Social Media Consulting
Everywhere you turn you see facebook icons or twitter birds, they are on television commercials, billboards, print advertisements and even on this very websites, but the important question is "Are they part of your marketing?" Over the last couple of years social media has taken business to a new level, it allows us to continuously stay connected with our prospects, clients and business associates. Xfactor Designs can help you navigate the social media world, we provide training on how to use the various platforms or we can maintain your facebook and twitter accounts for you - giving you a social presence without the work.
If you're not familiar with social media, you are probably wondering what are the different platforms, how do you decide which ones to go with? If you are a financial planner or investment broker, you should check with your compliance department before starting a social media campaign.
- Blogger is a third-party blogging site that you can use to post articles about your business without needing to have a blog integrated in to your website. At one time Blogger was a must have, but many of our clients has started to pull back from using third-party blogging sites in an effort to expand and freshen up the content on their own websites.
- Twitter, you hear about it but do you really understand it? Twitter is a great platform for sharing industry news (retweet) with your clients and asking questions in 140 characters or less; questions that can help enhance your interaction with your business prospects. If you're using twitter to promote your business make sure you share valuable information, avoid too much self-promotion; sharing information that's not yours helps you create credibility with your followers. The key to twitter is be involved follow good people, retweet other's posts and always respond to questions.
- Facebook, our favorite social media website, can be an ideal site for connecting with prospects and clients because you can share photos of your latest projects, existing clients can write reviews and the page owner can directly interact with all the fans as they ask questions or make comments. Facebook has two types of pages - business pages and personal pages; how you tell them apart is straightforward: business pages you "like" and personal page you "add as friend". It’s important to keep your business and personal facebook pages separate; it makes users more likely to LIKE your page if they aren’t exposing all their personal information to a stranger. As facebook's popularity has grown, many programmers have designed plug-ins for business pages, allowing page admins to customize the landing page and integrate their YouTube channel, twitter feed and blog feed into the page, creating a richer end user experience.
- YouTube, the video hosting site, is rumored to have become the most enjoyable social media source, who doesn't want to watch a silly clip of one year old twin boys having a deep conversation, but how can it help your business? It's simple consumers love How To videos, they seem to understand the information better when they are able to see how to do something instead of just following verbal or written instructions. YouTube houses a wealth of videos, but they are always looking for more and a video would be a good way to let your potential clients see exactly who they will be working with.
- LinkedIn is a professional networking website and it's a great social media source for those businesses that want a social presence but have very little time to maintain one. With LinkedIn, it's easy create a personal page about your professional self, then create a corresponding company page for your business. Your professional self page is basically an online resume that connects you will former co-workers and managers, business partners and associates, and prospects you've interacted with. Our favorite part about LinkedIn is the recommendation feature; it's amazing the glowing reviews people will write for you and your business.
