For a business investing time into doing social media, it’s important that you connect with the locals, because the grassroots approach of social media is all about getting the word out from person to person. By involving the built-in viral aspect of social networking you can gather more viewers and therefore more customers.

So here are 13 ways to connect and interact with local twitterers:

1. 
   Chirp City
2. 
   Twellowhood
3. 
   Geofollow
4. 
   Street Mavens
5. 
   Local Tweeps
6. 
   Happn.in  
7. 
   Twibez  
8. 
   Nearby Tweets
9. 
   Tweetup

If you’re lucky enough to have an iPhone, there are even more tools available to you.

1. Tweetie
2. Twinkle
3. TwitterFon
4. Twitterlator

Start a conversation with the people around you. Use advanced twitter search functions to find people that are interested in your industry or might be in the buying cycle for your product or services and make a connection. The number one rule is don’t be a salesman, be their friend. The last thing Twitter needs is another spammer. Provide quality content and you’ll find that people are eager to join in the conversation.

 Retweet This Post

Retweets are not just an ego booster, it’s a great way to distribute your content to people who are not currently connected to your social networking circle. And for social media marketers, that exactly what you want to do. Depth of content distribution in online marketing is the key to successful branding.

So here’s a list of eight ways to increase your chances of being retweeted.

1. Say something interesting, shocking, informative, funny (be careful about humor + business), or insightful.
2. Make your tweet retweet compatible. If your tweet is 140 characters long that leaves no room for people to reply with your username. So subtract the number of characters in your username and also subtract another 5 characters and that should be the max length of your tweet.
   — For example, our username (@LEVELTWO) is 8 characters long and we’ll take away another 5 characters so that leaves us with 127 characters max length for our tweet.
3. Tweet at prime tweeting hours. Your best bet, no matter what time zone you’re in, would be around lunch time.
4. Ask for retweets. A large percentage of tweets include the words “please retweet” or “pls RT”. While this does look a little desperate, it may be worth it if it leads to more tweeting distribution.
5. Give something away or host a contest. This is easy enough to understand. People love free stuff.
6. Discuss a hot trending topic. News broadcasters get retweeted all the time because they serve up updates as they happen. Jump on the bandwagon and offer breaking news about your industry.
7. Include a link. While being retweeted is a great way to distribute your content, you should offer more information about your topic if possible. Link to a picture or a video, but don’t just link to your own blog if it doesn’t provide vital information about the topic. That’s considered spamming.
8. Thank your retweeters. If you only get a few retweeters then take the time to say thanks, but thank them all in one tweet. If you get more than 10 retweets don’t take the time to thank everyone, just broadcast a general “thanks” to all your fans.

Want to add a tip? Leave us a comment below.
Completely disagree with something we said? Leave your ALL CAPS comment below!

Follow us on Twitter.
Be our friend on Facebook or MySpace.

 Retweet This Post

In marketing (online and offline) there are three basic questions that must be addressed when you are trying to sell a product or service. If you don’t address these basic questions, your website will not be successful.

1. What is it?
2. How can I use it?
3. Why do I need it?

Surprisingly, there are many websites and marketing campaigns that don’t answer these three simple questions. No matter how good your product or service might be, no one will buy it unless you present your message in an easy to understand way.

Here are a few tips to help you more effectively broadcast your marketing message through your website.

1. Micro-message
   Learn a lesson from the success of Twitter, keep your messages short and to the point. Explain “who you are”, “what you’re selling”, and “why they need it” as quickly as possible. Save the longwinded descriptions after they click through to the next page.
2. Multimedia
   Hire a marketing firm to create a 30 second video that explains your products. Even better than short micro-message is a short micro-message that I don’t even have to read!
3. Tunnel vision
   If you offer wide variety of products and services then you should compartmentalize each vertical. Present the visitor with a few options and let them determine what they are interested in and then you can provide more detailed information about the product or service.

A website is never finished. As you draw more visitors you should monitor how they react to your web design. Track where they are leaving your website and make changes to try and curb the visitor drop out. A good website can be your best salesman.

 Retweet This Post

It’s actually very simple to understand why social media marketing works. If you provide quality content using social distribution channels your marketing message is more likely to be viewed, interacted with, and shared.

Viewership
Social media is different (not better, just different) from search engine marketing because you are relying on your customers to perform two actions before you even get a chance to present your message.

1. First they have to actually search for your keyword.
2. Then they have to see and click on your ad.

Social marketing does not rely on your viewers to take an action before your message is delivered. You are distributing your content to them. As they browse Facebook they might notice that a friend of theirs recently became a fan of your product or company. That’s a customer testimony you didn’t even have to ask for!

Interactive
Because your viewers are consuming your content using a platform (Facebook, Twitter, ect) that they already love and feel comfortable with, they are more likely to interact with your message. It is more likely that they will view, comprehend, and comment on your content because rather than pulling them into your website and force feeding them information, you are pushing interesting content to them.

Shareable
The core of social media marketing is housed in the ability for people to share interesting content. Surrounding every memorable video or well written blog post is a plethora of “share” buttons (our own blog, for example, has lots of them). And blogs are structured so that people can send static links directly to the content that they want to share with their friend. The viral factor is a natural phenomenon.

In summary, your viewers are more likely to see, interact, and share you social content because that’s what social networking is all about. It’s about the end user and if you provide quality content, the rest will take care of itself.

 Retweet This Post

Attention business tweeters. Don’t buy into the Twitter tools fanaticism. Automating certain functions of your company’s Twitter account is tempting, but don’t take shortcuts in social media. Here’s why.

You aren’t fooling anyone.
Don’t forget that all those followers are real people. Interactive marketing means that you are speaking with individuals and creating relationships that continue to grow and change. A people are smart and they can tell if there is a real person behind that business’s Twitter account.

Automated responses are SPAM.
As a business, if you are using automated direct messages you should question your purpose for being on Twitter in the first place. You’re dealing with real people and they can tell that your direct message is simply a prewritten marketing message. If you aren’t taking the time to put a personal effort into each one of your messages your audience will know it.

You can’t streamline personality.
Each business’s culture is different and it takes time to develop that personality through social networking. Engaging with your customers through Twitter is not a push button program. It takes time to develop a campaign and standards for social media marketing.

If you don’t have the in-house manpower to manage a social media campaign you have two options. You can seek an outside marketing firm to help you develop a plan and execute that plan or you can stay out of the game until you are ready to take the plunge.

Don’t make the mistake of automating your social media campaign. Social media is a popular form of marketing because it’s based around real people making personal connections.

 Retweet This Post

Yesterday we talked about a few of our favorite Wordpress plugins and just this morning I found two more I want to add to the list. I just installed them to the LEVELTWO blog a few hours ago and I really like them.

1. Broken Link Checker
   Monitors your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
2. What Would Seth Godin Do
   New visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post asking them to subscribe to your RSS feed. After a variable number of visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location. The message can be excluded from Pages if desired.

Enjoy and happy Wordpress blogging!

 Retweet This Post

Blogs are important. That’s a statement anyone would agree with. All the major cable news channels rebroadcast their content through blogs and all the major corporations are likely to have not only one, but several blogs. However, knowing that something is important is much different than knowing why it is important.

I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning and I found a very logical argument that gives 4 very real reasons to have a blog. They are as follows:

1. A platform to be the expert – This is your industry, you have the opportunity to set the bar high. With a little research on places like Twitter, Yahoo Answers and other questions and answer websites, you can figure out what questions people are asking about your industry and provide them with (your) industry standard answers and insights. This is one of the best ways to add much needed content to your site, provide value, and become an expert online in your field. By the way, creating blog posts with this kind of information is one of the best ways to start blogging for those of you who are afraid to get your feet wet.
2. Give your company a personality – Be yourself. If you can come across as an individual who cares, rather then a corporation pushing a product or service it will serve you much better! Let potential customers get to know the person behind the company and trust will follow.
3. Search Engine Optimization – Think about how awesome it would be if you could create a piece of content, and have it indexed and ranking on Google (or other search engines) on the same day. If your website is providing enough value, and has enough trust, this is exactly what can happen. Having a blog gives you more of an opportunity to be found for additional keywords that you normally may not be going after. It is much easier to link to good content inside of blogs too, and we know how important people linking to us is. Blogs have many built in capabilities for sharing content too, which helps with the link building.
4. Help with staying relevant – Don’t just have a blog to have a blog because everyone else is doing it. The goal of your blog should be to help you company be more relevant from an information standpoint. Because, that is what people are looking for these days – news and information from individuals, companies, etc. Your blog is also one of the best facilitators for interacting with and embracing social networks, which in turn allow people to share your content. If you are using blogging platforms like Wordpress for example, there are many plugins that make sharing your content and information with others easy. That alone helps you stay relevant, people who use these platforms to find information understand that your blog is an up to date relevant source of information.

These reasons come from Mat Siltala over at Dream Systems Media. You can read his entire blog post on their own internet marketing blog.

 Retweet This Post

If the economic slowdown has slowed the volume of your workload or maybe your number of patients has decreased, we’ve got great news for you…

Use this opportunity to take more time with your clients. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, your small business is built for customer interaction.

Traditional marketing campaigns take lots of money to launch, so try:

1. Starting a blog
2. Joining Twitter
3. Starting a video blog
4. Inviting your clients to participate in your social media campaign (guest blog, customer review, answer their questions online)
5. Making an informative video about your industry and publish it on a social video site
6. Launching a low budget marketing campaign
7. Ditch your email newsletter and create a blog
8. Creating an alert based on keywords twittered in your territory
9. Monitoring your online reputation
10. Adding some social networking features to your boring website

I keep hearing that during the tough times are when some of the most innovative things are created. So, get out there and create something!

 Retweet This Post

This is no April Fool’s joke. Telegraph.co.uk is reporting that Birmingham City University is now offering a social media degree about Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

During the course we will consider what people can do on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be used for communication and marketing purposes. There has been significant interest in the course already, and it will definitely appeal to students looking to go into professions including journalism and PR.

Social media is very important for jobs within the marketing and communications sector, as a skill set within other jobs, and as an industry within itself.

more at bcu.ac.uk

 Retweet This Post

The other day I was explaining to someone why a blog is such a good idea for a business that is trying to optimize their website for search engines. I used the word “refreshing content” and I got a blank stare. They had no idea what I meant.

So if you too are confused by the term “refreshing content”, here’s an explanation.

Refreshing content is NOT

• An article that makes you happy
• Served with chilled, bottled water
• A type of coffee drink
• Good news about the economy
• Edible

Refreshing content is

• Preferred by search engines
• A great way to achieve high rankings in search engines
• Indexed (searched) faster than static content
• More up-to-date than static content

Examples of refreshing content would be a

• Blog that is updated at least 3-5 times a week
• New product page that updates often
• Weekly specials page
• Newsletter page
• Company news page that updates a few times a month
• RSS feed from your Twitter or other social networking site

Refreshing content is not only for preferred by search engines, visitors like to see that your website has been updated recently. People like to know that what they are reading is relevant and current. People don’t Tivo CNN’s headline news. They want to know the latest information and if you provide a steady stream of information not only will the search engines find your site to be more relevant, but your visitors will also find your site to be more useful.

Keep in mind, refreshing content is important for search engine optimization (SEO), however I would not recommend this strategy for search engine marketing (SEM). Best result for SEM would be to use a landing page.

 Retweet This Post