Social Media | smallbizdream blog

Facebook Is Back on Track for Small Businesses

Facebook has gone through difficult times. The social media giant had the largest single-day drop in stock market history, falling by $119 billion in value after being heavily criticized for compromising the privacy of nearly 2 billion users. Facebook also changed its algorithm. Ads won’t show up as often as it used to on the newsfeed, and as a result, a lot of businesses are moving away from the platform.

With the latest addition of business page, local, and standalone app, small business owners will have more reasons to promote their business on social media aside from the usual newsfeed post.

Finding More Ways to Improve Reach

Facebook changed the way ads work in response to the recent decline in reach and intense competition on the newsfeed. For anyone following this story over the last year or so, it’s pretty obvious that ads and promotional posts become less visible on the newsfeed.

Facebook business page provides businesses a place to thrive without competing for people’s attention. As a result, businesses can only reach out to a specific audience (similar to permission marketing) instead of showing up on everybody’s newsfeed. It’s a win-win for businesses and Facebook users.

With this new feature, Facebook is betting the social media platform will be more relevant for businesses, hoping people will use the social media platform to find goods and services, or book hotels and make reservations.

Facebook local and standalone app might also help small businesses through organic searches of the nearest shops, restaurants, and brick-and-mortar stores. Small businesses might actually fare better using the service as competition is narrowed down to a specific location.

Optimized for Small Businesses

Facebook page offers a way to encourage more businesses to build a strong brand on social media through CRM integration and data gathering. They’ve also made it easier for users to find information about business by improving its layout, esp. the home page where most users look for specific details like store hours, location, and contact information.

It gives Facebook a breath of fresh air with templates that are more industry-specific. Hence, a Facebook user who runs a hair salon business can choose a template suitable for his or her business. This applies to more than 80 million small businesses that are currently using the platform along with 1.6 billion users connected to them.

Fans and followers can also provide useful feedback about their experiences using the products and services via Recommendations. This, too, will improve online visibility on the page feed and local search.

Faster Way to Promote Business

It’s quite difficult to rank these days without spending a ton of money on SEO. Small businesses won’t stand a chance against big, established ones on Google. Thankfully, we have social media where the playing field is more even. Here, users can talk about their experiences using a product or service and be able to share it with others (also known as user-generated content).

Facebook has been diversified to accommodate both day-to-day social interactions and business promotions. There’s no doubt about social media being more cost-effective in spreading the word about your business than Google. It can be used as a starting point for any kind of business. However, it may not be a long-term solution for establishing an online presence. Sooner or later, you’ll need to be able to market your business outside of Facebook, create your own website and build your own sales funnel.

You can also connect your Facebook leads directly to a CRM service or request for CRM integration. Facebook Page contains a list of popular CRMs for managing leads when you avail of their Facebook Lead Ads.

Building Your Online Presence the Easy Way

Small Business Dream is a simple, yet powerful CRM solution for business startups and traditional businesses wanting to establish an online presence. There are a number of ways Facebook Page can be utilized for Small Business Dream CRM, including:

Lead Generation and CRM Integration

This requires setting up an Ad Account and choosing a daily or weekly budget. Promote your business page or integrate your own CRM like Small Business Dream and lead your potential clients into your custom-made sales funnel. There are at least 4 ways to integrate CRM on Facebook: direct integration, third-party integration, many integrations, and Facebook Marketing Partner.

Create Your Own Sales Funnel

You can easily make your own sales funnel with Small Business Dream and use it on Facebook to acquire new customers. The first method uses CRM integration mentioned earlier in this article. The second method is by customizing your Facebook Page and embedding your sales funnel link. However, unlike the first method, you’ll need to get enough ratings via searches and customer reviews to get results.

Or, you can create your own microsites and use both Facebook Page and Small Business Dream to generate leads. Having a website for your own business has several advantages over Facebook Page. For one thing, you’re not risking your online presence on someone else’s website (Facebook can boot you off of their platform, or it might disappear). However, it would be a great option for small businesses and start-ups who want to accelerate growth apart from traditional marketing strategies.

Conclusion

Giving users the ability to promote their business on Facebook is considered a smart move for the social media giant, especially during these times when the company is in need of a better solution in creating meaningful social interaction, and at the same time creating business opportunities for users.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

It’s Tougher Than Ever To Advertise on Facebook. What Should Small Businesses Do?

Facebook offers more control to users on what they want to see on their newsfeed; it will start filtering out ads and content they’re not interested in. This came as a response to the growing concern with regard to social media’s role on our society’s well-being.

In this article, we’ll talk how putting more emphasis on community-building over competition for viewer’s attention on social media can benefit small businesses.

Why a Change in Focus is Vital for Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have changed the way people interact with each other. They paved the way for communities of like-minded people to share life’s experiences and interests over the internet.

Since then, users have always thought of getting more people to like their posts, and it wasn’t long before sharing became attention-seeking. Internet marketers quickly saw its potential for marketing and spared no expense getting more ‘likes’ and comments to stay on top of everybody’s newsfeed.

Other businesses won’t just stand and watch while competitors get all the attention on social media. Facebook ads, page boosts and paid ‘likes’ soon became the norm in social media marketing, and staying on top became increasingly difficult (and expensive) as more and more people and companies fight for user attention.

Ads were just one of Facebook’s many problems. They also have to deal with fake news, scams, clickbaits, and viral posts which doesn’t serve its users. Changing Facebook’s algorithm gave users a much better experience. (Notice how your friends’ most recent posts always come first. Same goes for more informative posts; irrelevant posts are demoted or removed completely.)

Facebook is getting more serious about its purpose as a company. Mark Zuckerberg is a little concerned and vows on “protecting the community” which he believes is “more important than maximizing profits.”

Facebook’s Focus on the Community

Most of us can only look back when YouTube was totally ad-free before Google bought it for 1.65 billion USD in November 2006. It soon turned into a money-making social media platform with ads taking the likeness of TV commercials but with some degree of user interaction. Remember how quickly you skipped the ad as soon as it starts, or piqued when forced to watch all 20 seconds of it?

Facebook went down the same path when it started Facebook Ads, paid likes, and page boosting. However, after dragging users into countless hours of endless scrolling and passive consumption, they’ve decided to redeem themselves by giving more attention on things that matter most – meaningful social interaction.

This might cost Facebook a lot of money, considering most of their income comes from advertising. To get around this, Facebook might give users the ability to choose ad-free subscriptions on a monthly basis for a fee which is approximately the price per user paid for by advertisers on Facebook. Another option is to provide premium accounts the ability to fine-tune their viewing experience and exceed certain limitations not accessible in free accounts.

From the standpoint of a social media marketer who rely on Facebook ads for traffic and customer acquisition, this can be somewhat unappealing, since most of their high-end clients and potential customers who can afford ad-free subscriptions would be out of reach by then, and they would have to settle with what’s left of Facebook’s free user base.

Having an ad-free, community-centered Facebook for users is much more complicated than we think. Facebook’s intention to take away distractions from the user experience is a noble one, although much of it remains to be seen. As with any kind of business, it has to somehow generate income in order to survive, i.e. by giving “free access” to services, paid for by advertising.

What This Means for Small Businesses

One of the biggest advantages of small businesses over large companies is the community that was built around it. Creating and maintaining customer relationships is much easier on a tightly-knit group of customers than having to deal with a very broad audience. Instead of social media being used as the battleground for people’s attention, it will become a truly engaging, interactive space where real businesses and customers with common interests can share their ideas.

Paid advertising will always have its place in the marketing mix, but social media is not really about throwing your ad into a prospect’s face. Be genuine with your customers, speak to them on a personal level and they will refer you to their friends. That’s the power of Facebook, not trying to outspend the competition.

Big businesses who rely heavily on advertising might have to take their outbound marketing strategies elsewhere. And what better place to advertise than Google? This way, we won’t have to worry going against these giants on an ad-free social media. We can devote more of our time and resources building a community of customers and growing our businesses through customer referrals, word of mouth, and other networking strategies.

Having your own site where you can take your customers for a brief tour of your goods and services is the next big step after you’ve accumulated enough audience from social media. This is where your business starts experiencing exponential growth through organic searches and visits driving more traffic to your site.

As a small business, we need to start somewhere, and social media could be one of those places where we can grow our audience. Creating and maintaining customer relationships has always been the key.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Doing It Right: Integrating Social Media with Email Marketing

When talking about online marketing, these two will always come up in people’s minds: email marketing and social media marketing. This is for good reason.

First of all, email marketing has been around for nearly three decades since it was first used in the 90s as a cost-effective, direct response method to generate massive leads. It still does today.

2002 saw the birth of social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. As more and more people started using them, social media marketing came along. It was an instant success, and for a time many companies began using it to promote their brands.

But now things have changed. The online space has become extremely competitive, and we don’t see them being used by online marketers the way they used to. They knew their previous tactics won’t work anymore and so they started to rethink their strategies just to stay in business.

Why is this so?

Common Issues with Social Media Marketing

The problem with most online marketers today is they took something very powerful and useful, and turned it into a mindless lead generating tool with no creativity, and no real intention of creating meaningful connections or establishing good relationships. They took “the old-school” method of advertisement and simply moved it online.

Most of the bad rap social media marketing got into is the so-called ‘pay-to-play’ tactics used to create a superficial (or even artificial) ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ with little or no interaction whatsoever. This obviously doesn’t work with today’s savvy consumers.

Read: How All the Social Media Experts Got it Wrong

However, some social media marketers use legitimate practices to get results, but it takes a lot of time and effort (try responding to all the comments to your posts or tweets and you’ll get the idea). It also takes talent and creativity just to get people to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your post in social media.

Another issue with social media marketing is that you’re piggybacking on somebody else’s platform. If for whatever reason the social networking site decides to take down your social media account, goes under, or loses popularity, you’ll lose all your connections and you’ll have to start over from scratch. And as they say, ‘Own the racecourse, not the racehorse’ — don’t go all out on something you have no control over.

Why People Still Do Email Marketing Today

When social media marketing took off with just a million users to 1.7 billion worldwide, some believed it’s the end of the road for email marketing. The fact is, email marketing still ranks first as the marketing tool preferred by companies to conduct their businesses online.

Research shows why this is the case.

77% of consumers are more likely to respond to promotional messages in their emails than their social media accounts
66% of consumers purchased their products because of promotional messages and follow-ups from emails
44% of users go their emails to check with a company they know as opposed to 4% in Facebook

But here’s why email marketing still ranks first:

58% of people who go online check their emails FIRST, followed by search portal (20%), Facebook (11%), news site (5%), company website (3%), and others (3%).

Email marketing is still the online marketer’s best friend when it comes to lead conversion. If you’re into social media marketing, you might consider having an email marketing strategy as well.

Using Two Different Approach

Using social media and email marketing all at once is like having two different kinds of tools. Although very different, they can work together towards the same goal. Mostly, however, people have been using them for the wrong reason.

Online marketers need to understand the difference between communicating and mass sharing. Social media has always been used for sharing good reads, an interesting find, or anything that would start a conversation. Emails are most effective when following up with your fans or followers.

Here are 5 simple tips that you can use to integrate social media into your email marketing strategy:

Create a group on social media and invite people to join in. Spend some time on your social media home page’s look and feel. Run contests, or give freebies, and discounts for active fans and followers.
Time your posts well. Make them as ‘catchy’, relevant, and timely as possible. Hint: research have shown the average life span of a Facebook post to be around 3 to 5 hours.
For Facebook users, they can use ‘call-to-action’ (CTA) buttons to lead visitors and fans to their landing page.
For Twitter users, they can use Twitter cards to display their photos, and links to their landing page, app or downloadable content.
Export your friends’ and followers’ email accounts to your mailing list for your email marketing campaigns and follow-ups.

Small Business Dream is a sales and marketing tool designed to seamlessly integrate social media and email marketing for your small business. Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com and learn more about our Small Business Profitability Blueprint

How To Beat the Competition Using Social Media

Social media is still one of the most misunderstood marketing tools for small businesses. If you’re not using it, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to drive customers to your website and ultimately make a purchase.

According to a recent LinkedIn study, a whopping 81% of businesses use social media to drive growth while an additional 9 % intend to use social media in the future. If your online presence isn’t up to par, you may have missed out or you may have though that social media is already too crowded. In fact, it is still a vital way for businesses to reach their customers if done correctly.

Unfortunately most businesses don’t understand how to use it to connect with their customers and drive the results they want. Consumers now are more savvy than ever before and do their research before reaching a purchase decision. And that includes searching businesses’ social media presence.

In today’s competitive world, small businesses need to have a solid online presence in order to succeed. A lot of people are hesitant to do business with a company that doesn’t have a solid online presence. If they don’t see a strong following on any of the channels, they might look for somebody else with more social proof.

Customers are also more likely to speak out their grievances online which is why it is crucial for businesses to respond to customer inquiries and reviews. But you shouldn’t just be reactive online. Social media is a very inexpensive way to reach the same amount of people as doing a national advertisement campaign on television. Make use of creative social media content to grab people’s attention.

The age of your customers will also determine the way you communicate with them online. Millennials are more skeptical than older ones and typically want to know their business owners.

Part of the problem with social media is that small businesses have a hard time keeping track of their return of investment. It can be especially difficult to track organic social media if a small business is on a budget. Usually, it is the first thing to go.

However for those who invest consistently in social media, most people agree that there’s a payoff within the first two years and a significant payoff in five years. A small caveat here: it’s important that you don’t try competing with the big companies, especially online. They have people — sometimes entire departments — dedicated entirely to social media and their online presence.

You have to think how you can carve your own space out online. Perhaps it’s coming up with a unique and exciting campaign or maybe dominating a local area.

For the last couple of years, people have been focusing on paid advertising instead of organic content. Paid social media has enormous upside and is cost effective compared to other forms of advertising. But here’s the thing: no amount of paid social media is going to turn a dull, uninteresting content into a good one. And for the most part it isn’t sustainable for small businesses on a tight budget.

However organic content is still incredibly powerful and when used correctly, it can be incredibly effective. Organic content is the long-game plan of your brand. For example, if you use hashtags properly, you can easily be discovered over time. Whether you run a local restaurant or coffee shop, if you keep using relevant hashtags then you’ll be a part of the conversation which is the first step to getting sales.

If you run a small business you want to focus your time, money and effort on creating lots of great content. The amount of money you spend on social media depends on your industry and marketing goals. The biggest thing some businesses don’t understand is that quality content is so important when marketing to anyone under the age of 40.

Anyone could discover your business for the first time through Google search or though social media. If you’re not focused on quality content that you put out in social networking sites, you’ll become irrelevant. Organic reach is so important because the impressions you get when someone comes directly to your page is that they are more qualified leads and potentially valuable customers.

There are plenty of platforms out there for you to choose from to help you grow your audience in Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram to Twitter. Choose which one is right for you and your business. While the supply and demand for paid advertisement becomes more competitive and saturated there is a greater opening for brands to make headway organically.

How to Use Hashtags for Your Small Business Marketing

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that the number of businesses who utilize social media as a marketing medium has grown in massive numbers.

Now…for the purpose of our business, we’ve found that there are a couple of mediums that give us greater latitude, and much bigger “bang for our marketing buck” with regard to creativity than do others. And you might find the same goes for your own business social media purposes. In trying out the various platforms, we generally suggest that you find out which works best, and focus on those.

Twitter for instance, utilizes text to 140 characters, so if your message is text focused, and you can get that message (or a tantalizing part of that message) across in less than that, it’s a kick ass way to go, but creativity still rules. Simply said, the fact that you’re only ‘allowed’ 140 characters on Twitter can create the need to include links to whatever website or blog the rest of your information is located on.

What exactly IS a ‘hashtag’?

Hashtags have become so common these days that people have started using them outside of their intended purpose. People use them in text messages, chats, songs, and advertisements.

A “hashtag” is more simply described as a word preceded by the number sign (#).You’ll see them across a variety of different social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and occasionally on Facebook. When Pinterest first came out in 2010 there was a lot of confusion about hashtags and how they were being used on that platform.

Hashtags (#) are used for the purpose of locating people/industries/topics that you and/or your company might be interested in following/communicating with, etc. Whenever a user adds a hashtag to their post, it is immediately indexed by the social network and searchable by other users. Once someone clicks on that hashtag, they’ll be brought to a page that aggregates all of the posts with the same hash tagged keyword in real-time.

Those hashtags in the Instagram platform serve the same purpose, even though it’s primarily an image driven vehicle (no pun intended there). Using hashtags within those messages also brings WAY more eyeballs than those posted without them (it’s astonishing just how much traffic a simple hashtag can bring).

So now you ask, “how do I know which hashtags I should be using for my business?” There are a couple of really simple answers to this question;

1. When it comes to hashtags, common sense generally prevails. Using a business related word and simply prefixing it with a “#” is generally one of the best ways to start testing out some favorites.

2. When it doubt, Google it. Search for popular hashtags related to your business on Google! Google is a super helpful resource, and you can find any number of hashtag lists for use on your preferred social media platform, for just about any business you dare to search. Do some testing and tweaking. Figure out which hashtags work best on which platform for your business, and get to it!

Despite the problems I have outlined in this book, I believe that the future of small business is bright. Regardless of what your customer’s needs are, there’s one universal way to explode your sales, and keep that customer coming back, and/or referring your business; Keeping in touch. By ‘keeping in touch’ I’m not saying that you should badger your customer incessantly with mindless chatter. By “keeping in touch”, you’re simply, periodically putting yourself at the forefront of your customer’s mind with timely, helpful, metered communication.

Now you ask, “what exactly IS timely, helpful, metered communication”? Well ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to tell you. Go grab a java, take a seat in a big comfy chair, and read on.

Let’s say you’re in the real estate business. Obviously your customers aren’t buying real estate the way they’d buy say…socks (or maybe they are). Just because a client makes one real estate purchase doesn’t mean that the ‘sale’ is done when your commission cheque clears, but your client very likely has friends. And what do you think happens when those friends are buying property? They ask a friend for a referral. And if you don’t position yourself in such a way that there really ISN’T anyone else that your client can think of when asked for that referral, your sales, and therefore your commissions will have no other avenue but to jump exponentially.

Sounds great, right? I mean, who doesn’t want to make more money, while helping a client remember to do helpful things with regard to their real estate purchase? If you could in addition, have those helpful reminders to go out on a set schedule, so much the better, right?

Implementing a simple ‘system’ for reaching out to those customers automatically makes the task of keeping in touch one of the more simple tasks that you undertake in your business, instead of one that you dread for how difficult it can be.

If your business is a restaurant, keeping in touch is even more simple, by sending out ‘reminders’ of regular specials and special events happening in your establishment. It’s easy to keep your income pipeline full, when you’re at the forefront of the minds of your customers, regulars or not.

Making the task of staying in touch even simpler, why not implement a mobile CRM to your marketing strategy? That way your business doesn’t need to rely on you having time to sit down at a computer to do your ‘staying in touch’ tasks.

Cool, right?