10 Ways to Improve Visibility in 2011
Here is a list of suggestions to increase community around your business or brand in 2011. This is based on lessons I’ve learned in 2010:
1. Create a Facebook Page
2. Create a Twitter Page and or add a custom Twitter background
3. Add FBML tabs (custom tabs, much like a “webpage”) to your Facebook Page
4. Consider short video clips for your business, add to website, FB Page Tab, YouTube
5. Evaluate and update your website
6. Add a blog section to your website
7. Create an online marketing plan & schedule
8. Update your business plan, or create one if you haven’t already!
9. Update your LinkedIn profile
10. Engage, engage, engage through all of these channels!
Relationships: The New Marketing
On her business’ Facebook Page, my business coach, Christy Strauch, recently quoted Margaret Wheatley, who said that “Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”
Relationships are at the top of my list of values as a business owner. Through helping other business’ to enhance and improve their marketing efforts, I have made new connections with interesting people, long-term friendships and a new partnership.
The year 2010 was a big year for developing relationships in business. The Facebook Page quickly settled in to being standard practice for building community around your business, and is perhaps becoming the new website.
With Twitter you can see what the whole world is doing –– right now! More small business owners will see the value of the Tweet, and Twitter lingo will become more of a common shorthand language across platforms.
Video will be even more approachable as YouTube continues to make it easier to post clips to reach more and more of your audience online.
Everything is real time, localized, mobilized. The gap between business and consumer has closed greatly. It’s more personable, it’s more sociable. It’s more fun. Marketing has become less about the hard-sell, and more about building relationships and community around business.
In the new year, new marketing will continue to grow and offer exciting, fun ways to engage with the community around your business.
5 Reasons It May Be Time To Update Your Site
These days, new colors, graphics and layout is not the only reason to get your website up to date. For all the objectives that a website can fulfill for your business, the look and feel is really the icing on the cake. Here are 5 other ingredients for a successful web presence:
1. Is your website fulfilling your objectives?
When you set up your website, did you know what you wanted to achieve? If you’ve never formalized your goals, take time to create a list of specific objectives that you want to achieve with your website.
2. Are you keeping visitors coming back with fresh content?
Basic internet marketing strategy is all about offering value through interesting content and information. Is your site active with regular updated content?
3. Are you using Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that is easily integrated into your site. No matter how small of a brand or business you are, can give you endless insight into the visits and activity of your site.
4. Are you set up on a conent management system?
Using static html pages that need to be changed individually, and with knowledge of code. Content management systems streamline your site and offer many dynamic functions under one roof.
5. Is your site optimized for search?
Make sure your site’s meta data is up-to-date and that you are employing current techniques to make your site visible to more people.
How To Create a Facebook Business Page
There are some important things to consider before creating a Facebook Page for Business, previously called a “Fan Page”.
First of all, unless you create a business account to administer Pages and Social Ads, you need to have a personal profile on Facebook. I recommend this because if you open a business account, you will have limited access to the tools of Facebook. Some major drawbacks of a business account is that you will not have access to users profiles, cannot send messages and business accounts cannot be found in searches, so you limit your visibility within Facebook.
So, the best way to go about it is to set up a personal profile.
The profile behind the Page is invisible, except to any one else that you might assign as an administrator of that page. Also keep in mind that if you are the creator of the Page, you can never be deleted as one of the administrators unless your profile is deactivated.
If you are an employer and assign an employee to set up a Page for you, you may want to have them set it up through your own profile. Then, they can add themselves as an administrator to the page after it is set up. Anyone that is added as an administrator after the creation of the Page can always be deleted.
Beware of Facebook Terms. You can only have one personal profile, and you must use a real name. It is not a good idea to set up fake profiles just to administer Pages.
Once you have a personal profile in place then you can create Business Pages as a local business, brand, product or organization or artist, band or public figure. Additionally, you can create a Community Page for generating support for a topic or cause, or share directly with other Facebook members on a common interest or hobby by creating a Group.
There are a couple of ways to get to the Page creation area on Facebook. From your News Feed or “Home” page, you can find the link down the left column that says “Ads and Pages”. When you click on that you will come to a page that has a “create a page” button. Once you are the creator of a page, you can “Manage Pages” under your “Account” menu.
You can also start by going directly to the Facebook Create a Page page. From here you can create the aforementioned business account if you do not want to have a personal profile. Just go through the prompts for creating a Page or an Ad and you will have the option to open it through a business account.
Or, if you are somebody else’s Business Page, just scroll all the way to the bottom left, and there will be a link to “Create A Page for My Business”.
Stay tuned for tips on how to build your FB Page.
Social Media For Business
We have entered a new era. We are focusing more on community rather than corporation. Marketing is no longer just one-sided sales pitches, flashing promotions, and spam. Our culture is turning more towards independent businesses that have the human element. Businesses that support the community and the economy. We are becoming more conscious in our consumerism. And we are socializing online like crazy.
In “The Social Media Manifesto” chapter of his book Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web
Our culture is interested putting the “human” back into humanization. Our ability to connect and share online, now called social media, reflects this new era. It’s not that we have all these new interactive technologies and therefore are thinking of ways to use them for our benefit. It’s that these tools are a means that have come along with our need to change the way we communicate, live and integrate as people. Social media is a new channel in human evolution.
How does this help your business or brand? Think of it as a 24/7 networking event or party. The networking is not random. Shared interests, common friends and other “coincidences” are the keys that bring you to connect within the niche of your brand or business a lot quicker than off-line networking.
Plus, utilizing today’s social media tools is not just about making connections. As a business owner integrating social media into your business plan, you have immediate access to ideas, insight into the people who are drawn to your business, information about vendors, and immediate feedback. Using these tools can make a big difference in how effective your business is, and the rate it can grow.
All that I’m reading on social media right now have a lot of common ideas: Brands are humanizing, social media is the route, it’s the future of marketing, or “un-marketing” communications and that it’s here to stay and continue to evolve in ways that we haven’t yet imagined.
What Is Social Media?
According to the The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
While many think of social media as new fad technology, the social media movement of today has slowly evolved since the 80s, when a series of disconnected networks formed into the global network we know today as the internet.
In the early days of the “inter-tubes” users were able to instantly exchange ideas through message boards and emails. Over the years many new features have allowed greater levels of interaction. Weblogs or “Blogs” helped add a more personal presence on the internet, and blog commenting has greatly increased the conversational landscape of the internet.
These days users can have more control over the information they receive from the internet through aggregators and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). These tools are used to gather updates of content from favorite sites in one place. One example of this is Google Reader.
Socializing this process are tools like Digg where you can share your favorite stuff on the internet with others, and become part of a community that decides what information on the internet is popular, important and accurate.
Of course, there are the sites created for social networking. The first major social networking site, Six Degrees was launced in 1997, and is now only open to existing members. Since then many others have started, such as Friendster, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.
Other categories of social media include microblogging, a category which includes Twitter, although Twitter can also be considered a social networking tool as well. There are also the kind of sites that are set up exclusively for sharing photos, video and audio such as Flickr, You Tube and Podcast.com.
But what does all this mean for business? Stay tuned for the next blog entry…!
Fun Fonts
The web is becoming more fun. Social media is infusing the internet with large doses of the human touch in so many ways.
One of the ways that designers are looking to make websites more fun is the use of new fonts. Since we have been stuck with the same few font families that can be read across browsers and computers, we have gotten pretty bored.
In my last entry, I talked about sketchy design and how we are seeing more hand drawn graphics on line.
I came across is a resource for free hand-drawn fonts. There are many categories of hand-drawn fonts on this site, and I downloaded one to create the graphic for “recent updates” in my website’s top banner.
An exciting new free service of Google is the Google Font Directory (beta). It offers 18 new fonts that designers and developers can integrate into the CSS of the website. I’m using one of these fonts for my large headers on this site.
The one down-side to using these embedded fonts is that there are going to be a few older browsers that won’t support it. In that case, the browser will use the next available font in the CSS font stack for that website.
Sketchy Design
When we think of the aesthetics of websites, most of us probably think in terms of color, type, graphics and photography. We are also likely to think of it in terms hard lines, boxy sections or maybe fancy Flash sites with lots of movement and animation.
Something that we are seeing more of these days on the web are sketchy, hand-drawn themes and elements on websites. Very trendy right now are the hand-drawn or painted icons for social media and other computer related graphic representations. Just the presence of these can add a whimsical and personal touch to a website.
We are in the age of building more interactive relationships and community around business, and less of a cold, corporate feel. The aesthetic of a website becomes even more important in reaching out to the audience and building relationships.
Sometimes, though, it can be easy to get carried away with styles and scare away viewers with too much of a good thing. It’s great to have fun with they style of a site, but to keep the balance of other elements that keep visitors coming back –– ease of navigation, clarity of information and clean layout to name a few.
Here are a few examples of sites that are using some “artsy” elements and themes and still maintaining clean and simple organization of information:
Biola University
Neighborhood Homework House
Red Velvet Art