12. Finally, a Synopsis

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the last in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   It’s been a pleasure sharing my knowledge about social media and the independent consumer based business.     Good fortune.

Social Media Workshops

	What to post			Where does the informational, marketing and brand content come from?
Accounts that you need:	Holidays and Trends	Company Updates	How To… info
1.       LinkedIn	Alt week	1 x week	1 x week	Your product in real life, how it can benefit your client… what problem do you solve?   What is your brand about (in terms of benefit to your clients?)  None of this should be in sales or advertising terms.  All of it should sound like a lecture or Ted Talk.
LinkedIn Company Page		1 x week	1 x week
LinkedIn Write Articles			Alt week
2.       Facebook Account	Daily – 1	1 x week	1 week	One liner with title plus link to Blog, YouTube, or LinkedIn Post with information and how to for viewer.
Business Facebook Page		1 x week	1 x week	One liner with title plus link to Blog, YouTube, or LinkedIn Post with information and how to for viewer.
3.       Twitter account	Daily	Daily	Daily	One liner with title plus link to Blog, YouTube, or LinkedIn Post with information and how to for viewer.
4.       YouTube	never	1 x 2 weeks	1 x week	Primarily a Forum for how to do stuff and real info.   Always include links to your websites
5.       Blogs		1 x week	1 x week	Your product in real life, how it can benefit your client… what problem do you solve?   What is your brand about (in terms of benefit to your clients?)  None of this should be in sales or advertising terms.  All of it should sound like a lecture or Ted Talk.
6.       Instagram	Daily-1	1 x week	1 x week	Photos of your products, services, brand, good works, campaigns
7.       Snapchat
8.       Pinterest	Alt week	1 x week	1 x week	Attach links to your company pages on the pictures, reshare other peoples
9.       Google Maps	Daily – 1	1 x week	1 x week	One liner with title plus link to Blog, YouTube, or LinkedIn Post with information and how to for viewer.
10.    Google+ and Brand Account Google Page	1 x week	1 x week	1 x week	One liner with title plus link to Blog, YouTube, or LinkedIn Post with information and how to for viewer.
11.    Hootsuite : to schedule future posts		1 x week	1 x week

11. Hootsuite

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the 11th in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the independent consumer based business.   Good fortune.

“And the elves were able to do it all in one night…. “   I envy the elves.  No social networker is an elf with such magical powers.  Maintaining accounts and posting takes buckets of time.  Much of the posting is redundant (same stuff or almost the same stuff across many platforms).  If only there was a piece of software that could automate this process!

Well there is.  No one spot can allow you to publish to all networks in exactly the way you need, however, Hootsuite comes pretty darn near close. 

Sign up for Hootsuite and pay for the basic account (you will need it).   Enter in all your social networks.   

Streams allow you to view whats going on in any of your social networks and also to see what you published and what is scheduled.   

Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts ahead.   

Hootsuite allows you to publish on a number of different platforms - one post going many places.   

These 2 features make Hootsuite an essential service.  

Now you can begin publishing most of your stuff from one single location.  The scheduling feature allows you to spend a day on Twitter or Facebook posts, schedule the series and leave the topic for the next number of weeks or months.  It allows you to experiment with time of day publishing and frequencies.  Finally, it allows you to publish bulk or batch entries.  

Hootsuite is an essential service. 

Social Media for Business Workshops

5. Blogging

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the 5th in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the professional independent consumer based business.    Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.
#FinancialServices #Mortgage #Insurance #Appraisers #BloggingForBusiness

Blogs are articles where you discuss your industry, current issues and events in your business and marketplace, and occasionally, offer up your product as a solution to one or more of the issues that face your industry. The intent is to share the useful bits of your expertise.  

Great places to blog and tools to use include blogspot.com and wordpress.com

How to:

• Create your spot to blog (blogspot.com, haha…get it!).   Include some information about yourself and your area of expertise.   Add a background and some colour .

• Post articles weekly.   These articles are meant to share information, invite comment and introspection and become and essential service for the reader.   This will keep them coming back.  Stymied on what to write?   Please refer to an earlier blog:  What to write? What to right? 

• Add tags to each blog to describe the content.   This is how you will be found.

• Publish the blog.

• Publish links to the blog on all your other social media.

• And your website.   Don’t forget to link your website into this publishing frenzy.  

Social Media for Business Workshops

4. YouTube

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the 4th in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for t 
for #FinancialServices #Mortgage #Insurance #Appraisers – professional independent consumer based businesses.    Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.

Who doesn’t search on YouTube when you need information?  

Is there a better place to share your expertise, establish your brand, and market your product (also known as “solve your customer’s very specific problems with your offering”)?

YouTube videos can be slides, lectures, notes with voice over, actual videos.   Convert all of the above into videos, add tags and publish.   The tags should contain your intended audience.  

• Post weekly.   These videos are meant to share information, invite comment and introspection and become and essential service for the reader.    

• Add tags to each blog to describe the content.   This is how you will be found.

• Publish links to the video on all your other social media.

• And your website.   Don’t forget to link your website into this publishing frenzy.  

YouTube is a great good!   Remember, Justin Beiber was discovered via YouTube.  

Social Media for Business Workshops

3. Twitter

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the third in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the independent consumer based business.     Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.

How can anyone communicate any useful ideas in 140 characters? Let me count the ways:

1. Comment quickly
2. Be clever
3. Retweet someone else’s genius
4. Add a photo or video link
5. Add a link to a blog or a useful article

Comment quickly:

Commenting on current events and opinions is a great way to come up with tweets.   As you read news or listen to current affairs, issues that everyone is aware of will come up.   Commenting on these is easy because most people will background information. 

Be clever :

#beclever  is one of the many easier-said-than-done ‘isms.   It is in great company with 1. To lose weight, eat less, exercise more and   2. To win the game, we need to score more goals.  

Retweet someone else’s genius:

The lazy man’s guide to life includes this advice on twitter:   to appear clever when you are not, retweet someone else’s clever. 

Add a photo or video link:

Finding a great photo that is seasonal, or topical (not tropical… although tropical is probably trending in this northern winter) or a video and tweet that.  Create a longwinded video with your brand and marketing message and tweet a link to that video.

Add a link to a blog or a useful article:

What is ever so useful on twitter is the ability to link to a blog, or useful article.   The article should be informative and contain your essential marketing message:  the problem that you solve.   It can also reflect your brand.   This is advertising in its best form.   You are providing useful information to the reader.  Twitter gives you a place to hook the reader and the ability to link to your article. 

Footnote: Twitter is not expected to live past 2017 by many experts.  

Social Media for Business Workshops

2. Facebook

            In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the second in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the independent consumer based business.     Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.

Facebook has been written off by many professionals as a personal space.   Nothing is personal in 2017.  Everything is public.   So is your professional life. 

Facebook is useful for businesses because it has

• a search engine
• business pages where you can promote your business activities or at least publish them at no charge 
• paid ads to target audiences
• boost posts for pay, to a  pre-selected audience.

So create a page about yourself with tasteful photos of you.   Some of these should be personal and some of these purely professional.   Give people a glimpse of your true self and your many aspects. 

Publish updates weekly or bi-weekly.   These are gentle touches to your network.

Create a business page with address, phone, email and any other important contact information so that people can search and find your business easily using the search engine. 

Publish regular (bi-weekly or monthly) business updates on the business page.   Again, these are gentle touches.

Consider paying for an ad or two.  The ad should be interesting, innovative and entertain your intended audience.   The ad should most of all entertain.  Facebook is a leisure activity. The ad will increase your page likes and followers.

When something interesting or extraordinary happens for your business, publish these events and boost the post to ensure that as many people as possible in the public learn about it.  This will also serve to increase your network and your reach.

Privacy and Security

If you think of these Facebook pages as places to promote your professional self and business, then you will realize that privacy is really not very necessary.   Most of your posts should be public.  However, you should ensure that you get to review anything that anyone writes on your wall or shares on your timeline.  Do not re-share personal information or posts from your Facebook friends.  Do not include personal information on this site that you wish to keep personal or only share with close friends and family. 

Ending on a positive note:

Facebook can extend your network by leaps and bounds.  You can gently remind people that you are the trusted professional of choice for the myriad of services that you provide. 

Social Media for Business Workshops

1. LinkedIn for the Small Business

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  This is the first in a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the independent consumer based business.     Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.

LinkedIn is the social network for business professionals.   Seventy four percent of professionals are registered with LinkedIn.   Sixty percent of LinkedIn users check their LinkedIn site more than 3 times a week.   To network in 2017, use LinkedIn.  

In the olden days, I would get a business card, perhaps enter the information in Outlook, and then, with many contacts, lose touch with them as they changed emails or changed jobs. 

With LinkedIn, the contact maintains the information and the changes to their emails and job situation. 

     Rule 1:   Keep your contact information up to date in LinkedIn so that people can contact you, especially if they have no other contact information.  (oh yes, and have a professional photo of yourself)

Networking is more than just getting someone’s contact information.   It is about sharing who you are and learning about who they are and sharing updates.

        Rule 2: Share professional updates:   these can be articles of interest that you find on some publication, thought or musings or issues as they come up, company information, press releases, news and events in the business world that you work in, industry information, information about your profession.  

Write articles:   If you really are an expert about something, and good at your profession, you can write the occasional article that supports this.

        Rule 3:   Write articles for LinkedIn.   These can also be published on your blog if you have one.  Sharing updates and writing posts/ articles are 2 different things. Updates appear on the news feed on the Home page and flow.   Posts or Articles appear on your profile and do not flow away in a few hours. So it is worthwhile to take the time and write the articles. 

Company Pages explain to the world, the company that you work for.   You can showcase events and achievements of your company on these pages.   Your company is part of your professional legitimacy.  People do search on LinkedIn and Google treats LinkedIn information almost as highly as it does Wikipedia.

        Rule 4:  Create and maintain a company page.  (Post weekly or monthly).

Groups are a forum for you to connect with people in similar professions and interests, exchange ideas and publish opinions.   Join groups that reflect your professional credentials to further establish your professional credentials.

        Rule 5:  Join Groups that reflect your interests and skills.  Joins discussions and share interesting articles from groups to your contacts.  

for more info:  Social Media for Business Workshops

Why Social Media for the Wealth Management, or Insurance Company?

Much that has been written about Social Networking tactics is too general.   There is more than one type of consumer based business.  For example, a consumer based business could be a business that sells professional services to consumers, one that sells iPhone74 aps to tweens, or one that sells cheese to a mass market.  For a consumer goods, mass market business, the benefits of Facebook are obvious.   Get a million followers and use ads to promote your posts to the next million.   Entertaining posts will be shared by any and all. 

Re-shares happen organically, but only if you are cute, funny, a kitten, original, useful, and/or timely (or some combination of those).   This is such an easy thing if you are selling Coke and have a million dollar budget (or can add the ‘real thing’ into the real thing.   

Coke Its the real thing

The issue here for the small to medium sized business such as a mortgage broker, insurance agency, financial analyst, appraiser... 

For the independent consumer based business:  the wealth management firm, the financial services company, the insurance brokerage, getting results from Social Media for business is a bigger challenge.  

But the objectives are different as well.  Instead of a million followers, you are looking for a thousand local followers.   Instead of a million shares, you are looking for increased traffic and SEO (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but in 2017, it just means that Google should offer you up when your customers or prospects go looking.)   

In the year 2017, if you are not easily found on the internet, you do not exist.  Over the next weeks, I will publish a series of articles; “How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Brand – the Lecture Series”.   This is all you need to know to create a social media presence for the independent consumer based business that offers professional services and products.  I am specifically addressing the requirements of insurance, mortgage, financial services industries, but the results are also applicable to construction companies, consulting firms, and small B2B endeavors.     Enjoy, and Happy New Year 2017.

Social Media for Business Workshops

Want Your Posts to go Viral? On Social Media, Timing Is Everything

Ah, the busy life of the business professional – good for you if you’ve implemented a social media campaign strategy into your hectic schedule.  But, did you know that there are certain times of the day and specific days of the week that the content you post is more likely to go viral?  According to data put forth on Bitly.com, it’s true! 

The data indicate, for example, that on Twitter, “…posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.”

                                                                                                                           

This does make a lot of sense if you think about it – how productive, after all, do you think most people are after 3:00 on Friday?  The research furthermore maintains that the peak of Twitter activity occurs prior to the optimal time to post.  Twitter’s busiest time tends to be between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm, Monday through Thursday.  Should you post on Twitter during its peak hours, while there are more people clicking, it might raise the average number of clicks, however, your posts may not be receiving all the attention they deserve due to the fact that there will obviously be more competition for this attention. 

For Facebook, the data states that, “Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.”  It appears that Facebook traffic tends to peak around the middle of the week, from the hours of 1:00 pm until 3:00 pm and begins to fade more after 4:00 pm.  Moreover, the research contends that although traffic counts are comparable at 7:00 pm and 8:00 pm, if you post at 7:00 pm, you will garner more clicks than you would posting at 8:00 pm.

With respect to Tumblr, one of our  favorite blogging sites, there’s currently a vast difference from Twitter and Facebook.  The data from Bitly show that posting on Tumblr after 4:00 pm stands to garner optimal results, and that, “…postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr. Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday. ”

So, there you have it – valuable information on optimal times to post on three of the most prevalent social media sites out there.  As you’re undoubtedly pressed for time on most days of your life, knowing what times it’s most worth posting will help with your strategy!