Keep an Eye on Your Competition

Posted on April 23, 2013 by DeeReinhardt

Gone are the days of just having a “secret shopper” go to the competitors store to find out pricing. New tactics are required. After reading this article in Entrepreneur by a former CIA Officer on How to Get Ahead of Your Competition, I thought about how you could “spy” on your competition through social media.

There are four aspects about social media that help you build or protect your business. Let’s review:

Build Your Brand with Social Media – Using social media allows you to have your logo, ideals and business practices in multiple locations, hopefully, in the right places where your customers are looking for you. Make sure that you are sharing the same message everywhere you are.
Build Relationships – as you are developing your clientele you are also building a rapport between you and them. Learning more about what they want or need. Social media can help you stay in touch with them and carry on conversations.
Level the Playing Field – every business has access to the same networks and tools available on the variety of social media platforms. It is how well you use them and the available features as to how much better of an opponent you will be.
Monitor Competitors – you can “keep an eye on your competition” by following their movements on the various platforms in which they participate. Have they offered a coupon, a pop-up sale, a new white paper? Do they have a newsletter, a blog, a photo journal? Can you modify or improve upon their idea to help your business? Are you using more platforms than they are, but your engagement is lower?

What have you discovered when you were “spying” on your competition?

Twitter – Why invest your time

Posted on February 9, 2013 by DeeReinhardt

Personally, I felt the same way about Twitter as many of you. People tweet what they eat, what they do and who they are with. Twitter can be much more than that.

According to Mark Schaefer (@markwschaefer – his twitter handle) “Are you the type of business that can benefit from going to a Chamber of Commerce meeting or a local networking meeting?” If you are, then yours is the right kind of business to be on Twitter.” Read more

In my opinion, if used the right way, you can drive business to your website and into your door. Food trucks use Twitter to announce their location of the day and have been a rising phenomenon all the way back to 2009 or before. If you have a rabid fan base, you just need to tweet a special message and the throngs will show up.

Making appropriate use of a #Hashtag for a marketing campaign that you are promoting is an excellent way to drive followers to a specific place. If you use established ones in your industry, you may even recruit a new follower.

Don’t have a storefront or a food truck? Human resource recruiters are making great progress using Twitter to post openings and search for candidates using the advanced search functions. Twitter can help you elevate your job postings in search engine rankings. Always include a link, shortened or not, to the actual post on your company website.

One gentleman with whom I network showed actual fact that Twitter can increase clicks on articles or pages on your website or blog. Before beginning a Twitter campaign, one particular page only had 80 clicks. Within 3 weeks, that same page had 772 clicks. With a proper call to action on that page, the resolve to ask how did you hear about us, and some closing data, there is a measurable ROI for using Twitter in your marketing campaigns.

Even teachers are getting into the Twitter arena. This article gives you 6 Steps To Becoming A Better Twitter User. If you still aren’t comfortable and need some one-on-one guidance, give me a call. I can help you brand your Twitter to the rest of your marketing and help you figure out how to optimize the messages that you are sending.

BTW, if you got to this post by way of Twitter, I would like to know that as well! Happy Tweeting!

LinkedIn Endorsements

Posted on January 2, 2013 by DeeReinhardt

I am sure by now that you have seen the “Endorsements” on your LinkedIn profile. This is a relatively new feature from LinkedIn that allows you to perform a quick click and let your connections and the other person’s connections see that you feel your connection exhibits those skills.

The YouTube how-to video below explains:

Endorsement Monday’s – similar to Twitter’s #FollowFriday or #FF, take a few moments every Monday to endorse some of your connections.
Endorse someone from your home page - Something similiar to the image above will appear on your home page in LinkedIn so it becomes quite simple perform the “endorsement” action.
Endorsing someone from their profile – you can also go directly to a connections profile, find the “Skills and Expertise”, and then choose to endorse one or a number of skills they have listed.
Managing Endorsements – not everyone wants to show the endorsements for the skills they have listed OR they prefer not to have a particular person listed as having endorsed them. I show you how to manage those endorsements.

Thanks for reading, and if you would like to endorse me for any skills, here is the link – Dee Reinhardt

Share this post with your connections to help them understand the Endorsement process.

What is Hootsuite?

Posted on August 30, 2012 by DeeReinhardt

Last week my post about adding your LinkedIn company page to Hootsuite turned into a Do you Use Hootsuite? post in the groups to which I belong on LinkedIn. One group member asked - Please explain the basics and advantages of “Hootsuite” to one that is not familiar with the concept.

Owly says “Hoot – suite”

I thought it might be useful to provide an explanation on my blog.

First let me say that there are other options, but I have found Hootsuite to suit my needs the best.

Hootsuite is a a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. For free you can have up to 5 profiles in one browser window. For each profile you can have multiple streams from that profile – for example from your Twitter account you could include the Tweets of the people you follow, tweets that include a mention of your Twitter handle, and any direct messages to you. For this purpose it is a great customer service tool.

There are some limitations with a few of the profiles options, but in general this is a good one-stop location to follow most of the platforms on which you would have a profile. Hootsuite is pretty responsive to the requests from the users and new options become available periodically.

Another major benefit to Hootsuite is the ability to schedule posts. This is useful if you will be on vacation, in a meeting, on a webinar or otherwise unavailable to post at a particular time. There is even an auto-post feature that Hootsuite will post at the best time for your fan-base.

Drafts is another feature. I have found this useful when I was trying to promote a particular program or limited time feature on a product. To me this would be more beneficial in Twitter than some of the other platforms. The repetitive nature allows you to say the same thing and perhaps only change a word (a fundraiser would be a good example to use this).

Hootsuite also offers a team option – this is a paid feature. If you have a team of individuals who would be addressing customer service issues, you can forward a post that you see to that individual for that person to address.

Some of the platforms don’t give as much “credence” to the third party applications like Hootsuite, so your posts may not have the same visibility (in Facebook especially) as if you post directly to the platform, but they are still useful. If you want to manage your social media yourself, but need to be about the business of your business, sometimes, using a tool like Hootsuite is the best use of your time. Remember that even though you may schedule a post, you still need to keep an eye on your social media platforms to be able to respond to comments or messages that followers may post that you don’t “see” right away in Hootsuite.

Nothing is perfect, but we need to make use of the tools and products that help us to our best at the time.