Tag Archive for: social media

social media truths

7 Startling Truths About Social Media

Are your social media efforts inconsistent? Is your brand identity fading? Has every network investment yielded nothing but lost time and wasted dollars?

A Not-So-Sweet Song

It’s time to face the music, brand marketers: Social media is not infallible. All too often posts strike sour chords, leaving you unable to generate the necessary traffic, sales, and ROI. Your hashtag attempts rank as double-flats on the network scale.

Why does this happen? Perhaps you, like so many other marketers, have let the Pied Pipers of social media lead you in the wrong direction?

Let’s discover seven interesting facts about using social media for branded networking.

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social media customer care

5 Rules To Help You Care For Your Customers With Social Media

Has your company been hit with the ‘slap’ of negative online social sentiment? Not long ago, the biggest fear you had when a customer was dissatisfied with your company’s service was that they would tell their friends about the experience until they forgot all about it.

Now you have to worry about those friends helping to spread the bad news with a simple click of the “Share” button.  Are you kept awake at night by the fear that a disgruntled customer will tell all their friends about a bad experience and it will spread like wildfire via social media?

To make sure your business isn’t the next high-profile victim of a viral customer service complaint, make sure you observe the rules of engagement for social customer care.

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social media research

How to Research Your Brand with Social Media

Perhaps your brand strategies are failing to produce the results (and revenue) you expect, or your sales have tended go unnoticed by customers. If it seems that your competitors forever have the upper hand, you may already be wondering how to keep up with the (virtual) Joneses.

It’s an even more frustrating situation if you think you’ve done everything right – creating social media accounts, offering a flurry of posts and pins, conducting cross-channel interactions. However, if your customer responses have been less than impressive and you’re falling behind in the retail race, it is likely that your focus is the problem. Read more

social strategy

How to Develop an Effective Social Strategy in 5 Easy Steps

Is your social media presence like many businesses these days? Do you have a set it and forget it policy, posting content every once in awhile without thinking about a strategy?

It’s time to put that practice to an end!

A smart social strategy is essential in today’s crowded social media market. With more people posting pictures, videos, and updates, you need an effective strategy to help you rise above the noise and get heard.

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decode the facebook auction

Infographic: Decode the Facebook Auction

By Hilary Givens

At first, the Facebook auction may seem like a highly complex or opaque process. However, it is very worth learning and understanding in detail because Facebook advertising is one of the driving forces behind digital advertising today.

To help give you a better understand of the auction process, we’ve designed a visual guide as a reference as you participate in the Facebook auction process. We’ll tell you:

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Leaving money on the table

10 Ways Retailers Can Stop Leaving Money on the Table

Leaving money on the table

This is a guest post by Brian Laney, originally featured on the AlertTech blog.

Do you know what you need to do to create lifelong customers? Want to know what retail technology industry leaders are using to help maximize their profits and build customer loyalty?

Smart retailers are always looking for ways to increase profits. These 10 strategies will help you stop leaving money on the table.

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TrentCaricature

How to Start a Business with No Money

how to start a business with no money inteview

Last November I had the honor of being interviewed by Wes Schaeffer, President and CEO of  The Sales Whisperer, on the Sales Whisperer Podcast.

If you are looking to start a new business, or accelerate the growth of your current business, you will want to tune in!

Listen now and hear us discuss:

  • Our sales backgrounds
  • What gave us the drive to succeed
  • How I leverage social media for success
  • Using video and podcasts to drive engagement
  • Inbound vs outbound marketing
  • Creating a sales funnel

Resources Mentioned

Did you enjoy this show? Trent shares great business building nuggets every week on the Bright Ideas podcast.
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How to Use LinkedIn to Make Meaningful Connections

How to Use LinkedIn to Make Meaningful Connections with Qualified Prospects

How to Use LinkedIn to Make Meaningful Connections

Are you looking for a systematic way for your sales team to generate qualified leads using social media? If so, you are not alone.

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of receiving an email from a guy named Doug, who’d read one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written.

Here’s what Doug wrote to me:

Hi Trent, and thank you for accepting my invitation.

How can you help? OMG, do you have a comfortable chair?

It may be best in a phone call. In brief, we are not on the same page (people at my own company) when it comes to social media.

When we push too many emails to the sales force and determine few even open the information, our solution is to send the information next day air because the emails are not being read. My bet is soon they will not open the next day air letters so we will change to carrier pigeons. Um, what about sending more valuable content? Nah, that can’t be it.

Our social media content does not get enough views so now they want to change the time of day to a optimal time. Argh! How about we send valuable content?

Your article was like a breath of fresh air, validation for what I have been saying.

I need to see how I can incorporate you, or your company, into a presentation.

I need to be upfront. At this time, the company is committed to another, outsourced social media company. In my opinion, our efforts have not been very social.

Call me when it works for you Trent.

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5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 5

grow twitter followers

This is Part 5, the finale of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How To Get Influencer to Promote Your Brand
  • Tactics to Get Influencers Attention
  • Importance of Using Influencers

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

This is the final post in this series that gives you easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. You can check out the other episodes in the additional resources section. You can also Subscribe now so you won’t miss out on my upcoming shows featuring more strategies and industry experts.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 113 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business, and I have yet to meet an entrepreneur that doesn’t want to do that. So if you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and profits, well my friends, I’m happy to say that you are in the right place.

In today’s episode we are going to dive into part 5 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotion. So, why is that such a big deal? Why is twitter promotion such a big deal?

Well as I mentioned in previous episodes, the one thing that is so wonderful about twitter is that it is a very frictionless social media platform. It’s dead easy to use. If you are following the strategies that I have been explaining in the prior episodes, you have learned how to create pre populated tweets and you’ve learned how to create widgets that show real time social proof.

All of this stuff works because if you do this right people, we don’t have to type anything, we don’t have to think. All I have to do is click the mouse once or twice. So that’s pretty frictionless.

So, when there is a lot of people just taking an action that is almost effortless for them to take, get enough of them doing it and as you might imagine the aggregate value of that can be quite significant to increase the buzz for your product or your event or whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. If you’re in business, which we all are more than likely, that is going to increase your profits.

In this episode, we are going to talk about how to do a pre crafted tweet so that you can get influencers to help you to spread the word and there’s a process that you need to follow. To do this right, you don’t want to just call him up and ask him because that’s probably not going to work.

Before we get into that I got 2 announcements. If this is your very first episode of the BrightIdeas podcast, welcome!

If your listening to this on a mobile device right now, text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’re going to see some real  cool marketing automation trickery which I talk a lot about here on my blog, plus gives you an easy way to opt-in and make sure that you never miss a future episode.

If you are listening to this on iTunes, some other place, wherever it might be. If you’ve never been to the blog before go to brightideas.co and you can become a subscriber, you can let people all about it and get a lot of free stuff there and ton of free content and ton of interviews, and I absolutely know that if you’re an entrepreneur you are going to love it.

Announcement number 2. If you are in B2B sales, something that I have spent all my prior life for a 15 years’ worth of B2B sales sold millions of millions and millions of dollars’ worth of stuff. The key, or one of the keys, is being able to get your foot on the door. That’s a huge problem for a lot of people. Once they are in the door they can ask right questions and get the business done but get in the door, man that can be such huge challenge. If that is a challenge for you, I have a course that will help you to improve significantly the results that you are getting back by 15 years of my experience. It’s called the best buyer formula, you can learn all about it at brightideas.co/bbf.

Okay with that said, let’s get in to it. I want to talk about pre crafted tweets–as I mention before the objective of this is to get important people to share your content for you.

You want to provide them with everything that they need to make it dead easy for them to do. Ideally, you want make it so they can do this and maybe 30 seconds or less. So, the way you want to do this is–I’m going tell you what you need to do but after I tell you how you are going to be able to make this work.

What you needed to do is write the tweets for them, send them off an email, and say, “hey here’s 5 tweets, if you wanted to pick one just cut and paste it” Boom! Send it out!

Great! Right? Well, it is very simple but there are some important things to understand about this simple concept and that’s in the how you do this.

DO NOT email somebody for the first time saying, “hey man I love your stuff can you send another tweet for me?” No, that’s not going to work.

What you need to do first is you need to find out who were the influencers that have the audience that I want and start following them and reading their stuff, share then sign up in their newsletter list to put in your RSS reader. Pay attention to their work; share their content with your tribe for a while first. Make lots of comments on their blog, make sure you do lots of tweets and make sure that their @username is in those tweets where you’re basically say, “man, your stuff really rocks and I’m telling my crowd about it”. They are going to like that. Not only that, they are going to start to know who you are.

I speak from experience because I have a pretty big tribe of people and got a lot of emails but there are certain people whose names… “Owen” …who I’ve come to know over a long period of time simply because they’ve reached out and they become active participant in my community.

Now, the next thing that you can do if you happen to have a podcast and if you don’t–man I encourage you to start one immediately–is reach out and ask to interview.

My first professional network is better than it has ever been in my entire life and it’s not from going to conferences or going to launches or swapping business cards.

It is because of my podcast. It is hands down the most powerful personal networking tool I have ever discovered. Here’s why: when I send a tweet or an email to a stranger that says something to the effect of, “how would like to be on my show” or “I’d like to have you as a featured guest on my show?” The ego — and I have one too, I’m not calling out other people I’m calling out all of us — it simply prevents us from ignoring an email like that in most cases.

Now if I, reaching out to Richard Branson, he’s probably going to ignore me because he is a whale and I’m a fish, but I find reaching out to someone who’s a slightly bigger fish than me more than likely I’m going get a reply.

So once you’ve interviewed them, start to build the relationship. No tricks. Just bee real. I’ve tend to friend people on Facebook and I like to see what’s going on in their life and they like to look what’s going on with my life and we have opportunities to comment. One of the things for people who know me is that I’m going to be a Dad in about another 2 months. Depending on when this episode airs, so at the end of April. So if there are new Dads in the audience, I need some advice man. So feel free to reach out and tell me what I’m in for cause I’ve never been a Dad before.

The point is, you want to be real. You want to connect to these people and then once you’ve done all of that, then you can send them an email with your 4 or 5 pre crafted tweets and because you have a relationship with them and you have goodwill with them. They are going to cooperate with you and the impact that an influencer can have on your stuff can be quite significant. So, it’s very, very, very worthwhile to put the time and effort into doing this.

Another idea by the way on how to make an influence looks good is when you’re blogging and you’re writing about a topic–and this is actually in our checklist of things to do when we write a blog post, and yes we have a checklist for almost everything that we do–is that you find a way to mention other people and make them look good and then of course once that post has gone live you can tweet out to them and say I’ve mentioned you in this post and more than likely they are going to read it and when they do, if they like what they read they’re more than likely they’re probably going tweet out that content if it was a good post. If it is a crap post and you mention them you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting their time but of course you making yourself like an idiot so don’t do that.

There are definitely specifics on how to write a post as matter of fact, I have written a post on how to write a post so if you come to brightideas.co and search around you’ll find it and if you can’t find it, send me an email trent@brightideas.co and I will send you a link or a member of my team–say if I can I’m too busy to — have a member of my team reply to you and send you a link directly to that post.

Alright, if you do all this stuff, you’re going to be one step closer to having influential people promote you. To get the show notes for this episode, all you are going to do is go to brightideas.co/113. If you’ve missed the previous four parts of this 5-part series, there’s going to be a link in the show notes or links I should say, to all of the previous episodes. I really encourage you to check this stuff out.

Twitter is my number one social referral source and I still have plenty to learn about twitter and that’s why I’m doing these episodes cause I’m learning new stuff and I’m implementing it on my blog and I’m sharing it with you while I’m doing it so make sure that you go and check those all out.

If you been enjoyed this episode I would love it if you go to brightideas.co/love where you’ll find a pre crafted tweet that you can automatically just click on and send out and I would thank you very much for that. There’s also a way to leave the feedback for the show in the iTunes store. If you feel like doing that I’m going to be one of your biggest fans.

So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so very much for tuning in. I love doing this podcast and I love all the questions and feedback that I get so you as an audience member are someone that I appreciate immensely.

That’s it! I’m going to keep on trucking and will see you in another episode soon.

 

Additional Resources

 

5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 4

grow twitter followers

This is Part 4 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.

Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.

Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:

  • How to Create a Shout Out Tweet
  • Benefits of Using a Shout Out
  • What They Look Like and What They Do

I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.

The next and final post in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.

Resources Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

 

Transcript

Hey there Bright Idea hunters!

Welcome back to episode number 112 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth in their business. I know we all want some of that.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately increase your profits, I am very happy to say that you are in the right place.

In this episode, we are going to dive into part 4 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.

Now, if you’ve missed those other episodes, you can get to them starting at brightideas.co/109 and just keep on increasing that number one way up and you will get to all of the other episodes that proceed this one.

Okay, so we are going to talk about how to create a shoutout tweet and I want give a shoutout to Mike Stelzner from the Social Media Examiner—If you haven’t check it out you probably should–because I learned this little trick from him and I’m sure he learned it from somebody else.

The way that Mike uses it, is that when someone registers for social media marketing world, they can see this list of presenters and then next to the list of all the presenters names is a pre-crafted tweet like we talked about how to do in the previous episode–the episode number 111, the transactional tweet–but he does something that is pretty cool and I’m going to walk you through it.

Basically, the purpose of this tweet is it gives someone the ability to click a link and say–Hey Chris P we’re really looking forward to meeting you in person at social media marketing world.

So, what’s the big deal about that?  Well, there are two things that are kind of a big deal.

Before we get into the big deal, I’m going to explain how I’m going to use it. As you know, I interview countless entrepreneurs here on my podcast. Now that I’ve discovered this little shout out tweet idea and every one of the posts that I do to host those episodes, those interviews, I’m going to create a shout out tweet.

So, why would I do that? There are two reasons.

Number 1 is that I want a person who is my guest to feel the love for being my guest. So the people listening will click that shout out tweet with their name and I mean there’s a specific detail–I’m going to give it to you in just a second.

They are going to give a notification and gives my guest the opportunity to interact with the listener and of course, they are going to love that, so that helps them. So what helps me?

What helps me is I’m going to put a hashtag in there–you remember I talked about the importance of putting hashtags in. And that’s the very first episode, in episode number 109 or 110, or the both short episodes and you should listen to them both.

Anyway, so what’s the big deal about the hashtag? Well, if I have that hashtag I can then populate a twitter widget with all this wonderful stuff that the listeners are saying about all these episodes that I do. So the hashtag was #thebrightideaspodcast and each time they are tweeting this shout out, I’m going to have this never ending stream of peoples on twitter saying how much they love the so and so episode of the podcast.

So, there’s really good reason to do this, its super easy to do. You use Click to Tweet just as I described in the previous episode–that’s episode number 111–and if you go to that post you see the screenshot and everything of how to do that so I’m not going to cover it again.

But here’s the one detail that is super important. When you start to tweet to someone, let’s say you’re going to tweet to me. If you just write @TrentDyrsmid-“Hey men I really like your show” or whatever. I’m the only one who can see that tweet. That is not really doing a lot and that is not as effective as if you put the word hey or whatever before the @trentdyrsmid. If you say, “hey @trentdyrsmid, I’m really digging the BrightIdeas podcast”– which I hope you do by the way and if you do please go and tweet that.

That way it goes into the public twitter streams. Obviously, you want it in the public twitter streams so more people see it cause that’s the whole idea right? We are talking about ways to increase twitter promotions so we don’t want to keep this stuff all over ourselves, we want the whole world to know.

So make sure that you do that and then of course, if you’re going to put the URL in there–which you might want to do– that’s a way to get people back.

So, in my podcast I’m probably going to put a URL back to the homepage of my blog because that’s where people come when they learn about the podcast if they are not familiar with it. They can become the subscriber and so forth.

So then you just again, like I did in the previous episode, you take this little bit of code or hyperlink rather. Put it in the blog post. You guys see this actually when you’re listening to this very episode.

Actually, there won’t be this one because there’s no one to shout out to so maybe I make a shout out to me–yeah that’s we all do!

Anyway, so that how you do. We got one more episode to get on this five part series.

So please make sure that if you haven’t already become a subscriber that you do so that you don’t miss any episode, you can subscribe on itunes or if you want to get an email notification just head to brightideas.co and become a subscriber.

If you’d like the show notes, a link to the screenshot, and the links and everything to this and other episodes go to brightideas.co/112.

That’s it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in.

 

Additional Resources