Archive for the ‘How to connect with customers’ Category

• A part of my job is to  find ways to increase my clients online visibility and part of the service I provide is thinking outside the box.  One afternoon while I sat preparing content for one of my client’s Twitter accounts, it dawned on me.  Let’s use Twitter to not only promote the teleseminar but also to feed content about the teleseminar to the audience while the teleseminar event was taking place.  So this is what I did: I scheduled tweets to promote the teleseminar on Twitter.  Generally it would be tweets getting people to sign up to the teleseminar.
• On the day of the teleseminar, schedule more tweets promoting the teleseminar but don’t overdo it, you don’t want to spam your audience.
• Reminder tweets of the teleseminar taking place in 1 hr, 30 mins, 15 mins, then about to start.  Also do one after the teleseminar has started, saying listening to…., come and join.

This is all done on Hootsuite, so we don’t have to worry about it.  Lovely tool Hootsuite.

When the teleseminar starts, have your team, in my case, my clients would use my team who would sit in and listen to the teleseminar and tweet updates on what is being talked about in the teleseminar with a direct link for people to join in on the teleseminar.

Tips:

Use a hashtag to define your teleseminar and track it.  E.g. #teleseminar.

When it comes to the questions and answers, announce via twitter, “it’s questions and answer time” and again make use of hashtags.

#Qtopic: What is the best way to use this product?
#Atopic: The best way to use this product is….

This way you are adding more useful content to your Twitter account, and you are generating activity and conversation on your site.  After the teleseminar, if the tweets are related to what you do, take those feeds and feed them into your twitter sheet for future use.

If you want to find out more about getting your teleseminars updated via Twitter, tweet @romanythresher

When you leave your home to go to a party, down to the shop, to the office or down to your local pub, you don’t leave your face behind or put on a mask to disguise who you are so why is it that so many people fail to upload their photos to their profile?

If you use social media as one of the tools for your business to increase your visibility, create brand awareness and build relationships, not having a photo of yourself can actually defeat the object of what you are trying to achieve.

I feel that someone who does not post an image of themselves convey the message that they don’t care about the people around them enough to take the time to be visible and transparent.  It also conveys a message of distrust.  You would seriously need to impress me for me to hang around and read your profile or pay some form of interest in you.  If I’m shopping in a store and a faceless person came to serve me I would be wondering what they were hiding and why they were hiding instead of focusing on the reason why I visited in the first place.

If your argument is that it is for security and safety reasons and to avoid shady and creepy characters online, then I have to ask, are you not creating an image of being shady yourself by not posting a photo of yourself?  In the real world, whether you walk down the street, attend a party, visit the pub, you are never 100% sure that there are no shady characters. In fact, there are shady characters lurking in families.  Watching Dexter last night reminded me of this.  Here you have a serial killer who has been killing for 20 years, but here he is a normal person with a family, a deacon in the church, a teacher at a university who hides his true character so well, moving around real people and no one is the wiser, so the risk is the same..

If you have experienced abuse or harassment from certain online people, then they have violated that privilege of connecting with you and with others. Surely, this gives you the right to expose them?  I would politely reply to them and say to them that they are out of line and that you do not appreciate the tone of the message sent and, if they persist or continue communicating in this fashion, that you would be left with no choice but to report it to the community leaders and to expose them publically.

Either they will get the message or they will be stupid enough to continue. Whichever way, you have sent a clear message to stop them in their tracks.  If they do persist, then I would take action.

One, however, also needs to be wise and distinguish between abuse and harassment; having a tiff or a fall out with someone or having a bicker about something does not constitute or give you the right to publically humiliate someone just because you do not agree with things or because you are not communicating in the same language.
What are your thoughts and views on this subject?

Being a virtual assistant who helps busy business owners manage their social media activities.  I tend to read a lot of other blogs and recently I have come across some really great ones, especially inside some social communities. While it has tremendous value to blog inside a community, it is also important that you, as the author, have your own launch pad to build your own identity.

By placing all your content in one location, such as a blog, you make it easier for readers to learn more from you and they can bookmark your site for future reference. As readers begin to learn more from you, they begin to trust what you are saying and you build credibility.

Blogging from your blog site also makes your blog more authentic giving it an identity and a personality for people to learn more about you and your business.  If you are using social media as part of your marketing strategy to increase your online visibility you will also want a place for your visitors to see more of who you are and what additional great value you can provide for them.  Your little piece of the web is considered the storefront of your business.  It is where you will keep all your blogs and content and it is from this location that you will then distribute the content to the various social media platforms.

There is one downside of posting in social communities in that everyone tends to comment on the social community site but not on your blog.  One of the benefits of using social media sites is to get people interested in what you have to say so that they want to hear more.  I have posted in social community sites and have received some very useful comments in these sites and I think to myself, ” if only I could have those comments on my blog site”.

Remember not everyone uses social communities but do still surf the net for relevant content.
Generating traffic to your blog site is very good in terms of ranking and gaining popularity for your site.

Romany Thresher