Social Media Friday!

Yes, I’m still riding this horse.  The question is though, are you on-board yet?  If not, here are some tips:

On a Budget: How to Get Social Media Right

It’s 2012, and social media is no longer a new phenomenon, or a nice-to-have marketing tool. Social media is critical to your online presence and continual engagement with your supporters, and those you support.

With tight resources, these five steps will help you get started in social media, and begin building your online community.

1. Define your goals: Write down what you would like to see your organization achieve from social media. This list should include short-term and long-term goals. Building your online presence is a good short-term goal, and increasing donor funds is a good long-term goal.

2. Decide what sites you are going to start with: As you most likely know, social media is not limited to only a few sites-there are hundreds. In the future, you may find one site is more effective for your cause than another. For now, it is a good idea to start on very popular sites for nonprofits: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

To set up a Facebook Group Page, LinkedIn Company Page and a Twitter account, initially you will need a few things:
-An administrator, someone who has a Facebook and LinkedIn account, and wants to manage your organization’s social media activity. You can have multiple administrators.

-Your organization’s description and contact information

-Good pictures and logos

-A short and familiar username

3. Get good content: Nonprofits have a natural affinity to being “liked” or “followed” in social media. However, to engage with these followers, you need to provide useful and helpful information. While original content, like blogs and newsletters, are ideal, sharing the information from other nonprofits, foundations or associations that share your cause can be just as effective. As another idea, you could share photos and updates of events your organization is participating in. Posting short, daily how-to’s or tips will also get you the engagement you seek.

4. Participate regularly, or at least look like it: Manpower is always a struggle for nonprofits, and to dedicate a body to regularly updating social statuses may seem impossible. Fortunately, there are a few helpful tools to lighten the burden. Both Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to schedule social media updates on Twitter, Facebook and personal LinkedIn pages. So, instead of having to be active on social media every hour each day, in only a few hours, you could plan your updates for a week, month or more, and schedule them by date and time. These tools are also very easy to set up. While automation makes social media easy for you, it is always a good idea to log in now and again to see what people are talking about, and interact with them.

5. Invite others: Once your sites are up and running and you are regularly posting useful information, send an e-mail to your contacts. Let them know you are on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Invite them to join the conversation, and spread the word about your cause.

If you want to do social media well with tight resources, we encourage you to use these steps.

Thanks to Jen Kalies, Practice Development Manager, Hawkins, Ash, Baptie & Co.

How a Small Business Should Use Facebook

I didn’t write this … but you know how I feel about this question!  Geek=Cheryl!!

Customer relationships & marketing

Customer Relationships Are Key to Your Marketing Strategy
* Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
* Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
* It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

Ten questions every business needs to ask itself!
1. Do we have regular on-going training in customer care skills?
2. Do we have a clear vision of what we want the customer experience to look like?
3. Do we talk about how to delight our customers at our staff meetings?
4. Is our company culture — customer-focused?
5. Do we know what our customers’ expectations are?
6. Do we have a strategy for keeping more of our customers?
7. Do we have a set of customer care standards?
8. Do we measure our performance against those standards?
9. Do we know why we lose customers?
10. Do we have a “recovery strategy” for dealing with customer problems?

Copyright 2010. Reprinted with permission from Barbara
Wold’s Retail & Consumer Tips, bwold@ix.netcom.com.

Make the most of e-marketing

JD Milburn, Small Business Specialist from Wisconsin Main Street, sent me this article a few days ago and I thought it was a good once for business owners and managers.

With the high cost of postage, paper and printing, you may want to consider using the Internet more as an alternative selling partner.
Online marketing is more affordable, it facilitates one-on-one communication with customers, it can produce faster results, and it is more environmentally friendly.

Here are six quick tips to maximize the marketing power of the Internet during the sluggish economy and beyond:

• Steer customers during meetings and at trade shows to your company’s Web site rather than mailing out four-color brochures.
• Use keyword phrases in online content to boost the search-engine rankings — and visibility — of your organization’s Web site.
• Communicate and follow up with customers using e-mail.
• Drive traffic to your Web site by including a link at the end of every company email.
• Announce new products or offers online and in e-mails.
• Test and tweak new products or services on the Internet before offering them on a more expensive marketing platform.