Why Your Company Needs Social Media: Sales, Retention & Customer Service

There are case studies abound of how big brands such as Zappos, Jet Blue, Comcast, etc. have put social media into action and the success that they’ve had with it. Can small businesses be just as successful using social media? Absolutely! There are many advantages of using social media during the sales process for customer service, sales prospecting and customer retention for small businesses.

With the state of the current economy, social media networks are even more critical to companies, especially small businesses. Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Ustream and Youtube, are all extra avenues that a small business has at its fingertips to increase sales.

Here is the top 5 reasons why social media is an important requirement for your companies success.

• Sales Prospecting
• Customer Service
• Sales Retention

If you would like to find out to use social media to connect with your customers click here to read on

Social media is in the limelight right now, and I bet your wondering the best way your business can benefit from it, we have 4 easy steps to get your business on top.

1- Get to Know Your Audience

Social media is full of groups, fan pages, and other things that make it relatively easy to find an audience that is already interested in your topic or industry.

• Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about
• Get a Facebook account if you don’t have one already and look for relevant groups and fan pages.

2- Managing Your Reputation

Social media is a great way to keep an eye on the conversations that are happening online and respond to them. In fact, many companies have employees dedicated to watching the online conversations about their company and addressing them.

• Once again, you can use search.twitter.com to keep an eye on any conversations going on in the world of Twitter that relate to your brand.
• One of the best Social Media Monitoring platform is Buzz Numbers check out what they can do for your businesses reputation

3- Promotions

Promotion is nothing new to the internet, but it hits new levels with social media. If you push the right message through the right channels you can reach a lot of people.

The key here is that you have to already have a lot of connections, especially with people that are willing to push the information to their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for this. If someone finds a story, blog post, or promotion interesting, they can just pass it on by doing a simple Retweet.

4- SEO and Traffic Benefits

Social media is also a great way to have a lot of links built to your site. As a page is promoted on different networks people are going to be linking to it. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs. All of these links can help improve the authority of your site and lead to higher rankings in the search results.

Read more ways social media can help your business

I read Matt Leonard’s post on 10 Ways to be a Great SEO a while back and thought it would be great to put a social spin on it. Without further ado, here are 10 ways you can help build your social network/portfolio.

1. Socialize

Remember when your mom dropped you off for Kindergarten and told you to go make lots of friends? This is essentially the same thing, choose your social portal and use it for the reason it was made: SOCIAL NETWORKING. If you’re working on Twitter, be sure to speak with those you’re following and get to know them. I’d much rather have >1000 followers that I actively engage with than tens or hundreds of thousands of people I’ve never said word one too.

If the social news sites are where your focus is, be sure to network with the friends you find there. Go beyond just voting on their stories, comment and share them with others in your group. Not only will your friends begin to notice, but they’ll reciprocate.

2. Diversify

If your goal is better brand yourself or just simply to network, choose more than just one outlet to do that. Twitter is probably one of the best ways of interacting with your followers, but adding those same connections to Facebook or LinkedIn tends to take that relationship to a different level where you can share connections, photos and more. In my opinion it helps to solidify the friendship that you were building on the other portals.

3. Participate

It’s one thing to have a Twitter or Digg account, it’s another to use them. Twitter currently has over 70% of accounts that are considered “inactive”. I’ve had periods of time where Twitter was the last thing on my mind and with the myriad of ways I could update my status, I just didn’t want to. I feel like I’ve missed out on a bunch of things and have let some relationships stagnate because of those deserted periods.

One way to make your Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon account obsolete is to ignore it. I’ve unfortunately found that out the hard way, but I’ve also talked with many people who’ve had the same problem. Accounts just aren’t as strong and don’t garner the votes they used to when you socialized and participated in the past.

4. Contribute

Sites like Digg and other social news sites wouldn’t even be around with the submissions of its users. I’ll take this a step further and say you should really contribute quality articles (there’s enough spam as it is already). Along with supporting your friends’ accounts, build up your own by constantly looking and submitting good articles. Digg/Reddit/SU users notice someone who submits quality over quantity.

5. Be Real

Whether the account is your own personal one or business’s, don’t be fake…anyone can smell a fake from a mile away. A great example of this is the @10e20 account, there’s a great mixture of comedy, news-worthy links and communication amongst its followers. I gather the added snarkiness has come from bringing @rebeccakelley to the team Be who you are and who you know how to be and you will get REAL followers that want to follow you because of what you say and what you share.

6. Consistency

As I stated above, I highly regret the depressions in usage on Twitter in the past. Hubspot did a pretty interesting article on the optimum number of tweets per day to gain the most followers. While those graphs are nifty, I think this goes back to my previous mention of being real. If you’re a talkative person, tweet to your hearts desire. Don’t feel obligated to tweet/digg/submit a certain amount of times per day because it’s “statistically better”, that’s when things can get sloppy. Find what works best for you and stick with it.

7. Be Meaningful

Above all, the thing that will make you shine the most is to show people that you actually give a crap! So many people out there are trying to reach that 10,000th follower or reach a certain number of front page stories they’ve submitted. My philosophy is, if you continue to do the simple things listed in this article, you’ll eventually get there. It may not be the path that gets you there the quickest, but it’ll be a path filled with meaningful relationships and friends that will gladly share your stories, upvote your submissions, have a conversation with you on Facebook chat or whatever. I love the piece Lisa Barone wrote on How to Be Remembered. It really struck a cord with me not in just networking, but it blogging and client work as well. Make it a priority to genuinely care about the people you’re interacting with and you’ll build more than just a number on a follower’s list.

8. Get Creative

I know this isn’t necessarily the most hyped of the group, but another way to stand out as just another Twitterer or Digg user is to be different. If you’re trying to get the attention of a certain person or group of people, do more than just Retweet their story…make comment on the blog or attempt to strike up a conversation regarding the matter. Take a great story you saw on Digg and submit it to Reddit or Stumbleupon and help to get that story some more attention there through cross-pollination.

Probably one of the best examples of creativity on Twitter is @darthvader’s account! I don’t think I’ve seen a funnier set of tweets for another account than his, taking somewhat of a Robot Chicken-ish approach to his tweets, like this:

9. Monitor

This may be more for a business than for a personal account and probably more so for Twitter than most places, but listen to those who talk to/about you. Comcast did an awesome job of this by creating their slew of Comcast employee accounts as well as the main @comcastcares account. They were able to turn the majority of bad tweets into solutions for those with the issues.

One company that I think has failed in this area is AT&T; (of which I will thankfully no longer be a customer of in 3 hours). Toward the beginning of August, AT&T; was a trending topic on Twitter for nearly 3 weeks straight (on and off). If the tweet wasn’t about the iphone, it was usually something about how AT&T; screwed up their bill, being on the phone with tech support for over an hour or some other negative tweet. Unfortunately, for AT&T;, they have done little, if nothing to quell the barrage of negativity online. And while it may not be a big deal now to a large corporation, I’m sure there will come a time where no company will be safe, large or small.

10. Relevance

Staying relevant can be a key factor in why someone does and does not follow you. It’s understandable to be random on your own personal account, but if you’re looking to brand yourself or your business account, it’s important to share and promote stories within your industry. This will lead to more followers that talk about what you talk about and can help in further promoting your stories and building beneficial relationships with those who you share common interests with.

So there it is…10 ways you can personally become better at social media. Not the standard, by any means, but one that has worked for myself and many others I’ve spoken with. I’d love to hear of any ideas and practices that you have used to better your social accounts. Note that each social portal is different and users on each will likely be
so (like when I was on Plurk a long while back), so find what works best for you.

By Vince Blackham Source: SearchEngineJournal.com

Below are twenty excellent techniques and design elements you can incorporate into your designs to create a beautiful, polished website. Combine them or pick and choose which ones you want to use for each project you do. And we’ve also included plenty of examples to give you real-world examples of how designers are using them to create gorgeous website designs.

1. Vivid Colours
2. Gradients and Lighting Effects
3. Transparency.
4. Grunge.
5. Hand-Drawn Designs.
6. Muted Colors.
7. Watercolor Effects.
8. Nature-Inspired Elements.
9. Photo-Realistic Backgrounds.
10. Oversized Typography.
11. Decorative Typography.
12. Bold Backgrounds.
13. Retro and Vintage Elements.
14. Eye-Catching Headers.
15. Collage Elements.
16. Textured Backgrounds.
17. Tabbed Navigation.
18. Black and White.
19. Horizontal Scrolling.
20. Cartoon Elements.

Have a look at the examples of all 20 Techniques