Unless you have been under a rock, you probably have heard at least some noise about Facebook Graph Search (and if you haven’t and want to use Social Media to connect with your customers, you need to get out from under that rock). Graph search allows users to search through their connections “likes” to find solutions (think businesses) they like. So how does that work?

Instead of searching for “Chinese food in Corvallis, OR” they can search for “Chinese food my friends like in Corvallis, OR.” Big difference there my little camping buddies. Word of mouth meets Facebook. Who do you trust more, your BFF Susie or an ad in the local paper?

So if you are a business, you need to look at how your page is set up. Most businesses set up a “Page” which we tend to still call a Fan Page. However, if you set up a business page with a location, it really becomes a “Place” page. What is also problematic is that someone can “check in” and have created a “Place” page for you. While this blog isn’t going to touch on that, you can read this great post by Sam Scholfield @ Stuffedweb.com and learn some tricks.

You want to be found, I assume so,  Chinese restaurant in Corvallis, OR, listen up.  If you don’t have a Facebook Page for you business, log onto Facebook as you and create one.  Check to make sure one hasn’t been created and if it has, claim it.  Facebook does a nice job explaining this.  If you want to appear in a search for “Chinese restaurants in Corvallis” then make sure you are listed as a “restaurant” with a sub-category of “Chinese” and that your About section lists you as being located in Corvallis Oregon.

What else can you do?

• Always be building your following by aggressively seeking Likes!
• Try some Facebook ads and Promoted Posts
• Make sure your website has a like box
• Encourage customers to take photos while dining and upload them to Facebook (offer a free, special desert).
• Share great content

Download the Hubspot Guide “How to Use Facebook for Business” from bradattig.com.

I’ll be talking tomorrow, Thursday, February 20th at Noon, at the Corvallis Chamber of Commerce about social media. This is the February Brown Bag sponsored by the Business Enterprise Center.

My goal is to provide some practical ideas and methods that small businesses can use to improve communication with customers through social media.  For more information, you can check out this page at the BEC website.

Social Strategy at the Big B2B Player

Over the past few months, LinkedIn has been making quite a lot of changes, some driven by a desire to have a larger social strategy presence and some driven by bottom-line economics. In August, the social network, the dominate player in the B2B social market, started a fairly radical profile page redesign, promising more “changes to come” and they have. Some of these changes have been wholesale redesigns and some more like a model year update. A couple things to take note of.

Meet the New LinkedIn Profile: A Better Way to Connect and Build Relationships

When LinkedIn announced in their blog the changes to personal profiles, that was their exact heading. Sounds to me they want you to work on your social strategy with them instead of anyone else. The new layout certainly has some positives. Images and activity are featured more prominently as are your skills so you better have great pictures, well written content and stay involved in updating your activity and profile. LinkedIn has greatly enhanced your ability, through better visual insights, to find what you have in common with the the people and companies in your network. So updating your skills is another important consideration. Plus, this allows your to locate others you should be networking with.

For instance, you may follow ABC Corp. and if one of your skills is social strategy, you will be able to see others at ABC Corp that have that skill as well. A valuable tool for you to build your professional social network.

Just yesterday LinkedIn announced some other changes including the removal of some of the more popular application that many people have used including the SlideShare app and the WordPress app. Since LinkedIn purchased SlideShare earlier this year, one has to expect a more robust and improved integration is coming shortly.

Company Profile Updates

Company profile changes are important if you have a business presence on LinkedIn, even if you are a sole proprietor. Quite a while back, LinkedIn started by expanding the ability to post your products and services on a separate tab. Then LinkedIn allowed you the ability to send status updates to your followers. The problem was that most followers were either employees, recruiters or competitors. Now, LinkedIn has given company profiles the ability to send a status update to a targeted audience of followers. That audience can be delineated by Location, Seniority, Industry, Function and Size of Employer. You can also select to remove employees from an update. This ability opens up some new social strategy considerations.

For one, I think it makes company profiles much more valuable from a social recruitment perspective. If you have many of your competitors employees following you and you have a need for a new Director of Manufacturing in your Oil and Gas division, you can target that group specifically to alert them of your need. You also might use it just to build your employment brand, pointing out great things happening at ABC Corp.

If your a smaller business or sole proprietor who engages in primarily in B2B, you now have a social platform that might make sense to invest time into a company page so that you can better target select followers on pertinent updates.

More changes are coming, if you like to see the future, Hubspot was included in the first phase. Expect more changes on both the Company and Personal  profiles and be sure to evaluate how they fit into your own social strategy.

Related articles

• The Nips and Tucks Happening at LinkedIn
• Have you seen the new look to LinkedIn?
• The New LinkedIn Profile: It’s about time
• New LinkedIn ‘Follow’ Button Ideal for B2B Content Marketers
• LinkedIn revamps profiles with personal branding in mind

Yesterday, I put up Christmas lights in the Oregon rain for my mother.  Today, I have the cold to prove it, however the holidays are upon us and we move forward.  The greatest thing about social media is that you can do something today and your customers will see it today.  There is a great article on Shortstack, read it here.  It’s not too late to get it going.  Social Media can be instant.  So what if  you only have 50 likes on your business page, set a goal to double it this holiday season and then double it again in the 1st quarter.

Have a strategy, create a plan and work on it daily.  It will pay off and you will be rewarded through your efforts.

Related articles

• Winning Social: 5 Social Media Marketing Contests That Boosted Consumer Brands
• Social Media No-No’s – Hijacking the Facebook Feed

What does that mean?  We all have the person that posts incessantly, invites you to every new game they play (get a life), or suddenly on Saturday morning, “catches up” on their postings filling your and my timeline with 8, 12 or more posts in a couple of hours.  If it’s a person doing it, I usually direct message them and say, “I love the pictures but 12 in a row is overkill, create an album and if I’m interested, I’ll look at it.”

What do you do if it is a business that you’ve liked doing it?  Statistics say, most people just “unlike” the page.  It’s similar to the old adage that only about 1 out of 10 people will actually tell you about your poor customer service.  Here is a great article “6 Common Reasons People Unlike Your Facebook Page…” Note that 1, 2 & 3 are all about posting too much.  It’s great that you have so much content to share but how you share it is critical.

Here is what got me off on this rant today.  I “Liked” to View from the Tractor on Facebook.  I think it’s a start up Facebook page for Interact Education, Inc. but their website doesn’t seem to be up either.  It’s a classic case of trying to do good (you all know how much I support sustainability, local, organic and all things such).  They only have 40 some likes, so despite this call-out, please give them some Like Love.”  I think I connected with them  as a result of my love of the Excelsior Inn in Eugene and the Excelsior Farm Facebook page and I saw a post by View from the Tractor.

Anyways, someone at View from the Tractor, got into the posting mood this morning and posted 8 or 9 posts in less than 2 hours.  All good content but it just floods someone’s timeline and is really not the way to make friends.  These guys are just starting and I’ll give them some slack but when and if you have several hundred fans liking you, you need to understand how and when to post.  Do you look at your Facebook stats to see what is going on with your unsubscribes?  If not, you should.

Enter the Social Media Dilemma.

“So Brad, I only have a little time each week to post, what am I supposed to do?”

Try Buffer.  You can sit down, create a number of posts and schedule them so that the people that love you enough to like you don’t dislike you.  If you are a small business focusing on making the world a better place or a non-profit, send me an email, I’ll help you for free to get Buffer up and running.  Better yet, if you let me refer you to Buffer, we both get extra posts from them, keeping both our costs low.

Click here to let me refer you to Buffer and help you get it set up.

BTW, they did post about Terra Madre Day, happening today at the Benton County Fairgrounds from 3 PM to 7 PM.  I’ll be there, hopefully you will too.

Related articles

• Buffer App has a Brand New Share Button, Adds Facebook Analytics
• Why Your Facebook Page is Like a Tamagotchi

Here in Corvallis, Oregon a local camera shop is closing their doors after 47 years. The Gazette Times, our local paper, published a well written article where the owner attributing “showrooming” as one of the key factors for the business downturn and liquidation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia defines showrooming as when a customer visits a brick and mortar retail location to touch and feel a product and then goes online or to a low-service big-box retailer to purchase the product at a lower price. Hey, it exists and its only going to become more prevalent unless local businesses learn how to compete.

Edgell Networks did a survey on showrooming and the results were pretty interesting.

“80% of the retailers surveyed by Edgell Network and eBay Local said they expect their sales to be negatively impacted by an average of 5% because of showrooming. Even worse is that 49% say they are not prepared, with only 12% saying they have a strategy.”

So here are my thoughts, how can you know something is going to happen and not be prepared and not have a strategy in place to combat the issue?  I used to help small businesses prepare when a Big-Box store was opening in their area.  Those that planned, prepared and had a strategy in place survived, those that didn’t went the way of the dinosaur.  So if you have a small business that is vulnerable to showrooming, I’d suggest you get started planning and preparing.  If you don’t have a business strategy, get one or find someone that can help you put one together.

I read the Edgell Network study and it pointed out some interesting observations.  It also lead me to a recent Forbes article which you can reference below and to a Deloitte report on holiday shopping.  One interesting statement caught my eye.

“”Retailers that welcome the smartphone shopper in their stores with mobile applications and wi-fi access — rather than fear the showrooming effect — can be better positioned to accelerate their in-store sales this holiday season. Recent research from Deloitte indicates that shoppers armed with smartphones are 14 percent more likely to make a purchase in the store than those who do not use a smartphone as part of their in-store journey.”

This isn’t rocket science,  people are busy.  If they are in your store and you provide them competent service, answer their questions accurately and give value that is meaningful; you can convert many show-roomers (I just made that word up I think) to customers. If you only compete on price, you will lose.

Provide service beyond compare.  Engage your customers both present and future. Create a community using social media platforms. Leverage new technology to make your business look cool.  While price is still king, think about offering specials that the on-line businesses can’t compete with like hands-on training or a special loyalty program that’s meaningful. Have on-line reviews handy so you can discuss the pros and cons with the customer.  Lots of reviews have terminology that your customer might not even understand. So what if the reviews are from a competitor, information is king.

I’ll tell you what you don’t do.  You don’t look at people that are trying to save money as the enemy. You don’t treat them with disdain. You don’t make them feel guilty and you don’t blame them for your lack of having a business strategy to help them make an informed buying decision from you.

Corvallis Camera didn’t have any social presence (Facebook, etc.) nor seemed to engage their photo community with a timely news blog. I don’t know if they had a loyalty program or not and I don’t know if any of this would have made a difference for them given other business factors but it might for you. Showrooming is here to stay just like the big-box stores are as well. Imploring people to “shop local just because” isn’t a plan nor is it a sound business strategy.

Good luck this holiday season and be nice to your potential customers. As a local business you have a lot to offer, make sure they know just what that is that makes you worth buying from.

Related articles

• 5 Hyperlocal Tools To Help Retailers Curb Showrooming
• Owners of small shops push their perks on Small Business Saturday
• Small Businesses To Compete With Big Box Stores, On-line Retailers
• How To Convert Showrooming Customers

The LinkedIn Marketing API is here.

It’s official, LinkedIn has released their marketing (advertising) API.  Say what and why do I care?  Let me explain, first LinkedIn is a “professional” social network and a darling of Wall Street with a value of $10 billion and a PE ration of over 600.  Up until now, if you wanted to advertise on LinkedIn, you had to log on and use the clunky interface.  With the addition of an ad API, 3rd party providers can now get “in the game” and run marketing campaigns.

It’s not all good news yet as the players that have been given advanced access are focused on larger brands.  For instance, Bizo, which has had access and some excellent success is really for companies with a $6K to $10K and above monthly budget. That’s way out of reach for a small or mid-sized business or most non-profits.  However, this will change and the beauty of an API is that almost anyone can use it.  This article today on AdWeek explains in layperson terms how an API makes things easy.  Up until this release, advertising on LinkedIn was like making pancakes from scratch.  Now with the API, it’s like buying Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake mix and just adding eggs and water.

What is also exciting is that Bizo has reported that average cost of a lead is between $50 and $150 each and that one business has reported lowering their cost per lead by 60%.  Great you say, what do I do with this information.  I recommend you read this blog for updates, subscribe to my monthly newsletter and wait until some smaller (read, lower priced) players get into the LinkedIn ad API.  Then we sit down and look at your lead generation process and see if a marketing campaign on LinkedIn will make you a happy camper in 2013.

Regards,

Related articles

• Business Development, Which Social Media Platform Works
• LinkedIn Launches Ads API, Enabling Custom Tools For Large-Scale Campaigns
• LinkedIn Opens Up Ad Interface With New API Program
• LinkedIn takes Facebook approach and opens ad platform to developers
• By The Way, LinkedIn’s Profit Is Going To Explode (LNKD)

“Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday after Black Friday, the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States, created by companies to persuade people to shop online. The term made its debut on November 28, 2005 in a Shop.org press release entitled “‘Cyber Monday’ Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year”.

Did your marketing plan for 2012 have a strategy in place to grab some of the estimated $1.4 billion in sales that will occur today?  Did your web strategist contact you 2 months ago to “strategize” or did it sneak up on you? Having a sound marketing strategy that leverages social media to provide a cost effective, high ROI series of campaigns doesn’t happen overnight but it shouldn’t be an afterthought.

This event doesn’t have to belong to the $1.0 billion companies either, so shop today and give us a call so that next year, you’re getting more orders than you could have ever thought and you’ll be to busy to shop.

Happy Cyber Monday,

So what is anecdotal evidence?  Feel free to look it up, here is the Wikipedia definition.  I tend to like this statement regarding  anecdotal evidence;  anecdotal evidence and explanations may affect our understanding of a premise, and therefore influence our judgment.  So this individual has essentially discounted other social media sources, most noteworthy Facebook, based on what is possibly faulty judgement.  I don’t think that is the best way to run a business.

So let’s look at some numbers then I can toss my own anecdotes into the ring.  Over at The Social Skinny, my soon to be new friend Cara Pring, published “99 New Social Media Stats for 2012.”  One stat stands out…

LinkedIn is 4X better for B2B lead generation than Facebook and Twitter (business development)

OK, I can buy that but I have to ask, what kind of lead generation and is that number a great enough inducement to convince me to give up on a social network (hint Facebook) that will soon reach a billion users?  That’s like walking away from three quarters of India.  More importantly, how is the business owner tracking these leads?  Again, is is scientific or anecdotal?  If the only sandbox you play in is LinkedIn then you’re pretty much assured you’re only going to get leads from there.

Now I don’t have any solid evidence to back up this claim but I’m willing to bet that most people that are active on a social network, say LinkedIn, are probably active on others as well.  Twitter jumps to mind and so does Facebook. Keep in mind that each platform fills a different need or their wouldn’t be a need for all of them.  LinkedIn is the most professional and Facebook is more social.  Twitter is just Twitter.

I use all three and when I’m prospecting for business development and I use LinkedIn and Facebook about equally.  I find someone on LI, I check them out on FB and vice versa.  Why, you ask?  I’m a firm believer that the more you know about someone the more genuine you can be.  That leads to deeper relationships which can translate to more rewarding interactions.

So here is the problem with my B2B friend.  In his social media strategy, he has essentially abandoned most of India for Bangladesh without any real evidence to support his claim and the worst thing is he didn’t have to.  Here is my anecdotal thought for the day.  Since I find that most people that have a LinkedIn profile probably have one on Facebook as well.  Why not run on all cylinders instead of just some of them?

The video below is short and to the point and although it focuses on some pretty large corporations, the lessons learned can be applied at every level.

If you have a small business, want to grow it through leveraging social media and also make a difference, be it local or national, please comment below or shoot me an email.  I’ll be happy to talk with you, brainstorm and present solutions that can impact your bottom line and at the same time, make the world a better place.

Better yet, subscribe to my monthly newsletter and keep up to day on how to grow your business with a solid social media strategy that compliments your overall marketing plan.

http://www.bradattig.com