Category: Social Media

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Are You Losing Customers Because of Facebook?

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Your Customers Are On Facebook!

If you have 500 or more followers on Facebook, you should be checking your business page once a day for personal messages (PM).

Facebook use is growing and more users are never leaving Facebook; instead using Facebook Messenger or PM’ing a business instead of visiting their website.

As professional Facebook account managers for a number of businesses, we see the type of traffic that comes in on the Facebook control panel. What is surprising is the number of people who will ask a question, ask for a price, request that you call them, or PM them back with more information.

If you never look at your Facebook business page, you’ll be missing all of these potential customer interactions. In fact if you just have a writing service and don’t look or pay your service to look at least once a week, potential customers may simply feel that you are not interested in their business.

The more followers you have and the more active your page is the more frequently you need to be watching Facebook for online messages.

Facebook has some nice message automation tools, but they only work if you enable them and use them. For every account we monitor, we enable an auto responder that includes our clients’ phone number and email address. For many clients we will monitor their message traffic at least once a week and some nearly every day.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by wanting to grow your business and then never checking Facebook – it’s where your prospects and customers are hanging out connecting with friends and family every day. They think that you as a business are there, where they are. Don’t let them find out that you’re not.

Need help with Facebook? Find out about our Facebook writing and management services.

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Where Should You Spend You Money for Online Activities

You can recoveIf your business isn't in recovery yet, where can you trim money?r from a hack.
If your business isn’t in recovery yet, where can you trim money?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one.  Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms.  If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.

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Get on Google+ Guide

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

I consider activity on Google+ important for business owners. The real SEO and search benefits are however not achieved by updating your Google+ Business page, but rather your Google+ personal page.

So, how can you connect with others to start building your Google+ empire and improved rankings for your company website in the organic listings?

Start by making sure the content you write is on target, on topic, and engaging. I use my Google+ page for business and not personal use. Consider doing the same for now.

Work to actively add users to circles and respond when someone adds you to one of their circles. Click +1 and leave comments on posts you find interesting. You’ve simply got to spend some time.

Consider starting a hangout. Well I am still thinking about that one, but have participated in several others and they can be fun. I have just not initiated one.

I personally find that for placement Google+ will be very important. As Google does not allow any automated or scheduled updates to be passed to your Google+ page, you will find the community of business people, legitimate, real and engaging.

Personally, I use Facebook for personal interaction on my locked down private page and Google+ as my face on social networks for business.

If you are using Google+ for your business outreach efforts, make sure to check out our Google+ writing services. They are very cost effective.

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The Power of Social Activity in LinkedIn

Find out how to build your LinkedIn presence.
Find out how to build your LinkedIn presence.

We are seeing more clients start to get active on LinkedIn as a way to boost their business and it makes perfect sense for some industry professionals to really spend some time building their presence there.

For those that are just getting started on using LinkedIn, here are my “power” tips to build your profile and get some “buzz” going.

Be Complete
Make sure your profile is complete. Have a great photo, update your resume, and start posting interesting newsy updates.

Encourage Connection
LinkedIn is not like Facebook. I would not be overly selective of who friends you. Typically I take all comers except those who look like spammers. I accept all reviews and recommendations from those that offer them.

Post Your Blogs
I like to see users post their blog posts in LinkedIn. A well written blog post can be shared and liked extensively in the LinkedIn network. As not many people are using this feature at this time, it allows your content to be seen.

Connect Your Address Book
I do recommend on set up that you allow LinkedIn to connect your address book and that you try to “friend” people in your existing network who are already on LinkedIn. You’ll find that most business professionals and business owners do have LinkedIn profiles. Leverage this access to start building your presence.

Offer Unique Information
When you post to LinkedIn try to provide a unique piece of content or at the minimum post content at a time that is different than when you feed content out to Facebook or Twitter. I like to provide unique content for LinkedIn that caters to the business community versus content that is geared to the consumer that would typically appear on Facebook. Consider your audience.

If you need help getting going on LinkedIn and want a writer to help to build your presence, make sure to visit our website to review our LinkedIn writing services.