Click here to listen instead.

Most people would agree, they want their customers (most of them anyway!) to return. Learn their habits and you’ll improve the odds.

Engagement and relationship are words so overused, it’s difficult for me to say them. There are no other words. They matter, they work, and in today’s marketing environments they must be mastered. Your business is always a service, and you’re always serving people and your community with it.

If you’re not, people will know and not come back and share their experiences with others because they have mastered relationship and engagement!

There is a clear line in the sand. It’s simply not efficient for selling to be your number one goal right now. You must sell to make more money, but to do that and truly serve your market you need to be very aware of their needs and share that everywhere while they develop a trust with your company.

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Listen and share instead?

Every business is unique and different, and so are their social styles. Not everything you see others do will work for your company.

Social activity can’t be ignored, but most small businesses that didn’t grow up in a culture of social online behavior will agree that there isn’t a whole lot of time for chit-chatting in the unknown with whoevers. There’s a business to run.

The superficial benefits to social engagement are obvious:

• Brand recognition
• Industry thought leadership
• Staying current with trends and information

But those reasons aren’t enough to keep you interesting or interested in social activity – they’re kind of flat, aren’t they?

Among the more brow-raising reasons for social engagement, the term ‘social proof’ should have you rethinking social altogether. (more…)

Wonder how social media works for your company? If you don’t set up a decent profile, it won’t work for you at all.

The first thing to setting up your profiles is to make sure what you add really benefits your brand. We can talk all day about how to manage the Twitterverse, but when it comes down to it, people join these communities to stay involved with people. They go to profiles first for many reasons.

1. To make sure you’re a real person, to make sure you’re not some ‘bot’ that wastes their time,
2. To make sure you have something they want to hear more about.

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are three areas where most businesses should have a profile. Each of these areas allows you a small amount of space to share who you are, what you offer, who you work for, and how to get in touch with you to learn more. I suggest you take that one step farther – make sure anyone who is deciding whether or not to follow you knows how you could help them with your products or services. (more…)

My husband, gotta love him, hasn’t mastered Twitter yet. Like many of you, when he realized it could benefit his speaking engagement, there were too many other things that took precedence. The show had to go on.

Twitter isn’t hard, but it is different on different smartphones and the apps also work a little differently. It looks easy enough, but I suggest reading this letter I sent him first. (Had I known he didn’t ‘get it’ I would have started helping him a long time ago!) I have his permission to post the letter I sent him later that day, so here it is! ~Susan
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