Meticulosity » social media

Twitter Can Generate Sales

Admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:56:13 +0000

Or increase your expenses, depending on how you look at it. Let me explain… I just signed papers with my new insurance carrier, Guilderland Agency – a company I discovered and made first contact with entirely on Twitter. Before going to the last Tech Valley Social Media Breakfast event, I took the liberty of following everyone who was on the RSVP list, including @AlbanyInsurance. I now know @AlbanyInsurance as Ryan Hanley, my new agent.

I was in the market for insurance as it was, and during the event, I saw some Tweets from Ryan and thought to my self – “Hey, I bet that guy sells insurance.” I direct messaged him on Twitter, and wa-la, we connected by phone the next business day. That was a few weeks ago — and today, I signed my policy papers with him in person.

While he was at the office, I thought about how this was a real-life case study happening in front of our eyes. This was a real example of how Twitter can help you generate word of mouth. If Ryan wasn’t tweeting as @AlbanyInsurance, I never would have connected with him and I’d have signed with a different insurance carrier today.

So I made Ryan a few bucks today – though my new policy did cost me a few.

YouTube: The Only Place You Should Upload Videos

Admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:28:24 +0000

Whether you’re sharing a video on your website, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or anywhere – the only place you should upload and serve the video from is YouTube. Why? Here are some reasons:

YouTube videos work on pretty much every browser and operating system. While Facebook announced some newly uploaded videos will now work on iPhones and iPads (they don’t now because Facebook mainly uses Adobe Flash for videos, and Flash doesn’t work on any Apple mobile software), not every Facebook video will work. You might not have an iPhone, but 50% of mobile web browsing is coming from iPhones.
YouTube is trusted and will embed (or play) without any issues on all websites and platforms without any security warning. Facebook is also blocked by many corporate firewalls at the workplace, but often, YouTube is not.
YouTube’s content distribution network is unmatched. While the video you want to show may just be for your blog, using YouTube to play your video opens it up to a huge audience who might not follow your blog. Your video could show up when people are searching on YouTube, they could watch your video, then visit your website or blog.
YouTube is owned by Google, so you can bet videos being searched for on Google will show YouTube videos with a higher relevance then a Facebook video.
YouTube videos are easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels. Depending on your privacy settings, trying to share a video on Facebook might require a Facebook account to view that video.
YouTube is even integrated into many TVs and BlueRay players now, opening your content to even more potential viewers.
Why re-invent the wheel and try to use your own “custom” video player on your website? YouTube is free, and it’s a really awesome all-season performance wheel.

Remember, when properly used, social media can help you distribute content to a much wider audience with little effort. YouTube might not be a social media buzz-word like Twitter is these days,

33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business

Admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:20:11 +0000

Here’s a great article on how to use LinkedIn for business purposes. Click here to read.

Why Online Retailers Should Tweet

Admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:39:47 +0000

So how can you successfully use Twitter for your ecommerce business? Lets take a look at woot.com for a great example. Woot.com is one of the most popular “deal-of-the-day” websites. Woot has a pretty amazing and powerful business model – they sell one thing a day at a great price, and once it’s out of stock, they don’t sell anything else until the next day when they announce their new deal. They got so popular that they joined up with Yahoo! Shopping in September 2007 to power the network’s deal-of-the-day.

Woot has a perfect model for Twitter since they only sell one item per day. Using Twitter as one of their many marketing channels, they announce their deal-of-the-day to their followers. If a Twitter follower is interested, they can proceed to woot.com to purchase. Woot currently has over 1.6 million Twitter followers and that number grows every day (last summer, they were just under 680,000). That means that over a half million people are receiving a daily tweet from Woot who might not visit the website on a daily basis.

Even if you don’t just sell one product a day like Woot, you can still increase your marketing footprint using Twitter to send sales items, featured products, coupon codes, and more. Twitter is a great way to turn your ecommerce customers into repeat buyers – and it will cost you next to nothing, especially if you integrate Twitter into your ecommerce shopping cart platform to automate your tweets.

30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

Admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:02:12 +0000

Here’s a great article from Inc. about using social media for your business. Some of them may not apply to every business – but it’s a good read if you’re not already using social media to interact (key word!) with your customers. Our favorite? #11. Reward customer loyalty.

Click here to read the article.

The Starbucks Formula for Social Media Success

Admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:18:04 +0000

Here’s a great blog article from The Next Web on how Starbucks has used social media to grow their brand. With millions of Facebook and Twitter followers, they must be doing something right.

Read the article here.