Mine Your Own Business

Improve Your Social Media Results

There are many variations of an old adage in advertising that goes something like this, "I know that half my advertising works...I just don't know which half!" I wondered who first came up with this humorous statement and according to my research it was probably John Wanamaker in the late 1880s. You can follow this link to some other people that are credited with using some variation of this quote.

What holds true with figuring out what part of your advertising works also applies in a somewhat similar fashion to social media. Why do you receive unsubscribes from you email marketing, or "unlikes" from your Business Facebook Page, or why do people stop "following" your company on Twitter? There was a recent article from Entrepreneur that provided some results from a report from ExactTarget, an interactive marketing services provider.

Some of the results make perfect sense, such as 54 percent of consumers unsubscribe from emails because they get too many of them. The same holds true with Facebook, too much posting causes 44 percent to "unlike" your page. The results were a little different with Twitter, evidently consumer don't mind getting a lot of Tweets but 52 percent stopped "following' because the tweets were boring and repetitive.

There is a lot more information in the article regarding not only what consumers dislike about these three forms of social media, but what they like about them as well. If you're interested in more information on this topic there is a link to ExactTarget in the article. I followed the link and they are having a Webinar on this topic on March 15th. In this instance the Ides of March might be a good thing for your company if you pick up some good tips at the Webinar.

Facebook Business Page Upgrade

I'm a big believer in duct tape (sometimes referred to as hundred mile an hour tape) so when I ran across an article from Duct Tape Marketing on an upgrade to Facebook it immediately caught my attention. Many small business owners have been proactive about social media and have created a Facebook Business Page and according to the article there are some major improvements that will be implemented by March 1st. The article goes on to describe some of the most important improvements.

• iframe Tabs for pages
• Look and feel
• Operation

There are many links in the article to help any small business in upgrading their Facebook Small Business Page before the changes take effect. The article makes the point that many of the changes may mean a move to separate business and personal profiles and stresses that all the changes are fluid. Some will stay, some will change over time, and some will disappear. The main thing is now is the the time to do your homework (or in this case business work?) to make sure you take full advantage of the upcoming changes.

New Program from Facebook

Facebook Places was launched late last year for the iPhone and has since expanded so that you can use Places on touch.facebook.com or the Facebook App for  BlackBerry, Android, HP webOS or Windows Phone 7. If you're not familiar with Facebook Places and would like more information, visit the Facebook website or this article we ran across when Places was first released.  Originally there wasn't much incentive for users to use Places, but now Facebook has followed up with a beta version of a program called Facebook Deals.

How to Build Business with Facebook Deals from Entrepreneur provides a lot of informaion on Deals and why it can be such a valuable tool for any small business. The article describes how Deals offers four different types of deals.

• Individual Deal
• Friend Deal
• Loyalty Deal
• Charity Deal

Allowing four different types of deals greatly increases the options available for any small business owner. Don't miss the link at the bottom of the article that will take you to the Facebook website so you can set up Facebook Deals for your business.

More Tips on Email

We just did a posting yesterday with some tips to make your emails more effective and originally thought we might combine two articles on the topic, but there was so much good and different information in both of them that we thought it was worth two postings. The article The 7 Top Email Marketing Trends for 2011 begins by describing how one of the most important small business marketing trends for 2011 may be the integration of social media and email marketing. Two leading email marketers also provided seven other trends they are predicting for 2011.

1. Integrate Your Email Marketing with Your Social Media Campaigns
2. Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Mobile
3. Engage Readers
4. Keep Content Brief and Focused
5. Don't Go Overboard On Images or Design
6. Plan Ahead for More Effective Email Campaigns
7. Track Campaigns To Determine What's Working and What's Not

While there is some overlap on the two articles (point number four above with point number 1 in the previous article on brevity), this article presented some totally different points that I had never considered. With the current explosion of smart phones and new tablets point 2 is especially relevant since more and more people may read your email on one of these devices. Your emails of the past that were designed with a computer or laptop in will not work as well on one of these devices, so the article provides some great ideas for making your email more mobile device friendly.

The other point I especially liked is the last point about tracking or analytics software. I spoke to a fellow employee that is involved with Tacony email marketing and he said that this is very important and we use a number of different techniques to monitor the success of our emails. After all, if you don't have some way to track results how do you know what does work and what doesn't?

 

 

 

More Effective Email

I know a lot of people think that with all the new social media email is quickly becoming an an obsolete technology (some would even say it is already effectively dead). Let's have a little fun before we get to our main article and look at a very interesting post that illustrates the above point. It seems that Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List every August since 1998. The list gives some cultural touchstones that have shaped the thinking of the incoming freshmen. This is where I found some interesting points on the class of 2014, one being that they think email is too slow. You can have a lot of fun with the list and there are lists all the way back to 2002, so it is worh a visit.

Now on to our main article titled 10 Old New Rules for Business Emails that makes the point that email is the backbone of all the other social media and it is still very important for a small business to use it correctly. Here are the 10 tips recommended in the posting.

1. Keep it short.
2. Make the subject line a summary.
3. Start and end with "you."
4. Only one topic per message.
5. Use appropriate tone.
6. Don't send extra copies.
7. Respect spelling and grammar.
8. Remember it's not private.
9. Email isn't for arguments.
10. Mind those threads.

Most are common sense and are rules we have probably all followed for years, but a few of them were something I had not considered before. I'd also like to provide one addition to point number 8 on Remember it's not private. I take that one a step further and assume every email I send can be read by anyone. With all the hackers out there it makes me cringe when I see what some people put in their emails.

 

Tips to Improve Your Google Place Page Results

There was an interesting article from Small Business Trends on how Google is really empasizing local with Place Search, Place Pages, Google Hotpot, etc. The article emphasizes how important it is becoming for any successful small business to optimize their Google Place Page, but small business owners have many demands on their time so the article provides four tips for doing it most effectively with the smallest amount of wasted time.

• Claim your listing completely
• Be smart with keywords
• Add images
• Start heavily encouraging reviews

There is a lot of great information including examples on how to use these four tips. Whether your Place Pages just need some enhancements or if you are starting from scratch, these tips can be a great help for any small business. Another bonus to this article is that it has some great links on the right and bottom of the Web page to some other interesting postings.

6 Tips to Build Small Business Credibility

Every small business owner knows how important it is to establish the credibility of your business, after all if people doesn't have trust in your product, customer service, and overall business performance they will go somewhere else. A recent article described how for almost 100 years the Better Business Burea (BBB) had been one of the best methods for establishing the credibilty of a small business. It then went on to reference a recent controversy on BBB's current rating system. This got me curious about the controversy so I did a Google search and found this article that gives some very interesting background if your curiosity is aroused as mine was.

Back to the article, it recommends the following six tips that any business owner can take to build business credibility:

1. Start a Blog
2. Encourage Customer Reviews
3. Post Testimonials and Endorsements
4. Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
5. Be Easy to Reach
6. Reward Referrals

Probably not all of these will work for your particular business and obviously some are better than others. The three I like the best are Encourage Customer Reviews, Post Testimonials and Endorsements, and Reward Referrals. All three of them have one thing in common, they are providing actual feed back from current customers to prospective customers. What better way to build your business credibilty?

 

 

Spam and Facebook Business Pages

More and more small businesses are setting up a Business Page on Facebook. So you've gone to the trouble of setting up a page and then find out that it is targeted with annoying messages and irritating advertisements. We know first hand about that, because Mine Your Own Business sometimes gets some very stange, meaningless, or irritating comments. Currently we have to watch for comments on a daily basis and delete any junk comments.

Facebook is aware of this problem and has come out with a new automatic spam filtering system to help you keep the problem under control. The article Facebook Moves to Eliminate Spam on Business Pages gives the details on how this new system works and even gives you some images to better illustrate  how it works. The final part of the article provides some things to watch for as you use this new tool and only time will tell how effective it will be, but at the very least it is a start in the ongoing battle with the spammers.

 

Emails and Subject Lines

There was a recent article that made the point that the subject line is very important in getting a prospect to open any email in the first place. Any email you send has to contend with spam and spyware software, firewalls, and just simple deletion by the recipient. We have to poke a little fun at ourselves since anyone who has signed up to get email updates on Mine Your Own Business gets an email that has Mine Your Own Business as the sending party and the subject. We have tried to have the subject line be the same as the title of the posting, but our current platform doesn't have that capablility. We are in the process of changing platforms in the near future.

The article then gives three ideas for what to put in your subject line:

1. The Blank Subject Line
2. The Referall Subject Line
3. The Cold Email Subject Line

There are a lot of very good ideas and techniques in the article and the final tip is especially good. It recommends that when you do get a prospect to respond, ask them what prompted their respoonse. Keep track of what works to develop the most effective strategy.

 

Cloud Computing Warning

So I'm sure most of you have heard of the new cloud-based technologies, but if aren't familiar with the term it is technologies such as Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and one I wasn't well versed on, Salesforce. For a very thorough discussion of the history and pros and cons of cloud computing you can visit Wikipedia. Cloud computing may be sometime in the future for your small business, but one figure a recent article from Bloomberg Business Week really caught my attention.

Ponemon Institute conducts research on privacy, data protections, and information security policy and their annual study reported that the cost of a data breach rose to $204 for each compromised customer record. The article makes the very valid point that for a small business any breach of security  could be a terrible blow. The article provides five tips for safeguarding your network and data, so it might be a good idea to check them out before your business engages in any part of cloud computing. After all as Miguel de Cervantes once wrote:

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.
Miguel de Cervantes