people by city or job, select browse and then use the second dropdown to narrow them down.

Some types of friend lists you might use are:

City (plus) friends – I have Tampa Friends and Denver Friends
Job type – I work with small business owners, MLM (multi-level marketers) and Realtors…I have a list for each of these types of business owners
Groups and Associations – if you belong to a leads group, networking group or even your alumni association, you might want to have them in separate list
Mega Networkers – I have a super special list of mega-networkers who have big networks like I do…occasionally I send things out to them to get out their groups

Do not make too many or they will be hard to maintain.

How and why to make an everyone list on Facebook

The most counter-intuitive thing I heard was to make an “everyone” list. It seems like you ALREADY have everyone on a big list BUT it is neat to have so that you can suggest pages or invite people to events all at one time with the “select all” feature.

How to invite people to your Facebook Event

Once you have your lists, inviting people to your events is easy-peasy! If it is a local event just pick your “City Friends” list, if it is a national event you can use your everyone gang.

If you have extra questions about how to any of these things, we have a GREAT social media training videos for just $47 lifetime membership!

This post is a work in progress, please feel free to add your suggestions to the comments.

Social Media Marketing Twitter Events

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:15:46 +0000

Social media marketing with twitter events is an easy and FREE way to get your event message out there AND to let your attendees know about what is going on in and around your venue.

Whenever I tell my clients and workshop attendees about this they always think that there is something they have to sign up for in able to be able to take advantage of twitter. Not so. All you need to do is let your sponsors and attendees know that you are going to use #eventname. That is the pound sign or hash tag plus your shortened event name.

In the case of the last big event I spoke at, the abbreviation used was #affcon. If you had done a search for that on twitter you would have found a sort of running commentary of what is going on at your venue from attendees who like to use Twitter. Please note, if you would like to find out who is tweeting you MUST do it within a couple of days as Twitter and search.twitter.com do not archive tweets for long after the event.

So, we are having a charity event called 7 Minutes in Marketing Heaven. This is a two part event, one in Colorado in July and one in Florida in August. I will use the same tag #7minutes for both events and will encourage people at the event to “tweet” about it when they are there.

This marketing opportunity is not something that will be available for years, BUT you can…

Get additional people to attend
Get more free marketing help
Schedule tweetups for your guests (by saying something like #7minutes tweetup at Teds 5:30)

Most small business owners are not involved in Twitter on this level so they do not think about using this marketing channel. BUT, just because you are not interested in it does not mean that it cannot help grow your event!