Facebook and Social Media Marketing: What Tips to Follow?

We live in a world where everything transfers to the Internet. So, it is only understandable that you will keep up with the ongoing trend of having your company’s Facebook page and, further – having people who will ‘like’ it. If you are wondering how to attract people to hit that ‘like’ button, wonder no more – here are some useful tips to help you get as much internet audience as possible.

1. Seduce them 

No, we’re not talking dinner with candle lights and a violin. We are talking about your clientele being seduced with the service and quality of your products. If you are looking to gain Facebook popularity, you first need to have real life popularity of your customers. So, be the kind of company that not only offers great service and products, but is always polite and patient with their clientele!

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Since you have gained your clientele’s trust, it is time to introduce your Facebook page to them. Include the link of your page on business cards (and all other printed material) and make sure your staff always mentions that you’ve got a new page up, encouraging them to ‘like’ and recommend it.

As for the organization of your page, always have adds about new products, discounts, promotions placed front and centre on the page.

2. Keep your cool 

When you have a web page up, it is always recommendable to interact with your customers so you can understand what they expect to get from your business establishment. Still, the amount of interaction needs to be wisely planned out. There are three things you need to be careful about:

a) Communicate

The questions you ask your clientele need to be easy to answer and relatable to buyers. Ask them what they would like to see in your stores and/or on your page. Ask them to give feedback on your latest products and staff’s engagement in helping them out.

b) Be responsive

Two-way communication with your fans is crucial. Stay on top your customers’ comments/questions/suggestions/needs. Respond to their comments and messages within 24 hours. If someone posts something goofy, or jokes about something, like it. This will take you no longer than a second, and your customer will know you care. Be aware of everything happening on the page. Check page activity several times a day, not just in the morning and in the evening. If you are overwhelmed with work, hire somebody to deal with Social Media Marketing. If your budget allows it, naturally. There is another option: scheduling your Facebook posts in advance. Facebook itself doesn’t still have this generator, but iContact does. Check iContact for further inspection.

c) Do not spam

Newsfeed is already loaded with variety of contents which makes it easier for a Facebook user to overlook certain posts. Clever advertising and answering everybody’s questions and e-mails is one thing. Spamming every five minutes is quite another. You don’t want your clientele to hit ‘hide’ instead of ‘like’ button, do you?

3. Be Marketing-Smart

Several things that will gain popularity to your Facebook page are:

a) Check-Ins

Encourage people coming to your stores to check in whenever they are there. This way, their Facebook friends that haven’t yet become fans of your page will notice the check in and wander to your page to see what’s up.

b) Organize contests

Think of a contest that may be suitable for your brand and launch it. Everybody is a fan of getting free stuff, so make your clients happy! Also, provide some discount coupons on, say, weekends.

c) Publish Photos and Videos

Publish interesting visual and audio contents on your page. Obviously, they need to be relevant to the brand you run and it’s advisable to make them relatable to your employees. Why not capture your stuff on a brake, having fun or even during working hours, interacting with customers? It sure will make your fans smile when they spot themselves in the photos!

These are just some of the things to have in mind. However you chose to run your business, always have quality products and make sure you put your customer first – that is a sure path to a great reputation!


Author
Katrina writes about small business, creative marketing, digital marketing and social media marketing. She is always searching for new ideas online. This article was inspired by tips on how to promote your business with facebook.

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HR Analysis For Small Business

Good analytical practices are in the core of every successful business. Using today's technologies, however, we no longer have to think about analysis in the same way we did in the past. We no longer need people to perform the analytical processes. Specialized HR analytics software is the future of HR analysis. Even though the software cannot give you concrete directions as to how to run your business properly, it can use the data you provide in order to identify trends and help you decide which practices are useful and which aren't. You can also figure out the most relevant factors that either stimulate or trump productivity and introduce changes in order to boost your production rates. You can easily achieve all of this with the help of analytics software. No longer do you have to count on gut feelings. Now you can actually make important decisions based on raw data and draw proper conclusions.

HR problems for small businesses

Up until now the HR options for a small business were rather limited. You either had to cough up the big

money to an HR officer, which is not really viable on a smaller scale, but it has happened in some organizations with very disappointing results. An investment of this sort is just not worth it. Another alternative is giving a small pay raise to an employee and giving them some responsibilities in the HR area. This is also not a very good practice because the motivation is lacking – for the minute pay raise, the employee is charged with too much responsibility. Furthermore, their influence isn't clearly defined – can they make practices or just suggest them? Are they the ones doing interviews or are they just supposed to sort out the CV's? These questions and more arise and the problem becomes clear.

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Last option is the owner of the business taking care of this responsibility, himself, but as we've seen it time and time again, this usually ends up badly because they don't really know what they're doing. This is the reason behind the employment flow in some businesses – because the owner can't really find the right people. With no HR practices specified, there is nothing to be done about this and so all you've got left is counting on your luck and hoping that this time you hire the right employee.

HR software solutions for small businesses

HR software changes all that. It enables you to create coherent HR practices and gives you the proper tools to finally put your affairs in order. There are many different HR software applications you can use and since big companies usually have HR departments, most software manufacturers aim at small businesses. You can find the perfect software that fits well within your budget and needs. This is a really viable solution to calibrate your HR practices.

MUST READ: 5 Finance Essentials For Your Business 

What most business owners don't understand is that their employees are people. If you were employing robots, you wouldn't need anything more than programming – you tell the robots what to do and when and the robots will comply; simple as that. Sadly, many business owners are trying to apply the same principle with people. But it doesn't work that way – just because you're paying someone doesn't mean that their individuality disappears. HR software will help you cater a better work-flow that falls well within the parameters of good HR practices. Analyzing your employees and their potential, their productivity as compared to their experience, as well as different tendencies can help you manage your work-flow much better. Business requires adaptation. The question is: are you up for the challenge?



Author Bio: Rose owns n3 builders clean. In her spare time she loves to write and get in touch with her readers.

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Learn How Google Trends Can Be Beneficial For Your SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something you do on your website and it may be helped by the information you gain from the Google trends tool. It is possible to pull information from the Google trends tool and apply it to your website so that your website becomes more search engine friendly. This will then help you rank your website up through the search engine results pages. All of the Google Webmaster Tools are free to use and so is this one, even though this tool is applicable to more people than just web masters.

Google trends allows you to see trends from around the world

This is one of the bigger selling points of the tool besides the fact that anybody can use it for free. You can see which trends are currently taking place around the world, and you can keep track of how they are moving across the world. You can look into five categories where trends are concerned and you can research into your own niche and into the factors affecting your website keywords. You may even use the trends to predict future trends or predict which keywords are going to become more popular and which are going to fade into the background.


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The Google trends tool is full of information

That information may be used to help your own SEO. You can conduct research regarding the trends with certain keywords. You can see if your current keywords are still popular England to warrant such a prominent position on your website. You can look into if you should change them for keywords that are a little more popular. You can reassure yourself of how well your keywords are performing and re-confirm your faith in your current keyword profile, and you can do it all for free with regular searches on the Google trends tool.

You can target people in different parts of the world

It is possible to target people in your own country too, but the trends tool is not very candid about specifically small areas. Still, you can see how the trends for certain keywords differ in your country when compared with other countries.

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You can learn about other brands

More importantly, you can learn about your competitors’ brands. You can use the trending tools to see if your brand and your business keywords are doing well online. You may also see if your competitors are doing any better. You may see if lots of people are searching for your products and if they are searching for your competitor’s products or your competitor’s business names. You get an insight into the things that your competitors are doing well, after all it is difficult to rank up the search engine if people are searching for your competitors by name.

You can analyze crowd behavior with the tool

It allows you to see how other people act online and allows you to see a pattern in their movements. Doing this means that certain keywords may be targeted and studied to see a pattern. Is one keyword always less popular when another keyword becomes popular? Plus, is there a halo effect that surrounds certain keywords, where if that becomes popular then so do a bunch of others. If you can identify such trends, then you are in a very good position to guess which trends are going to occur next and will be able to take advantage of them.

Have a look over time to see when your keywords come into fashion
 
Not all keyword have a life expectancy where they go up and then down and stay down. There are some keywords that routinely become popular and then unpopular at similar times every year. Easy ones are things such as "Halloween" and "Christmas" but you can see persistent trends at other times in the year too, such as how "turkey" becomes more popular near thanksgiving and Christmas.


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You can use this information when creating your keyword profiles or when making up your affiliate advertising. For example, if you run a carpet cleaning company, then you can use the Google trends tool to find out when your services are in the most demand. Times such as just before Christmas and around spring are going to be peak times. You can use the Google trends historic data to find this out and then target certain keywords during that time. You may also increase the amount of advertising that you do around that period so as to take better advantage of the keyword at its peak.


Author’s bio:
My name is Sonia Jackson. I represent the web-site http://www.cool-essays.com We’ll help you to solve all problems with writing different essays and research papers in a short time.

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5 Challenges of managing an online business

Managing an online business is hard as it is rewarding. Business opportunists strive to establish their names and be the predominant force behind major internet niche that presents an opportunity to profit. But like any wise investor would tell you “The fear of failure sometimes clouds even the wisest decision”. Fear that comes from unstable markets and ruthless, often overwhelming competition. For your investment to pay off (especially in the long run), a good management official must be appointed to carry out important decisions and keep a close vigilance over what goes on in the company.

Whether you are in retail, direct sales or in the service sector, chances are you are not the first person to open up a firm. Even the most obscure niche is bound to have at least 2 major brands competing for first place; and you are left to warm the benches. Establishing your brand and breaking thought the monopoly is certainly no easy task. But everything can be done with the right man on the job. In the end, however, there is always a chance that you will fail. In fact more than 90% of online businesses don't make it pass their third year. Here are some reasons why:

Challenge Number One: Competitive Market 

The only way one can make it big in this day and age is by being completely original about their ideas. Big business giants like eBay and Amazon where among the first companies to invest in the retail business. And ever since then they have dominated the market, showing no signs of regression or bankruptcy. But we are just scratching the surface here. Alongside big businesses, there are always vicious vultures eating the leftovers. This is an inevitable consequence of the virtual free market system; compelling people from all over the world to invest their money in online prospecting.


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Challenge Number Two: Marketing, Seo And Why It Fails 

The way you market your product online has nothing to do with the way you would market your product in real life. Successful marketing depend on savage and continuous SEO (Search engine Optimization), day in, day out. Let's say you have found the best fine china for just the right price, direct import from India. And you have an actual, working website. You take pictures of all the little porcelain pieces; you dress up your home page to be nice and welcoming. A little tweak here, a little animation there; and of course the countless hours you spent choosing the perfect font for your head banner. You upload your website with the high hopes that it will take off almost immediately, and visualize how are you going to spend your money. But as the days turn into weeks, turn into months you start to realize that something is not quite right. What is not right is that you have absolutely no SEO, and without SEO your website is as good as dead.


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But even if hire some to write content for your website, you still have to use guest blogging; linking etc. which can be a lot of work. And let us not forget that other people are doing the same sort of advertisement; sometimes having whole departments doing just that. You have to beat all those people at their own game, and depends on your commitment, determination and sadly – luck.


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Challenge Number Three: Anonymous Customers And Finding Your Target Market

When you are marketing your products online, you cannot make an accurate statistic relating to the type of customers you are dealing with. Of course if you are selling football equipment, there are going to be a lot more young people buying your wares, and this is normal. But like I said, you cannot be absolutely sure and that is for good which have a very specific target demographic. What about selling products like peanuts, or laptops, or any good that doesn't have defined target consumers? How would you know how to market your product? Of course there are ways around this by using online statistic gathering software and have some sort of a poll to figure this stuff out.

Challenge Number Four: Managing A Team
It is easy being a boss in a building where you have everyone sitting in front of you. But when running an online business, sooner or later you are going to find yourself wondering how can one manage so many people without being there in person. And because your employees don't have a direct supervision official, keeping a close eye on what everybody is doing, corruption and laziness run rampant. Again, you can solve your worries by implementing new software to help you keep track of all the comings and goings of your workers. And just like with any worker, you still have to do everything that is in your power to command respect and demand quality work out of your employees. Setting up interactive work groups is an easy way to keep everything in check.  

Challenge Number Five: Delayed Profits

Usually people get into online marketing to sell good and services more freely, with much larger supply of customers; easier overall management etc. But selling stuff online is not often the best thing to do, especially when it comes to making a quick buck. It might take your business months, even years to start making any worthwhile profits. Of course this is not to say that you won't see any money during that period, it is just it won't be enough to keep you in luxury. Like I mentioned above, your company's success is determined solely on your SEO rating. That goes double for profits. And sometimes SEO might take some time to work, leaving your website among the back-ranks of the Google ranking system. You don't have to get discouraged from trying everything in order to boost your SEO, just no black hat please, this just won't work in a million years. So arm yourself with patience and the profits are bound to show up, sooner or later.


Author Bio:
Rose Finchley provides regular office cleaning but has different plan for her future. After her graduation she want to be a dentist.

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