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What can an online presence do for your small business?

As 2013 approaches, the American small business faces as many challenges as it ever has. Finding the right people, getting fair prices, collecting payments, accessing potential customers, keeping up with demand, finding ways to grow, accessing necessary capital, and affording marketing are all issues that business owners may lose sleep over. However hard it is out there, having a little help can make a big difference! That’s what Socialty is here for. At Socialty we can help you with customer access, leading to new growth, new revenue, and new success! By leveraging social media and letting Socialty help you to manage your company’s online marketing, you can relieve your stress and improve your bottom line.

Perhaps you’ve already set up a Twitter account, a Facebook business page, or maybe you even started a blog. How can you really leverage your Social Media Outlets and make it work for you? How can you use these online tools to attract new customers for your business? Utilizing social media correctly often requires remembering a simple rule of thumb: simply put, your following will mostly include the people who have done business with you. So to encourage repeat business and attract new customers, Socialty can help you set up one, two, or all of the following ideas!

A popular way to leverage social media is an online promotion. Take a product or service and offer a discount to your online fans. Posting a printable 10% off coupon (with the proper maximum value and/or “limited time only” text) could be a great start! Large companies use this kind of incentive to bring customers into their stores and restaurants all the time, and it improves word-of-mouth (“sharing”) advertising from customer to those all-important friends of the customer!

Use your blog or Twitter account to combine a compelling offer with interesting content. If you own a restaurant, for example, you can get Socialty to help you write and publish a weekly message about new menu items. But you could also have an online poll asking for anonymous feedback about a new dish. Or ask followers to suggest improvements, with the best idea tied to a contest or in-store event. Then take pictures and Socialty can “tweet” them to all your online customers.

Always continue to encourage customers to sign up for an e-newsletter or e-mail offers. You can enter the new registrants into a monthly drawing for a free item or discount. Keeping a constant, steady, but unobtrusive amount of information flowing from your business to the social media communities is the key! (And it’s also Socialty’s specialty!) Once established, you want to keep the online relationship active, because whether they’re a daily customer or someone who purchased something once last year, it’s all about the potential return!

Here’s a true story from my own life: as I wrote this blog, I was about to celebrate my birthday. In the back of my mind, I was wondering where my family and I should have a fancy dinner … I logged on to Facebook, and a locally owned restaurant (where I dine infrequently) had announced a menu change. They had shared a .PDF document of their brand-new menu. I viewed it and thought “I’ll have to go back there someday” … but I just went on with my day. A few hours later, I received an e-mail from the same restaurant. It turns out I had filled out my date of birth when I signed up for e-mail offers, and of course, it was an offer for a free entrée! I called my spouse and set up the birthday dinner.

Without these two online social media efforts, would this business be earning money from my family and friends on this occasion? Probably not. It always pays to advertise, and social media can and will provide your business with more and more leads, referrals, and revenue as the years go on.

There are many different methods of using social media to attract people to your business. Contact Socialty and start strengthening your existing online presence today! We help small businesses to utilize all the social media sites and services to improve relationships with customers.

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LinkedIn, It's Here to Stay...

At Socialty, we have a simple, yet elegant, mission: to help small businesses manage their social media campaigns and online reputations. Socialty creates dynamic content, manages your presence and engages users to create word of mouth buzz. We use an online approach that focuses on sites such as, but not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Today let’s take an in-depth look at LinkedIn, one of the fastest-growing social media sites. LinkedIn maintains a specialist approach to social media marketing.

On October 16, LinkedIn held a press conference to announce its new profile page design and other changes, upgrades, and statistics.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner began the event (also streamed online from company headquarters in Mountain View, California) by saying that LinkedIn is “about connecting talent with opportunity at a massive scale.” The social media networking site and its features aren’t “just tools that enable people to find their dream jobs,” Weiner said, “but tools that enable people to be great at the jobs they’re already in.”

The CEO then shared LinkedIn’s company mission statement: “To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” He then emphasized the word professionals, and said that is the context with which LinkedIn creates value for its members as a social media service. Worldwide there is “one social platform – LinkedIn – that has that exclusive focus on a professional context.”

Weiner stated that LinkedIn has over 175 million registered members, and has added 50 million of those in the last year alone. LinkedIn is currently adding an average of 2 new members every second. Interestingly, Brazil has recently become the fourth nation in which more than 10 million LinkedIn members reside. The other top countries are the United States, India, and the United Kingdom.

LinkedIn ultimately helps professionals “connect, find, and be found by other professionals,” said Weiner. It has become “the professional profile of record.”

The CEO pointed out a phenomenon, saying that people update their profiles when they aren’t looking for work. He contrasted this to a traditional resume, which is often only dusted off and updated when a job change is wanted or needed.

Weiner went on to talk about the increasing importance of what LinkedIn calls “mobile solutions,” using the social media site via smartphones and tablet applications, especially via the iPad. He announced that mobile utilization (how often LinkedIn is being accessed by a person using an app) has increased from 10% last year to 23% now. In other words, LinkedIn is being used more and more by people who aren’t necessarily sitting at a desk in an office.

Weiner seemed proud to announce that over one million unique website domains have deployed a “Share On LinkedIn” button. This allows any LinkedIn member to easily post links from interesting or enjoyable online content to their own LinkedIn page, which then is viewable by that member’s professional contacts. Also, thousands of companies are utilizing a button to “Apply With LinkedIn” which makes filling out online job applications easier.

Over the last few months, LinkedIn has improved or introduced several features, said Weiner. He included:

  • A redesigned homepage at http://www.linkedin.com/
  • New capabilities for receiving optional notifications
  • New capabilities and apps for smartphones
  • Apps for the iPad tablet
  • The Endorsements feature (which allows members to vouch for other members who have a certain skill or ability)
  • A feature allowing members to “follow” professional luminaries
  • Long form content publication made affordable/free for those luminaries
  • “Engagement increases” such as status updates, “like” buttons, and the ability to comment on other peoples’ content

The press conference was then turned over to Deep Nishar, Head of Product for LinkedIn. He led off with a statement of the company’s product philosophy. It is to “build insanely brilliant and simple products that change people’s lives.”

Nishar then announced statistics provided by comScore, Inc. (http://www.comscore.com/) – LinkedIn has 135 million unique visitors per month and ranks 26th overall in the entire world (as of August 2012).

One month ago, said Nishar, the site launched a new design for the “LinkedIn Company” pages. It features insights into what is going on at a given company, and potentially it can share fresh information. On one corner of the page, the new design features “How You’re Connected,” listing “First Degree Connections” (people you know), “Second Degree Connections” (people those people know), and total employees of that company who are members of LinkedIn. Nishar added that the new company pages also feature a products section and a careers section, and that currently there are over 2 million “LinkedIn Company” pages.

Nishar then spoke about “LinkedIn Today.” He called it the “defacto professional trade magazine” for members and stated that by utilizing the knowledge of who members are, what members’ networks are, and what industries they are part of, it provides a tailored view of daily news they should be reading. It “gives insight and helps [the members] do [their] jobs today.”

The Product Head then mentioned that LinkedIn recently launched its “Top Leadership Series,” a sort of long-form blog which is being written by “150 of the most powerful business luminaries” from around the world. They represent 11 countries, he added, and they post “about what they care about to share it with the community.” The group includes a Nobel Prize winner and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius” grant winner. The group as a whole has authored 29 books from the New York Times Bestseller List.

Nishar also expressed his pride in the “Endorsements” feature, repeating that LinkedIn is adding 175,000 new profiles per day (about the same as 2 per second), and announced that profiles on the site are now being viewed 25 million times every day.

When you choose to bring your social media campaigns to Socialty, you can definitely count on our company’s expertise to help you to create, freshen up, and then to maintain a dynamic profile page on LinkedIn.

In 2012, it’s more important than ever that you and your company’s interests be represented accurately and honestly on websites such as LinkedIn. Isn’t it time for you to contact us? Then you can “Keep Social and Carry On!”

Watch the entire press conference at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqfefJ6SYTk&feature=plcp

Keywords: LinkedIn, members, social media, professional, socialty, connections, page design, media campaigns

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