Archive for December, 2011
Author: The Ibis Network Published: December 20th, 2011
In years past, if you wanted to be on top of the newest and latest in social media, you had to be registered on the newest and latest social-media site. Each year brought with it a potato sack stuffed with new sites and platforms that made whatever you’d signed up for last year obsolete. If you were still using MySpace once Facebook came around, you may as well have been sending your status updates via telegram. Which is to say, social media moves quickly and leaves most of us playing catch up. Fortunately, 2011 was not that kind of year.
Here are the top three social-media trends of the past year …
The Leaders of the Pack: Though there will likely always be new social-media sites popping up and begging for your time and attention, this year’s social-media news seemed to focus more on the continued dominance of Facebook and Twitter. If you still think there’s no reason to start a Facebook fan page for your business, ask yourself why companies now include Facebook and Twitter logos on their print and television ads. It’s not that they’re under the impression you can click on the pages of a magazine, it’s that the top social-media sites are increasingly becoming an Internet of their own and businesses want you to know they’re available there too. Everyone from your grandmother to the mom-and-pop shop on the corner has a presence on Facebook and it’s mostly because, when people check in online, that’s where they start. In other words, there are a lot of people on Twitter tweeting about their breakfast but you can also find just about any other information or entertainment that interests you.
Sharing is Caring: The key to social-media success is getting people to share what you’ve posted with their network. Social media is a 21st century word-of-mouth machine and, in order to benefit from an online presence, people have to see it. Having content people want to pass on to their friends and family will boost your reach and your brand. But where are they doing the sharing? Well, Facebook and Twitter, of course. Facebook is responsible for 52.1 percent of all the sharing happening online. That’s a lot, considering the vastness of the Internet. Twitter, on the other hand, makes up only 13.5 percent but grew 576.9 percent this year. Email, print, and favorites came in with 14.4 percent of the sharing taking place over the past year.
Quality Over Quantity: The number of fans or followers you have would seem to be a pretty good indicator of how popular you are online. But consider how many of your online devotees are either inactive or not even a real person. Particularly in business, having thousands of fans and followers but no potential clients may make your ego feel better but won’t do anything for your bottom line. In other words, it’s not the numbers that equal success it’s the number of real-life connections you’ve produced. Sometimes it’s hard to measure whether or not your efforts are being noticed but it only takes one phone call from someone that found you on Facebook to strike up some business. Which, after all, is the point of all this.
The Ibis Network / www.theibisnetwork.com
Tags: Articles, Bran, Dominance, Facebook, Fan Page, Free Loan Officer Training, Free Realtor Training, Free Training, Friends And Family, Grandmother, Josh Millar, Leaders Of The Pack, LinkedIn, Loan Originators, Logos, Marketing, Marketing Tools, Media News, Media Trends, Mom, Mortgage Loan Officers, Mortgage Marketing, Networking Strategy, Platforms, Pop Shop, Potato Sack, Presence, Professional Networking Suite, Realtor Marketing, Realtors, Social Media, Social Networking, St Century, Status Updates, Television Ads, The Ibis Network, Tips, Twitter, Valuable Marketing, Word Of Mouth
Category Networking Strategy, Social Media |
Author: The Ibis Network Published: December 13th, 2011
If you’ve ever been a child, you know that making a mess is far easier than cleaning one up. Which is to say, we’ve all been guilty – at one time or another- of putting off the thankless task of cleaning up after ourselves. Cleaning, however, often exposes things previously hidden by clutter and makes it easier to use what you have. Your Internet presence is no different. Having a social-media presence for your business requires maintenance.
Here are a few tips, hints, and motivations for an end-of-the-year social-media house cleaning …
Google Yourself: It won’t make you an egomaniac to have a look at the results that come up when your name is plugged into any of the more popular online search engines. In fact, it’s an effective way of discovering what appears when a prospective client searches for you or your business. If you run your business’ name through Google or Bing and are embarrassed by the results or find pages with old contact information, you can be sure your prospective clients have seen the same. It’s also a good way of finding the Twitter or Facebook fan page you set up and abandoned a year ago. Have a good look at how you’re being presented online and go to work cleaning and updating your presence.
Be Consistent: Having an Internet presence is one thing. Having a consistent presence is another. If you have multiple social-media pages for your business, make sure you’re presenting yourself in an uniform way. That means, they all have the same contact info, bio, photo, name, addresses, and tone. If you’re “Crazy Eddie”on Facebook but “Edward” on Twitter, you’re likely to confuse anyone searching for you or your services. Having a consistently professional online presence means, no matter where someone finds you on the web, you’re well represented and offering the most up-to-date contact information.
Organize It: Once you’ve had a look at where you’re being represented online and spent some time updating your pages, take the time to organize things and make it easier to maintain in the future. Start by saving all your login and password information in one place. There’s no quicker way to lose motivation for maintaining your social-media presence than to try to repeatedly log in to your profiles only to be turned away because of a forgotten password. Next, link your pages wherever possible. Having your blog posts appear on your LinkedIn page or your tweets on your Facebook page makes it easier to keep everything fresh, consistent, and up-to-date. Once you’ve found your pages, updated your contact info, linked them together, and saved your login information in an easily accessible place, you’ll be better able to communicate with potential customers and take advantage of any available online opportunities.
The Ibis Network / www.theibisnetwork.com
Tags: Articles, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Business Name, Clutter, Consistent Presence, Contact Information, Crazy Eddie, Egomaniac, Facebook, Fan Page, Free Loan Officer Training, Free Realtor Training, Free Training, Google, House Cleaning, Internet Presence, Josh Millar, LinkedIn, Loan Originators, Maintenance, Marketing, Marketing Tools, Media Presence, Mortgage Loan Officers, Mortgage Marketing, Motivations, Nbsp, Networking, Networking Strategy, Networking Suite, Photo Name, Professional Networking Suite, Prospective Client, Prospective Clients, Realtor Marketing, Realtors, Search Engines, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, The Ibis Network, Tips, Tweets, Twitter
Category Networking Strategy, Social Media |
Author: The Ibis Network Published: December 7th, 2011
Predictions are a dangerous business. After all, if they’re wrong, it’s only a matter of time before everyone knows it. Nevertheless, the end of each year brings with it a flood of forecasts, predictions, and crystal-ball gazing gurus who claim to know what will happen in the year ahead. For your convenience, we’ve scoured the web in an effort to collect the experts’ most frequently forecast trends in social-media and email marketing for 2012 …
Email and Social-Media Marketing: A recent survey found that among the marketing programs businesses planned to invest in during the coming year, email and social-media marketing topped the list. And though the edge of the cutting edge will tell you that email is obsolete, everyone uses it – which explains its continued presence on trend lists. More than two-thirds of companies surveyed said they plan on integrating their social-media and email campaigns in 2012 and 47 percent said they would focus on using email to grow their social-media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter pages.
Content Curation: If you have a friend that’s particularly good at finding adorable puppy videos and insists on sending every one of them to everyone in their email address book, you’re already familiar with the concept behind content curation. Which is to say, it’s nothing more than sharing. For business, that means sharing good, relevant content with your fans and followers. When you come across something that would be informative or interesting to your customer base, post a link with an explanatory note. Make it your goal to become a trusted source of quality content. Sure, anyone can do a Google search and find what they want on their own but collecting the best bits and presenting them in one place will save them time and keep ‘em coming back.
Facebook: Facebook is hardly new but the number one social-media site on the web continues to evolve. And that evolution means Facebook will continue to weave itself into the everyday life of their members through new platforms, apps, and smart phone functionality. Once upon a time, merely having a Facebook presence for your business was the trend but now it’s time to take it seriously. Just based on the staggering membership numbers or the fact that it’s the website Americans spend most of their time using, Facebook has become an essential part of any social-media campaign.
Content Marketing: The difference between content marketing and content curation is simply who’s writing the blog posts, composing tweets, and creating videos. So while it’s a good idea to share interesting industry-relevant news with your online network, you’ll also have to create some content on your own. And no, this doesn’t mean you need an audio/video department and a team of former newspaper editors. It means you need to communicate. How and when are up to you.
The Ibis Network / www.theibisnetwork.com
Tags: Adorable Puppy, Articles, Best Bits, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Crystal Ball, Curation, Customer Base, Dangerous Business, Email Address Book, Email Campaigns, Email Marketing, Facebook, Fan Page, Free Loan Officer Training, Free Realtor Training, Free Training, Google, Google Search, Gurus, Josh Millar, LinkedIn, Marketing, Marketing Email, Marketing Programs, Marketing Tools, Matter Of Time, Media Channels, Mortgage Loan Officers, Mortgage Marketing, Networking, Networking Strategy, Networking Suite, Professional Networking Suite, Realtor Marketing, Realtors, Relevant Content, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Survey Found That, The Ibis Network, Tips, Twitter, Valuable Marketing
Category Marketing, Networking Strategy |
