It’s no surprise that Australian businesses are quickly beginning to use Social Media for marketing their business. Why wouldn’t they?, when Australia ranks among the top in the world for internet usage with users spending around eight hours per month on an average on various Social Media Networks. With so much time being spent on Social Networking Sites, according to statistics provided by OfficingToday, 43% of small businesses now use Social Media to attract new customers.

Virtual meeting & collaboration

Business executives who travel extensively are increasingly turning to the virtual meeting applications that Social Media offers. All they need now is a laptop and an internet connection to hold meetings or collaborate with their suppliers, joint-venture partners or even staff in real time. This is especially important for businesses whose success hinges on virtual collaboration and where reaching people on the go can make the difference between winning and losing a customer. The new generation of business professionals now demands access to Social Media Networks as a prerequisite operating system to conducting business.

Marketing and Managing Reputations

By far the most potent use of Social Media is marketing. According to a Burson-Marsteller study, 65% of the Fortune 100 organisations now use Twitter to reach their customers. 29% of these companies also have a “Like” page on Facebook. Large business such as Sony, Nike and IBM dispense news, updates and initiate conversations with their stakeholders and customers effectively through Social Media. Although senior management place a premium on using their time, they have also embraced Social Media with 30% of CEOs of the top companies now have a Facebook page. Corporate leaders have emerged from their cocoons and are increasingly opening their doors and being accessible through Social Media.

With Social Networking opening opportunities for instant dissemination of positive and negative feedback about companies a single tweet can spread virally through the channel and make or destroy the reputation of the company. Companies are now carefully monitoring their online reputations and the smarter ones are quick to respond with information aimed at damage control so their reputation is not tarnished.

Innovation and knowledge management

Social Media is being used by progressive businesses to source, improve and implement new developments that allow them to deliver outcomes that meet and exceed their customers’ expectations. Delivering outcomes based on Social Media feedback is an innovative way of improving relationships with customers who may otherwise not be positively inclined towards the business.

Most businesses rely on the pool of knowledge that their employees possess to innovate and grow their business. Managing and organising the knowledge can be a challenge, especially with large organisations. Social Media communities overcome this barrier by drawing people with shared interests to contribute to a forum. This knowledge house of information can then be captured and transferred to produce innovative products and services.

Recruitment & Employee engagement

With the era of job for life long gone, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their staff engaged emotionally and intellectually challenged. Social Networks sponsored by companies encourage dialogues between staff and management and help in keeping employees focused on the company’s mission.

Professional social networks such as LinkedIn are an excellent source for recruiting and making business connections. A study by Deloitte has found that 23% of businesses now use social networking as a tool for hiring staff.

While businesses have adapted Social Media in increasing numbers, they have only touched the surface of the innovative ways in which Social Networks can be used. Where most businesses fail is in implementing a tracking mechanism to gauge the success and failure of Social Media initiatives. Once advanced tools are developed to show the correlation between Social Media Marketing initiatives and monetary results, businesses will embrace Social Media the same way they have embraced online marketing to grow their sales.

Flickr is a web site that offers photo sharing and a host of related services for users of any level – beginners to professionals. More than just being a web site, Flickr is a community – one with a very strong and active user base and one of the fastest-growing photo sharing sites on the web. Clearly, Flickr provides an excellent opportunity for the smart, creative small business owner.

Flickr offers one of the largest image archives and communities online and one that is often not targeted because most small businesses aren’t yet good at creating the one thing they need to have credibility in Flickr … high quality non-marketing images.

Once you have some high quality pictures, you can follow these simple steps to market your business using this photo sharing platform.

1. Sharing quality photos – Share good quality photos. While you don’t need a professional photographer, share authentic “real life” photos. Try using a real Digital SLR camera with a high quality lens.
2. Get a “Pro” Account – Getting Flickr “Pro” Account is taking your flickr strategy o next level. When you can upload up to 200 images with free account  you don’t get the “Pro” icon next to your name and your account doesn’t have the same authority for members community.
3. Create Collection Homepages – Flickr photos are arranged into sets and collections. Sets are like photo galleries or albums, and collections group various photo albums together. As you organize your photos, think about how to make each set about a certain them, and then group them together into collections. Once you have a collection homepage, this can be the public URL that you send people to. This way, you could use the same URL even while you add new galleries to the collection each day.
4. Think in thumbnail terms - Sets, collections and individual images are represented by thumbnails. These are the visual elements that need to engage someone before they are inspired to click and delve further into your account. When you take and crop your photos, paying attention to how the thumbnails look matters. More importantly, whenever you create a new set the thumbnail is set by the first image. Make sure you change it to the one that offers the most compelling reason to click and see the rest of the set.
5. Use correct tags - Tagging sometimes seems like the online equivalent of going to the doctor for a check-up, you know you should do it but always manage to put it o_ in place of doing something else first. On Flickr, tags help people find images and tagging your images properly is a necessary step. Use the right descriptive keywords, but also check and see what people are already searching for and see if any of those tags may apply to your images. Aside from direct links, many of your image views on Flickr will likely come from people searching for these tags.
6. Share in real time – One of the most powerful benefits of Flickr is that when you are at an event or something current that people are likely to care about in a particular timeframe, speed of getting photos online matters. If you have a blog, configure it to work with Flickr. If you are using a computer, use the Flickr uploader tool to get your images online faster. The closer to your event you can get your photos up, the more likely it is that people will use them to refer to, share with others and drive traffic to.
7. Join and contribute to groups – Whatever pictures you are taking, it is quite likely that there is a Flickr group with others who are already sharing photos of it. People who are active in Flickr groups tend to also be some of Flickr’s most active members. Joining groups not only lets you be part of a greater community and conversation on a certain theme, it can often give you a direct connection to Flickr users who this really matter. Remember, what you post into a group must be relevant and on topic or else you risk alienating yourself and your brand.
8. Actively promote and approve reuse – Many services, bloggers and media are now using Flickr images to power their own stories and media. Once you start getting your imagery noticed, you will likely start to receive invitations for permission to reuse your photos. This means your photos are gaining traction. Try to approve the requests quickly and encourage more people to use your images … and credit you properly for them, of course.
9. Enable stats – Flickr has a great tool which allows you to get deeper metrics on your photos. With these stats, you can see which ones of your photos proved to be the most popular or shared from person to person, and also what sites are driving people to your photo collections.
10. Build Momentum – Once you start using Flickr to promote your business, the toughest thing can be to keep uploading good content. Doing this means that you need to treat almost every event as a chance to create more images for your gallery, from participating in conferences to everyday life. If you start to use Flickr for marketing, your ongoing challenge will be to avoid having one big spike and then no more activity.

Hot tip:

Search Flickr for photos related to your business and products. You may find that your customers have already been uploading photos — hopefully ones that paint you in a positive light. But they might also be posting photos of the terrible packing you did when shipping items. In addition to marketing, Flickr can sometimes be a good avenue for monitoring what some customers are saying about you

Using YouTube for business is not about creating a profile and uploading a bunch of commercials. There’s a lot more to using as a social media marketing tool.

To reach out to your target audience and keep them coming back to view the videos again, you need to maximise your strategy:

1. Create a specific channel for the videos : People watching your video can subscribe to your channel, and watch all of the videos you have created, as well as your favourites. This means that obviously your videos will be seen more, and people will start searching for your videos by your profile or channel’s name.
2. Optimize your videos : Optimize your videos with the desired keywords and include “comments on” for community discussions.
3. Add new videos : A one-off video will not help your business. It is essential to upload new videos frequently to build an audience.
4. Provide original and interesting content :It’s important to keep in mind when creating the videos that viewers will come back to view the videos again, and share them with their friends, only if the videos are informative, original and interesting.
5. Leverage social media : Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization.
6. Embed the videos in the blog : This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience.
7. Take advantage of YouTube tags; use adjectives to target people searching based on mood; and match your title and description to the tags.
8. Experiment! Don’t be afraid to innovate and experiment. Get creative and have fun. Your audience will love you for it.

Familiar terms on LinkedIn

Connection: Just as the name suggests, this is a person you are connected to. You can view each other’s information.

Network: All your connections

Invite: This is how you “Invite” people to join your network

Recommendations: Getting recommended by your network is a great way to establish credibility. You can get contacts who you know very well to recommend you and in turn reciprocate by recommending them as well.

Making the connections

When searching for people, the people that you see are ordered in terms of their degrees of relationships from you. You will be able to view criteria such as the company they work for, their previous company and so on.

A good place to begin looking is to try and people you know well enough, who have moved from the company they were working at. This is the company you want to do business with, but want to know more about their culture. Ask them why they decided to leave the company. This will give you an insight about how the company operates and how they treat their vendors. If the feedback shows that the company treats their vendors well then they may be worth doing business with.

You can also make some meaningful connections by examining your first level connections and requesting them for introductions to someone you would like to connect to through a LinkedIn message. When connecting to a person this way they will be your second level connection. A good idea is to first work on rekindling the relationship with a first level connection. Invest some time in them and look for an opportunity to be helpful. Most people will feel that they have a need to return the favour, and when the timing is right, they will be happy to introduce you to the decision maker that you are interested in getting touch with.

If you are a former student of a prestigious university or school, look for someone from the same school or university and try to connect with them. It is likely that they are in a position of influence and as your alma mater; they will be more willing to trust you and connect with you.

LinkedIn Groups

Another way to establish some great connections is to join a discussion group related to your industry and participate in discussions.

A LinkedIn group is an online community having a common interest. The groups are free to join, and you can choose to join up to 50 groups from a list of thousands of user-created groups for literally just about anything. Not only do these groups provide you access to connect with and contact fellow group members who could become future partners, employees, investors, customers etc. The groups’ discussion board and news sections can provide more networking opportunities, answers to your questions and insightful advice, tips and support.

LinkedIn groups are unique because they’re special contexts within the world’s largest professional network. Take full advantage of that by clicking through to the people of fellow members, sparking conversations about what they’re working on, and as relationships develop – inviting them to become connections.

Posting news is one of the best ways to participate in groups – it takes less thought and work up front than starting a discussion and groups provide an easy way to get your fellow professionals’ take on an article or blog post… or to gain additional reputation for your take. Post a couple of articles a week that catches your interest while browsing the Web, the newsletters you get, your RSS reader, your Facebook feed, or Twitter. Now that managers can add RSS feeds to their groups, suggest they include your favourite news source or your own brilliant blog.

If you don’t find any groups, you could always create one. Regular participation in LinkedIn discussions will help establish your credibility. You can ask an interesting question or share feedback. Soon you will find that your comments can turn to direct email messages and even phone calls that results in a sale, an opportunity to form a joint venture or any other business relationship.

Hot Tip:

Ask for recommendations from former bosses, partners and co-workers. These testimonials carry weight and provide comfort to prospective partners that you are trustworthy. The more people you get recommendations from, the greater the probability of people willing to join forces with you or ask for your services. Even if you don’t have a connection in a company you want to partner with, you can check out the Company page and find out who in your network is connected to the people in the company that you would like to contact.

Personal Updates

When you write a message on your pro_le it appears on all of your Facebook friends’ Facebook | Friends pages. If you write on somebody’s wall it appears on all of their friend’s home pages.

Group Messages

If you started a group that has 5,000 or less members, as the administrator you can send a message to all of them. The benefit is that the messages are delivered to the members personal in boxes.

Invitations for Events

As administrators of groups, members can send event invitations to Facebook friends and group members.

Business owners can use Facebook to build a list of followers by following a few simple steps:

1. Identify groups that are your prospects or target groups. Look for groups that match your niche and look for prominent systems & technologies within your own business
2. Find leaders and key participants of these groups and use carefully crafted messages to get them to become your friends on Facebook
3. Spend time to track your followers and the people they network with. Note their conversations, style of messages, their topics of interest, even what they don’t write about
4. Join in the conversations and post messages in popular threads.
5. Add friends. Use a friendly, personable message and request people who interact with your Facebook friends to join you on Facebook or on your Fan page.

Hot tip:

By joining groups you can connect with like minded people and post content that is relevant to your market. Search for specific groups using keywords in the search box or click on ‘Groups” on the left side of the news feed.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great alternative to Google Adwords. You can see them on the side bar of all pages other than the home page. Facebook ads allow users to accurately target their market, down to the exact age bracket. Creating an ad is also simple, and all that a user has to do is click on the ‘create ad” link and follow the required steps. Facebook ads are becoming increasingly popular among advertisers as a low cost option to traditional forms of advertising

Fan Pages

Fan Pages are a novel way of promoting your company and inform your target audience about product developments and other important updates. Fan pages help your target market to go beyond the “walls” to find out what your company really represents.

The more interesting the posts on your fan page the more readers will be willing to return to your pages to catch up on your updates. Besides brand updates, write about what’s going on in your once and other things that bring out the human aspects of your business. This is also a great platform for starting discussions and posting photos.

Following the immense success of ‘Twitter Secrets For Your Business’ e-Book last year, Logan Nathan, an Australian based entrepreneur & Social Media Marketing specialist has launched a new e-book titled, “Social Media Secrets For Your Business”.

Since its arrival on the internet marketing scene, Social Media has had a tremendous impact on the way businesses interact with prospects, customers and partners. Social Media Marketing is now a business skill that must be learnt for success in the new economy. Many businesses however have no clue about taking the next step to integrating Social Media into their business.

The proof that social media is influencing the way businesses interact online is clear from the increasing presence of businesses on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube. These platforms were until recently, thought to be the place where teenagers & young adults hang out online. However all of this has now changed.

Social Media Secrets for Your Business takes entrepreneurs and business owners by the hand and unravels the mysteries of what social media is all about, why businesses should embrace this opportunity and the different platforms that can be taken advantage of from planning a social media campaign, to understanding the major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & LinkedIn, the e-book delves deeply into each platform, explaining exactly how each can be integrated into an organisation’s marketing strategy. The e-book also includes the precautions that should be taken to ensure that businesses play by the rules and avoid getting banned by social media platforms.

Logan Nathan is the owner and Managing Director of an award winning company, ICT Internet Presence (or ICTIP). ICTIP has been servicing customers throughout Australia, creating & implementing a number of innovative online initiatives using creative Social Media techniques.
The company has been focusing on ‘Social Media’ and is leading the way in a number of initiatives such as reviewing company websites and putting together online strategies and implementation plans for them. ICTIP demonstrates to companies the exact processes to implement that are practical and measurable.

In addition, Logan is also founder and owner of www.TweetMyEvents.com, which is a Social Media Web Tool released in April 2010 and has quickly increased its popularity within a short period of time.

Logan Nathan also runs a workshop called ‘Social Media for Business’ in Australia and 100+ businesses have undergone the training. Several of these have implemented what they have learnt and reported their success stories to Logan.

Rod Mathews at KSR Smash repairs said “Curiosity got the better of me about Twitter & Social Media. Logan’s workshop was a step-by-step course explaining exactly what to do. Now I really believe that Social Media can help to grow your business and am going full steam to implement what I have learnt.”

The Social Media Secrets for Your Business e-book, Logan says, is a “must have” for entrepreneurs and business owners who wish to implement social media strategies to grow their businesses. Using the step-by-step instructions businesses can now begin to fast-track social media marketing initiatives without relying on hit and miss strategies that have left so many businesses frustrated.

Integration with Paid Search

Considering paid search, it is always important to examine the marketing efforts a business is involved in anyway across the different channels in the company. For instance say a video is being uploaded to a Company’s Website, YouTube or another search engine. In this case paid ads can be used to direct users to the places where the video is housed. From here the users can click on the links to the landing page of the business. This is an easy way to get direct traffic to the page where the business would like the customers to visit.

Creative ways to boost Organic Search

For Organic Search the business can launch a strategic Digg, Delicious or a Social News type campaigns. Another tactic is to engage with bloggers online and encourage them to write about the business which creates content and backlinks. This helps in raising search engine ranking. The other way is to get more involved with the community and create content with links to the business. Social Media is still in its evolution stage and businesses need to have brainstorm sessions to find new ways of integrating it with search. There are no right or wrong answers and the opportunities for search engine optimisation are abundant.

Using Social Media video sites

With the popularity of YouTube and user generated content, there has been a surge in the use of video. Further, users are not just using video sharing sites for fun and entertainment but also as a search engine tool. This provides an excellent opportunity for businesses who should optimise each and every video they send out to these sites with the right title tags and links to their blog or website.

Social Bookmarking is the process of taking the favourite places that a business may have on the web and putting them into one specific place so they can be managed and point others to them. Delicious is one such example where an account can be created and customers or prospects can be directed to these. This is very important because search engines are increasingly picking up on these types of sites, pulling in the information and indexing the originating sites, which helps in raising their organic ranking.

Establishing the right Connections

What many businesses don’t realise is that the scope of Social Media Extends far beyond Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. While it is important to establish a presence in this area, there’s a whole other world in Social Media Marketing. There are a number of blogs, forums and message boards that allow businesses to connect one-to-one with their prospects and customers. This is a great way to use social media to leverage a business’ core competency and optimise the business for search. At the same time finding and connecting with new prospects online.

With Social Media growing at a phenomenal pace there is bound to be a greater impact on search strategies in the coming years. Businesses who embrace Social Media and find creative ways of using this powerful platform will emerge as winners, while those who stick to strategies that worked in the yesteryears will find themselves sinking into oblivion in the internet universe.

Understanding the media and the participants needs

It is easy for business owners to get attracted to Social Media just like a child being drawn to a shiny object. While it is possible to find a way of buying 1000 Twitter followers, this strategy does not merit longevity. How does the business owner know that the followers are interested in what they have to say about your products or services? A business should first understand the audience they are trying to reach and communicate in a language of their customers, not theirs. Just like SEO, you might have keywords that are accurate, but don’t represent the customers’ perception of the business. It is important to find out what customers want in terms of content, information, resources and give it to them.

Developing a unique voice

To find out why some entrepreneurs and business owners find it difficult to communicate effectively using Social Media, while others don’t, it’s important to examine their Behaviour offline. Often people who are unsuccessful in being social online are not social in their day to day lives. Just like an author who finds his or her “voice”, businesses need to find their own social voice. The easiest way to do this is by taking action. By getting on the social media platform, learning the “language” that others are using and then joining the conversation using the same language. Social Media Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have their own set of explicit rules published in Black & White that must be followed. However there are unwritten rules involving social etiquette and other things that are acceptable by group members and others that are not. There’s no way of knowing what these are, without actually participating.

Matching resources to needs

The secret therefore is finding out what others are interested in, their problems & frustrations and finding out how you can use your resources to make it easy for them to get value out of the content that is posted. This is a far better strategy in attracting followers and growing a network than simply buying followers.

Creating content that adds value

Another obstacle that needs to be overcome is content generation. It’s always important to generate fresh content to keep readers coming back to read posts and blogs. Often businesses turn to automation, using software to add content that has already been published elsewhere. The danger here is that it is not possible to develop equity as no value is being added. The way to overcome this obstacle is to leverage crowdsourcing, by building a community where like, minded people can do things that are interesting to them and make it easy for them to connect with each other. Part of that interaction would be your content which would be shared by users which is what you want them to do.

Just like learning any new skill there is a steep learning curve to mastering Social Media. The best way to overcome obstacles is to participate regularly, keep aware of what others are looking for and add provide solutions through value added posts.

Think of social media channels as funnels, with a narrow stem. The purpose of a funnel is simple: to enable liquid or substances to flow into containers with a small opening. They facilitate access and movement.

Your website is the container. Most visitors enter through the wide topical lens of social media channels and exit them to reach your narrow-focus website.

Example: someone searches YouTube for internet marketing videos, finds an original video you uploaded and notice the URL to your website. They click through and visit your site.

All social media funnels are fuelled by your proposition, your bait, your attention magnet; things that captivate interest and pull visitors into the heart of your site. You are responsible for the evolution of visitors from a mere prospect to an engaged opportunity and possibly a closed sale.

Apart from getting traffic and attention for your website, Social Media Marketing also involves the process of promoting and spreading ideas among targeted audiences. Social Media Marketing can also be used as a calculated tactic to nurture feelings or goodwill towards a specific event/website or business.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. While this may be the case at times, don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Social media also brings you the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand. Further, recommendations, editorial links or paid advertisements on social media sites will send you interested individuals and potential customers.

The advent of Web 2, quickly introduced the concept of Social Marketing, which has changed the way businesses go about driving traffic to their websites and blogs. Linking a website to social media channels such a s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter helps marketers get their business categorized correctly by search engines. This results in targeted traffic being driven to the websites.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook, Digg and Twitter rely upon their members who have created RSS feeds so that their visitors can be assured of fresh content.

LinkedIn also has a feature that enables members of a similar interest group to share and critique articles. Further, originators and managers of groups can add an RSS feed or even a URL of a website to share information that is relevant to a particular group.

How to get an RSS feed of a search term on Twitter

Twitter is a great way to keep up with what people are saying about you and your company, but you really don’t need to search Twitter over and over again. Visit the Twitter home page and sign into your account. If you want to see all the Tweets for your own name put in your name and hit search. Once Twitter comes up with the search, hit the RSS feed button for the search query on that page. This will take you to a page which has the feed URL. Copy the URL and paste it into Google reader or any other feed reader that you use, and you will have an updated stream about what people are saying about you, your company, your competition or any search term that you like on Twitter

Twitter as an RSS Feed

Twitter is now increasingly being used in place of RSS aggregators. It is now possible to link your blog to your Twitter account so that readers who read your Tweets can find your website every time you update your blog. For this purpose you would need to set up a free account with a service such as Twitterfeed or Typepad. Using these services will result in tweeting all of updates automatically.

You may also want to exercise the option of Tweeting only certain posts, in which case the manual option will be preferred. For instance you may decide to tweet posts that you have originated and not comments on your original posts. In this case you can log in to your Twitter account and write a tweet with your permalink which will be shortened automatically by Twitter.

Using RSS to For Added Business Exposure

RSS technology can easily be harnessed to increase the exposure of a business on the internet. The advantage of RSS is that it is easy to syndicate all type of information, not just those from blogs. For instance you can have an RSS feed from discussion forums, newsletters, product reviews or just updates for prospects all over the world to look at.

Blogging however is one of the best ways to use RSS as a traffic generation tool. Blogs such as WordPress are simple to install on your website and the quickest way to publishing RSS feeds. Blogs can be categorised by date and topic. There are several RSS directories that can be used to promote blogs, one great reason why it is important to set up an RSS feed.

RSS is an amazing free tool that can be used in conjunction with social media to generate traffic and target prospects that would have otherwise not have heard of your business. Many webmasters now find feeds they are interested in using software programs and post the content on their websites or blogs to keep the sites updated with a view to attract visits from search engines spiders helping to position you as an expert in your niche.