Erik Qualman's Blog, page 494
February 2, 2016
How To Connect With Non-Tech-Savvy Customers In The Age Of Social Media
Social media services like Facebook and Twitter are a wonderful way for businesses to connect with their customers. But this is not an option. As more and more customers use these networks to vent their unhappiness about businesses to their friends and followers, being inactive here could easily spiral these tweets and posts into a customer support nightmare. The onus is thus on businesses to ensure that they are at the top of their game here so that these tools could rather be used as a customer support medium rather than one where you lose reputation.
In an increasingly social world, customer support over Twitter or Facebook is also an opportunity to build a brand reputation. Every support transaction between the business and an unhappy customer is visible to the public – with the right strategy, successful engagements can be transformed into PR opps to build your business reputation.
But how do you go about it when you deal with customers who are not tech savvy? This is particularly true for senior citizens or older industries like law firms and medical labs. In such instances, engagement with customers still happen mostly over telephones and fax lines. Forget social media, a lot of these customers may not have an email ID to begin with. It thus becomes difficult to use the power of social media to connect with such customers. In other cases, while the business may not particularly need social media marketing, they may still prefer support over social networks and emails over phone lines for the lack of sufficient budget to afford a full-time operator or legacy infrastructure like fax machines and 1800 lines.
In both cases, there are a number of ways businesses can use technology to connect with customers who are not tech-savvy. Here are a few options:
Rental Toll-Free Numbers: Gone are the days when only large enterprise businesses could afford toll-free numbers. Thanks to cloud-based service providers like Twilio and Vonage, it is now possible to get your own toll-free number for a monthly fee of just a dollar or two. Since these are accessible over native API tools, it is possible to integrate these calls with your computer so that you will not even require a phone to receive calls. What more, you can also alternatively choose to forward these calls to your own mobile phone so that you can answer support questions over toll-free numbers from anywhere on the go.
IP-Based Legacy Tool Integration: Typically, businesses choose to share documents with customers over email to avoid the hassle of physical documents. But what if your non-tech-savvy customer wants you to ship them those documents? You may either invest in a photocopier, but if that is an expense you want to avoid, you can instead sign up with cloud based fax services like Xmedius or try one of these several options to send physical letters to your customers online.
While the above solutions help you reduce your physical investments, they do not directly help you use social media marketing while serving customers. One way to do this is by using the API provided by these cloud based service providers to connect your engagement with social media so that you may log these offline transactions too as a social media communication. This helps your customers view these multiple channels of support offered while helping you promote your brand as one that commits to the needs of every customer regardless of the channel of support they require. This is a wonderful strategy to not only reduce your support infrastructure expense but also use social media and other technologies to serve all kinds of customers.
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February 1, 2016
Twitter Automation and YOU
Twitter Automation and YOU
If you’re someone interested in or currently involved with online marketing, you’ve likely come to realize that social media plays a huge part in this field. Managing a few different Twitter accounts sounds easy at first, but can quickly become a headache if you want to keep them all thriving. Fortunately, there are a handful of tools out there capable of expediting a lot of the mundane tasks involved with managing marketing related social media accounts.
The History of Twitter Automation
Several years ago when Twitter was first taking the internet by storm, there wasn’t a whole lot out there as far as automation goes – and there wasn’t really a need for it back then either. However, as the platform became more and more popular, it also became a bigger draw for marketing and businesses. Once profits from Twitter traffic entered the picture, automation was quick to follow in order to maximize profits.
A service that really helped bring twitter automation a lot of popularity was one named TweetAdder, which offered black hat methods of automation to boost engagement and popularity for Twitter accounts. Recently, TweetAdder was essentially pronounced dead – or at least the black hat version of it that was extremely useful for Twitter automation is now dead. The death of TweetAdder was mainly a result of recent API changes made by Twitter, which made it much more difficult for the service to do its job effectively.
Even without TweetAdder around, there are still plenty of other services that offer the same things TA once did. There will likely always be some form of Twitter automation around, whether it be something endorsed by Twitter to make things easier without cheating the system, or a black hat service like TweetAdder to boost engagement.
Pros of Twitter Automation
Depending on what type of automation you choose, the pros can vary. With services like Buffer and Hootsuite, you are able to schedule posts on multiple accounts for certain times of the day, which is extremely useful when managing a handful of different profiles. If you choose something similar to what TweetAdder offered, you’ll be able to get followers injected to your account, retweets added to your tweets, and a whole lot more.
Cons of Twitter Automation
Cons definitely exist with Twitter automation, like the fact that automation can negatively affect an account by displaying blatantly obvious fake engagement. However, that can be avoided by using automation tools properly, but it isn’t always that simple of a task to complete. One thing you can’t avoid is a loss of real interaction with your audience, which simply cannot be achieved through automation no matter how hard you try.
As for whether or not the pros outweigh the cons, it really depends on your exact situation and the audience you are trying to reach. If you aren’t trying to achieve personal interactions and genuine user engagement (which is a legitimate strategy for certain types of marketing), automation can be extremely beneficial.
Types of Twitter Automation
There are basically two types of automation and we’ve briefly touched on both throughout this article. First, there are automation services that work within the TOS that simply deal with scheduling and automating manual tasks. Second, there are automation services that ignore the TOS and actually allow you to generate new accounts and send retweets to your main account through the new accounts.
Twitter is constantly cracking down on bots like the latter described form of automation, which makes these somewhat dangerous to use. Using these services in moderation is the best way to avoid getting your accounts banned and effectively throwing your money down the drain.
Choose what is best for you/your audience!
So we’ve covered a lot of information about Twitter automation, and hopefully you’ve got a good grasp on all of the different methods of automation. Remember, there is a pretty clearly defined line between what is perfectly acceptable by Twitter to use, and what goes outside Twitter’s TOS – so be careful if you go down this road.
Now that it’s all said and done, you just need to decide what is going to be best for your target audience. If you have an audience that is going to require a more one-on-one connection with real engagement, you may want to stay away from Twitter automation. On the other hand, if you’re trying to get a link out to as many people as possible, or grow your account to have a massive list of followers – automation may be worth checking out.
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Common Mistakes When Promoting Financial Services Through Social Media
Nowadays, all companies can benefit from social media exposure. This is quite obvious. The problem is that there are some industries that have to be extremely careful when they use social media. The freedom that is associated with what people say and where they say it can easily lead towards having the brand negatively affected by its online social presence when it is improper.
While there are so many things that can be said about how to optimize a digital marketing campaign, in this particular scenario we should focus on mistakes that are done as financial services are promoted through social media. This will help us to move in the right direction and build something proper.
Image source: pixabay.com
Over-Promotion Of Financial Services
Facebook and Twitter followers do not want to see the same financial services promoted over and over again. They actually see this as spam. They will like your Facebook page and follow your Twitter account only in order to learn new things about the industry. Because of this, what you post needs to be informative.
Many companies tend to promote just their services online. This will never be effective. You want to be focused on the quality of the posts and try to educate the followers. This is how trust is created and that will help you to eventually get new leads through social media.
Lack Of Communication
At the moment, the internet is filled with numerous debt collection scams. One characteristic that is shared by the dishonest lenders is an improper online communication with followers on social media. You want to communicate with your followers in a proper way.
As an example, let’s say that someone says a negative thing about your service. The bad approach is to delete the comment and try to hide it. The correct approach is to talk with the person so that everyone sees what the company behind the page says. When people see this, they see the company as having a human side. That is something that you surely want to see as it drastically increases conversion rates.
Improper Use Of Post Types
In order to have a proper online presence, you need to use the most effective post types but that does not mean that you should use only one type. Many financial services are promoted only with photos. This can bring in good exposure because of the viral potential but you want to take advantage of all the other options that are available. You can also use videos and even share links for articles that are highly informational.
Keep in mind that every single post type on social media channels can bring in great conversions when used in a particular way. Since we talked about images, when they are only featuring financial quotes, they will not help much. In this case you want to also share advice and even add something funny that is related to the type of service that you offer. A proper mixture of posts that are used properly will bring in the results that you are interested in gaining through social media.
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January 28, 2016
7 Worst Mistakes That Are Eating Up Your Content Marketing Success
We’re all rushing to create piles and piles of content to serve our customers, upkeep an online image, and create more brand awareness. Despite that, few organizations have it really figured out when it comes to content marketing. The people they’ve targeted aren’t “taking action”. Visitors come and go and analytics aren’t as great as they should be. What could have gone wrong??
Content marketing is a tricky game and unfortunately, there are a number of ways you could mess up your content marketing success. Here are some of the worst and most common mistakes made by content marketers that you should avoid making.
Not Writing up Your Goals and Plans: First of all, you need have clear goals and content marketing strategies to begin with. Secondly, you need to make sure you outline and document and every single one of these goals on paper. The importance of taking this step is to have a clear idea of what worked, what didn’t work, how long it took to work, etc. Not only will you know which goals to focus on currently, but you will also have clear idea of when to change your methods and stick to the ones that are actually working.
Not Being Consistent: Whether you are writing up blog posts, uploading a fresh stream of videos, or promoting a new product, it has to be consistent! They say consistency is the key – and in this case, it couldn’t be put more accurately. It takes months, maybe even several years, to create regular fans of content and not being consistent means that you’re not being predictable enough for your loyal fans to come back regularly.
Not Providing Value: If you’re too focused on sales and conversions, you’re missing the point. Content marketing cannot be all about your company and fulfilling company needs. Agreed, that this is the “ultimate goal”, however, that’s not how it should seem to your online visitors. Get rid of excessively promotional content because that is a major turn off for an online audience. Instead, focus on providing value to customers by knowing exactly what they care about. What issues, challenges, and problems does this target audience face? What makes them tick? Choose those topics and write inspiring content that somehow solves, addresses, or capitalizes on these issues, ideas, or topics.
Choosing Only One Form of Content: Sharing inspirational blog posts is definitely a plus for content marketing, but since online visitors are particularly fond of diversity, it’s not always enough. The idea behind content marketing is not only to craft large chunks of text, contrary to what many amateurs may think. Quality content can be in the form of videos, images, infographics, and other forms of visual content. A large portion of online visitors prefer visual content to readable forms content. By ignoring that lump of potential visitors, you run the risk of alienating them completely.
Participating on Every Social Media Platform: Believe it or not, but content marketers actually run the risk of damaging business reputation by signing up for more networks than they can manage. Trying to occupy as much “social media space” as possible is an overwhelming and ineffective strategy. Not every social media platform is best for a particular business.
Instead start out with just one or two social media network(s). Give some time, thought, and consideration to answer questions such as, “How does this platform contribute to my end goals?” and “where would I expect to find my target audience?”. Pick one that fits the needs of your business and customers best. Posting frequently and consistently on those selected networks is important to ensure that your customers stay in the loop.
Ignoring Your Customer’s Questions: Ask yourself what could your target audience want to know—not from About.com or Wikipedia—but from you and you only? These are the topics, problems, or questions you should be addressing. For example, if your business provides auto-repair service to customers, you may write about the latest car event, which is fine. But there are some crucial questions your customers may have about your business which should be a number one priority. For example, they might want to know about your service plans, how long a certain repair service would take, or who you’ve partnered with for your products. Never ignore this type of useful, valuable, and audience-oriented content.
Promoting Only Once:There is no rule that says you have to share a certain piece of content only once. Given that your subscribers could be following tons of other individuals as well, there is no guarantee that your message has been heard by all of your followers. Consequently, there is nothing wrong with giving your blog post or video a second or third round. Share it in different ways on different times, using different platforms. Share it again a month later. There’s no reason to put down a valuable piece of content just because has already been shared once.
Sharen Stuart: Sharon Stuart is an executive at Dissertation Mall, a company that offers dissertation help in the UK. She’s a multi-talented person having both passion and skills in fields like writing, designing and painting.
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January 27, 2016
Success In A Snap: How Small Businesses Can Make Snapchat Work
It’s a new year and that means time for businesses to reconsider old strategies and implement new ones to keep up with changing times. This is especially true when it comes to social media strategy since the field changes so quickly.
Snapchat is all the buzz with teenagers, but does your business know how to use this social media tool? The app allows users to send creative image and video messages that disappear after they’re viewed. Currently boasting 100 million active users each day (mainly between 13 and 37 years old), Snapchat is a promising platform for reaching the younger generation. If this is your target demographic, it’s time to learn the ins and outs of this app.
Craft A Narrative
One way that small businesses can use Snapchat to attract business is by telling a great story. Snaps, as messages on the site are called, a brief, but this allows you to break your story down into bite size pieces. The key is not to overcomplicate each snap. Let each one tell a small part and spread them out – you can tell the story over the course of a day or a week, drawing the recipients along with you.
Offer Sneak Peeks
Much like other photo and video formats, one of the strengths of Snapchat is that it can be used to offer a behind the scenes look at your business. Take your cameras into the production area or the packaging line or grab candid moments in a staff meeting. Part of what makes social media effective in the broadest sense is the feeling of personal connection it allows users to have with a company.
Join The In Crowd
Your choice of social media platforms says a lot about who your company is. Favor Pinterest over Tumblr? Then you may find yourself talking to more moms than teens and far more women than men. So what does using Snapchat say about your company?
Because its user demographic is primarily on the younger side, Snapchat can help you build a reputation as a cool company. It signals that you’ve kept up with the times and understand the youth, even if your initial attempts are a bit clunky. If you haven’t got someone young enough to know the ins and outs of this platform on board already, consider sending intra-office snaps among colleagues to get the hang of this platform.
Keep It PG
While your social media presence should be kept fairly family friendly, this is especially important with platforms that attract younger users. After all, remember when you were the younger sibling tagging along after your older brother or sister? You wanted to do everything they did. The same is true of Snapchat.
If you’re familiar with using Instagram, then you can take a similar tack with Snapchat. These two sites are both populated by younger kids, so keeping it PG will keep you in the good graces of their parents and make sure that everyone understands your jokes.
One, Two, Three, Snap!
2016 is the moment to unveil your Snapchat strategy, even if you feel like Snapchat has just been unveiled to you. Luckily the app is pretty self-explanatory so you won’t spend months trying to figure out the quirks. Download this app, send your coworkers a few snaps, and become that cool company that totally understands the youth.
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January 26, 2016
Identity Theft is No Small Problem for Your Business
Ask a small business owner what some of their greatest fears are in running their companies and they could probably fire-off a litany of items in just a few minutes.
When it comes to running a small company, there are tasks such as making the right hires, keeping the budget in order, making sure your customers get top-notch service, and growing at a pace where you don’t grow too fast or too slow.
With that in mind, how concerned should you as a small business owner be about identity theft?
Cyber-criminals Can Strike in Short Amount of Time
While you have hopefully avoided becoming an identity theft victim, your small business can always be looking to do more to prevent such crimes, along with reacting quickly and effectively if they do happen.
Among the tricks to deploy:
Hiring the right talent – Keeping identity theft at bay starts with hiring the right talent, especially when running a smaller company. Keep in mind that many smaller companies have employees handling multiple tasks. As a result, your workers could have their hands in a number of areas, leaving them with more work to do online. The more time workers are online, the more opportunities there are for identity theft thieves to strike. That online time also likely includes surfing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. With that in mind, make sure your employees are not divulging personal company or customer information during their social visits. Something as innocent as “we leave the back office door unlocked during the daytime” to “many of our clients gross more than $200,ooo a year” put out in a tweet, share etc. can be picked up by people who have bad intentions and are monitoring social sites. It is also important that you hire employees who come with clean records, meaning no brushes with the law and those not trashing former employers in person or on social networks. While not set in stone, individuals who come to you with checkered pasts can prove to be a higher risk if you take them in as an employee. Lastly, it never hurts to have more than one employee overseeing important areas like billing, handling client accounts etc. That way, you lower the risk of one of your workers taking pertinent company information (for themselves or spreading it on social sites) and using it for financial gain;
Securing usernames and passwords – It sounds like a simple thing to do, but just how safe are your company-issued passwords and usernames? To lessen the prospects of your Internet security being violated, it is vital that you safeguard such sensitive information just as you would do with home computers. Never allow employees to share such information, especially with those outside the company. You may also be working with independent contractors who have administrative access to your website. As a result, they might be able to access client or company data, client or company email addresses and more. When this occurs, make sure you are dealing with trusted workers and trusted techniques to protect usernames and passwords from identity theft criminals;
Responding decisively – In the event your small business does fall victim to cyber-crimes, don’t panic. In order to effectively respond to the needs of your business and your customers, deal with the problem/s in a cool and collective manner. Your clients will want to see action that demonstrates solving the problem and not leaving them hanging. With all the identity theft stories in the media in recent years, the companies typically who come out of the incidents the best are those who rectify the matter as soon as possible, along with keeping customers updated about how to fix matters and better protect against such cyber-attacks in the future. Using social media to soon announce that the problem has been rectified (without going into specific measures taken and/or security protocols) will go a long way in calming the fears of your customers;
Review security procedures – Even if your small business does not fall victim to identity theft, you should always be reviewing the security procedures you do (and do not) have in place to see where improvements can be made. Take note that cyber-criminals are always looking to stay one step ahead of both the business owner and law enforcement, so it is up to you (and your web hosting provider) to keep such thieves at bay. Along with reviewing your security procedures, have occasional staff meetings and get input from your employees on how to better avoid cyber-attacks. Since your employees are essentially your frontline against such attacks, their feedback can prove invaluable. Finally, never look at money spent on cyber security as a waste of valuable financial resources. You have to remember that just one successful cyber-attack (on your website or through social media errors on the part of one or more of your employees) against your small business can lead to sizable financial losses, the divulging of proprietary information, and bad PR. Yes, you may think you’re spending too much right now in identity theft prevention measures, but do you really want to find out the true cost of just one successful attack against your brand?
While having a website and a presence on social media is all but a must for many small businesses these days, do it in an educated and secure way to make sure you’re not the next identity theft victim.
Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com
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How Your Slow Website Burns a Hole in Your Pocket
How well you are perceived as a credible business, largely depends on the way your website performs. You might have an excellent product and with serious amount of operating time in your space but it still doesn’t guarantee an eternal spree to your business.
Putting together a website to characterize your business and services brings in additional responsibility to maintain it at all times. Maintenance has to do more than just ensuring that your website is up 24 hours. The website loading speed is even more important as a poor performance defeats the entire purpose of setting up one.
Slow loading websites not just lead to substandard user experience, low traffic and customer freedom but also results in less conversions and poor sales.
Though you might have a dedicated team to analyze your sales; however the causing pattern is generally incomprehensible and the scope and measures to catch up on a fix, primarily revolve around poor sales strategies and product deformity.
A clear assessment on how your slow website impacts you from all corners, would clearly help you to retain those fewer pennies in your pocket. Let’s have a look at the infographic -
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New Snapchat Update 2016: Audio, Video & Stickers
When you send a snap to the wrong person…..
Oh Snap. Some developers recently stumbled upon what the latest update for Snapchat will look like and it brings it closer to Facebook Messenger in terms of audio, video and stickers. A new design that’s much easier to navigate appears in the works. The chat feature now has the ability to show the entire conversation. Before this, each message would disappear..That’s why people used snapchat in the first place so they could snark & sext without worry.
The update also enables users to video and audio call, and provides a more fluid way for you to choose pics on your camera roll from Sushi roll to Selfie roll. The new features don’t necessarily mean they’ll be available to normal folk anytime soon, but things can change in a snap. (Source Mashable)
Netflix and Amazon Wars to Heat Up in 2016.
Amazon announced last year that they’re jumping in on the streaming bandwagon and this year at the Sundance Film Festival they definitely made it rain Amazon style. Amazon rain dropped $10 million for the streaming rights to “Manchester by the Sea” an emotional film starring Casey Affleck that everyone is talking about. Netflix bought the rights for “The Fundamentals of Caring” a much anticipated drama with comedian Paul Rudd. Ding, ding, onto round two.
Intelligent Automation
According to Accenture, the trend to watch this year is intelligent automation. Accenture’s report indicates robots, IBM Watson and drones won’t replace humans but will be our co-workers. Accenture posits this could help reduce the time it takes a pharmaceutical drug to get to market from 14 years to 7 years and impact 10 million instead of 10,000. R2D2 as a drug pusher – may the force be with us. (Source Venture Beat)
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How to Harness the Power of Social Media in your Job Search
Gone are the days when looking for a new role meant trawling through a newspaper or even browsing a recruitment website. Now you can use the power of social media to bring the right job direct to you. However, there is a little work to do first to make your search more effective. Let’s look at three of the key sites, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and see how you can use them in differing ways to find that perfect position.
Facebook is the place where the majority of us interact with friends and family and therefore it’s a great way to find those word-of-mouth jobs which may not even have been advertised yet. One word of caution here which is true of all the social media platforms, but maybe even more so of Facebook, is that just as we can find jobs through social media, so companies can find out more about us. If you have a tendency to publicise your private life on Facebook, including photos of social events which might be better off forgotten, bear in mind that external sources can view this information unless you tighten your privacy settings. In addition, if you are friends with anyone at your present company on Facebook it may become apparent to your colleagues and even your boss you are looking for a new job.
If you hold no such concerns then actively use Facebook to find new vacancies via friends and family and let as many people as possible know you are seeking a new role; as they can then spread the word to their own network. You can also join Facebook groups for your local area as vacancies will often be added here early in the recruitment process.
Twitter is a great place to keep up to date with your industry’s news and to follow brands who you may be interested in working for. Many companies will even advertise their vacancies across Twitter via regular updates; in fact it’s often the first place to be updated when a vacancy goes live, so this gives you the ability to be amongst the early applicants.
Twitter also allows you to easily carry out background research and to find out more about the businesses you apply to. This is essential as you will doubtless be asked about your company knowledge should you progress to interview stage. To find the most up-to-date information follow the profiles of a few people at the company, especially if you can find a member of the department you would like to work for.
LinkedIn is probably the social media platform that most people think of first when they are looking for new employment. This is a platform which values real life knowledge of someone, so try to connect with as many past and present colleagues as possible. You can also write recommendations for people you have worked with directly and this will often prompt them to do the same for you, a big benefit when it comes to prospective employers viewing your profile.
It is essential that your LinkedIn profile is completed as fully as possible. Add detail for every job on your CV and always include what you as an individual will bring to a role. It’s also important to include details of your education. Here, you should go into as much depth as possible about each level of education and the skills that you have taken from it. For example, someone that has undertaken a part time business degree, should explain how this enabled them to learn the theoretical side of business, whilst also gaining hands on experience whilst working alongside their degree.
Social media is a great way to find a new job, as instead of passively sitting back and waiting for the right position to be advertised, you can actively network and look for your next step, even while you are still employed at your present company. The biggest benefit of all is that it takes the power out of the hands of the recruiters and hands it squarely to you.
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January 25, 2016
Make Winter Great Again…
Make Winter Great Again…
That’s what Donald Trump is probably saying after Blizzard Jonas hit the Northeast this weekend. Everyone else was saying #Snowzilla – trending on Twitter of course. The storm was so intense it was even spotted from space. This will be New York’s first blizzard and the largest snowstorm on record for some of the east coast locations. “Every state that picked up some snowfall is going to be looking at refreezing every night,” CNN meteorologist Tom Sater said. Transportation bans and flight cancellations will be on lockdown today. College students, Netflix and the Weather Channel are the only ones happy about this.. For the rest of us we can watch a timelapse of Blizzard Jonas here. (Source ABC News)
What to say When a Pregnant Lady Just Got Told What to Do…
Please don’t hurt me. That’s also what you’ll be saying if you’re planning on travelling to Brazil or El Salvador any time soon. The countries are asking women not to become pregnant until 2018 because the Zika virus is on the loose! More than 20 countries have confirmed the virus and now it has begun to spread to the U.S. The Zika virus is caused by mosquito bites and the symptoms range from joint pain, rash and a fever to microcephaly in babies. Microcephaly has affected around 3,800 babies in Brazil which could cause a lifelong cognitive impairment. Guillain-Barre syndrome has been confirmed as another symptom, which causes paralysis in adults. (Source U.S. News)
What to Say to Your Hovering Boyfriend
Well at least you didn’t explode. Turns out Hoverboard sales aren’t the only thing exploding. The boards themselves are exploding and in some instances catching the riders on fire and in others burning down houses. We don’t remember Marty McFly catching on fire in Back to the Future… more to come on this one and the main company Swagway. If the name Swagway reminds you of Segway – the pioneers in the space – it might be that you are the cop riding the old version in the airport.
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