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  • Easy Ways To Bootstrap Your Business On Social Media

    Easy Ways To Bootstrap Your Business On Social Media

    When your business is just starting out, both capital and cash flow may be limited, and you need to grow your business by using elbow grease, also known as “bootstrapping” your business. It means you have to do a lot of manual tasks to get customers into your sales funnel.

    Most people have a smart phone similar to an Iphone or Samsung Galaxy.  So when you are at a red light, watching a movie, or just resting, these are some great tasks you can do from your phone or desktop computer.  I typically do these types of things when I am not at my desk, simply because when I am at my desk I am doing paperwork or other more complicated tasks.

    Add Friends on Facebook

    You get up to 5,000 friends on Facebook. Facebook just tweaked their algorithm so that posts by friends have more of a priority in peoples’ newsfeeds than a page post.  And adding friends is free.  Before doing this, ask yourself who your target audience is for your business.  Are there certain types of people you like that will like what you post?  Are there people that would be interested in content that relates to your business you could add as a friend? Remember, this is your friends page so they will see your restaurant check ins, your family photos, and your rants. So people you add will be your friends, as well as possible buyers. It is a fine line and you have to balance it out how you want to go about it. But if you don’t have 5,000 friends, you are missing out on a natural backbone of your business – your family and friends. The more you have, the more help you will get.

    One way to find friends is to check and see if there are any groups out there that cover topics you are interested in or relate to your product. So if you sell space food, you could check out the Space X group or the NASA group on Facebook. If you graduated from college or a high school, you could see if there is a business group out there for your school.  Then look at the members list and add as many of those people as possible if you think they will be good friends and it is appropriate.

    A word of caution is this. Facebook has ways to check to make sure you aren’t adding too many people too fast.  One way around this is by adding people you have a lot of mutual friends with already.  So you can add friends using mutual friends. I always try to add people with at least 3 mutual friends as me.  If Facebook gives you a warning that you are adding too many people, take a break for a day or two, then start again.

    Follow People on Twitter

    You can follow up to 2,000 people at a time on Twitter initially.  Typically I have found that if you follow someone, they will follow you back 20-30% of the time.  But you want to have people follow you who will help your business or will relate to the content you are putting out. How do you do this? Go to other peoples’ pages who are similar to yours or who have crossover appeal to what you are doing. Follow other companies’ followers. You can also find public lists out there and follow all those people if it relates to you. Keep following people until you hit 2,000.  Then after a while, if someone hasn’t interacted with you or followed you, then you can unfollow them since they didn’t reciprocate the relationship, which will give you more followers freed up to add other people who might follow you back.

    Add People on LinkedIn

    LinkedIn gives you 3,000 invites before you max out invites (asking people to connect with you on LinkedIn). There are all sorts of ways to add people on LinkedIn. You can search by groups, companies, management position, location, and many more. Add as many of these people you can who are 2nd connections. Join groups to make all the group members 2nd connections. If you know them, add them for sure. Check out the connections of people you know, maybe you will recognize somebody? Add them.

    Recap of First Few Steps

    Ok so by now you have added 5,000 Facebook friends. You have followed 2,000 people on Twitter. And you have invited 3,000 people to LinkedIn.  Based on who adds you back on Twitter and LinkedIn, you probably have about 7,000 total people in your network.  That is a great start for your business, and it was all free.

    Publish Content

    On your social media sites, you need to put out content that your friends will like (by friends, we mean Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers).  Each site has a feel of its own. But you need to learn what those are and start putting out articles, updates, images, and videos that your people will like.  Remember, LinkedIn is professional – so no politics, personal family photos, or religion or anything that wouldn’t happen in a professional business setting. Twitter is short and sweet – so you can put out sound bites and short snippets that will get peoples’ attention. Facebook – anything goes as long as it doesn’t completely alienate your friends.  Don’t upload pictures that are disturbing. But people expect to see personal photos, controversial topics, and things like this on Facebook. In fact, your stuff will get more visibility on Facebook if you can get a good debate going.  That is sometimes good, sometimes bad. You have to make the call for your business.  You need to put out content and share things that your people will like or are interested in.

    Create a Blog and Write Articles

    You can make a blog for free at Blogger.com, WordPress.org, Medium.com, Tumblr.com, and several others. These are not recommended for the long term (a full-fledged website is recommended for long term), but are free and can get you set up so you can start putting out articles.  This is essential.  Sure you don’t have time. But you need to at least write something to stay current with the times for your industry, minimum once a month. But if you can do more, like several times a week, or even daily, that would be huge for your business. But as a busy business owner, it probably isn’t going to happen if you are bootstrapping.  So publish content relevant to your industry when you get time. Become an expert in your field.  There is so much information out there, people need trusted sources that they have verified they know what they are talking about.  Do they believe you, or some guy they never met and can’t verify? I would believe you if I knew you from Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. After all, you would be in my social circle of trust.

    This will get people coming back to your blog.  It will create a good search presence for you on the web.  You can then link to your social sites and your business website.  It will give you good SEO support via backlinks and relevancy, and it will keep your articles “in house” as opposed to sending them to someone else’s blog.  You can send people to other blogs and news sites, in fact you have to. But you want to try and get people coming to your blog by writing content as much as possible.

    It is About Relationships

    On all your social media sites, the entertainment ratio vs business posts should be like 7-1.  Don’t put out too much about your business.  Just enough to let people know what you do.  But for the most part, try to actually get to know the people on your friends lists.  Make sure you give a darn about what they are up to by “liking” and “retweeting” and “commenting” on their stuff.  Try to say Happy Birthday to people on their birthdays.  Invest in your friends.  They are going to be your base of support for anything you do in life. So make it a top priority.

    Ensure People Know What You Do

    I have a lot of friends I don’t even know what they do for work or their business. So you have to at least let them know what you do.  Occasionally say something about your business, but don’t be sales-y.  Just let them know what you do.  That way if they like you or trust you, they will reach out when the time is right.  If you out right need help with something, ask.  Say you need a supplier who does packaging. Ask your friends.  If you need someone to share a promotion, ask your friends. If you need funding, ask.  Just don’t do it daily or too much.  Only if you really need help and are in a bind. Your friends will be able to tell if you are sincere.

    Take Advantage of Direct Messages

    You can direct message people and tweet people directly on Twitter. You can tag people on Facebook, and can message them privately. You can send people messages on LinkedIn if they are a connection. Try to reach out to a few people a day, get to know them. Find out what they need help with. Try to help them. They will try to help you too. This kind of goes in hand with relationship building mentioned above, but this is a more direct way.  Don’t just blast content to the four winds all the time, reach out to people.  You can even invite them to lunch if you think there is something bigger to discuss, like hiring them as a subcontractor, them hiring you, or setting them up as a distributor, or a partnership etc.

    Build a Facebook Page

    Once you have maxed out your followers and friends you can boot strap, create a Facebook business page. This is a great indirect way of letting your friends know what you do, because all of them will see your invite.  You can invite all 5,000 of your friends to your business page, you can post that business page on Twitter and LinkedIn for people to follow. You can mention it on your blog.  Start putting out content on your Facebook Page.  It won’t get the interaction your friends page will, but it will still help and is a great foundation for the next step of expanding your business’s social media presence.

    There is always more to do. But if you do these steps, you will be a social media super hero and your business is going to get sales, customers, and reach.  And all of this is free.  It just takes time. So you have to balance all this with actually growing your business systems and executing tasks.

    If you start generating revenue, there are more effective steps to help grow your business. We can address that in another article or directly.  Tweet me or ask me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

  • 11 Ways Competitors are Beating You on the Internet

    11 Ways Competitors are Beating You on the Internet

    The internet is evolving so quickly, that no one company completely understands or has the expertise or time to master the highly-complex digital landscape. There was once a time when having an HTML website and a Facebook page was good enough. But now there are a million things one must do digitally to even be competitive. It is an endless list and it is up to the business itself to prioritize which digital tasks must be done first.

    Businesses should not look to large marketing agencies that have been around since the dawn of time. They will tell you the age-old techniques they used when people still read print newspapers and when people still sent email forwards to put out information to their friends and family. Instead, businesses should look for companies and people with innovative ideas on how to reach customers in a new, dynamic way. Things are changing, and companies that get that will be able to survive along side those changes.

    So this brings us to the point of the article. What are your competitors doing that you aren’t? There are a lot of things. And many of your competitors won’t broadcast them to you. So I posting some possible ideas here that I have seen be successful with our clients and with our clients’ competitors.

    They Are Growing Audiences Continually

    Take a look at some of the bigger companies in your industry. They are growing their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, email lists and others to thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Growing your audience gives your company the RIGHT to talk to someone. Audiences are an asset, that can be harnessed when you want to put out a press release, when you want to announce a new product, when you want to leverage their buying power during bad economic times, or just when you want to engage with your customers. Audiences are critical. Large highly targeted audiences are no longer a nice-to-have, they are a necessity. And your competitors are growing their audiences each and every day by the thousands.

    They Are Collecting and Analyzing Data

    Your competitors are collecting data on you, other companies in their industry, and on their customers. They have executive level dashboards that tell them what is going on across their industry in an easy to read format, who is being engaged on social media, who is ranked high in Google and for what keywords, who is buying ads on what platforms, and a slew of other data points. They know the age, sex, zip code, interests, and buying habits of their customers, prospects, and engagers. On top of that, they are using this data to make sound business decisions and marketing decisions. They know their ROI (return on investment) for a certain kind of marketing spend and they know their rates (CPM, CTR, CPC) on all the marketing platforms. They know their web traffic stats and which sites are referring them. If your company does not know these data points, it may be a good idea to learn it.

    They are Building Predictable Models

    Your competitors have taken all of the data they have collected, paid a marketing firm or a data science firm, and have several models that tell them when, what, where, and how to sell something for the biggest bang for the buck. They know how many catalogs to send to get a wealthy father of 3 to buy XYZ. They can predict how much they will make monthly when they spend a certain amount for a specific product. This is because they have predictive models that allow them to plug in the data and output a prediction. It isn’t always 100% accurate, but it is a lot better at helping executives make decisions than the “finger in the air method” or the “hunch method”. Chances are small and medium size companies are not building models yet, but they should be. It is the way of the future that works and will help you overcome your competition.

    They are Trolling You and Hurting Your Reputation

    Whether knowingly or not, they are going on social media, review websites, and forums talking about your product or service in a negative way. They build complete websites designed to look like third party objective review sites that say their product is either better than yours, or they leave your product off the lists completely. They are going on Yelp, Foursquare, Google Local, and Facebook leaving a 1 star rating with some snide remark. They thumbs up all the negative comments left by someone, or they make a negative comment themselves. Sometimes it is a paid staff that does this, sometimes it is employees of a competitor that are mad they are losing sales to you, sometimes it is a disgruntled ex employee or a ticked off customer who didn’t like the way a customer service rep of yours talked to them, and sometimes it is the owner of the company talking bad about you indirectly or directly. Not saying that you need to do these things, but your company should empower your employees to defend you on these sites and there should be an environment that makes it easier for customers and employees help your reputation against the attacks of a competitor. Of course marketing companies like mine can help with online reputation management as well. There are tricks of the trade that need not be mentioned here, but something can always be done to help your particular situation.

    They Are Part of the Social Conversation About Seemingly Unrelated Topics

    Scroll through some of the posts of successful companies on Facebook. They are a part of the political conversation. This is in part because they want to push an agenda that helps set the conditions for their industry. But also because taking a stand on an issue generates buzz and PR. One must be careful not to undermine their brand or business model by alienating too many people, but being political or commenting on newsworthy topics is now an accepted practice. And with the 24 news cycle, people will forgive you if there is something they disagree with. A couple of recent examples are when Mark Zuckerburg commented on internet privacy, or when Kroger took a stand on the 2nd Amendment, or when Mark Cuban commented on tax inversions. Sometimes these things generate new customers, followers, and buzz and work out really well. Your competitors know which news, current events, and political topics they want to engage on, and are doing it.

    They Are Hiring Better People Because of Digital Solutions

    Recruiting has gotten highly sophisticated and fragmented these days. If your company isn’t recruiting across a wide range of websites and job boards, you could be missing some great candidates. The data suggests that a lower barrier of entry when hiring means that you will get a wider candidate pool. Companies that take advantage of the 1 click hiring processes out there like Zip Recruiter and LinkedIn, instead of making people fill out forms and forms of data, are getting more qualified candidates. Companies that are paying for executive search firms and paying for recruiting services are getting better candidates. If your company is still recruiting the old fashion word-of-mouth way, it may be time to think digitally and open up the pool to the rest of the nation and the world, because your competitors sure are.

    They Are Raising More Capital

    Competitors are taking full advantage of the digital space to raise money for projects, research and development, and expansion. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, and other crowdfunding sites are opening companies’ access to capital. Then you have LinkedIn, Angelist, and Crunchbase that help businesses and start ups link up with qualified investors. It truly is a dynamic space out there and if the trip to the local bank is all a company is doing to fund an expansion, they are missing out on this critical component of generating capital. Competitors that do this are getting all of the money, instead of sharing some of that market share with you.

    They Are Everywhere Digitally

    Any successful brand, company, or public figure goes to the places where their clients, customers, and supporters hang out. In the digital space, these different social sites, blogs, websites, and forums are just like a “room” or a “place” where a potential supporter spends some or a lot of their time. It is important for companies to be present on the 30-40 places that matter. Not only that, it is important to have some level of engagement on those sites, don’t just leave them stagnant. Competitors are doing it. Every industry I have evaluated has a handful of companies that dominate the entire social and web space. And it isn’t always the Fortune 500 or 100 companies. Sometimes it is just a tech-savvy marketing department or a hired marketing firm that has done it for them. This is something that needs to be considered.

    They are Generating Constant Content

    Videos, images, posts, and articles are constantly flowing throughout their website and social space. They are considered the subject matter experts on whatever they are talking about, and naturally people want to buy from them. They give you free advice or make you laugh or impress you, so you go to their website and see what it is they do. They have a system and it is like a well-oiled machine. They have a video person to film and edit videos, they have a photographer to take pictures, they have writers and editors to write content. They have graphic designers and Photoshop experts to make memes and logos. They either have a massive staff of 10-50 people handling their content or they have outsourced it to a marketing firm. Either way, they are winning and dominating and will continue to dominate because of the widely fragmented social and content space.

    They Understand Proprietary Marketing Techniques

    There are about 20 or so proprietary marketing techniques that just aren’t written about. Companies that don’t have an experienced digital marketer on staff or have not hired a marketing firm just won’t get close to what these 20 untold techniques are. But rest assured, somebody is using them and they are running circles around your company in terms of marketing ROI, reach, engagement, and lead generation. It is important to seek out people that know what they are doing and hire them as a consultant or hire them to actually perform these tasks for you so you can beat your competitors.

    They Have Gone Mobile

    Their website is mobile friendly aka “responsive”. Their contests and landing pages are mobile friendly. They may have a mobile ap so users can engage with them separately from the rest of the web, while gathering useful data on their users, and while sending push notifications at key times or when their customers are nearby. They are targeting mobile users with ads. They send out mobile-friendly coupons and tickets. They are completely there while others are nowhere to be found. Is your website mobile friendly or was it made 10 years ago before mobile devices were as prevalent?

    Please feel free to reach out to me or comment below if you want to talk more about these topics.