Keep Up To Date
If your business is about offering a service or goods, people will want to see recent activity to give them confidence to contact or purchase from you. Nothing is worse than a blog that hasn't been updated for 3 months, social media channels that are ignored or just not utilised properly. Don't start to a blog or any social networks if you don't have the time to commit or can offer consistant value to your potential customers or advocates through this activity.
Think About SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is often something that gets second spot (here is no different) but seriously, don't let it be something that gets ignored or left too late to do anything about.
- Identify your keywords. Start by building a list of the keywords that you think potential customers will use in searches to find your business. Once you have your list, use a keyword tool like Google AdWords. This will determine the frequency that those keywords are used and help you to identify other related keywords. With this information, you’ll be able to quickly reveal the most important keywords that will drive traffic through search engines and grow your business.
- Use your keywords in your website. For each page on your website, figure out which keywords you want to target, then use those keywords in both the page content and the meta-data (the title, description and keywords of the page, will be the language used by the search engines to recognise the content of your website). Then, create links on other pages of your site using the selected keywords in the link title. Basically doing all you can to make it easier for your potential consumers to find you.
- External link building. Despite being the most complicated part of your strategy external link building is the most important aspect of SEO. When other websites link to your site, it indicates to search engines that the content on your site has value, which in turn boosts your SEO. A simple step to take to boost credibility but watch out as it can also be the most difficult, because you have limited control. With that in mind it's advisable to focus on the links that you are familiar with and have control of, such as your Facebook and Google+ pages, Twitter feed, blog, and other business listings sites (Yelp/Yell/TouchLocal etc). Be sure to link to your website from all of these channels.
Integrate With Social Channels
Again, as detailed in point 1, it is essential to keep content up to date. If you are not up to date, consumers will assume your service is not and look else where.
Then think about the best social channels for you to commit to. Think about where your customers are and what they like doing. This information will arm you with more detail on your potential consumer. This will be the key to how you connect with them and what will be the hook that will get them to engage. It sounds obvious but you would be amazed how often business's closeness to the project blinds them. Subsequently they skip this imperative 'getting to know' part of the planning. An insight into their habits and web usage can provide some smart ideas to get to the right people. For instance, lets say you sell photography equipment. An obvious thing for you to do for your community would be to create a photography competition. Obviously this will meet your primary objective of generating the interest, but what you need to be mindful of is how you sustain that engagement. To do this you need to go further. In this example you could do this by having the winner could appear on your website, blog or app for a period of time. This will increase the chances of loyalty, revisiting or importantly, sharing with their friends.
Make E-Commerce Easy
There are lots of rules about site design & user experience. However in our opinion there are two basic rules; make the experience as 1. simple and 2. easy as possible.
If you're asking people to fill in 15 fields of information to register for your site, offers, updates etc - think about why you need that data? Would an email address and name be enough? In some cases no, but in many, it would - just think about keeping registration easy for people to complete. This also applies to the payment path - integrate Paypal or Google checkout, but again only if you think it's right for your audience.
Think of your personal experiences with websites that are complicated. What did you do? Exactly, search for an easier option.
And the final advice. Knowledge is power. Nobody should know your target audience or potential new customer better than you. Make sure you continue to take the time to learn about the every changing needs/wants of your (potential) consumers, then use those insights to drive your business to success.
Have an amazing 2012 from all the contributors at SocialBusinessToday!
Article @JasonDigital
http://SocialBusinessToday.net - The Best in Social Business
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