Everyone knows about the big players on social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus contain billions of accounts and give marketers vast audiences to segment and tap. While their scope and reach are tremendous, though, these media giants can leave some small businesses feeling lost in their immensity. How do you attract Twitter followers when your latest tweet is just one of half a billion – that’s with a B – sent every day? Great content creation, strong SEO and organic traffic build your brand, but while you’re aiming for relevance on the big channels, consider some offbeat social streams to take full advantage of a powerful free medium.

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They may not be grammatically or orthographically correct, but everyone knows the three R’s taught in school: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Customer service via social media has its own set of guidelines that aren’t as well known yet, but as social media occupies an ever larger chunk of customers’ awareness, these rules are critical to keep in mind. Work with your content creation team to give great customer service via social media, and you’re well on your way to mastering the lessons your competitors may have yet to learn. Continue reading

When they want a larger market share, many companies loosen their purse strings and buy it. Through advertising and direct mail, businesses can become part of their customers’ conversation and widen their market. Social media marketing has historically been a subtler force; because most social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are free, they haven’t constituted a major, direct part of the marketing budget. While companies paid their content creation team to tweet and maintain a Facebook page, paid social media wasn’t a part of the picture until relatively recently. Continue reading

Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can see how social media marketing works for B2C companies. While it may be hard to predict which content will get shared or go viral with end-use customers, the process happens all the time. Unilever, for example, has caught fire with Dove’s Real Beauty campaign and turned it into an ever-expanding series of YouTube videos to go along with print ads and newsletters. Continue reading

If you consider social media and SEO as separate entities, you may want to rethink that. New research suggests they’re closely linked and that failing to integrate the two can cost you. A recent SEO strategy report from marketing research specialists with Ascend2 and Research Underwriters found that successful SEO strategies are predicated on making social media a key part of their overall optimization plan. Continue reading

The next time you walk down a busy street, stop and look in a specific direction – up, down, toward the street, at a shop window, it doesn’t matter where. Take note of the people around you, and you’ll see that at least a few of them turn their heads to follow your gaze. If you’re looking, then there must be something worth seeing, or so the mirror neurons that note other people’s actions tell them. Continue reading