Here is a good video that shows how to use FourSquare, the geo-based game that helps businesses. Don;t forget to add your business to FourSquare.
Facts on small business marketing and social media
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
- Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
- Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
These are facts from the video social Media Revolution
Google TV. When TV meets Web
TV meets web. Web meets TV. Learn more at www.google.com/tv. Produced by Epipheo Studios.
This is Better Than Ice Cream
Let’s go right to the point: We’ll be offering a full day to increase your profits.
Not only we’ll be working with you we’ll also allow you to look over our shoulders to see how we create online profits.
This will be in Salt Lake City on the last week of June
Check it out right now: Profit Magnifier
Why Use Social Media and Some Business Tips! Buzzbooster TV #10
This week Shahar and Nashlah marketing advisors, show you the real reason why you need to use social media, they send you some small business tips from Moab and share some insights they learned at the Super Conference 2010. Special guest: Suzanne Ziemba from YeloCreativeGroup.com
Enjoy it at: http://www.BuzzBooster.TV
Twitter Trivia
I got this from a presentation by Corey Condello and thought it would be useful to my readers:
Retweets:
*Retweet serves 2 important functions
allows you to post another user’s tweet to your followers
it makes sure you give credit to the original tweeter
* 2 ways to retweet
Click the retweet button on the original tweet
add RT@ with the Twitter name to your post
DMs
*what is a Dm?
A direct message is a private Twitter message.
*2 ways to send a DM
Click on the Direct Message button on the sidebar of the user’s profile
* D+@username + message in the tweet box
Hashtags:
*Hashtags (#) help categorize tweets. You can add a hashtag to any tweet
*When someone searches for that hashtag, they will see your tweet.
Twitter Lists:
*They allow you to organize your followers into groups
*The lists that you follow show up in your sidebar
*You can create a list by clicking on the “New List” button.
Use Bit.ly to shorten urls.
#FF
#FF stands for “Follow Friday”. On Fridays you can post a tweet that suggests people to follow. This is a way to help your favorite tweeters to gain more followers.
Place the @ symbol before the username so that it will link to the user’s profile.
How great are you?
Playing small does not benefit the world.
How much can you take and keep moving forward?
Creating a bridge between offline and online
I’ve pasted below a post from FourSquare.com on a promotion Starbucks is launching.
It is exciting to see how offline businesses can benefit from technology to market their businesses. What is not exciting is looking at all the small businesses that could do the same but just keep waiting to jump and try new ways of promoting their business until it is too late.
Foursquare is one way to bridge an offline business with online technology, but there are other things small business should look into like the QR codes.
These codes are an amazing bridge between offline media and online media and businesses in the US should be using them more. After all they can be easily created, can be free and be very effective. You might not be using it, but remember, you are not your audience.
Here is the post I mentioned earlier:
Facebook may be teaming with McDonald’s, but Foursquare refuses to be outdone in adding big brands to its portfolio. Starbucks is increasing their partnership with Foursquare by offering a mayor special at select locations across the US from May 17 through June 28. Mayors will receive $1 off a Frappuccino beverage by showing the unlock screen on their phone to the barista.
Starbucks is a frequent experimenter in the social media space, with a heavy presence on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Foursquare and Starbucks have previously teamed to offer the Barista badge to users who check in to five or more Starbucks locations. At that time the NY Times’ Bits Blog reported Starbucks was excited about Foursquare because “it’s where the intersection between digital and physical starts to get interesting,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online at Starbucks. “Starbucks loves that, because we’re always looking for that intersection, which we think is the evolution of social networks.”
The biggest problem I see with this initiative is that Starbucks employees are not prevented from holding the mayorship of their stores. For instance, at one local Starbucks the mayor is an employee with 40 checkins over the past two months. It would be almost impossible for an honest-to-goodness customer to become mayor of that venue and unlock the mayor special. Starbucks has claimed most of their stores as the owner, but they haven’t added any of the local employees as staff, which would prevent them from holding the mayorship.
Starbucks becomes the largest major national chain to offer a mayor special nationwide. Partnering with Starbucks will certainly help propel Foursquare use into the mainstream as users at more than 11,000 locations will be exposed to the Foursquare concept for an extended period of time.
Looking for Sales Reps
BuzzBooster is looking for people motivated to promote one of our new services for local businesses.
Commissions are very good! Contact us by e-mail buzz@buzzbooster.com
Local Business Marketing Domination
Most service professionals use only one or two ways to market their business and keep doing the same thing for years. Two examples are postcards and mailers. While these methods can bring good results, it is based on you having or buying a list every time you need new clients.
The internet receives millions of searches a day from people looking for specific services and products. These are very targeted prospects ready to buy.
When people look for you online, do you show among the first results without paying for clicks?
Have you heard of local search?
When people look for your services on Google, a Google map shows up showing the local results. Are you on Google Maps? Even if you are, are you showing for the different types of services you provide?
I’m asking you this because many businesses are listed on Google maps but they don’t show for their main search terms or show only for one of them.
There is more. When people are searching for a service like yours from their mobile phones, do you show up?
35% of all online searches contain a city, state or zip code. If you’re not showing up you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
The internet has now surpassed print Yellow Pages and newspaper as a primary source for local consumer service information. And the adoption of smart phones will only add to these numbers; 27 percent of all mobile searches are for local information.
When I mentioned that you can benefit from this without spending a penny, I refer to the fact that Google will not charge you for the listings, nor the directories that will help people find your business over the phone.
You just need to do it right and you can have your business showing for different search terms, have it listed on local directories that will drive traffic to your business and will show on smart phone applications that are geo-based, so people will find you when using their phones.
This is part of what Google calls Local Marketing and is one of the best ways to get more clients and spend less.
This is so important to Google that when you type a service on the search bar that contains a service that is supposed to be local even if you don’t type a city, it will provide local results only.
Go ahead and give it a try. Go to Google and type “Restaurants”. You will see that the results shown are all local.
You just cannot ignore the power this has and not have your business listed. Have in mind that 75% of all online activity is related to local. 54% of the US population has already substituted online searches for books, yellow, blue or any other color.
While the strategy here is a simple one, I can assure you that most of your competition is not paying attention to this and are still offering the same offers using the same channels they have used for years.
I know you are different and you want to stay ahead of the game. You want to attract clients without a lot of work and without spending a lot of money. You understand that things have changed, the economy has changed and the way people buy has changed. It just doesn’t make any sense to keep marketing to them the same way!
Did you know we can do the work for you and list you on the maps, on geo-based applications and local directories?
The normal investment is only $350, but just for my subscribers i’m offering the same package for $250 for the next 24 hours. After that, it goes back to normal.
Dominate local marketing