Monday, 21 July 2014

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.
It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.
1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.
2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.
3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.
4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.
5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.
This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.
6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.
If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.
7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.
9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.
10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.  

5 Ways to Build Your Brand in Short Chunks of Time

Your brand embodies everything that you do and stand for as a business. At a tangible level, your business name, tagline, the colors you use and the content you publish encode your brand and present it visually and conceptually.
Building a solid brand requires a big investment of time. Yet it’s important not to overlook the power of small steps and single interactions that can solidify and share your brand with others. Here’s a closer look at five ways you can spend small chunks of free time to help build your brand.
1. Align your visuals. The visual elements of your brand are a powerful reinforcement of what you’re trying to achieve. Customers recognize your logo. Fans know your brand’s colors.
Are you using your logo in all the places you should? Is it part of your social-media profiles, in your email signature and on your presentations? Do your Twitter and Facebook presences reflect your company’s color scheme? If the answer is no, take a moment to change one thing that’ll bring you closer to a unified visual brand presence such as adding your logo to your email or changing the background color of your Twitter account.
2. Respond to your fans, followers and friends. An accessible brand is one that people want to do business with. One way to help cultivate this image is by being responsive to questions, comments and customer reviews. Spend a minute replying to the latest messages left on your social-media pages, customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google, and touching base with new connections on major networking sites.
You’ll strengthen your relationship to a specific customer, while also enhancing your image as a conscientious and responsive business owner.
3. Use a social monitoring tool to listen to social trends. Tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck let you follow brand mentions and hashtags in one place, and are a great way to focus your social-listening efforts. Measure sentiment about your brand, spot and deal with any problems being discussed publically about your business, and track discussion around high-value keywords to keep your pulse on your industry.
Monitor the conversation, learn more about what’s happening and strategically jump into the discussion when you have something to add.
4. Strategically curate brand-building content. Each day, we consume a vast amount of information from industry news, how-to posts about topics we love and posts that are geared for pure humor or entertainment. When we fail to share those posts, we miss two key opportunities to distribute that information in a highly leveraging way.
When you share posts or content from colleagues or competitors, they see your support and are more likely to do the same thing for you in the future. Also, each time a reader discovers something great to read or listen to through you, this adds to your brand.
5. Practice your elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch is critical today in a wide variety of contexts. It’s the short bio you use each time you guest post. It’s the pitch you use when meeting a prospective client at a networking event. It’s how you describe what you do at an investor pitch panel.
There’s a lot to be said for having an elevator pitch that captures your business and is concise, compelling and on brand. Work on your brand message, strategically test refinements and experiment with it in different environments to get helpful feedback. This kind of approach yields a short pitch or bio that can be used anywhere to open doors, attract customers and drive positive recognition.
Building your brand is an essential component of a thriving business. But it’s an easy thing to fall by the wayside as you do the harder work that’s associated with being an entrepreneur. Make the most of small bursts of time to improve your brand’s messaging and visuals, increase engagement, find great content and keep an eye on the market.
Your brand will grow fast, in a way that’s inversely correlated to the tiny amounts you have to invest to keep it moving! 


Wednesday, 9 July 2014

There simply isn’t another social network with that kind of community and momentum for business professionals – buyers of business goods and services.  With the proclamation of being “all in” on content marketing, LinkedIn serves as an opportunity for social media and content marketers alike. Of course where there’s content, there’s an opportunity to optimize as well.


While most professionals are already on LinkedIn and see it as a jobs marketplace, many simply haven’t taken the time to optimize or maintain their profiles. They also haven’t discovered all the ways you can capitalize on LinkedIn as a marketing and social selling tool. The good news is that quite a few people have.
http://www.toprankblog.com/

Social Network Users Statistics India 2013 till 2017 – Maturing growth next five years


According to a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” the number of social network users in India is expected to cross 100 million users and reach more than 127 millionusers by end of 2013. The total numbers of social media users will more than double and reach close to 283 millionusers by 2017. But the interesting fact is that the number of users has already started to see slower growth from 2013 and the decline in the YoY growth is expected to continue which also highlights the maturing numbers for the social networks in India which is also a global trend. There has been a strong social media adoption in India since past few years as the business organizations, government organizations and even political parties are actively utilizing the various social media platforms and social network sites to reach the people. 75% of Indians who are active internet users use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest etc. and interaction with friends, relatives, colleagues and community, live chat, status updates, image- as well as video-sharing are some of the major activities by Indians that spend close to 30 minutes every day online on the different social networks.
(Source:http://socialmediacases.blogspot.in/)