According to a consumer online behavior study from Forrester Research the number of people visiting social networking sites has doubled since 2007. Forrester surveyed 40,545 US heads of household in January and February 2009 about a variety of topics including online behaviors and media consumption. Their executive summary states that,

Our 2009 data shows a stabilization of consumers’ overall time spent with online media. However, engagement with the online channel has deepened, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of such activities as social networking.

Take a look at this graphic that shows the very clear trending in favor of social networking.

Notice the not so subtle big red circle I added? It shows a large jump in the number of people that visit social networks. That’s great news! However if you look a little further down on the graphic you’ll notice that less than 20% of those surveyed read blogs, so there’s a key lesson to learn here.

When you decide to launch your business into the social networking world it’s important to incorporate your blog posts into your social network. Import your blog posts into your Facebook Page and other social networking accounts, because chances are that people may not visit your blog, but they much more likely to view your content through a social network platform.

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LEVELTWO Medical

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Continued from part 1…

As we have introduced people to Twitter, we’ve had a lot of questions about the Twitter lingo. Twitter is basically just like a very short blog, but there are some key differences, mainly the built-in social community. So we’ve got a two part post that will help explain common Twitter key terms.

This is PART TWO:

Retweet (RT): To help share cool ideas via Twitter and to give a shout-out to people you respect, you can repost their messages and give them credit. People call that retweeting (or RT), and it usually looks something like this:

“RT @Username: Original message, often with a link.”

Retweeting is common, and it’s a form of conversation on Twitter. It’s also a powerful way to spread messages and ideas across Twitter quickly. So when you do it, you’re engaging in a way people recognize and usually like—making it a good way to connect.

Trending Topics: On the right side of your screen and on the Twitter search page, you’ll see ten Trending Topics, which are the most-mentioned terms on Twitter at that moment. The topics update continually, reflecting the real-time nature of Twitter and true shifts in what people are paying attention to. A key feature of Twitter, Trending Topics aggregate many tweets at once and often break news ahead of the mainstream media. (Note that the trends often include hashtags, described below.)

Hashtag (#): Twitter messages don’t have a field where you can categorize them. So people have created the hashtag—which is just the # symbol followed by a term describing or naming the topic—that you add to a post as a way of saying, “This message is about the same thing as other messages from other people who include the same hashtag.” Then, when somebody searches for that hashtag, they’ll get all of the related messages.

For instance, let’s say you post, “Voted sixty times in tonight’s showdown. #AmericanIdol.” Your message would then be part of Twitter search results for “#AmericanIdol,” and if enough people use the same hashtag at once, the term will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.

Companies often use hashtags as part of a product launch, and conferences and events frequently have hashtags associated with them.

Tweetup: A tweetup is simply an in-person gathering organized via Twitter, often spontaneous. Companies use them for things like hosting launch parties, connecting with customers and introducing like-minded followers to each other.

Shortened URLs: With just 140 characters at your disposal, Twitter doesn’t give you much room to include URL links—some of which are longer than 140 characters themselves. If you post a link on Twitter via the website, sometimes Twitter automatically shortens the URL for you. There are also a number of services—URL shorteners—that take regular links and shrink them down to a manageable length for tweets, and some even let you track clicks.

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We’ve discussed why using Facebook is important for your business’s social media marketing campaign, so here’s a short list of rules to follow when using Facebook as a way to interact with your customers and encourage new customers along the way.

1. Go Slow and Steady, Don’t Overdo It
   Your fans use their Facebook as a personal communication tool. While they have shown interest in your product or services, remember that there is such a thing as too many updates. Keep your status updates, videos, pictures, and blog posts consistent, but don’t overwhelm them with information. Post at least something a day, but don’t overdo it.
2. Contact Your Fans Directly
   Your small business is built for customer interaction. You may not have thousands of fans and tons of comments on each of your blog posts, but you’ve got an advantage on the large companies because they have no way of interacting with all of their fans. Follow up with new fans and reply to comments. Don’t spam them with messages to buy your stuff right now, rather encourage that one-on-one relationship.
3. Don’t Spam
   Treat your customers like you would want to be treated. Posts in all CAPS and with big flashy buttons won’t help you sell your products any faster. Instead it will likely result in a loss of fans.
4. Consider it an Educational Experience
   We’ve said it before, but it’s still not old. The most important part of social networking for businesses is to make your content interesting. Let your visitors in on a few industry secrets and they’ll come back for more later. Establish yourself as an industry expert.
5. Create a Facebook Page, Not a Profile
   Take a look at our recent blog post called “The Difference Between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile.” Don’t risk getting banned from Facebook because you didn’t obey the rules.
6. Use Incentives
   Your marketing tactics may have changed, but those traditional marketing pulls are still just as strong. Offer new fans a discount the next time they come into your store or order your services.
7. Post Occasional Entertaining Statuses
   Put some personality in your updates. Fridays are always a good opportunity to post something a little off topic. If you find a funny video post it on your facebook. Or share a joke with your fans. Especially if there is a way to tie it into your own business. Like a dentist might post a joke about a kid with braces. It’s a great way to break the ice.

Interested in talking to us about advertising on Facebook? Contact us or visit our website. Become a fan of LEVELTWO on Facebook.

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Facebook is now a household name (especially for those with teenagers in the house) and as business owners become more aware of the effectiveness of using social sites to market their business, there are many frequently asked questions about how to put your business on Facebook.

Let’s start by noting the difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page.

Facebook Profile:

• Strictly for people (not a business or product) to interact with friends and family
• Any individual can create a profile, just not a commercial business or product
• A business that opens a profile page is in direct violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and will be disabled
• Other users become FRIENDS of a Facebook Profile
• A Facebook Profile can upload pictures, videos, status updates, and can invite people to become friends

Facebook Pages:

• Designed for businesses, brands, companies, products, and celebrities
• Other users become FANS of a Facebook Page
• Can upload pictures, videos, status updates, host a discussion board, display wall posts, and other features
• Can track metrics like fans, page views, interactions, gender, age, location, language, and more
• Can not invite other members to become a fan

Example of Facebook Page metrics:

The reason for keeping companies and individuals separate on Facebook is to reduce the amount of spam. If a business was able to invite you become a fan of their page, users would be flooded with businesses looking to inflate their number of fans.

The purpose is to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible. Sites like MySpace and Twitter do not have such strict boundaries between individuals and companies. This unrestricted access has contributed to the ongoing decrease in MySpace’s traffic and could lead to the death of Twitter if stricter rules are not put into place.

This points back to the first three rules of social media marketing:

1. Content
2. Content
3. Content

If you don’t provide interesting content with a positive experience for your readers and fans you will never achieve success in developing a strong online following. It wouldn’t be good business practice to cut corners in your trade, so it’s equally unprofessional to break social networking etiquette.

Questions? Comments? Let us know in the comment box below. Or contact us here.

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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.

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You may be familiar with social software as a platform for networking and sharing content, but there’s another side to the social world and it’s a mashup between social networking and professional collaboration management software.

SocialCast is a business management software that is modeled after services like Friendfeed and Facebook. Basically it’s a communication tool businesses can use to incorporate social networking with real-time messaging to share knowledge across enterprises.

It carries many different social media standards like IM, mircoblogging, RSS, bookmarklets, email, and it’s even iPhone ready.

Why Should I Care?
It’s important because these social platforms are becoming standards in project collaboration and personal connectivity. While Facebook and other networks become a staple in our personal lives for connecting with friends and family, organizations are realizing the power of using the internet as a communication system to connect people within their businesses.

And this isn’t a new idea. Other sites like CubeTree, GoogleWave, and Yammer are also popular professional intranets. The online world is flocking to social engines like these to provide them not only with personal connectivity, but a new edge in the business world.

Is your company ready for the Web2.0 revolution?
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Social Media Marketing is not spam. It’s an honest campaign by which a company provides key insights into specific points of interest. If other words, if you are a plumber, your social media marketing campaign would be pro-tips aimed at plumbing laymen.

As a business that is participating in social networking, you MUST strongly avoid pitching your product. If pitch marketing is a hammer, then social media marketing is a magnet. Draw people to you by providing quality content about your industry. There’s nothing wrong with a small blurb about who you are and what you do, but don’t forget that the meat of social media marketing is about the content.

Don’t be lured into automating your social media campaign.

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. 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.

Take a look at this quote from Bernard Moon over at Mashable.com:

I just hope that Twitter won’t go the way of MySpace, where fake accounts are abundant and the majority of my “friend” requests are from small businesses pitching a product or scammers trying to sell their fool’s gold. MySpace grew because of its wild, wild west environment, but eventually it became too unruly and disengaging for most people. – via Mashable.com

Your business doesn’t engage in underhanded schemes to provide its product and services, so why should your marketing campaign creep around in the shadows. Customers like transparency.

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We’ve discussed Twitter a lot on this blog, but there are a lot of other social networks that have some great reach and interactive features to help get your business and services to as many people as possible. I’ve been doing some testing on Friendfeed and I’ve been enjoying the service more and more.

As Twitter continues to have stability issues, Friendfeed is a great environment to distribute your content to people you are interested. The big difference between the two sites is that Friendfeed will aggregate all of your social channels into one place. So as you post pictures on your Flickr account and videos to your YouTube account your Friendfeed profile will display all of your activity in one central place.

BONUS TIP:
So if you don’t have a blog, here’s a great tip. Use your Friendfeed widget on your website to display the latest activities that your business is doing online. Just go to http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget and customize your widget to fit your website’s theme. You now have a centralized hub for all of your social media marketing displayed neatly on your website.

Subscribe to the LEVELTWO Friendfeed here.

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TechCrunch.com recently posted an article about how Facebook’s total traffic is nearing Google and Yahoo.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

So what we are seeing here is a very fast growing SOCIAL network that showing traffic trends that could overtake both Google and Yahoo. This is very significant because while Yahoo is more of a destination search engine that frames its site to be a fully functional website, more people are using a social network on a regular basis AND at an increasing rate.

With visitor stats this strong it’s even more important for you business to dive into a social marketing campaign. You might be using search engine marketing and other forms of lead harvesting, but unless you are present on the social networks, you are missing out on a very large part of viewership.

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Yesterday was a big day for Mac and iPhone users. Apple hosted its annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and announced the latest updates to their wildly popular iPhone. While the majority of the opening keynote was focused on updates to the Apple products, they did allow some time for featured developers to discuss their latest technologies using the iPhone.

A very exciting presentation was done by AirStrip Technologies. They made medical devices and their presentation at WWDC 09 was about AirStrip Critical Care which delivers real time information to practitioners like ventilator flow tracings, patient vital signs data and rhythm strips.

The medical industry is flocking to the tech market and applications like this are a glimpse into the future of healthcare. Patients are looking for their healthcare providers to take steps toward advanced technologies. It’s important that your medical company show its strong commitment to staying current and valid in today’s dynamic market.

While you may not have the ability to create your own medical technologies, there are other ways to establish a presence of innovation and we can help you do it.

We specialize in:

• creating integrated marketing campaigns that include TV, radio, print, outdoor and interactive
• developing surgical cases for healthcare facilities, surgical centers and surgeons
• ensuring your staff effectively captures and tracks leads
• patient generation for individual physicians and physician groups
• website development
• pay-per-click (sponsored keywords) to drive targeted leads
• natural/organic search engine optimization to drive targeted leads
• powerful social media tools that capture grassroot leads doing research on the web
• results that are quantifiable by our proprietary software tracking and CRM system

Find out more at LEVELTWO Medical.

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