By now, you’ve heard over and over how social media marketing can help a business grow, so you decided that you wanted in. You set up an account for your business on Facebook, Twitter, maybe even Google+.

Now that you have the account, what’s next? Social media marketing isn’t very powerful when you have zero followers. How do you grow your network?

Announce

Start by adding a link to your new accounts from your website so that visitors to your site can connect with you socially. If you have a blog or email list, announce it there. All three are a great way to give your follower counts a jump start.

Listen

Before you start posting all over the place, looking around and take some time to familiarize yourself with the etiquette of that social network. You can cheat by watching to see what’s working well for other businesses and what is scares away other business’s customers. You don’t want to be that guy that’s labeled a spammer because he does nothing put push his content to his followers.

Follow

The more you follow, friend and like, the more that people will follow you back. Follow other businesses that you like, influencers in your market locally and nationally, as well as people who you think could be perspective customers. One word of warning, not everyone is your potential customer.

Share

Retweet and share content that your followers share, as well as from other online sources like blogs and magazines. Share content that you think is informative, useful or entertaining for your customers. If your business is a hotel, share articles about what is going on in New Orleans. Over time, this will establish you as an expert in that area, as well as making your account interesting and giving people another reason to follow.

Engage

Social media is no place to be shy. Jump in and become a part of the conversation. Conversations not only create loyal customers, but it also attracts new followers. An active account is a lot more attractive to someone deciding whether or not to follow you.  An account that is active and does more than just spam their sales and specials is much more likely to get more followers.

Remember it’s not a numbers game. You don’t need a million followers to see an impact on your profits from social media marketing. With one hundred engaged and enthusiastic fans, you’ll be able to see the results with the right relationships and marketing strategies.

You may notice something a little bit different here at the Compucast blog. At the bottom of each post, we added social share buttons.

What exactly are social share buttons? They’re the buttons that have the Facebook logo, along with “like” or the Twitter icon with the word “tweet.”

What do they do? Click on one, it won’t hurt! They’re an easy way for the visitors of your site to share the content of your blog or website with their friends and your new potential customers.

Interested? I thought you might be. The next step is to get the code for these buttons and to put it on your website. You can go directly to the social network and dig up their buttons. Or there are sites that specialize with social share buttons and you can get all of the buttons your heart desires in one place.

The next decision is which buttons to use? You could go all crazy and use just about every social share button out there from Facebook and Twitter to Arto and Yigg. (Yeah, I’ve never heard of those last too either) However, I would limit it to just a few buttons based on your audience.

If your audience and potential customers spend a lot of time on Facebook, I would be sure to add a Facebook button.

I wouldn’t add Pinterest, just because it’s a hot, up and coming social network. However, if your site features a lot of extraordinary pictures and your audience spends a lot of time pinning, then it may be worth your time to add a Pinterest button.

You may also want to include an email button, so they can easily email your website content to a friend. We cheated and used a catch-all button that enables visitors to share via Facebook, Stumble Upon and more than 300 other social networks, as well as sharing via email.

A little bonus tid bit. If you use a Twitter button, there should be an option to make it @reply your name when someone tweets that link. It’s a great way to find out who is sharing your content and then you can interact with them to increase brand loyalty.

Now where should you put these buttons on your website? There are a few different theories. The most common are at the top or the bottom of your content. The top gets the most attention from visitors, but the bottom of the post is where your true fans will see it, the audience who may be more likely to share it. The decision is up to you, you can even do both. I suggest playing around with both options and testing it out to see what works best.

A couple of tips for best results. The more interesting, the more entertaining and useful content earn the most shares. Don’t expect someone to share your content just because you put a button there. You’ll get the most out of the buttons if you’re active on the social network you want your visitors to share on.

Confused? We can help with adding social share buttons and your entire social media marketing plan.

Do you have a Facebook profile for your business? Or do you have a page for business? If you have a profile, people can become friends with your business. If you have a page, people can like your business.

Why you want to have a Facebook page for your business:

It’s more professional. Do you want people to be friends with your restaurant or do you want them to like it?

Facebook limits profiles to 5,000 friends. You don’t want to turn away potential customers because of a cap Facebook places on your profile.

Facebook wants your business to have a page, that’s what they made pages for and they may even delete your profile if you don’t convert it.

There are many other reasons, but those are three of the most important. Don’t be ashamed if you do have a profile, Facebook can be confusing and they make it a lot easier to make a profile, than a page. However, don’t take too long. Convert your profile to a page as soon as possible.

How To Convert Your Facebook Profile To A Page

Ready? Converting to a page is pretty simple. You don’t need to be too computer savvy, but it won’t hurt either.

First you have to download your timeline information. While the process is pretty simple, it could be easier. When Facebook converts your page, you lose all of the pictures and videos that you’ve uploaded to Facebook, besides your profile picture. You’ll be able to download those and re-upload them after the transfer.

Second, if you’re an admin for any groups, you’ll have to appoint someone else as an admin because when your profile converts, you’ll lose access to those groups.

Third, visit the Facebook Profile to Business Migration page and you’ll be walked through the remaining steps.

After that, you’ll just have to re-upload your photos and videos. You may want to explain why you’re doing it, so that you don’t overwhelm the people that like your page. Also, you may want to add your personal profile as an admin of the page.

Last week GROWCO, a conference that focuses new and innovative marketing ideas, came to the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans.

Of course, members of the Compucast team were there including, CEO Judy Weitz. At the conference, they met and talked with Johnny Earle of Johnny Cupcakes fame. Johnny built his entire business with word of mouth marketing, marketing that was tremendously successful because it was out of the box.

His business began in the back of Johnny’s old ’89 Camry. Without a business plan, start-up loans, investors, wholesaling or even traditional advertising, Johnny turned his business into a multi-million dollar t-shirt company. That’s right, Johnny doesn’t sell cupcakes, he sells t-shirts. The closest he comes to cupcakes is the vintage bakery look of his stores, even displaying limited edition t-shirts inside bakery styles cases and refrigerators. Today, his independent t-shirt brand is popular in the United States and Europe, with retail locations in Boston, Los Angeles and London.

We enjoyed his presentation and the unique way he garnered a worldwide following through out of the box marketing, as well as the success stories from the many other speakers at the technology and marketing event.

Some businesses may not like it, but their customers and perspective customers are online and talking about them. This is a good thing…unless you’re one of those shady businesses that has something to hide. If you have a business that’s doing things right and wants more customers, clients or guests, this is definitely a good thing and the type of online conversation that you want to join.

So how do you find out about these conversations and monitor your brand online?

Use The Search

They’re talking about your business or industry out there, you just have to find where. There’s  a lot of different options, but a couple places to start are with Google Blog Search and Twitter search. They’re both easy to use and cost nothing.

The Google Blog Search connects you with millions of blogs and blog posts, so you’ll know if anyone is blogging about your restaurant, hotel or service. If you find someone that is writing about you, you can respond in the comments on the blog.

Twitter Search connects you with anyone that mentions your brand on the 140 character micro blogging service. There you can respond in real time and create an on-going conversation.

Bonus points, if you see a blog post or Twitter conversation about a related topic, say New Orleans Hotels and you jump into the online conversation. Remember not to be too pushy, so that you don’t get labeled as a spammer.

Set Up Some Alerts

Google has a free service that will monitor the entire internet for mentions of your brand or business. Then once a day (or more often if you want), they’ll email you a link to those mentions. You just set it up and Google does the rest of the work. You just have to follow up to investigate those mentions to determine if they need an response for something like further information, etc.

You can also get bonus points for setting up alerts to a topic related to your business and becoming a part of the conversation beyond your brand name.

Check In On A Regular Basis

At least once a week, probably much more often, you should check into the social media sites where you know people are talking about your site. This includes responding to people on your Facebook page. If you’re a restaurant, you should check your reviews on Yelp. If you’re a hotel, you should review the reviews on TripAdvisor. Both allow businesses to respond to customer reviews. Just remember to keep it positive and genuine.

Then What?

The next step after you find these conversations is to join the conversation. Answer their questions, respond to their feedback (good or bad) and you can steer the conversation where it drives more customers through your front door.

Last week, I updated an unnamed client’s website with some minor changes and noticed something weird. I noticed that the Facebook widget on their page was blank.

Check out the example on the right for an idea what I’m talking about. We removed the name of the business to protect the innocent, but beyond that you’ll see a large blank space in the middle of the widget.

That blank space in the middle is where their latest updates from Facebook should post. I checked the html code for the widget. It looked fine, but who knows, maybe it was corrupted along the way, so I went to Facebook and got the code again. I added the code and check to make sure it was fixed.

It wasn’t fixed. The blank space remained. I did some experimenting and the problem wasn’t fixed until I updated their Facebook page with a new post.

The problem was that they hadn’t update their Facebook page in a long time. Now, I’m not exactly sure how many days you have to go without posting for this problem to pop-up, but it looks like it’s somewhere longer than 45 days.

You can prevent this problem by posting on a regular basis Now don’t be lazy. Post a lot more often than just once every 45 days. I’d even go and say you should post once a day during the work week.

Why? Because your customers are on Facebook and you should be too. When a prospective guest sees a stale Facebook page, they’re going to click away from your business.

So why not take a few minutes once a day to lure in new customers with pictures of your food or events in your neighborhood. Let them know about your specials or important upcoming events.

It’s that easy to prevent the blank widget effect on Facebook!

Congrats! You have a great new website! The new orders, reservations, customers and most importantly the money will just start rolling in. Right?

If it was only that simple. It’s not like Field of Dreams. You have to do more than just build it. You can have the best looking website, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll start seeing an increase in profits. You have to make sure people can find your page.

How do you do that? Funny that you ask that, I was just about to write a blog post about it. (Which by the way, blogging is a great way to build the profile of your site.)

On-Site Tactics

Unique, Well-Written Content

The Google gods love unique, well-written content. They believe that it provides more value to the visitors to your website, so they’ll reward you by sending more people your direction. That means don’t use the same content on multiple places. Don’t use the same paragraph over and over on your site. Don’t use the same description on your site that you use on a travel directory.  The more unique content that you have, the better. Plus, all that unique content gives the search engines something to notice.

Regularly Updated Content

More and more, the search engines are rewarding sites with regularly updated content. That means that they love sites with blogs that are updated at least once a week. The new content shows that the site is vital and worth checking out. Plus, it’s a great way to keep visitors coming back to your site.

Off Site Strategy

Tell The Search Engines Know About Your Site

Google and the rest of the search engines are pretty smart. Okay, really smart. They’ll find your site if other sites link to it. They send their bots around the internet looking for new sites like yours. However, It doesn’t hurt to give them a little bit of help finding you. You can submit a sitemap letting them know that your site exists and they’ll send one of their bots right over.

Let Your Friends On Social Media Know

Now, don’t get all spammy on the people that have your liked or followed your business online. But it doesn’t hurt to let your audience know that you have a new website. Ask them for their opinion on it or let them know about the new features of it. Can they reserve a table at your restaurant or book a room at your hotel now? They’ll want to know, but remember with social media don’t just push your link down their throats. Treat them like friends.

Long term, it’s good to be active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Google sees that activity as your site is relevant and will rank your site higher up in their search results.

I Want Traffic Now!

Stop being so pushy! Just kidding. If you want traffic to come flooding into your site ASAP, I want to introduce you to my friend pay-per-click (he also goes by the nickname of PPC). Basically you set up an ad that shows up on Google, or their network of sites. When someone clicks your ad, you’ll pay Google an X amount of money. It might be five cents, it might be five dollars, it all depends on your industry.  You can have a PPC campaign set up in a matter of minutes and in a matter of hours, you can have traffic flooding your website.

Oh and by the way, we over here at Compucast would love to help your business sort through all of this!

We’re buried in newsletters this week over here at Compucast and I’m not complaining. Earlier this week, we helped New Orleans Famous Praline Company put together an email campaign to promote their Facebook page and a Facebook only special. Today, we put the finishing touches on an email for the New Wyndham French Quarter, to announce their change of their management.

I’m excited to see these two companies taking advantage of email, it’s something I wish more businesses would use to communicate with their customers.

It’ll Make Sure Your Message Reaches Your Audience

I love social media, but I’d argue that it’s not as effective email.

There’s a couple problems with social media. You don’t have complete control over your social media outpost. Facebook and Twitter own your page, tweets and can do whatever they want with them. While it’s not likely that either of them are going to close up shop, but you never know what they might have up their sleeves. Plus, you can never be sure that all of the people that like or follow your page will see your message. Facebook has this pesky rule where they won’t let all of your fans see your message. If you want even most of your fans to see your update, you’ll have to pay. With Twitter, there’s so much noise that often you’ll tweet will get lost in it.

With an email, a reliable email service like iContact and a verified email address, you know that your message will get delivered to their email inbox.  With a good headline and regular contact, your email won’t just land in their inbox, it’ll get opened and read.

It Builds A Long Term Relationship

When someone visits your website (or even your store/restaurant), it’s a one time thing. They might come back to the website, they might bookmark it, but probably they’ll check it out and forget about it. However, if you give them an option to subscribe to your newsletter it’ll create a long term connection between you and them. You’ll be able to email them once a week, once a month or however often you like to build a relationship with them. They may have not made that reservation the first time they visited your hotel’s site, but after a few emails, they may be more than likely to include you in their vacation plans.

You Can Use That Long Term Relationship

You can use that long term relationship to promote your business. You can email the subscribers of your newsletter to tell the story of your business. You can let them when you have something new to offer. A new item on the menu, a special chef? You can tell them about that via email. Have a sale coming up? Of course, you can let your subscribers know about that. The best part is that it’s a lot cheaper than putting an ad in the newspaper or in a magazine. Plus, you can get your message out right away. You don’t have to wait months for the magazine to hit newsstands. You just need ten to fifteen minutes to put the newsletter together and hit send!

(And Social Media In General)

Facebook is more than just a place to post photos from vacations and chat with people that you haven’t seen since high school.

You can use Facebook to increase sales at your hotel, restaurant or just about any other type of business you happen to own or manage.

However, marketing on Facebook is a little tricky. There’s a thin line between promoting your business and becoming a spammer. If you push too hard, you’re labeled as an annoying at best and at worse you’ll end up losing followers.

Creating/Sharing Great Content

Hands down the best way to increase sales with Facebook is to create and share great content with your followers. It’s a long term strategy that will do the most to increase your sales.

Great content increases interactions with current followers,  the more interaction you have the more people that see your posts and it leads directly to an increase of people that like your page.

So what is great content?

I know a certain Mexican restaurant that whenever they post a picture of their nachos, margaritas or sizzling fajitas, I’ll be going to their place that night for dinner. They time the pictures late in the afternoon when I’m starting to get hungry for dinner and it creates an instant craving. It’s the perfect way to promote their business without being too pushy.

If you’re a hotel and there’s an upcoming event in New Orleans, it’s a great opportunity to get attention without being too over the top. Say you have rooms for Jazz Fest still, link to an article about the musical line up. It’s a great way to remind people about what’s coming and you can bet they’ll think of your hotel first when they’re making their reservations.

Promos Via Facebook

Want to get a bump in sales quickly?

Promos via Facebook are a great way to reward your most enthusiastic customers and entice perspective customers to try you out. A great way to do this is to offer something like 10% off a night at your hotel or a free appetizer with the purchase of an entrée. Use a code that they must mention at checkout or to their waiter, so that only Facebook fans will get the special discount. It’s a good way to give a special treat to those fans that love you so much that they found your business on Facebook on liked it, as well as an excellent way to get people that were thinking about trying out your business to actually try it out.

Directly Promoting Your Business

Direct promotion is a great way to also increase sales in the short term, but you have to be careful to not over do it.

About twenty percent of the time it’s safe to directly promote your product or service.  If you do it too much, people will end up ignoring you or unliking your page. However, if you save it for the things that you really want to promote, that you really think people will like, it can be very effective.

I hope everyone had a great Mardi Gras! If you’re a New Orleans restaurant owner, hotel manager or any person doing marketing for your business, I hope it was a successful season for you.

Last week, I put together a fun little post about the ways businesses are failing at social media. Unfortunately some of the worst offenders choose to ignore it, I still see them chasing away potential customers and ignoring complaints from customers. Maybe if I give them some tips on how to market your social media online the right way, they might listen to me this time. For the rest of you, you can join in. Take a read and learn a little bit more about how to do social media in ways that will attract new customers, improve your customer service and most importantly increase your bottom line. Done right, I promise you that it’ll be worth your effort!

Attract New Customers

I see far too many businesses jumping online and doing one of two things. They setup their accounts and forget about them for one reason or another.  Maybe they think they’re too busy or maybe they just don’t know what to do post about. The other far too common thing is that they go overboard into spamming their followers with links and promotions.

Neither way is a good way to make new friends.  Sure you’re marketing to these people, but in this age of social media it’s more than just that. You’re building relationships with long-term customers. You’re not just annoying them on their television in thirty second spots during their favorite show. You’re on their computer, going with them on their mobile phones and they choose to follow you. So give them a reason to follow or keep following you and you better make sure you’re interesting. Don’t just tell them to “buy, buy, buy,” like some used dirty car salesman.

No one likes being sold to! However, they love to learn more about your story. Talk about what makes your business different. Tell them about the new chef and his favorite food.  Post pictures of things to see and do around your hotel. Join in the conversations about your business, your city or anything else relevant. However, don’t just tell them to come visit your business.  Nothing scares people away quicker than the guy at a party who just wants to talk about himself and brag about his achievements. They’d much rather talk to the guy who is friendly and adds something to the conversation. Those are the businesses that social media users are going to visit.

Get where I’m going? It’s as simple as telling the story of your business without being pushy, then going out and joining relevant conversations.

You’ll know you’re doing it right, when you start seeing people appear on a regular basis commenting on your Facebook posts or retweeting you on Twitter. Don’t fall into the follower count trap. It’s not about how many people your billboard reaches anymore. Now it’s about the type of relationships you build with your customers.

Customer Service

In the past, upset customers might complain to a coworker in the next cubicle or the best friend on the phone. Now, they go online, vent to 250 or more of their closest friends, and the whole rest of the world that has an internet connection.

Believe it or not, this a good thing! Before they might leave a comment card or complain to the manager on duty. However, more than likely they just kept the complaints to themselves, their small circle of friends and made sure to never return to your business. Now you have a chance to resolve the issue before you lose the customer forever.

Unfortunately, this is where so many businesses fail. Their customers are online, but even if they have a Facebook page and Twitter account, they aren’t responding to those issues. The customer was upset before, now they’re even more upset when they don’t get any easy response.

Sometimes the solution is as simple as just listening to the customer and say that you hear them. Other times you may need to take further action, just like any other customer service issue.

You will need to monitor social networks and review sites for places where you can step in and it will take some time, but social media is just growing and isn’t going anywhere. It’s past the point where you can just ignore negative reviews because people are using these sites to find restaurants to eat at and hotels to stay in. If they see nothing but negative reviews, with no response, they will find some place else to spend their money.

A couple of suggestions. If you’re on Twitter people expect to see a response within an hour or two. It’s easy to setup alerts so that you can an email or notification on your phone, so that you know when there’s a customer issue that you need to take care of ASAP. You don’t have to sit on your computer, constantly reloading the page to see if there’s any new complaints. I can only imagine how quickly that would make you go insane.

With Facebook, you have a little bit more time. You have closer to a day, before the customer starts to feel ignored.

Review sites don’t exactly have a similar timeline, however it’s best  to check in on them regularly to stay up to date.

Final Thoughts

You don’t have to be connected to your computer 24-7 to be successful with social media, but you do need to check in on them on a regular basis. If you make it part of your daily routine, it can be handled in as little as fifteen minutes a day. However, if you discover it’s something that you like doing, you may find that investing more time in social media leads to increased reservations or profits.