This article was written by Daniela Baker, a small business blogger at CreditDonkey, a credit card deals website. She helps entrepreneurs compare small business credit cards to find rewards right for their business. 

The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

When was the last time you went to a corporate website, other than your own? OK, now when was the last time you went on Facebook or Twitter?

Yeah, this is the reason why some people are asking whether social media is killing off company websites!

According to blogger, public speaker, and social media strategist Jeff Bullas, company Facebook pages seem to be absorbing corporate website traffic.

For example, he cites three companies that have both a booming Facebook presence and developed corporate websites: Coca Cola, Starbucks, and Oreo. A quick check this morning revealed that Coca-Cola boasts 36.6 million Facebook fans, Starbucks has 26.6 million, and Oreo has 23.7 million. They’re doing well, right?

Except Bullas noted that Coca-Cola’s corporate site traffic dropped by over 40% last year, Starbucks’ site traffic reached a plateau, and Nabisco’s traffic plummeted from 1.2 million hits each month to just 321,000 per month in a year. The social media strategist pointed to a Webtrends study showing that 68% of Fortune 100 websites have been experiencing negative growth, with a 24% decrease, on average, in unique visitors.

Even back in 2009, blogger and Internet media entrepreneur Adam Ostrow pointed out how common it was becoming to see business cards which included Twitter usernames instead of domain names and ad campaigns that included URLs to Facebook pages.

But is this death, or just specialization?

It’s important to note that neither Bullas nor Ostrow are predicting the death of company websites. Rather, the rise of social media seems to be taking them in a different direction.

Bullas, for example, argues in favor of integrating and optimizing content for different websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. That way, consumers can be more engaged all around.

He suggests using social media pages to send traffic to your corporate site by offering links on your company’s social media profile pages. For corporate blogs, include a sample of the start of the latest blog post in your company’s Facebook status or tweet, then include a link to the article. Make a Facebook or MySpace contest that requires users to track down information on your website, then announce you’ll publish the winners on your corporate website. Use social media to link your fans or followers to on-site coupons and use e-mail marketing, too.

That way, social media sites can help interested visitors find your corporate site instead of being a replacement for it.

Need help figuring out how to make your company website and social media communications play well together?

If this is all leaving you confused, consider hiring a social media consultant to help. With so many experts participating in the social media trend today, this task has never been easier.

Many major freelancing websites, such as Elance, even allow you to pay remote workers using your credit card. Business credit cards can be particularly helpful when using this strategy. Using a business credit card allows you to earn rewards that go toward your bottom line, access a steady source of cash to help you through dry periods, and establish business credibility.

Look for a social media strategist that’s familiar with many different social networks, has good feedback from past clients, can show you their own social media presence, understands new technology, plans ahead, and has a professional attitude.

Social media presence + corporate website = better communication with consumers.

In short, your brand’s social media page may take some attention away from your corporate site, but that doesn’t mean that you have to choose one or the other. With a little effort, you can make them work together for best results.

Think of it this way: your brand’s social media page can hand out flyers while your corporate website hosts the party.

After setting up your account, you probably searched for friends, family and colleagues and then came to a grinding halt.

What happens next? How do you find new followers?

Let Twitter give you a helping hand

If you go to your Twitter page, you should see something like this:

At the top of the screen you can see #Discover, clicking on this brings up this screen. As you can see, it gives you the options ‘who to follow’ and ‘find friends’.

But what happens when people follow you?

Should you automatically follow them back?

The simple answer is no. Take control of your Twitter stream and follow only those people you want to follow.

Here are 5 very simple ways to make sure you get value out of your Twitter experience:

1. Say farewell to spam

When someone follows you, take a look at their tweets. Are they excessively promotional? If so, they are more than likely going to be a spammer. Unless you want your stream full of their plugs, don’t bother following them back.

2. What are they saying?

Someone’s Twitter feed will tell you a lot about them. Take a look at their past tweets – do you find them interesting? If so, follow them, if not, don’t bother.

3. OTT

Tweeters come in all shapes and sizes; some have a lot to say, others very little. If someone follows you who is a prolific tweeter think carefully before following them back. Do you really want them to be filling your Twitter stream 24/7?
If what they’re saying is interesting, go ahead and follow. But if you’re not so sure, it may be better to pass.

4. Silent night

Twitter is all about being social and that means interacting. If you’ve been trying to engage with a particular follower and they’ve just been ignoring you, you’re not really getting any value out of that relationship so it may be time to unfollow and find someone who’s a little chattier.

5. Bio and interests

The best way to find out a bit about your followers is through their biography. Personally, if there is no avatar (i.e. uploaded their own rather than using a generic one), or there is no bio (or a very poor one) I won’t follow back.

Your bio is where you can add details about you, your likes and dislikes. It’s the best way to work out whether you have something in common with your follower or not. If you do, you are far more likely to enjoy a great Twitter relationship.

At the end of the day, Twitter is about being social. It’s not about a band of silent stalkers that don’t interact with each other.
Choose who you follow carefully to make sure you get the most out of your experience. By following these 5 very simple ‘quality checks’, you’ll be able to ensure your Twitter followers will add value to your social media activities.

Sally Ormond – Copywriter and Tweeter

Let’s face it, if you are going to spend man-hours on using social media as part of your marketing strategy, you’re going to want to see some sort of return for it.

In an earlier post, The Money’s in The Relationship, I showed that your return through social media is measured in relationships rather than cold hard cash.

Taking that a step further, I came across a great post on socialmediaexaminer.com that looks at the 4 steps you need to take to sell with social media.

After all, it is your customers you are interacting with through Facebook and Twitter, so there must be a way to encourage them to buy from you through those platforms.

The post tells use that to improve your ROI your marketing and campaigns must include these essential components:

• Attraction
• Retention
• Conversion
• Measurement

To read more about how it’s done, follow the link and discover the 4 steps to selling with social media.

 What do you think?

Are you convinced? Can you sell through social media?

Leave a comment and tell us your experiences.

You often hear stories of people being ‘found’ by prospective employers and being offered their dream job, all because of their LinkedIn profile.

So how can you make sure you stand out from the crowd?

Well, it’s all about getting noticed, so keep reading to find out how you can maximise your profile.

7 ways to boost your LinkedIn profile

There are 7 elements within your LinkedIn profile which must be maximised to make the most of your listing.

1. Headline

As with all sales and marketing, your headline is the very important.

You need to sum up, as succinctly as possible:

• Who you are
• Who you  can help
• How you can help them

This will tell the reader everything they need to know in an instant and allow them to decide whether they want to read on or not.

2. Be real

It’s too tempting to be boring, business like and wooden in your profile.

Granted, people are going to want to know about you from a business perspective, but they also what to get to know the real you.

In your summary, show something about yourself – your goals, what you love doing, what makes you get out of bed in the morning. By offering a personal insight into who you are enables a connection at a personal level.

3. Spelling

This one always crops up in lists like this, mainly because it’s so important.

It doesn’t take long to proofread something, so make sure you go through your profile and spell check it. A typo or grammar gaff could cause you to be overlooked.

4. Call to action

One thing often overlooked in LinkedIn profiles is a call to action.

It’s something you automatically place within your copywriting, so why not add one here too?

After your profile has told them how great you are and what you can do for them, direct them to your website for more information or give them a phone number/email address so they can easily get in touch with you.

5. Proof

OK, so your profile shows you can talk the talk, but so you have any concrete proof to back everything up?

Make sure you detail your education background, any awards you have won as well as recommendations from past clients. All this evidence will help convince the reader that you’re the person they need.

6. SEO

Yes, you can search engine optimise your profile.

Make sure your keywords appear in your:

• Headline
• Current work experience
• Past work experience
• Summary
• Specialities

7. Be different

This one will make you stand out from the crowd. Try and be original when putting together your profile. Don’t stick to the normal description that will make you blend in. Think about what you can say that will make you different. Don’t just follow the crowd, try to put yourself across in a unique and memorable way.

Over to you

Have you had successes with your LinkedIn profile?

Did it land you your dream job?

Leave a comment below and let your experience help others.

Once upon a time, we would pick up the phone or pop round for coffee when we wanted to catch up or arrange outings.

Today, it’s a whole different ball game. You can maintain relationships through outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. But there is one major difference with the social media age compared with the ‘olden days.’

91% of employers use social media to screen applicants

When you post a comment on Facebook or send out a tweet, it’s not something that just disappears after your conversation has ended.

Before, you could say anything to anyone (within reason) and you could get away with it. Your private life and social life were completely separate from your employer. Unless you told them about the bender you went on at the weekend, they were unlikely to find out.

But, social media changes everything.

The rather sobering statistic above was recently reported by The Drum.

Because your status updates on your social media sites are there for all to see, they are an invaluable source to perspective employers.

Let’s face it, when in an interview situation, we all just tell the panel what they want to hear, so the impression they get of us isn’t always the whole truth. But now, by using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, they will see the bigger picture.  In fact (according to the Reppler survey):

• 47% of employers check social networking sites to screen prospective employees immediately after receiving their job application
• 69% have rejected a candidate based on something they saw
• 13% of candidates were rejected because they’d lied about their qualifications
• 11% were rejected because of posting inappropriate comments, inappropriate photos, posting negative comments about a previous employer or demonstrating poor communication skills

But before you head off and delete all your social media accounts, it’s not all bad.

68% were found to have employed someone because of what they saw about them on a social networking site, with a positive impression on their personality and organisational fit being at the top of the list.

The moral is…

Social media is great, but be careful what you post.

As the above shows, more and more employers can use these channels to dig below the surface and discover the type of person you really are.

So next time you are about to post in haste, stop and think about what you’re typing.

Sally Ormond – copywriter and social media addict

The only problem is, once you put something out onto the web it’s gone, but not forgotten as it will be there forever.

Therefore it is important to have a strategy in place before you start. After all, you don’t want to experience that sinking feeling – you know the one I mean. When was the last time you send a text to the wrong person and stood watching your phone helplessly because you couldn’t get it back?

To help you survive and thrive in the online world, here are 3 simple tips to help you avoid making too many bloopers along the way.

1. Strategy

Briefly touched on above, it is essential you have a strategy in place before you dabble in social media.

If you throw things out in to the ether willy-nilly it will have no effect whatsoever. So, before you get going make sure you:

• Know what the goal of your campaign is
• Who your campaign is aimed at
• What your audience want to know
• The actions you need to take to get results

2. No optimisation

 The idea about social media and social networking is to boost your online visibility. But in order to be found, you must optimise your profiles.

That involves including your keywords in your biography.

3. Ignore feedback

Feedback, good and bad, must be dealt with.

Ignoring comments and messages is rather like sitting in your office and ignoring all calls and customers that walk through your door.

Social media opens up new channels through which your customers can interact with you. They will make use of your Twitter account and Facebook fan page. They will openly tell you what they think of your products and services (both the good and the bad) so it is essential you monitor these channels and deal with their feedback in a timely manner.

This is where your strategy comes into play. You must gave guidelines in place so your staff understand how to deal with positive and negative feedback to make sure you don’t end up with a PR disaster on your hands.

Over to you

Social networking is a great way to promote your business online, but it is essential you have a strategy in place.

How did you go about putting your strategy together?

Did you start out with one, or were you forced into it?

Leave your comments below and see if we can put together some best practice tips.

If you Google their name, reams and reams of listings appear. How do they do it? How do they make themselves so visible?

The answer is good old fashioned search engine optimisation.

If you’re thinking I’ve finally lost it because surely, SEO is surely just for websites, let me put your mind at ease. No, I haven’t completely lost it. SEO is just as important for your social media profiles as it is for your website.

The whole point about filling in your profile on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other social networking sites, is to make yourself visible to potential clients or business partners. So if you’re not making the most of them, why bother?

To illustrate my point, after Googling ‘Sally Ormond’ the first page of search results alone show 6 social media/networking profiles.

So not only does my website and blog appear, but anyone searching for information about me will also see my name splattered all over the web with numerous profiles (and blog posts and articles) detailing all the great work I do for my clients.

That’s pretty powerful stuff.

OK, I hear what you’re saying – Sally Ormond is my name as opposed to a search term that I would optimise for.

So what if I amended my search to ‘Sally Ormond Copywriter’ or ‘Sally Ormond freelance copywriter’?

Well….

As you can see, in both cases even more social media sites appear.

So there you go – this is why it’s essential to make your profiles stand out. That doesn’t mean you have to cram them with your keywords. But make sure your keyword (which is probably your primary business activity) appears near the beginning of your description.

Filling the web with great information about you and what you can do for your clients is essential if you want to position yourself as an expert in your field.

After all, it’s becoming more common for people to Google other people so they can find out a bit about them. If nothing shows up (or very little), what does that tell them?

Apparently 71% of companies are still ignoring consumer complaints on Twitter.

Social media has opened up communications between consumer and business. Now, someone can complain through Twitter about poor service or product quality and within seconds potentially thousands of people will know about it.

And yet, there appear to be an alarming number of companies who are not monitoring Twitter effectively.

According to the article, in a survey by Maritz Research, only 29% of those who tweeted a company with a complaint received a reply. This shows a worrying trend – namely, businesses are still not ‘getting’ Twitter.

The post goes on to say that…

The American research looked at 1,298 consumers over the age of 18 who frequently tweet and have used the micro-blogging site to complain about a specific product, service, brand or company.

• 49% of respondents had expected the company to read their tweet
• 64.9% of older tweeters (aged 55+)  expected a reply
• 38.4% of younger tweeters (18-24 year olds) expected a reply

Of those who received a response from a company, 34.7% were very satisfied and 39.7% were somewhat satisfied with the response.

While 86.4% said they would love/like it if the company had got back to them regarding their specific complaint, 63.3% said that they wouldn’t like or would hate it if the company contacted them about something other than their complaint.

The power of a tweet

Once upon a time, if a customer was unhappy about something they would pick up the phone and have a rant. But because they would be speaking with someone representing the company, in theory, their complaint wouldn’t go unnoticed.

But today, consumers have the ability to tweet their anger. Not only would this be directed at the company’s twitter name so (you would assume) they would get to hear about it and take action, it would also be seen by all their followers.

Whether companies like it or not, Twitter (and other social media channels) is the new ‘social telephone’.

The above research shows that most people (84%) liked it when companies got a response form their tweet.  Just by listening, a company could greatly improve its customer service satisfaction levels.

Monitoring the noise

If a company is going to use social media, it must ensure it has the resources to use it effectively.

A Twitter account must be monitored to offer timely responses to customer queries and complaints. If you quickly make contact and resolve the issue, you can turn a potentially bad situation into a positive. Your customer will see you as a company that cares about its customers and listens to them.

Make sure your company isn’t one of the 71%:

• Monitor Twitter for any mention of your brand
• Respond quickly to tweets you receive from customers
• Never get into a Twitter argument
• A quick response will turn a bad situation into a positive outcome

Over to you

Does your business use Twitter?

How are you making sure you monitor it?

If you have any tips to share to help other businesses get to grips with the ‘social media telephone’, leave a comment below.

 Sally Ormond – Freelance copywriter

It takes a look at the good, the bad and the ugly sides of social media and how it has permeated all our lives – enjoy…

The explosion of Social Media over recent years has thrown up all sorts of fascinating sociological paradigms. We have to thank Twitter for helping engineer the Arab Spring, Facebook for catching up with friends, and Youtube for making the secretive machinations of oppressive regimes all the more difficult to conceal. There are numerous examples of the good that Social Media has brought to our increasingly fragile world, and there will doubtless be more to come.

But among all the brilliance of Social Media, there are inevitably demons lurking within. Obviously nobody is trumpeting the rise of cyber-bullying, the open platforms for ranting extremists or the accessibility of a Daily Mail comments page. Actually, those last two are pretty much the same thing, but anyway…

Whatever the ying and yang of Social Media, something else seems to have pervaded our collective online consciousness – particularly for those of us who use social media regularly. Namely, we have all become narcissists. Even the most modest and placid among us seem to have a field day, telling all and sundry about the minutiae of their lives, when let loose on a Facebook status or a Tweet. This blog advertises my own guilt here; the fact that I’m typing away, voicing my opinions on this and that, assumes there are people out there who actually care what I think about such things.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning people for announcing to their 1762 ‘friends’ matters of import or joy (or sometimes misery…often misery, in fact). It’s just that the Social Media world seems so, I don’t know, cluttered.

In the old days, if we had something to share with our friends we would call or meet them. And because we had to go to some physical lengths to do this, you could rest assured that the topic would be of relative importance. Today, we have Social Media, so we don’t have to get off our backsides and tell people our news any more. We can type it in less than 140 characters and know that most people in our social circle will learn of it within 24 hours max. So…what’s wrong with that? Nothing. It’s great. I love it.

But…

Would a friend call me up to tell me they had just eaten a nice pizza, been for a particularly satisfying run or bought a new pig for their virtual farm? Nope. Or if they did, they wouldn’t be friends for long! The point is that a lot of people now litter the Internet with matters of absolutely no interest whatsoever; things that very often don’t ‘bring anything to the party’ at all.  That’s not to say that every update or tweet has to be of particular interest to me. But I’ve had to hide some people from my Facebook ‘wall’ for bombarding it every five minutes with a litany of utter irrelevance.

I could go on. I’m not pretending to be whiter-than-white here – somebody could no doubt call hypocrisy somewhere – but I think that there needs to be debate about this. I’m not calling for bans or rules (you can go to the Daily Mail site for that). But if we go on creating so much unnecessary noise, we could end up drowning out the whole Social Media goodness that there is.

Thanks Neil for your take on the virtual world that is beginning to take over the real world – or at least it feels that way at times.

Over to you

What do you think?

How has social networking sites affected your life?

Have you embraced them with open arms or are you keeping them at bay with a very large stick?

Leave a comment below and lets get a virtual debate started.

Yay!

The bad news is that unless people can find it, it won’t get read and won’t generate the constant stream of traffic to your website that you were hoping for.

Boo.

How do you make sure people can find your stuff?

There are several things you can do to make sure your hard work isn’t wasted.

1. Research

Before you start writing anything, take a good look at your target audience. What is it that they want? What interests them? What issues do they have that they might want help with?

Only when you can answer those questions can you be sure you’re writing focused, informative articles that they’ll want to read.

2. Call to action

If they do happen to find your articles and posts, but you fail to ask them to do anything once they’ve read it, they’ll just go away again.

The whole point of generating content is to drive people to your website, so make sure you tell them to visit your site, or place relevant links within your article to take them to the page on your site that holds all the answers to their questions.

3. Forget the search engines

OK, don’t write them off completely, but make sure you write for your reader. Make sure your information is interesting, well written in simple language (no jargon) and easy to read.

It is your readers who will (hopefully) be buying from you, not the search engines.

4. Keywords

Yes, I know I just said don’t write primarily for the search engines, but you still need to get your keywords in your headings and body copy if you want to be found. But that doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords.

Keep your writing natural – the keywords will drop in automatically without you even realising it.

5. Social media

Make sure you promote your writing. Send out links through Twitter and Facebook, but make sure you add value and engage rather than just blatantly self-promote.

Social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) are a great way to spread the word and to get your article. Plus, promoting them will encourage people to share your content with others.

Over to you

Do you content market? What has your experience been? Leave a comment below and share your tips too.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter, blogger and social media addict

Briar Copywriting – T:@sallyormond – F: www.facebook.com/freelancecopywriting