How to leverage Quora for your Business

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How to leverage Quora for your businessQuora is an unbelievable yet simple concept. It’s a Q&A website in a nutshell, but offers seamless possibilities for business.  Founded in 2009, by former Facebook employees, Quora has grown rapidly and now has more than 10 million registered users. We can see how your business can leverage from Quora.

Thought Leadership

This is an over-used term now. However, Quora can make you a Thought Leader and an undisputable expert in your niche. Answer questions that are related to your business area. As you continue doing this, you will generate lots of contacts that can be converted into customers later. Beyond that, you would able to connect with several influencers in your industry. Continue reading →

Social Media Resolutions for Your Business – Some Useful Tips

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Social media resolutions for the BusinessAs we move closer towards 2013, there would be plenty of resolutions that we have set for ourselves – losing weight, spending more time with family and learning new things etc. What about social media resolutions for improving your business? Here are some tips to achieve your social media resolutions.

SMART

Be it personal or professional, the goal should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound) enough, then only you would able to manage it properly and achieve it. For example, your goal should not be like this – ‘I will generate more leads through social media.’ Instead it should be like –‘I will generate 100 leads before August 1, 2013’.

Business impact

Your entire energy should focus on creating business impact through social media and not just on metrics that doesn’t add any value to your business. Imagine that you have improved your customer retention rate through Social media. That is a solid business impact. Through this you would have saved/generated x amount of dollars. This indeed is a meaningful metric. Continue reading →

Social Media Audit – How it can be done?

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You are in the process of embarking on social media as your competitors have already joined the bandwagon and you don’t want to fall behind. Social media may be an alien for you and you are stuck with the important question – Where to start? The answer is ‘Social media Audit’.

You have figured out what to do but then the next question pops out immediately – How to do a Social media audit? What exactly is that and how will it help in my social media strategy?

Let’s start with competitive analysis – To see how your competitors are using social media for their business. This includes the image they project across the social channels, the content they post, its tone, type and finally how the customers react to it. For example, if the customers are engaged by visual content then your focus should be on creating visual contents than textual contents. Continue reading →

How to Setup and Measure An Effective Facebook Ad Campaign

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Facebook Ad is a critical source of targeted followers for any business when they foray into Facebook. Unlike Google Ads, with Facebook ads, you can know your target audience precisely if not you can decide it. Properly executed, Facebook ads will give you a great value for the money you spent on it. Here we will see how to setup and measure a Facebook Ad Campaign effectively from a business point of view.

Pre- campaign preparation

First and foremost activity is to setup your Facebook page. Have a clean and neat profile image and cover page that depicts your brand identity. All the details about your business, web, phone & email details should accurately be mentioned in the page.

Before starting off the ad campaign it is advisable to have some likes in your page. For that, you can use your existing email subscribers list (hope they have come through an opt-in process ). Send them a newsletter about your new Facebook page and a link to access it. Don’t force them to like it; instead inform them about the benefits they get through that page, like short and quick updates, contests, polls etc. Continue reading →

LinkedIn’s new Company Pages – What is in it for the marketers?

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LinkedIn have rolled out, a rather, massive face-lift for Company pages in their website. This is a pretty huge opportunity for a marketer, especially in terms of branding and positioning their company, its product & services and recruitment and that too for free of cost. Let’s delve deep into the changes rolled out by LinkedIn and see what is in it for the marketers.

Status Updates

This is something which LinkedIn had rolled out earlier; however coupled with the other changes this feature has a significant impact. In the Status updates, there is an option to choose the target audience, which you can select apart from your connections. This is more or less the connections of your own connections in LinkedIn. So the key is to have more connections – More connections means wider target audience, simple as that. You could feel that this feature is similar to Facebook ads where you to pay for it. This was even mentioned in Business Insider, when LinkedIn introduced this feature. Continue reading →

Strategic Human Resources through Social Media

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Strategic Human Resource Management using Social MediaStrategic Human Resources is all about attracting, recruiting and retaining the best talents in the industry for your business. Just like any other communication channel, social media also play a critical role in maintaining your brand name. Following are the three areas where changes happened with the advent of social media.

Employee’s voice

Before the proliferation of social media, there were only closed arenas where employee could open up about his employer. But now his options are seamless. Through Facebook status updates, tweets, blog posts or comments on another blog etc. are some of the options. So the room for error is less when it comes to managing an annoyed employee. However if you encourage your employees to share their experience with your company in a positive way, then it can improve your brand as well.

Employer Branding

During the pre-social media age businesses looked for talents through job websites, newspapers, job fairs, job boards etc. Today, through LinkedIn itself you can find many if not hundreds of prospective employees. Based on his/her activity you could identify some of the personal traits and attitude of the person. Continue reading →

Social Media strategy – Not creating 100,000 followers

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Social Media Strategy for BusinessMost Businesses have a misconception that if they manage to reach 100K or more followers on Facebook or twitter, they are successful in their social media campaigns. So, they aggressively work on increasing the number of followers. Very late only will they realize that they have got nothing as return on their social media marketing investment. You goal of the Social Media strategy must not be to reach x no of followers, rather something like reducing the lead generation cost or increasing customer satisfaction etc. In simple words, you should be able to measure the ROI. So, if can’t see an ROI despite millions of followers, you campaign is a big flop. Keep these points in mind, while preparing your social media plan.

1. Identify your customers, competitors and Market – You must have a closer look at your customers, competitors and market before embarking on a social media campaign. You should know how your customers are using social media, what strategies your competitors are applying, what influence social media have on your market etc. Continue reading →

Top Word press Plugins for your blog

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Top WordPress Plugins for your BlogSo you have made the decision to start blogging and as a part of that you have registered a domain, hosted it on a server and have installed WordPress. Now What? Next step is to install a good theme and necessary plugins to embark on your blogging journey. Here I will help you to choose the necessary plugins to start blogging.

  1. All in one SEO Pack – This plugin will help you to optimize your blog for search engines. All you need to do is to enter the necessary keywords, Meta description etc. about your blog. It will create Meta tags automatically.
  2. BWP XML Sitemaps – If you are looking for easy ways to create sitemap, then BWP XML sitemap is the best. It generates a sitemap index than a single sitemap. Despite being a light-weight one, it has several powerful and advanced tools. Continue reading →

How to Design Your Social Media Strategy

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Social Media Strategy for BusinessSocial media is here for long, however very few organizations have harnessed its power.  If you are among that group which is yet to plunge into the world of social media, then it’s time. Designing a Social Media strategy is never an easy task for any business but it is not rocket science either.  This post will help you to design a social media strategy from scratch.

What are you looking for?

You should have the answer for this before embarking on a social media campaign. Starting a social media campaign without an objective is a total waste of time, money and other resources. Even though social media would not have the answer for all your business problems, it can provide you to resolve many issues in your business. This can be like improving your customer service, generating leads, Establishing thought leadership etc. Continue reading →

How to increase followers on Twitter

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How to increase followers in TwitterIncreasing followers is the biggest hurdle each and every ‘non-celebrated’ twitter account holder will encounter from day 1 since joining twitter. There are several websites that will help you to get twitter followers for ‘free’ and ‘fast’, however it won’t serve your personal or professional purpose. Following are some of the effective ways by which you can increase your twitter followers.

  • Include Tweet and follow button on your blog. This will help you to get followers from wherever your article is posted.
  • Include your twitter handle on your email signature, business card, documents, websites and other social channels. You can even include that on your T-shirt J
  • Use hashtags in front of targeted keywords in your tweets, so that it could reach targeted audience. Continue reading →