I recently spoke to an audience about the basics and ‘must haves’ of LinkedIn networking and personal branding. My focus was targeted on how an individual can enhance their own professional brand efforts as well as their job hunting and networking efforts.
Poor Alice in Wonderland. She fell down the rabbit hole and it took her days to get out. Not to mention tea parties with weird dudes, a croquet match with a nasty queen and a few conversations with a creepy cat. As a business owner you don’t have time to fall down the rabbit hole of social media, getting all tangled up in conversations and activities that don’t directly support your business. You could spend all day reading Buzzfeed lists, looking at Pinterest ideas or even congratulating people on their LinkedIn accomplishments, but none of that is gonna really do much for your business.
Remember way back when? That was about 30 years ago when content (social and otherwise) was disseminated very differently than it is now. Before the Internet, anything digital, social media, brand campaigns, email and websites, your choices for building your brand and refining your content were television ads, print ads and radio ads; and your social networks were personal Tupperware parties, Avon get-togethers or Amway, among others.
There are a lot of technical facets to location based marketing, aka Geomarketing. But the fact is that the technology exists and it’s growing rapidly in sophistication and availability. The bottom line is that it’s very possible to know where an individual is and serve up an ad based on external factors.
One of the most important things for a business to do is to reach their audience. However, businesses are up against overwhelming odds as the average consumer is bombarded with more than enough information on a daily basis. For those who are active on social media, refreshing the news feed could cause something you saw merely seconds ago at the top of your feed move straight to the bottom of the feed. Taking the necessary first steps in the social media world is paramount, because if you don’t get the basics correct, there’s no way to move on to bigger steps. Once that is achieved, businesses should think of ways to “amplify” their content to get it from being just another message out there on the Internet, to the message everyone is talking about right here, right now.
A major reason for this is that more and more people are turning to the online world to find what they need. This means that you have to be found there. It’s about more than just having a website, too, because that will not automatically make you visible online. You also need to make sure that you are investing in SEO, local marketing, and social media in order to create an online presence that is actually going to work for you.
People give a lot of lip service to the “team” thing, but there really are people who actually deliver on that promise.
Ok, so by now you know your small business needs to make social media part of your marketing plan. But, where to begin? Between the hashtags, followers, pins, posts, blogs, PPC, and SEO it can all be pretty overwhelming. And, surely you’d be great at any or all of these things if you just had the time – but you’ve got a business to run!
We’ve all heard the phrase fast, cheap or good. It’s often discussed when touting the options for levels of service. It makes sense in general, but resonates closer to my thoughts when thinking about web development.