Turbo Social Media Marketing» business | Turbo Social Media Marketing

The Importance of a Consistent Brand

Zack — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:32:17 +0000

A little while back, you may have noticed, that here at Turbo Social Media, we redid our whole website. We upgraded the features as well as the design and style. In order to stay consistent across all outlets of Social Media, that we are present, we have finalized implementing our design on those sites as well. Go Ahead and check them out, I will be waiting right here:

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

So what do you think? Pretty cool, huh?

Well this amazing design is not just for the looks. The design was implemented in order for us to keep our brand apparent wherever you find us. Branding is a very important aspect of just about any business as it gives you an edge in competitive markets. Your brand is your promise to your customer, and you want to make yourself know wherever people find you.

To learn more about how we can help you with your Branding and your Social Media Marketing, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

How to Not Waste Time on Facebook

Tom Sullivan — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:29:59 +0000

Despite what some old-school marketers and internet bloggers think, Facebook is not a complete waste of time (but it can be). As social media becomes more intertwined with internet marketing every business needs to consistently evaluate the return they are getting on each piece of the internet marketing puzzle. This includes Facebook.

Ideally, you should be spending no more than 15 minutes a day on Facebook (and probably a lot less). When I say “you” I’m referring to your business, so if you want to play around on your personal page after work that’s fine. However, if you want to get the most out of your time on your business’ Fan page then you’ll want to follow these steps:

1) Time yourself: The best way to get in a habit of spending 15 minutes or less on Facebook is to keep track of the time every time you log on.

2) Set up a blog feed: This is an easy way to continuously add quality content to your Fan page (directly from your blog). Simply select ‘edit page’ on your Fan page and then click ‘notes’. Then you’ll want to edit the import settings.

3) Suggest your Friends become Fans: Since you have a personal page associated with your Fan page I would suggest asking these Friends to “like” your business every month or so, depending on how often you Friends’ list grows.

4) Ask your Fans for feedback: At least a couple times a month you should pose questions to your Fans in order to get their feedback. Their responses can help you improve your services, understand your target market better, spark new ideas within product development, and much more.

5) Respond to Fans’ comments: This should take the bulk of your time. The less questions and comments from Fans the less time you should be spending on Facebook. These Fans should be considered potential clients, and for many of them, Facebook and social media is their preferred choice of communication. Do not lose out on a new client by not responding to their questions, concerns or comments on your Fan page.

I know that it can be very tempting to spend countless hours on Facebook, but for your business’ sake, limit it to 15 minutes or less per day, and focus on the Fan interaction. Feel free to add any of your own tips for managing your time on Facebook. We’d love to hear them.

Social Media Not Producing the Leads You Want?

Zack — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:21:27 +0000

Early last week, I was reading one of my favorite social media sites, and came across a somewhat disturbing article. The article discusses results of some tests that find that Social Media Marketing does not produce leads for your company, and that it can be considered a waste of money. The author of the article points out at the end of the article that the finding of this test are short-sighted a real answer cannot be derived from these results.

The problem is, the results of this test are wrong, and only because they are not finished. As the author explains in the last paragraph, the results of these tests were observing social media marketing much like that of traditional marketing, where “lead generation happens at the point of arrival.” However the big difference is, is that Social Media Marketing utilizes various aspects of the internet to create buzz and drive traffic to your site. It then becomes your job to capture this traffic as your leads.

Here at Turbo Social Media, with every site we build for a client, we strongly urge them to add in a form on their site, and wherever possible encourage people to fill out the forms. Dangle a carrot for them, with offering a complimentary product, or some advice of some sort and capture their information. People came to your site because they were interested in what you had to say, so do not lose them by not offering them something upon their arrival.

To learn more about building leads through Social Media Marketing, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Turbo Social Media Gets Rave Review from Valued Client

Zack — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:33:16 +0000

As a company, we are committed to excellent service for all of our clients. We strive to do our best work each and every time and develop an end result that all of our clients will be happy with.

Recently, we were given the honor of helping Jordan McAuley, owner of Contact Any Celebrity, revamp his site out of the old fashioned internet style that of the wonderful world of Web 2.0. There was a lot of work that went into his site, but we were up for the challenge and have developed a great looking, functioning site, that helps him promote is growing business! Be sure to check out his site, www.contactanycelebrity.com and read his testimonial below.

My site ContactAnyCelebrity.com has been live since 1996, so as you can imagine it was built on very outdated technology (Frontpage!). I knew we had to implement social media and get on the WordPress platform ASAP because we were losing potential customers (our site looked old) and search engine rankings (there was no easy way to add or manage content). Then I discovered Turbo Social Media! Switching our existing site with its huge dynamic database (over 60,000 celebrities), thousands of affiliates, and a lot of traffic to a new platform was not easy, because here were so many tricky things that had to be handled. Matt, Zack and their team were not only able to revamp our site so it looks great, but is also now powered by all of the latest web technology – not an easy task! The best part is we can now add content, videos, blog posts, etc. ourselves without having to pay a webmaster every time, and plugins can do many tasks we had been frustratingly doing by hand automatically. Turbo Social Media has literally saved my site (and my sanity!) I highly recommend them.

-Jordan McAuley, Owner, ContactAnyCelebrity.com

To learn more about Social Media Marketing, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

How to track ROI from social media marketing

Tom Sullivan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:30:04 +0000

The first question many businesses have when considering the decision to invest in social media marketing is: what kind of ROI should I expect? Many people view ROI as revenue/cost equation. Under this presumption, if a business brings in more money than they spent on a marketing campaign then they have a positive ROI. If they bring less money than they spent they have a negative ROI. This revenue/cost model should be altered to compare total cost with total value gained, not total revenue.

It’s easy to keep track of your businesses costs associated with social media marketing. There are hourly/salary costs associated with employees who spend a certain amount of time maintaining and updating social media accounts. There are agency fees associated with any outsourced work done for your business on social media. There are direct costs for advertising. Finally, there are miscellaneous costs for additional time, money and resources allocated to social media. Calculating value is not as easy.

The first thing to look at when analyzing value is revenue and sales. Like costs, this is also pretty easy to track. Setting goals will help you measure your success. Consider creating different “calls to action” for your website or Facebook Fan page that track conversions, and then track these conversions to see if they become clients. Beyond revenue, there are additional ways to measure value:

• Measurable goals (other than revenue): Generating leads is typically a necessary step to achieve before you generate revenue. Having the proper follow up process in place, like email marketing and newsletters, make these leads extremely valuable. Also consider improvements in website bounce rates, average time on site, unique visitors, etc.
• Customer Feedback: Additional knowledge that you gain by interacting with individual clients and get feedback from them about your products or services
• Industry Expertise: Putting out a consistent message that is both unique and valuable to your following on social media
• Testimonials & Referrals: It’s great to have testimonials on your website. It’s even better when happy customers are raving about you on social media. Even better than a testimonial is a referral.
• Customer Satisfaction: Improvements in various metrics can often indicate that clients are more happy with you product, service or brand.
• Improvements in other marketing efforts: Social media can often improve the effectiveness of a business’s other marketing efforts. Email marketing, direct mail marketing and mobile marketing campaigns are typically more successful and well received if your prospects have already connected with you via social media.
• Branding: This is a hard thing to measure analytically, but long-term brand recognition is easier to achieve if you put out a consistent message and identity for your business via various outlets of social media.

The tough part about assessing ROI with social media is that many of these benefits cannot be measured with analytics and other tools. Often times companies get too caught up with statistics, like “number of Facebook Fans”, “number of opt-ins” or “number of click-throughs”. These things measure value, but that is not really value in itself. Real value is measured over time. One happy customer that tweets about their experience to their 5,000 Followers could potentially lead to dozens of new clients. If you can track each of these new clients back to this tweet then you can determine the monetary value of that one happy client. However, how do you attach a value to the collection of happy clients who collectively make your brand well received, potentially leading to more business down the road? More specifically, how do you measure the value of a survey that you conduct through social media that leads you to promote one service more heavily over another?

The answer to these questions is that businesses need to determine what these values are before getting started with social media. Determine what the most important benefits are to your company from using social media (other than direct revenue). Give each of these benefits a (rough) value and monitor them closely. ROI isn’t just about revenue.

If you want to learn more about measuring ROI or getting started in social media, contact Turbo Social Media today.

The Pros and Cons of Bookmarking with StumbleUpon

Zack — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:34:43 +0000

As we have discussed in previous blog posts, Social Bookmarking is a key part of the whole Social Media Marketing System. They bookmarking sites are a great way to build back links, as well as put your information on the internet for more people to see. Some of these sites help to create traffic tot eh bookmarking site, where people can read your blog posts and follow you there, where as others help direct a lot of traffic directly to your site, which is what most people strive to do. However the amount of traffic is not always a good thing.

StumbleUpon has moved its way up in popularity of most used Social Bookmarking sites, as it is fun and easy to use and it drives mounds of traffic to your site. The downside to this traffic is built into the way StumbleUpon is used. Most people download the Stumble Toolbar, and it allows them to randomly flip through websites based on their favorite topics. So if you are a Business Enthusiast, you can flip through all Business related sites that have been bookmarked within StumbleUpon. Now this is a whole lot of fun, however there is a huge drawback: it drives the bounce rate for the site sky high. The bounce rate of a site is determined by the amount of people who visit a site and leave after only viewing 1 page, or before a specified amount of time.

Take a look at this picture below from one of the sites was manage. For the month of April, they had 109 visits to their site, however the average time on the site was 1 second, and the bounce rate was over 97%!! This is not quality traffic, this is people who came to the site and did not find it interesting or did not find what they were looking for.

StumbleUpon Stats (click to enlarge)

What most people forget about when driving traffic to their site, is that they should be targeting their traffic to drive in a higher quality of prospects. Sure StumbleUpon can help drive hoards of people to your site, however, you rarely find any business from it. I am sure you can find that one diamond in the rough, and the odds are, the more people you drive to your site, you will find 1 or 2. However, from our experience the only thing you get from StumbleUpon is a sky high Bounce Rate, a lower average viewing time on pages and a lower pages viewed per visit. And if you are like me, and really enjoy reading your analytics reports and finding out the best trends to observe, this StumbleUpon effect throws a blanket over the whole thing, and it becomes very difficult to get an accurate reading.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the Importance of Social Bookmarking, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

WordPress.com Passes 200 Million Posts

Zack — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:08:26 +0000

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about Twitter and it’s 15 billionths tweet. The purpose of that blog post was to outline, just how big Social Media Marketing is. if Twitter is seeing 2 billion tweets per month, then that just goes to show you how often people are sharing information online.

This last week, we heard another milestone has been surpassed, as WordPress.com has seen its 200 millionth Blog Post! Again these are staggering numbers. With the installable version of WordPress (which we use for ALL of our clients) releasing version 3.0 this last week as well, it is quite obvious that WordPress means business, and is a powerful platform.

Sure blogging takes a little more time than a 140 character tweet or a quick Facebook update, but the blog post itself is a great way to dish out information, intrigue interest of others and help you build a larger network. You can then link your blog up to Twitter and Facebook and build your network even larger! Blogging is essential to your business and social media marketing, so again, it comes as no surprise to see a blogging platform as wonderful as WordPress reach such an awesome milestone!

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the Importance of blogging, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

7 Ways To Double The Conversion On Your WordPress Blog – Part 4 of 4

Mike Lorence — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:19:44 +0000

I’m back for my fourth and final guest blog post. By the way; if you’d like to apply to get me to be a guest writer on your blog or Facebook page, then send an email right now to jv@smallbusinessblackbelts.com and put “Guest Writer” in the subject line. You need to let me know how big your house list is. This is up for grabs for the first 3 (and only the first 3) who respond.

Strategy #5: Use Involvement Devices To Boost Conversion

Ok, today I’ll cover the topic of Call To Actions (aka CTA) and involvement devices. Let’s first talk about involvement devices. Robert Chaldini wrote a ground breaking book called Influence. If you have not read it, you’ve gotta. He talks about how to use commitment and consistency to increase response rate.

Here’s how to apply this to your blog. Get your readers to take subtle, easy actions that have very low barriers to completion. This is easily done with putting an entry pop on your blog. If you are a plastic surgeon, you might put a simple pop up on your blog that says “Do you have wrinkles?” Since most people do have wrinkles, most will answer yes.

When they answer yes, redirect them to a webform that says “Sign up for my blog and get my 7 Tips To Taking 20 Years Off The Look Of Your Face.” The response rate can be 10%-30% higher on that webform if you ask a prequalifying easy question first like “do you have wrinkles.”

Strategy #6: Use Effective Calls To Action To Maximize Conversion

Finally, I’ll close with the topic of how to craft a good call to action. In order for a blog reader to take a call to action (thus dramatically improve your blogs conversion rate), you’ve got to leverage the three psychological triggers of scarcity, urgency, and curiosity.

The best way to illustrate this is to show you the difference between (3) examples calls to action (CTA). Say you own a Yoga instruction business, and you’re blogging about the health benefits of Yoga. And you’ve got a little 15 page free report entitled “5 Ways To Improve Your Marriage By Using Yoga.

Remember you want to use your blog to build your house list. So here are the three ways to end your blog posts:

Click here to get my free report entitled 5 Ways To Improve Your Marriage with Yoga

Click here right now to get my 5 Ways To Improve Your Marriage with Yoga

Only for the next 13 who click here immediately – get my free research report worth $27 entitled 5 Ways To Improve your Marriage With Yoga.

The first CTA is blah. No scarcity, no urgency, barely any curiosity. The last CTA incorporates all three.

Strategy #7: Use Google Optimizer To Test Different Calls To Action and Headlines

Bonus tip. Use the free multivariate testing tool called Google Optimizer on your blog. It’s easy to split test placement of different calls to action to see which gets the higher conversion rate. This topic needs about 4 blog posts dedicated to it. If you want Matt to have me guest blog about this tool and using it in your business, leave some comments on this post to that effect.

Mike Lorence is the founder of Small Business Blackbelts – he teaches entrepreneurs how to double their cashflow in 9 months or less. And he guarantees that. Click here immediately now to see if there are any free Business Owner Bailout Packages worth $597.39 left for you.

P. S. If you are one of the few who has not yet completed our easy survey (we’ll give you a free $47 gift for doing so), whatya waitin’ for? Go here right now and take the short survey.

Twitter: 2 Billion Tweets per Month and Counting

Zack — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:16:23 +0000

A new report has come out that states, that there are around 2 Billion tweets per month on Twitter. That is Billion… with a “B.” This is just more proof that Social Networking and Social Media Marketing are HUGE, and you and your business and missing out by not grabbing a piece of this. Twitter is getting bigger every single day, with more users joining and sharing their information for you to read. It only makes sense for you to be a part of it, so your company does not get left behind.

Now I know what you are thinking, “2Billion tweets a month is a lot, but there is no way that number will continue to rise, it has to be on its way down…” Well what if I told you that Twitter reached its 1 billionth tweet back in the fall of 2008. Nearly 1 year later, it reached 5 billion tweets. In March of 2010, Twitter hit the 10 billion tweet mark, and now, less than 3 months later, they are over the 15 billion tweet mark. The graph would look something like this:

Aside from showing the insane growth of Twitter, these numbers tell us something else: Everyone and their mother is now on Twitter. That means there are that many more people out there to sell your products or services too. It is a great way to keep in touch, syndicate out your Blog Posts, or Network. Twitter is the best way to stay up to date on current issues build your business to a level you are happy with.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the Importance of Social Networking, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

7 Ways To Double The Conversion On Your WordPress Blog – Part 3 of 4

Mike Lorence — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:16:52 +0000

BTW, just in case you have not yet answered my short, easy, painless survey about a free teleseminar, go here right now to answer a few questions.

Remember that I’ll reward you handsomely for doing so with a $47 free gift that teaches you more about social media for small business.

Getting back to the topic at hand…this next strategy is killer for conversion.

Strategy #4: Use A Valuable Free Gift As A Bait Piece For Conversion

One of my mentors, Bob Bly, taught me the concept of using a Bait Piece as a conversion tool. Here’s how: come up with a valuable free report or other information product that your prospects will find very valuable. Then use that as a ‘bait piece’ to get people to respond to a call to action in a blog post. I’ve implemented this in my business and it’s worked quite well.

Here’s how it might sound for a Laser Eye Surgeon doctor blogging about LASIK surgery:

…. That’s all for today. If you’d like a free report worth $97 entitled The 6 Question You Absolutely Must Ask A Laser Eye Doctor Before Your Have Lasik, then go here immediately to get access.

The “go here immediately” would be a hyperlink to a landing page with a webform. You’d collect name and email in exchange for the report. That’s Bait Piece 101. I’ve found that the higher the ascribed value to the bait piece, the greater the conversion.

Another example of a nail salon owner blogging about nail styles:

….. If you’ve never visited my salon before, I’ll give you a $25 gift certificate for your first visit. Simply email me at sarah@sexynails.com and include your full name, address, and phone number.

In the first example, the call to action was clicking a link to a landing page, and filling out a webform. The second example was a little more simple. She used email as the direct response mechanism.

Before you complain about not having any time to creating a free research report or bait piece. Don’t worry. Outsource that work to a ghost writer on www.elance.com or www.guru.com for you for a nominal fee.

Next post I’ll cover several strategies that will make your readers take whatever action you want them to take.

P. S. If you’d like to apply to get me to be a guest writer on your blog or Facebook page, then send an email right now to jv@smallbusinessblackbelts.com and put “Guest Writer” in the subject line. You must tell me how big your house list is. I’ll entertain the first three requests that I get.