As a Business Owner, Which Social Media Platform Should You Use?

As The Small Business Authority, we decided to lend a helping hand with this decision as well, outlining the strengths of both to see which is a better fit for your preferred social media platform.

Facebook Advantages

More Personal – If you are into relationship building, Facebook remains the unequivocal leader in social media. While new algorithms preclude your audience from likely seeing all your posts on their feed, you are able to receive and communicate significantly more information, content, and (and arguably personality) with Facebook than Twitter.

Versatility – Facebook’s platform allows for personal profiles, professional profiles, business pages, and fan pages so there is a bit more latitude. While Twitter allows for the same concept, ultimately there is no difference in appearance or functionality. So, if multiple options is important, consider Facebook’s power of choice.

Facebook Ads – Facebook allows businesses to purchase targeted ads to extremely specific demographics. Graph search is Facebook’s newest toy that is incredible for targeting like-minded people (yes, potential clients). The possibilities are admittedly intriguing.

Benefits of Twitter

Continue reading here http://www.forbes.com/sites/thesba/2013/04/17/as-a-business-owner-which-social-media-platform-should-you-use/

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Facebook Pages Are a Bad Investment for Small Businesses

Image via CrunchBase

In my last four posts I’ve shared some of the lessons that I’ve learned from helping set up lullubee.com, a new business that makes and markets kits for making crafts. After we launched the site and figured out how to take orders and ship products, the next task we faced was to get more visitors to the site, and ultimately more sales. In the next few posts I’ll cover several of the techniques we implemented, but in this post I’ll focus on Facebook marketing.

The first thing we did was to set up our Facebook Page, as recommended in Facebook’s “Four Steps to Business success on Facebook“.

Once you set up your page, you need to get users to visit it and, hopefully, to “like” it. The reason you want people to like your page is that your posts will then appear on that users news feed. Over time this will allow you, according to Facebook, to start “building loyalty and creating opportunities to generate sales.” The first method to get likes is to promote it on your own website using Facebook social plugins. As this costs nothing, you may as well do it, but the percentage of visitors that click on these is typically very small. The second is to purchase Facebook Ads that persuade people to visit your page and to like it. The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page instead of our site was not lost on us.

After some experimentation I was able to create several ads that successfully generated likes on our page at costs that averaged from $0.27 to $0.57 per like. We spent some money and built up several thousand likes, all the while optimizing the campaign to better target likely customers. We justified the expense as it seemed to be analogous to building up a database of email addresses of people that wanted to learn about our site and our products. However, we shortly discovered our error.

The next part of this article goes on to show a few facts about the number of posts that your user sees in their feed …. If you assume that most of your users see your posts in their feed then you will be surprised by the facts. Continue reading the article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/elandekel/2013/01/22/facebook-pages-are-a-bad-investment-for-small-businesses/

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5 Risk Removal Strategies To Boost Online Sales

When a person comes to your site to buy your product or service, or even just to browse through what you offer, he or she usually has several concerns:

• Is this company legit?
  
• Does it work as advertised?
  
• Will I get my money’s worth?
  
• What if I am unhappy with my purchase?
  

These and others oftentimes prevent a client from buying, or at least delay the decision-making. The good news is that there are a number of simple but proven risk removal techniques that, when implemented correctly, may have an immediate and dramatic effect on your online sales.

# 1. Try before you buy (shareware model)

# 2. Use the freemium model

# 3. Let customers pay only if they like your work

# 4. Guarantee results where others can’t

# 5. Let the client set the price

Read the full article here at  http://tweakyourbiz.com/technology/2013/05/13/5-risk-removal-strategies-to-boost-online-sales/

Making positive reviews work for you

Positive reviews and feedback scores can be vital to the well being of a fledgling business. Negativity will clip your feathers, but positive responses could give your business wings.

The savvy consumer will always check what past customers have been saying about a business or its products, and their opinion is easily swayed. Here are six pointers on how to ensure that your business gets glowing reviews and that your business reputation stays sparkling.

Know where the feedback is coming from

There are plenty of websites where anyone can post reviews about a business- you’ll want to do a quick Google search of your business name to make sure you are up to date with what is being said on various feedback websites. Continue reading…

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