Why is it that social media marketing seems to take up so much of our time? It’s so easy to pop on to Twitter or Facebook for “just a few minutes” only to find hours later that it has sucked you in and kept you away from that other work you should have been doing.

I don’t by any stretch of the imagination claim to have mastered the art of social media time management, but I thought I’d share some tips with you to help minimise the amount of wasted time spent on social media sites without giving up on social media marketing altogether!

• Stick to a schedule – decide in advance exactly what you want to accomplish on each social media platform each day and how long it should take you then schedule that exact time into your calendar. Avoid checking your accounts on an ad hoc basis as this inevitably leads to time wastage.
• Plan cleverly – schedule your social media time before meetings or appointments so you can’t get carried away.
• Minimise the distractions – figure out what distracts you the most and take steps to control it. For instance create a shortcut to take you straight to your Facebook business page without going via your personal account if it’s too tempting to click on those personal notifications.
• Use timesaving tools – using a tool such as Hootsuite or Social Oomph to schedule some of your tweets and updates in advance can help you to go into your accounts less often and thereby minimise distraction. A simple alarm set on a timer can also help remind you when you’ve spent enough time on a task.
• Create content in bulk – sometimes it can be more efficient to create your content in batches, e.g. cranking out a number of blog posts at once or researching several interesting news links to share on Twitter or Facebook, then use a tool like those mentioned above to post them out at regular intervals.

Do you have any other tips to share with us on how to save time on social media marketing?

With so many social media sites out there it is difficult to identify those that are worthwhile spending time on. Pinterest is one of those websites, it first launched in 2010 and has recently started to grow massively in the popularity stakes. It’s basically a pinboard where you can collect all of your favourite images, for example if you were getting married you could keep all your favourite wedding dress pictures in one place so that you don’t have to keep going from website to website.

But what does this have to do with business I hear you ask. Well the website allows you to categorise your images so you can have separate boards for different things. You connect with people in the same way as many other social sites and so your followers will get to see every time you ‘pin’ something new onto one of your boards. These images can be shared, liked and commented on and it’s a great way for people to get opinions on specific things, so maybe a range of business card designs, pairs or shoes or a new car as a way of helping you decide what to go for.

Now here’s where the magic happens! When you click on an image it takes you to the website where the image was sourced and this is proving to be driving traffic to websites at a higher rate than many other social networking sites. Businesses are also setting up their own pages, kind of like an online brochure it’s a great way of keeping customers informed of any new products that you may have to offer. But as with all kinds of social media you can’t simply post loads of images and expect the traffic to come flooding in, you need to be engaging with people on these sites, writing comments giving feedback on other peoples boards otherwise you might as well forget it.

And any decent marketing consultant will tell you, it’s not about complete self promotion either, take the wedding dress example as a business you may want to give people advice on different venue’s or make up artists that you have worked with before. Social media is all about sharing content with people and as a business you need to be offering up free advice and showing interest in related content not just trying to sell your own products and services.

We will certainly be watching Pinterest closely over the coming months and will report on any new developments along the way.

Following on from my previous posts An Introduction to Google+ and Creating a Google+ Page for your business, this time we’ll take a look at some ways to leverage the + power of social media.

Those with their own website or online business can explore a whole new world of social media marketing with an efficient social profile Page using Google+. It’s fun and easy and can be profitable too.

• Google+ posts that are sent to “Public” rank quite well in Google search results By merging Google properties into Google+ and integrating it with the serach engines you can have a significant impact on where your company appears in the results pages.
• Something else you can do is manage circles by distributing clients into specific categories and then share different posts, news or offers with the various circles. This allows you to connect with fans and share information with clients easily.
• Use Hangouts to engage your customers and colleagues. This is high quality video chat that gives you the opportunity to interact with followers face to face, making it much easier to get to know them, answer questions and also get immediate feedback on products and services.
• Another use of Hangouts is for video conferencing and to push live events and seminars to customers.
• Make use of the Google+ badge to promote your site and your Google+ Page. It links your website and page and makes others aware you’re there. If a visitor likes your site and clicks the icon they are taken directly to your Google+ Page and can share and follow your posts.
• Google+ Direct enables people to just enter a “+” in front of your business name when searching on Google in order to get directly to your Google+ Page.
• The +1 button on Google+ is an excellent way for customers to spread the word about your business and let others know about your Google+ presence. You are also able to connect your website +1’s to your Google+ Page +1’s, which is great as people are more inclined to trust recommendations from people they already know.
• Another useful Google+ tool, Ripples, allows you to keep an eye on your posts and information as they move across social networks, so it’s easy to figure out who is sharing and who is paying attention to your content.
• Analytics provide information about your page’s followers and visitors as well as general traffic and social activity around your business.

What makes Google+ for business unique is that it has blurred the lines between personal social networks, e.g. Facebook, and business networks, e.g. LinkedIn. It really is a social media game changer.

As I mentioned in my last post, An introduction to Google +, businesses are starting to see the value of Google+ with its new Pages feature. This post will look at how to go about creating a Google+ Page for your business.

Google Plus Pages have a small square icon next to the business name to differentiate them from Profiles. Users can add your Page to their circles (which helps increas your follower count), take a look at your business information and check out your business’s photos.

Here’s how to create a Page for your business and take advantage of Google+:

• In order to create a Page for your business, you need a Google+ Profile. Clicking on the “+You” link at the top left of your Gmail dashboard or iGoogle page will take you to the Profile creation page.
• Click Create a Google+ page on the right of your stream and choose a category to begin. For a smaller, less well known business, Local businesses is a good choice. For companies and larger known businesses, Product or brand would work. Company, institution or organization is mostly for those businesses that don’t directly sell something, e.g. not-for-profits.
• Personalise your page by adding a photo or logo and a tagline, and continue with an introduction, information and contact information, then finish with a photo strip of 5 photos.

You’re now ready to start engaging with the Google+ community. A business Page can create Circles (networks) and post information and news on its feed. Don’t forget to add your Google+ Page details to your website or blog and to share it across your other networks.

In my next post I’ll discuss some of the ways you can leverage the + power of social media.

Google+ seems to be one of social media’s hottest new networks, with its popularity growing tremendously since it started in June 2011 as a test version. Its slogan is “real-life sharing—rethought for the web” and it features integration across a number of Google products, including Google Buzz and Google Profiles.

As Google+ notices are posted inside your Gmail inbox, you get 100% real-time Gmail deliverability. If your Circle friends Google a subject that you’ve written about on Google+, your comments and links are displayed automatically on page one of Google, giving you free traffic without any back-linking or on-site optimization. These are just some of the things that make us think it is a social media platform that will probably stick around and grow in popularity.

What makes Google+ special?

• It is focused on targeted sharing within social subgroups you’ve set up (your Circles)
• There is also a section within Google+ that is specifically for viewing, editing and managing multimedia, and which includes an image editor as well as privacy options and sharing features.
• It has introduced a new group chat feature called Hangouts. You can click ‘Start a hangout’ to immediately enter a video chat-room and a message will go out to your social circles to let them know that you are ‘hanging out’ and invite them to join you.

Many businesses are already beginning to see the value of building a Google Plus presence, especially with the new Pages feature. A Google+ Page looks similar to a Google+ Profile except that it has a small square icon next to the brand name to indicate that it is a page. Other users can add your brand to their circles, check out your information and browse your photos. Each time someone adds your brand to their circles, it helps to increase your follower count.

Your business needs to get ready to integrate Google+ into its social media marketing strategy, so in my next blog post I’ll look at how to build your Google Plus presence and build a Page for your brand.

I blogged recently about creating quality content. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of creating great content, that people actually want to read, it makes sense to get the most out of it, so here are some suggestions for how to do that.

Syndicate your content

It seems obvious, but it’s surprising how often it gets forgotten in the rush to move onto the next item on your to do list. Whether it’s a blog post or a new page on your website make sure you share it with as many different people as possible. Tools like NetworkedBlogs make this easier by automatically sending your blog posts out to your Twitter and Facebook feeds and save you having to remember.

Social bookmarking is another good way to get your content out there. Sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon are all useful, as well as niche bookmarking sites that relate to your industry. Just make sure you follow the guidelines and don’t only bookmark your own content.

If you write an email newsletter then you can also use this to point subscribers towards content that they might find useful too.

Make it easy for others to share

Getting others to share your content is even more effective than doing it yourself as it will then be read by people out of your network too. Hopefully you’ve already got social media buttons added to each of your web pages and blog posts to make it easy for others to share them on their favourite social networking sites. An occasional little nudge or reminder asking people to share a particular article if they find it useful won’t do any harm either.

Internal linking

If you’re referring to a topic already covered in a previous blog post or on another website page then link directly to it to make it easy for people to find other relevant content. Internal linking is important within your website and blog and helps both search engines and readers to find more of your content.

Recycle content

If you’ve written a good article or blog post it won’t take you long to rewrite it (to avoid duplicate content which the search engines frown on) so that it’s suitable for use on another website or blog. Writing guest posts on another blog or articles for another website is a great way to get more exposure for your own website as well as a link back. Using existing content and rewriting it saves you from having to come up with another idea or having do any additional research for a brand new article.

Do you know of any other great ways to get the most out of your content? Please add a comment to share your suggestions.

I love New Year and how it makes you feel like you have a clean slate to start over with. Whether you kept the resolutions you made for 2011 or not, 2012 offers the opportunity for a fresh start.

If you are a small business owner, social media marketing is one of the areas you should definitely be making some resolutions about. We all have good intentions when it comes to social media but if we want to make sure they become more than just that we need to set some proper goals.

With social media you are much more likely to stick to your resolutions if you turn them into specific and measurable goals. For instance, instead of saying “I will blog/tweet/share more regularly” try setting yourself goals such as:

• I will write two blog posts every week
• I will share something interesting on Twitter/Facebook every day
• I will increase my followers to xxx by the end of January
• I will reply to every comment or @ tweet within xxx amount of time
• etc

and then decide how you are going to go about doing that, e.g. schedule time into your calendar, put a reminder on your phone, start work 15 minutes earlier, check tweets while getting your mid morning coffee, etc.

I do, however, still think that we need to remember that social media is about relationships and engagement and some facets of this are less measurable than others. When I look at the amount of self promotional noise that is posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc I think that there’s a good case for some of these less tangible resolutions:

• I will only share information that is useful to others
• I will chat to people without trying to sell to them or blow my own trumpet
• I will only follow people that I’m actually interested in on Twitter
• I will always be honest and transparent

Somehow I think these will be much harder for many of us to stick to!

Happy New Year!

Most of the bigger brands and many smaller ones now have their own customised Facebook welcome page and you may be wondering whether your business should too.

What is a Facebook welcome page?

For those of you who are not sure what a Facebook welcome page is, it’s a specially designed page that visitors land on when they first find your page in Facebook. It’s almost like a mini website within Facebook that they initially land on instead of the usual wall or feed.

First time visitors are welcomed to your Facebook page with this attractive branded page, and can also see any deals or new products that you want to promote on there.

Why should you have one?

There are several good reasons for having a custom Facebook welcome page:

• It welcomes first time visitors with an attractive branded page, letting them know a little bit more about your business and what you do.
• You can add a call to action encouraging them to ‘Like’ your Facebook page and explain the benefits of doing so, which makes it far more likely that they’ll click that button.
• Some businesses use their welcome page to promote deals, events or competitions or to call attention to new products.
• Having a custom page reassures people that you know what you’re doing on Facebook and makes you look more professional, hopefully encouraging them to engage with you.

What should you include?

Your Facebook welcome page should reflect your current social media marketing objectives, so think about what action you want visitors to take when they land on it. This could be to ‘Like’ your page, to engage with you on other social media platforms such as Twitter or your blog or whatever else is important to your business marketing goals. Make sure that your page contains an appropriate call to action that stands out clearly and leads them to this next step as quickly and easily as possible.

Let visitors know what sort of information you share on your wall and how they can join in. Lay out the benefits of engaging with your business on Facebook to increase the chances that they’ll ‘Like’ your page and come back again. If appropriate you can also include links to your other social media accounts and your blog’s RSS feed and encourage them to connect with you there too.

As you can see, a custom Facebook welcome page can improve your ‘Like’ conversions and act as an additional promotional tool. Without one you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities and failing to make the most of your Facebook marketing.

Twitter has become such an accepted tool as part of an online marketing strategy that more and more businesses are getting involved. However getting your business on Twitter just for the sake of it, because everyone says you need to, is not enough of a reason.If you’re going to market your business on Twitter you need to first figure out why and what for?

These are just some of the things businesses can use Twitter for:

• To offer existing contacts another way of engaging with the business
• To provide customer service
• To find new customers or prospects
• For research purposes
• For brand awareness
• To drive traffic to the business website

There are many other valid uses for Twitter as a marketing tool, but these are probably the main ones. Do any of these fit in with your goals for using Twitter? If so, are you monitoring the results you are getting to find out whether you are meeting your goals?

I see so many businesses on Twitter that have no idea about how to use Twitter to engage with people and end up alienating others rather than drawing them in. They post only self promotional tweets and offer nothing of value to their followers, then can’t figure out why they’re not getting any benefit from their efforts.

The shame of it is that it is ruining Twitter for a lot of people and businesses who are using it as intended. There is so much rubbish and spam on Twitter that genuine users constantly have to find new ways of filtering all this noise out. If you decide to use Twitter for your business remember that whatever your goals you need to be having conversations and engaging with people. It is not just a broadcast channel and those that treat it as one are never going to get the full benefit out of it that they could.

Before you jump on the Twitter bandwagon (or before you go any further if you’ve already climbed aboard), first figure out what your business is trying to use Twitter for. You’ll then be in a much better position to educate yourself and your staff on how to use Twitter effectively to meet those goals.

Social Media has been around for a while now, many businesses have jumped on the bandwagon and are actively networking using sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  With all this information around about how to do it, why are so many still getting it wrong and using it as a platform to try and directly sell to us?

It’s one of my pet hates to check up on a group in LinkedIn and find it is littered with posts telling everyone how fantastic they are and how they can help them and their business, please stop it.  It does worry me that if it continues to be flooded with self-promotion then people will just simply get fed up with the whole thing.  It seems the whole givers gain philosophy has been twisted around the wrong way and people are simply out to see what they can get.  It really ruins the whole experience for so many people.

Another (and there are many) pet hate is being bombarded with spam via the social networks, yes I connected with you because I am interested in what you have to say, yes I want to learn more about your business, but no I don’t want a daily email trying to persuade me to spend money with your company.  In fact I am far less likely to do business with someone who is trying to shove it down my throat (unless it’s ice cream – I might make an exception there).

Social networking is about building relationships with people, it’s about creating an awareness of your brand amongst your network in the hope that they will spread the word, it’s about knowledge sharing and helping eachother to succeed in business.  You don’t need to blatantly sell to people. You will gain far more by taking the approach you would with an offline networking group because if you help people out by putting them in touch with someone useful or giving them some free advice then you can bet when they need your services in the future, you will be the first person they think of.

That’s it, rant over.  I’m off to Facebook