Picked up this article from Mashable and it is great news
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
Social Media sites are always changing their features, benefits and more. Recently I planned a teleseminar and set up a Facebook Events page as part of the promotion. I also invested in a Facebook Ad for the event and the ad took people to the my Events Page. For this campaign that ad was successful. I could track people confirming their attendance for the event.
I implemented a comprehensive marketing plan for this event and that resulted in nearly 1,500 people registering for the event. About 500 registered on the Facebook Event Page. So watching these stats I was feeling good about the results especially since most people don’t come near driving that many people to an teleseminar. 24 hours before the event I went to message all who registered with the information on how to connect. BAM!! …I discovered I was not able to message the 500 people who registered for the event on the Facebook Events Page…Major disappointment.
Next Time
1. I continue to recommend building groups. I don’t advise against fan pages. However, groups still receive my highest recommendation.
2. I continue to recommend positioning messages where you can communicate with those interested in your offer. Find them using Twitter and Facebook.
3. Don’t waste your time on Facebook Events unless they change and you can message those registering. This was a feature that was active in the past and I do not see it active now.
4. Use Twitter as part of your strategy to drive those interested to a squeeze page for your event. You squeeze page should be set up for name and email capture into your auto responder.
5. Be sure to set up you teleseminar so it is recorded and have an offer so people can still register after the live event is over.
6. I am cautiously recommending Facebook ads. There is some typical marketing hype going around about Facebook Ads including at least one course for several thousand dollars on Facebook Ads. Hold onto your wallet.
This the kind of stuff speakers tell you from the front of the stage where you have paid hundreds and maybe thousands to hear. So here it is for no charge . How cool is that?
Steve Pohlit
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
First the most important point: anyone using ATT or Verizon saves money right now. How is that relevant to a business devoted to social media marketing and social media network building?
Most likely you are using an iPhone or some other smart phone device for connecting to the Internet, retrieving email, posting to Facebook, Twitter and more plus watching YouTube videos. The device (iPhone, Droid, Nexus, Blackberry …more) is a tool that has just become less costly.
I am very happy about that and remember when the base charges drop so do the taxes and fees on the services you have. I know I am saving money now and you are too if you take action
As read on Mashable:
If you thought AT&T and Verizon weren’t at war already, today will change your mind. In an effort to undercut each other, both networks have dropped the prices of their unlimited voice plans, including the unlimited plans of iPhone owners (but with a caveat).
Verizon was the first to strike. Earlier today they revealed a new set of nationwide plans for unlimited talk and text. An Unlimited Talk plan now costs $69.99, a full $29 cheaper per month. Unlimited Talk and Text now costs $89.99. Family plans and low-end data plans have also been overhauled (the $19.99 3G data package no longer exists). These new prices will not impact existing customers unless they change their plans (which requires no contract extension or penalty).
It didn’t take long for AT&T to respond, though. It just announced its own price cuts, matching the price of Verizon’s unlimited voice plan ($69.99) and unlimited talk and text ($89.99). The iPhone, labeled by AT&T as a smartphone, costs $99.99 for unlimited voice and data, while texting plans remain unchanged ($20 for unlimited). And just like Verizon, AT&T customers can switch to these new plans, starting on Monday, without penalty or contract extension.
Click Here for the remainder of the article:
Steve Pohlit
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
This is very well done and worth the time to review.
Mashable published an article titled “4 Surprising Google Wave Uses”
“Four uses in particular have stood out for their cleverness and high fun factor, and you probably didn’t see any of them coming. …. if you’ve been following Wave closely you might have heard of them.”
The jury is still out on Google Wave and I think part of that is because it is in beta and at most 1 million people have activated it and far fewer have really taken it for a test drive. I never underestimate Google so while time will tell on how Wave evolves check out the examples reported by Mashable. Click Here
To Your Success,
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
“Comscore worldwide data says Digg, Twitter and Facebook have 32 million, 58 million and 411 million unique monthly visitors (September 2009), respectively. Google Trends says much the same thing.” (As reported by Tech Crunch)
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I love scanning the comments when an article like this hits. People write about what they love, what they don’t love and some write as to how long these sites will be around. For me that is not a good use of my energy.
What I focus on and help New Digital Media clients to focus on is how best to use these major sites for maximum benefit. That is the key. Social media helps me and my clients expand business. In the process we make new friends. I love both results.
To Your Success,
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
For the full article by Tech Crunch Click Here
If you follow the keyword Google on Twitter, you will notice an ongoing buzz about Google Wave. This is the social networking application in beta from Google.
There are people who are testing this now and several sites that say they have complimentary invites to distribute are using name capture squeeze pages to entice you. We see no compelling reason to be overly interested in this pre-launch. However, we have been tracking ideas on how Wave might be used.
This article has some very good ideas for applying the features of Google Wave submitted by people in a variety of jobs. If you have been wondering what the Google Wave buzz is about or just curious how others are thinking about using this application, click here for this article.
To Your Success,
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
It is reported Twitter “randomly” selected about 1000 users to beta test the soon to be released build your list feature. The exact number of Twitter users seems to be elusive. It is likely more than 10 million. So don’t be discouraged if you were not a beta tester.
Several high profile people and companies who were “randomly” selected like Mashable and Tech Crunch have written reports on this latest development. Here are links to those that I have found most useful to date:
The following article has screen shots:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/15/breaking-twitter-begins-lists-rollout/
I recommend reading this last as it is more detailed and will make sense after you read the first two.
http://scobleizer.posterous.com/twitter-lists-limitations-bugs-impact-and-bri
Other
Check out the news feeds to the right. Interesting headlines.
To Your Success,
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
If you are on line for business and you are building a social network for business, you are nuts if you are not including a contact capture form on every page you are intending for people to visit.
The reason that is important is to go to the next step in strengthening the relationship you are developing on social sites, you want to be able to deliver valuable content to the email boxes of those who are interested in your material. You spark interest in your material using your social media network, then you provide more value in the sequential delivery of information typically by email. Even on places like Facebook where you can message members of a group, use techniques to invite those members to a report or article where you have a chance of having them offer you their contact information. That list is a major asset in any business.
There are some techniques you need to know in order to implement lead capture properly and cultivate your list. Most of those involve knowing how to set up your lead capture page and then developing an autoresponder sequence that converts your list to buyers.
Even if your social network is well developed, all businesses need traffic. Most marketers are under the impression that they MUST get their website ranked high in Google to get lots of traffic. But it’s just not so! Not that getting high search engine listings is a bad thing, but imagine if you could get hundreds, or even thousands, of visitors to your website DAILY… and Google had nothing to do with it?
Here is a system you can copy that produced 2,000 visitors, 600+ leads and $314.00 in one day… without ANY help from Google! You may NEVER have to worry about SEO, backlinks or PPC again: http://bit.ly/1iCONk And the BEST part? It’s running as a Wacky Weekend DIMESALE! The price is going up constantly but if you hurry you can grab it for … well, you don’t believe me if I tell you, so just head over and see for yourself: http://bit.ly/1iCONk
To Your Success,
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc
“Building Social Media Networks That Build Revenue and Profits”
How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business
The tools available to market products and services are numerous. Direct response marketing, Internet marketing, brand awareness campaigns and more are all labels for marketing programs. In every case, the goal is the same…increase revenue and profits.
My experience working with companies to grow profits is extensive. (Click Here for my resume) I have developed my views on marketing from actual experience implementing programs, monitoring the results and continuously testing ideas to improve response rates and profitability. Social media is phrase representing an ever increasing number of places people congregate. Social media marketing is just that..marketing to people using social media sites.
There are a number of credible people holding seminars, selling courses and offering consulting on how to do social media marketing. My recommendation to business is to focus on your business. My company will build your social media network and I will work with you to develop and implement your social media marketing program. These are two very distinctly separate tasks.
How we build a social media network is based on my actual results in developing several of my own business ventures and providing these services to clients. I have personally done the social media work staring February 2008 . Since that time I completed the detailed steps. I will highlight some of them in this article. From this experience I recommend what steps you should leverage to others and the tools I feel are a must have for developing your network. This is for people very serious about using social media as a business building tool.
Key Marketing Principle Reviewed
Marketing is primarily about attracting traffic to your offer and converting that traffic to customers. Many know this. Most ignore it. I never ignore it. For clarification it is not just any traffic but relevant traffic. What does relevant traffic mean? It means people already interested in what it is you have to offer.
The late Gary Halbert said if you are selling hamburgers, he would rather have a starving crowd than all the positioning of signs, building, location and all of the other things we normally address in marketing a physical product like hamburgers. It is every marketer’s dream to have a starving crowd. I am no different. The starving crowd is not right outside my door. I need to find them and so do you.
The Cloud
My view of the cloud is simply an image of all the people using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. So when I use the phrase the cloud that is what I mean.
The Goal
Return on investment in time and money is the goal. Sure I work on projects and products where I have expertise and interest. Sure I do things out of curiosity without having any monetization objective, but most of what I do is to drive profitable revenue doing business where I have a high personal interest. When I do this well, I am compensated by the marketplace for providing value. For me spending time on what I enjoy is not work. However, unless there is income flow, my enjoyment of a an area of personal interest is going to expire. Having said that, I will encourage you to make sure your attention span is long enough to allow your business to develop.
To achieve the monetization goal I am developing as large a portion of the cloud as possible that I can reach. I then continuously send messages intended to invite people I am reaching to consider my offer. Related to this goal is my objective to at also have as many people as possible give me their contact information. That action tells me there is some level of interest in what I am offering. For those experienced marketers reading this I am not sending out selling messages. All of the messages are indirect intended to create an interest in wanting more information. Many flavors of messages are used and I am always developing new ones to test.
The Specifics
The work is done by my company New Digital Media, Inc. I work with all clients directly. When the scope of the work is defined some of the tasks that I previously have done personally are leveraged. The staff working wih me is very experienced and they actually develop their own network which I encourage. We share social media network growth tips.
Our primary focus is on growing Twitter and Facebook accounts. Within Facebook we work with client to grow friends and when friends are at a certain level we build a targeted group. As a group is being built we implement a messaging strategy to the group. We are gradually expanding our focus into several other social media sites. However, for now Twitter and Facebook is out primary focus.
The goal of the network is to drive interested people to a landing page or a product sales page. As appropriate, we advocate the destination to be a blog article. As articles are added they serve as desitinations for new messages to the network. In certain cases we will promote a client through our own network which is quite large.
We use a combination of tools to assist us in growing accounts. Most of these tools are used with Twitter. There are no automation tools we use to grow Facebook friends and groups. We use an automation tool to assist us with posting messages to Twitter and Facebook. This tool has the capability to post messages to LinkedIn, MySpace and more. The primary tools we use and recommend if you are doing this work yourself are:
Hummingbird for growing Twiter followers
Tweet Later – message management
Tweep
Blogs – Wordpress format exclusively This Site Shows You How To Set One Up – Free
Each person in the company uses at least two computers. It is not practical to run our automation tools and do our other work on one machine. This can be done but it will affect productivity by at least 50%.
Effectiveness
The following Twitter accounts were developed in six weeks. digialmediabiz 9735 followers. buildprofits 8694 followers So those are a couple examples of accounts growing.
Size of our total network – very large
On Facebook we grew the group Deliberate Creation to over 2,500 members in three weeks. This happens to be a very niche market and we were very pleased with how rapidly this developed.
Return on Investment – we have numerous success stories for ourselves and for clients. However, it has taken quite awhile to systematize what works. Additionally, we are constantly monitoring the rules of the social media sites as they can change and we want to be in compliance. For these reasons, I highly recommend looking at our company to help you grow your network which allows you to focus on growing your business.
Based on Twitter’s current algorithms we can build an account to 10,000 followers in about two months. Facebook has a limit of 5000 friends and it can take 6 months or longer to hit that level. Remember once built, these assets are in place for multiple purposes.
Personally my network is used to market consulting services, New Digital Media and several other ventures. I noticed the most significant improvement in what we do once I developed a laser beam focus on our objective and finding the right staff. Both are in place. The difference between my company and most of the people who are experienced, is we do it for you and hand over the results. Along the way we teach you so you are in a position to continue the process or have us continue. If you are a large company, I will teach your in-house staff how to do this.
Fees and Referrals
Our fees are quoted for each client. I pay referral fees that average 15% of fees collected. This percentage varies depending on the scope of work performed. Currently we have capacity for a limited number of clients. With the marketing we are now doing to create awareness of our services, the door for new clients may close quickly. If you are thinking about working with us, I suggest you contact me now.
Contact Information
Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc.
727-587-7871
Email
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About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies. Steve is business owner and an expert business consultant, direct response and social media marketing and social networking security expert . Steve is focused on helping companies improve their business performance. All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.
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