Like, Follow, Share! Phase 2!!

I finally got actually sat down and typed all the ideas I had for phase 2 of the Like, Follow, Share campaign.

If you haven't read my first blog on Like, Follow, Share, you might want to go back and read if first.

Now that you have your friends and employees following you, it’s time to get your clients, customers and potential customers to follow you. Hopefully, if you’ve had a website for a while, you have printed your website on everything from invoices to Frisbees to get it out in front of people. Getting people to your social media isn’t quite as subtle a message and you don’t want it to be.

Adding “Follow us at twitter.com/yourcompany” and “Like us at facebook.com/yourcompany” to all your forms, letterhead, and promotional items is kind of overwhelming and somewhat tacky. If you have a store or office where your customers visit you can very easily create a sign to sit out with your social media addresses on. Another option for stores is brightly colored bag stuffers.

There are other great options that everyone can use. If you are a company that sends out paper invoices, you can include a brightly colored slip of paper (a 1/3 a sheet of paper will work) with your social media information on it. If you have a physical or email newsletter you send out to your customers, include not only your social info, but an article getting them excited about your social media.

Watch for Phase 3: Gaining followers outside your friends, employees and customer base.

Like, Follow, Share

Social media is social. I know this is a pretty obvious statement and you know how important being social is, after all, that’s why you have social media. (If you haven’t started using social media, skip to the bottom to find out how to start.)

It is your goal to grow your business through your website and social media and you may post specials, promotions and news about your business to your social media accounts, but you may not see much growth in people following (Twitter) and liking (Facebook) your business.

Part of my job is to provide pointed updates for our clients various accounts. In doing this, I’ve noticed that was spending time creating daily updates for social media accounts with only a hand full of followers. I thought to myself, I think we can grow these numbers and the quickest way is to invite the client’s employees, friends and family to follow/like their businesses, so I created the Like, Follow, Share campaign.

Like, Follow, Share includes several tips and elements to use to reach more people in your personal social circle, to help get the word out about your business. Below is the first phase of Like, Follow, Share.

Phase 1:

Your friends and family may have contacts that you don’t know about that are in need of your service or product. Plus, you can brag about the great things your business is doing without actually bragging!

Getting your employees involved in your social media is great for getting them excited about new things happening and makes it easy for them to share with their friends and family.

A few ways to grow your social network through your employees are to add links to your various social media in employee newsletters, a slip of paper in paychecks and post a sign in employee break areas.

Letting friends and family know is even easier, because you are probably already connected to them on Facebook or Twitter so all you have to do is to click the “Share” on your business’s Facebook page. To share your Twitter, just post the Twitter link below on your Facebook or mention (@yourbusinesstwitter) in a tweet on Twitter.

--Dan The Man

Watch for Phase 2, covering getting existing customers to follow/like your business, coming soon.

If you haven’t started using social media yet or aren’t sure where to begin, we would love to provide this service for you! If you prefer to do it yourself, I recommend getting copies of Twitter for Dummies and Facebook for Dummies.

Marketing Communication

There are some that may say that I’m not the best communicator in the world, but I have picked up some things over the years from working in the marketing realm. Sometimes the person or people that we are working with are not in the same office or even the same state as we are which makes written (e-mail) communication very important. I’ve decided to share some of those things with the world. They are not all going to be discussed here and now, but over time, watch for me to post some important and fun tips.

Today’s tip is about changing copy on a website, newsletter, sign, or in an ad. Generally, in my experience, my boss has given me basic copy and simple directions how the end item show look and fell. I would then create a draft, usually with images, and then send the e-mail back for changes. When returned to me with corrections (this is when the communication technique comes in), the words that needed to be changed would be put into quotes, such as ‘Please change “gaint” to “giant” on the first line.’. This made it clear what word needed to be changed on the first line. If it would have said ‘Please change gaint to giant on the first page’ then it wouldn’t be clear what needed to be changed, especially if it was a phrase versus a single word.

Using quote for copy changes really makes it much faster to get changes made. I hope you remember this next time you e-mail someone with changes. Have a great day and make things happen!