Facebook should be an important part of any small business’s marketing plans to reach local customers. Small businesses can take advantage of some of the new features recently introduced by Facebook to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.
This guide will help you to understand the new Facebook Graph Search and Facebook Nearby features, and deliver practical advice on what your business can do to take advantage of them.
Category: Local Social Media Marketing
For Small Business Internet Marketing Help read the articles in this category
What is the future of marketing for the small business owner? …and how can we help you be successful in this new paradigm?
It’s going to take a lot more technical skills and business acumen to be successful in the future than at any other time in history. Using the same old tactics no longer work. The following infographic points out the tools and skills the marketing agency of the future will need to service the business community at large. What do you think about this?
Local Small Business Trumps Walmart on Facebook – Score One for the Little Guys (via www.thesocialmediahandyman.com)
I have a love/hate relationship with Walmart. On the one hand, I admire the company’s business prowess and its efforts to move the needle where social commerce is concerned with its new Walmart Labs division. On the other, coming from a small town I’ve seen first hand the deleterious effect its…
What social networks are in the most demand in 2012?…more importantly which ones are waning?
The following infographic produced and presented here courtesy of http://www.IgniteSocialMedia.com is based on the search volume of the respective sites. So in viewing this you may want to reconsider spending a lot of your time posting content to Friendster and MySpace and begin to place more of your resources into Pinterest and Google+.
2012 Social Network Winners and Losers
The Social Media Examiner has written a an article that explains how to use Twitter in some creative ways to get more business. If you’ve been using Twitter for a while and want to try some new techniques then this article is for you! This probably should be titled “how to get more business with twitter”.Here’s the article:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/twitter-for-business/
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How are consumers spending their money this year and where? The following report shows that consumers are spending this year but not in the same ways as previous years. Online shopping is taking a bite out of local retail shopping.
Online spending remained strong in early December, a period that usually marks a lull in the U.S. holiday shopping frenzy, comScore said on Sunday.
For the week ending December 9, consumers spent $5.9 billion online, up 15 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to comScore, which tracks Internet activity.
E-commerce spending for the first 39 days of the 2011 holiday season reached $24.6 billion, also up 15 percent versus the corresponding days last year, comScore added.
Best Buy quarterly profit missed Wall Street estimates as bigger discounts during the holiday season squeezed margins at the world’s largest electronics chain, and its shares fell 9 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday.
To woo budget-conscious shoppers from mass merchants and online rivals, Best Buy offered deep discounts on items such as flat-screen TVs, promised to match any lower prices its brick-and-mortar rivals advertised during the peak of the holiday season, and even offered free shipping.
Stay connected for more updates.
Since I’ve written a few articles on Daily Deal sites, this article from Inc. magazine was of particular interest. I hope that you’ll reference it and the additional articles on this site when thinking about or planning to set up a Daily Deal for your business. Here’s the link to the article on How To Make Daily Deal Sites Pay off
Related articles
- Running a Groupon? Your Yelp Rating Just Went Down (coverboom.com)
- Study: 56% of People Still Dig Daily Deals (readwriteweb.com)
- Using Groupon Isn’t Saving You Any Money (businessinsider.com)
If you’re considering doing one of those “Groupon Like Daily Deal Promotions” for your business be prepared for a huge influx of customers. If you’re prepared you can turn some of those coupon clippers into customers for life; but do it wrong and you’re not only going to be incredibly disappointed in the results but it could put you out of business. Following is a list of some of the Groupon best practices you should follow for a successful promotion. You must train your staff on the best practices in handling the influx. Sometimes when business is slow the staff may start taking shortcuts when performing daily business operations. Believe me, these shortcuts will be magnified during a promotion. Additional steps need to be taken to man the phones and emails you’ll be receiving,so a central point of contact should be established and trained to manage this process. Also the primary value of these Daily Deal sites for you is that you get access to their customer base. The sites will not give you access to their clients’ contact info, it’s up to you to build your own database from these coupon redeemers. Set up additional terminals at your POS system to capture their name,mobile phone and/or email address. You can also set up a separate Landing page and contact form on your website and forward all coupon redeemers to that location where they’ll have to enter their contact information as a requisite to redeeming their deal. You will then be able to promote your offers directly to them in future promotions without having to split the cost with the Daily Deal site.
You must also be prepared for the anger your regular customers may feel towards your Daily Deal customers and you, because they’ve been paying full price for your product that you’re now “giving away” in their view, to people who may never visit your place again. So to alleviate this problem you must be prepared to address their concerns with an offer exclusively for them. If you need help or would like more tips contact us, we can even manage the entire process for you if you’d like. Check out the video below, which explains what you should expect from your “Daily Deal Offer” and best practices for taking care of the customer and your staff. Good luck
Preparing for your Groupon feature from Gregg Jaffe on Vimeo.
Related articles
- SuperCharge Your Groupon Promotions (locallyact.org)
- Running a Groupon? Your Yelp Rating Just Went Down (coverboom.com)
- A Restaurant, Dive Shop, And Bakery Share Their Groupon Experience (TCTV) (techcrunch.com)
Here’s an excerpt from an article found in Marketing Daily that I think you’ll find interesting –
According to new research from GroupM Search, 86% of buyers who make their purchases in-store use a generic term to find what they’re looking for before they head out to the store to buy it. The recently concluded research also shows that when consumers click on a link after a search, 90% of the time they’re using the organic search listings.
“People know the categories they’re interested in, and in very specific instances [the remaining 14%], they know the brand,” Chris Copeland, CEO of GroupM Search, tells Marketing Daily. “But for the most part, they’re trusting Google and Bing to find what they’re looking for.”
And they’re relying on Internet searches more and more. According to the research, 93% of all buyers, whether purchasing online or in-store, use search, and 80% of them rate it as very or extremely useful. But with such a preponderance of searchers using organic links, many brands and retailers may want to rethink their strategies, Copeland says.Get the full article here
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- Three Digital Revelations from the GroupM What’s Next Conference (compete.com)
- What Exactly Is Link Building And Just How Is It Necessary? (ronmedlin.com)