Google+ For Business

The book I read to research this post was Make Google+ Work For Your Business by Alex Stearn which is a very good book that I bought on kindle. This book is around 170 pages so is a decent length. It is also part of a series about promoting your business on various social media platforms. Google+ is the second biggest social media platform in the world with 540 million users. It integrates nicely with YouTube also owned by Google. They have a feature called hangouts where you can video chat with several people at once. They also have HOA or hangouts on air which are particularly good for business as anyone can watch them and they automatically stream the video to your YouTube account. With this platform there is also the +1 button you can incorporate into your website and everytime you like something online can easily copy it to your page in Google+. You also have circles where you can group different types of friends and acquuaitances into different circles. These can also be subject based according to people’s interests and don’t need to be activated by the other person. You can find people according to their interests on http://circlecount.com. You check who is following you back and whether they like your posts on http://circleoscope.com. Alex has a website at http://alexstearn.com and if you give him your e-mail address he does send out a e-newsletter you can subscribe to. The most important things on this platform are posting regularly and posting interesting content people want to read. It should also not just be based around what you sell. Remember people can smell an advert a mile away and it usually turns them off. They want something they can trust and before buying something will often look to see what there friends recommend. This is an interesting book which I do recommend.

Twitter Marketing Book 22

In this part I’m looking at Google+ or Google Plus. This site is primarily about having links to interesting content. Unlike Facebook you don’t copy blogs directly just the headline and a comment. You can copy videos and photos directly into this site though. Your paramount purpose of being on this site is to help people by providing something useful. They don’t have an advertisement program like some other sites. The Google search engine also takes into account links from this site as part of their algorithm. Google can’t index Facebook. If you join this site it is still growing rapidly and you are getting in at the beginning. This site could become a lot bigger in several years. Many people upload photos and short videos of their days activities. Especially if you are on this site on behalf of a company it goes without saying that you must stick to appropriate content. You can go off topic a little bit and ideally have separate business and personal accounts. You should be aiming to educate people not besiege them with adverts. A rough guide for this site should be do 2 original blogs you link about your product, do or find 4 blogs on other subjects and link & 10-12 comments or updates. You should generally follow people back who follow you. The exception being if they post no or inappropriate content. Jeri Ryan who played Seven Of Nine in Star Trek Voyager is a very active celebrity on this site and I would recommend following her. You have circles you can categorize followers in. You might have one each for business colleagues and friends for example. When you send messages you select a circle and everything in there receives it. It’s probably not secure enough for sending out sensitive data. You should try and spend 30 minutes twice a day looking for content to link to your page. If you enter a + before a name in a search engine such as Google, ie +nike you are taken to that companies Google+ page.It’s also a good idea to have links to experts in the field you work in.If you are a writer have a link to a writing tutorial for example.

Twitter Marketing Book 21

Most employers nowadays will research you on Linkedin and giving them your CV is little more than a formality. They normally won’t even look at it. You need to plan your career throughout your working life. You also need to look at if a goal is realistic given things like your qualifications and experience. Decide what is the essential things in a job or role. Your profile in Linkedin has to be searchable with the right keywords. There is a keyword suggestion service at http://wordie.net where you can copy and paste then scan people’s profile and it checks them for prominent keywords. Another technique is to read lots of profiles from people either looking for or currently doing your desired job and look for recurring keywords. You should normally give an employer 2 months notice that you are leaving and this will be just after you are offered the new job. You should set up an e-mail specifically for job searching. Nothing else is sent to this address and you can use a free e-mail service like Gmail or Yahoo. The address will normally be your name and you can use initials to make it unique. Avoid having a name with numbers at the end or a nickname or similar. The purpose is to look professional. The best place to get a professionally done profile photo is trade shows. These often have booths where they take the photos and post them online ready to use. The photo should have a neutral background and be a head shot. If you are serious about getting an alternate job one think recommended is the Jobseeker Subscription Account on Linkedin. It costs around $60 per month and puts your profile in a more prominent position for any search results potential employers might make.

 

Twitter Marketing Book 6

1 in 4 people or 1.73 billion people are on social media in one form or another. Facebook has around 1.1 billion and Twitter has around 280 million. Between them they produce 500 million tweets per day on average. What this means for businesses and that includes smaller businesses is they don’t need a huge budget to market to and sell to millions. Of course your company must have an advantage over the competition and do it by price but there are others like quality of service and reliability. There is an acronym for setting goals in general that can also be applied to social media. It is called SMART which stands for, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. This can help you no end in planning social media strategy. If like most businesses you have a blog consider sharing photos from the blog to social media. Most people do little more than glance at posts and it is more likely to attract their attention than text. Also a good photo can convey quite a lot about your business. It goes without saying if you have a business blog purchase a domain name as it looks much more professional. If you market on Facebook you need a product page and a basic one is free. Businesses are supposed to have a product page and not a personal page like some do. The biggest difference is the former attracts likes not friends. You should also maybe be looking at integrating YouTube into your business which has the 2nd largest search engine after Google and 100 million minutes of video are uploaded every minute. Many businesses also market on Linkedin and prospective employees can choose to get updates from specific companies. Linkedin is more for hiring staff than selling stuff unless you sell to businesses.

Pinterest In The Food Industry

The book I read to research this post was Pinterest In The Food Industry by Gabriela Taylor which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This is only a short book that looks at promoting your food blog or food business on the social media site Pinterest. This is a social media site where you have to request an invitation to join although that shouldn’t be a problem. It veers away from being commercial and it’s tend to be mostly women and they have a virtual board or page where they re-pin content. People can follow each other and when it comes to the food industry which is one of the most rapidly growing niches on this site the two main angles are doing recipes or telling a story. With the latter it might be a new product, charity work by your company or a profile of a showcase restaurant. MacDonalds did a Pinterest page where they profiled their  Olympic Park restaurant in London in 2012. In addition of course you re-pin content of interest from other pages that might be of interest to your followers. Many blogs now have re-pin buttons for attaching content to Pinterest in addition to the usual options like Facebook. In fact Pinterest is the 3rd biggest social media site in the world only beaten by Twitter & Facebook and the most rapidly expanding. Another option of course in getting your page popular is having a competition and had one to see who could repin the most content from their site. You could also maybe have users vote for a winner which might also encourage people to visit multiple times.  I think this book is only around 30 pages so is very short and isn’t a how to guide to how to use Pinterest but is quite an interesting book. I think also it is a niche book that’s unlikely to have many competing books. I’d recommend it.

Using Linkedin

The book I read to research this post was How Not To Suck At Linkedin by Joshua Waldman which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. I think this book is about 70 pages so it is concise and although I like big books the information is interesting and I think the length of the book would suit a lot of people. This book is primarily about using Linkedin for networking and not waiting until you are unemployed and need a job. I must admit I find Linkedin a bit snobbish but it has its uses. Much of the job market is moving away from advertising jobs and waiting for applicants like with Monster.com. Companies that advertise on Linkedin want to build up a relationship with potential employees and want the best applicants for a job which often means head hunting or enticing someone with skills and a good job to come and work for them. At the very least you should join at least 3 industry groups, post daily updates which you can also do on Twitter and you should get updates from companies you potentially can work for. Twitter which is a site I quite like is a micro-blogging site and you can get contacts on both sites to help you professionally. You should be looking to network for professional development and lets face it if you get a job in sales or management social media contacts could be crucial to your success. You shouldn’t neglect doing a profile and although many people don’t rate putting their qualifications as very important it makes it look like you have something to hide if you don’t do it. I really enjoyed this book, it gave me plenty to think about and maybe consider using Linkedin more. I think also with the book being free what have you got to lose.

Social Media

The book I read to research this post was The Social Media MBA  by Christer Holloman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I think this book is edited by Christer rather than written and features social media specialists from 4 continents who look at social media from an international perspective. In the west obviously Facebook & Twitter are extremely popular and the former often vies for most popular site in the world with Google. Half of all Facebook members log in and check their account in any given day. There are other very popular social media sites in other parts of the world. In Hong Kong for example there is a very successful bulletin board site at http://discuss.com.hk & in Japan there is a very popular social media called CyWorld. Two Chinese social media sites which are even more popular than Twitter are Baidu & QQ. The latter being the top micro-blogging site in the world. Many companies are encouraging employees to use social media to promote the company they work for. Some are trying to only have a specialist social media department promote them but they are gradually realizing they can be missing out on potential business. Some companies are very concerned about branding and if any employees do promote them they have to follow very strict policies with in that branding. Other companies are less strict and feel that having a more open policy is better. I think in most companies managers do find social media is a major component of their job even if they have a secretary that handles a lot of it. There are specialist social media marketing courses at most colleges in Britain. Some businesses like Dell have turned their business around with the help of social media. They have exclusive offers to followers on Twitter.  In addition they have upgraded their quality of their computers considerably and at one time their computers tended to use onboard graphics which has mostly been remedied. There are over 25,000 comments and discussions about Dell Computers on social media sites every day and they have a team that monitors this and tries to see if any of the suggestions can be applied to improving their business. I did quite enjoy reading this book and I may join some of the social networks mentioned. One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of web browsers translate foreign language and Google Chrome does a particularly good job of this.

Foursquare For Business

The book I read to research this post was Foursquare For Business by Brett Allen which is a very good book which I think I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is fairly and there is another book called Foursquare In 10 Minutes which is more comprehensive although this book is quite interesting. I can’t understand why there are so many books on things like Facebook & Twitter because there is such competition between the different titles it’s hard to see how any can be very successful. I think Foursquare has more potential for budding writers because it’s popular but there aren’t many books about it. Foursquare is a location based marketing social media site. The idea is you take a smartphone equipped with the app and check in from time to time to let your friends know where you are. Foursquare is the most popular location based website on the planet. Most businesses which market on this site have special offers and virtual pins which many offer are quite sought after. You can change the pins you offer each week and many people will want the full set so will buy from you. You can have special offers and many places target these to Foursquare users. It’s difficult to register your business because basically they have to make sure you do indeed own the business and are who you are. It’s quite easy for normal users to register. Apparently Foursquare is 3rd behind Facebook & Twitter in terms of mobile users of their site. I did quite enjoy reading this book and while you can probably work out how to use Foursquare, this book will save you time.

Social Media Engagement

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Engagement For Dummies by Aliza Sherman et al which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

A lot of what is in this book is in other very similiar books which I have reviewed. It’s obviously about promoting your business on social media platforms and concentrates on the main ones twitter, facebook, pinterest, google+ & linkedin. Apparently google+ has overtaken twitter and is the 2nd most popular social media site. There is also blogging, podcasting and conferencing. You should try and contribute other stuff apart from what is related to your business especially stuff like humor and should add a human touch. One of the most common complaints about businesses promoting themselves on social media is they appear to have no personality. Something which might also help is apps like hootsuite & tweetdeck which merge your social media information into one program making things easier. Something else the book looks at is location based marketing like foursquare and yelp although these probably work best for locally based businesses like restaurants seeking local customers. YouTube which funnily enough is owned by Google, the biggest search engine, is reputed to be the 2nd biggest search engine such is the huge amount of video uploaded on that site. If you are promoting your business on YouTube, humor is probably key to it being successful. One company had a lot of success doing a video where they crushed an iphone in one of their blenders. I did quite enjoy reading this book but it’s something I knew a lot about already and didn’t find a lot of new information.

 

Online Reputation Management

The book I read to research this post was Online Reputation Management For Dummies by Lori Randall Stradtman which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book does cover everything about this topic as I think a bigger book would be necessary but it does a good job of covering the essentials. In this day and age particularly for businesses it’s more difficult to keep a uniformly good image. Also if someone libels your product it’s not straight forward taking them to court for damages especially if they are in another country. A lot of potential abuse comes from trolls which all you can do is ignore them, delete their comments and get them banned from that particular site. Other folk you should reason with and if they have a strong greivance take the conversation to another medium like email or phone. You should also keep them informed of any developments in dealing with their complaint. Many smaller companies have only 1 person who deals with their online image but bigger companies have a team who each specialize in different aspects. Something suggested is a website called Klout.com where they let you search on social media on topics connected to your products or services. I may join a site called http://getglue.com which lets you review films, books and music and of course is loosely connected to the book topic. There is also a service at http://wordtracker.com that lets you find the most commonly used search terms. I did enjoy reading this book and did find the topic quite interesting.