Availlive – Your Virtual Assistant

When you are planning on marketing your business online, the first thing you have to first identify is who are your target audience.   To be realistic, not everyone will be interested in your service or product, so who will?  These are the questions you should ask yourself when you are looking for your target audience.

Who are customers of your service or product?

Where will these customers be located?

What will be the age range of these consumers?

Are they mainly male or female?

What are their lifestyle?

What will their occupation be?

What is their education level?

What is their average income?

What are their interests or hobbies?

Are they single, engaged, married or divorced?

Do they have kids?

What is their motive in making a purchase?

After answering all the above questions, you should have a good idea on who your target audience is.  Make good focus to communicate with people within these interest group through social media and connect with them through giving out ideas, comments and advices.  Win their trust!

If you still need ideas, contact me.  I will be happy to help.

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When it comes to social media marketing, a blog is basically the core of the whole plan because this is where your content will be placed.  Good content is essential to social media marketing.   A blog is where you can post useful information about your business, share your expertise and give your viewers insights on your industry.  A blog is where you can start earning trust from your readers.

A blog is where you can distribute free content on the internet, who doesn’t like free content?  I read a lot of blogs everyday to learn new things on internet marketing and social media marketing everyday.  It is important to become the thought leaders in the industry, so people will visit your blog or even subscribe to your blog and read your blog on a regular basis.

Why do I say it is the core of social media marketing?  This is because you can import your blog feeds into your Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other social media platforms.  You can submit each post on social bookmarking website such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit, bringing more traffic to your blog and earning links back to your blog, which increasing your search ranking.

Blogs are extremely search engine optimized friendly, therefore you should use keywords or keywords phrases wisely for each post’s title.  That will attract readers to your blog which may ultimately convert to sales.  Also, the search engine loves fresh content.  If you blog regularly, your content will most likely be picked up from the search engine which again drives traffic to your blog.

Has this convince you to start a business blog?  If it hasn’t, why not?

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Since the launch of Google Buzz, there are a lot of debate on the security issues raised due to the auto follow function for all the contacts within the Google Gmail account.  Although it might be quite reasonable that your contact list are your friends, it does not mean we would like to share what we have to say to all these people.  Social media profiles can be strictly for personal or business purposes.  I am sure people would not like to share what they had for dinner with their business contacts or promote their business to close friends.  To my point of view, social media should be managed independently from personal to business purpose.

One more issue on Google Buzz is when you reply to a specific contact on Buzz, others can actually see their full email address, which one sure not everyone will appreciate.  Although it is very thoughtful of Google that we can build another social media presence without signing up for any extra services, the lack of consideration on privacy issues is quite severe.  Unlike their previous launch of services like Gmail, Wave, and Voice, which people may only receive each service by invitations, they took a full launch of the service upon their announcement of their service.  Is this because of their worries of the dominance of Twitter and less people will sign up?

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Assessment

Do you already have any sort of social media profile set up?  Do you have a blog?  A Facebook fan page? Or a Twitter account?  Are they successful?  For example, do you have a lot of readers at your blog?  Do you have a good number of fans on your Facebook fan page?  Do you have a lot of followers on Twitter?  These are all questions that you have to ask yourself before planning out a strategy.

Check out your competitors

Look for social media profile set up by your competitors and see if they are successful or not.  If they are successful, look closer and see what they are doing to achieve their success.  Is it because of their design?  Their content?  Their engagement with their audience?

Research

Locate where your target audience is engaged in.  There are thousands of networks that serves specific audience.  For example, like myself, I’m a virtual assistant, therefore I have joined specific forums for virtual assistants and online businesses where I can share with others my expertise.  Find these networks and see the latest trends in your industry.

Mind mapping

So you have researched and analyzed, what is your current position in social media?  Mind map what sort of social media you would like to be involved with.  Explore all the options to spread your message across and be recognized for your expertise and brand.

Action

Start registering with the networks you have decided to join.  Setup a blog.  Do whatever that needs to be done in order to get involve.

Setting a goal

What is your expectation of outcomes from these activities?  When it comes to expectations, you have to be sensible.  Establishing a certain amount of good content time to accumulate.  Therefore you should review the outcomes based on at least one month.  Goals such as gaining 500 readers to your blogs or having 200 fans on Facebook is a good way to calculate your outcome as an evaluation over the progress.

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As of the latest press from Facebook, there are now more than 350 million active users on Facebook.  50% of them log on to Facebook daily.  There are more than 1.6 million active business pages on Facebook and more than 700,000 are local businesses and have created more than 5.3 billion fans.  Are you part of it now?  If so, have you been actively engaging conversations with your fans?  If not, why are you not participating?

Yes I know, it can be extremely time consuming to be active on your business page but what is worth less than getting to know your clients or potential clients’ point of view on your product or service?  When you reply or comment on what people have to say about your business, it gives a connection to your fans.  It also provides a sense that you do care about how people feel about your business.

How Do You Get Attention on Facebook?

If you are a small business owner, do not just name your page using your business name.  Add keywords that is related to your business as part of your business page’s name.  Also use the keywords or keyword phrases in your information box so it is SEO friendly.

Provide your fans with contents that they are interested in.  Believe it or not, content is still the king in social media.

Creating an outstanding landing page for new visitors to your page.  Give your audience an image of your business and encourage them to join your page.

Host contest on your page, whether it is for promotion purposes or simply having fans to engage in your page.  It is important for you to keep the traffic up on your page.

Last but not least, advertise your page on Facebook.  Create a pay per click ad specified to your target audience on Facebook, you might be impress with the results you get in return.

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