BTVSMD – Burlington Down & Dirty Social Media Workshop – Barbara Dozetos

Down & Dirty Social Media Plan for your Business

This presentation was made at Burlington’s Social Media day by Barbara Dozetos, Owner, Above the Fold Marketing, on June 27th, 2013

How do you know if you’re succeeding at social media? – It’s the same as marketing

CMO.com tool
Where you should be spending your efforts online?
Customer communication or customer service

Brand exposure – people know you exist
SEO also known as ‘Google juice’
Website is your online storefront, and just as important as a physical storefront
Website should be a dynamic site

Facebook overview:

• More than 40% of people have a Facebook account
• Great for business to connect to customers, and local marketing
• Colleges are no longer giving email addresses, and some college students have not had an email at all
• Fastest growing Facebook demographic is women 50+ due to grand-kids
• It’s rare to copy and paste links in Facebook
• No need for reciprocate links to interact with customers

Google Plus overview:

• Customer communication – connection based on subject matter
• High brand exposure due to Google owning it, great SEO
• Best for traffic, as you can share and send content to different circles, such as Elaine Young’s classes

Twitter overview: 

• Allows customers to communicate with companies faster than other forms of contact
  i.e. a friend who had trouble reaching right person on phone, and was resolved in minutes on Twitter
• Average SEO
• High brand exposure
• Be sure to follow back new followers, otherwise considered rude,
• Create lists to control Twitter feed
• Report spammers to remove them from Twitter

LinkedIn overview:

• LinkedIn designed for business to business contacts
• LinkedIn written recommendations more important
• People do not follow links posted from LinkedIn
• Business page on LinkedIn more open than Facebook
• LinkedIn Groups: look for quality groups,
• Best tool for finding employees

Question: Burlington Segways promotion:

• Facebook indicates customer interest when they fill out profile
• Facebook’s new hashtags give subject matter where it wasn’t before
• When people connect with your company, it’s an invite to talk to them, not a one way conversation
• Suggests to like other local business pages, and link to your page

Pinterest overview:

• Main demographic females
• Chris Bohjalian interacts with his readers on Pinterest
• Pinterest is a very visual medium, good for traffic building
• Catalog sharing opportunity, so make site social media friendly

YouTube overview: 

• Best for Social Media overall
• It’s the 2nd most used search engine in the world
  An entire demographic that visits YouTube first
• No professional equipment is needed, you can just show slideshows
• Make your videos have good descriptions, title, tags
• Best for customer communication, brand exposure, and SEO

Don’t try to outsmart Google, as paid links are tacky

Blogging – Don’t use Blogger, place the blog on your web site instead
WordPress – Best for SEO, find the right developer & get an amazing site, Google gives higher rank to WordPress

Question: Therapist & client privacy – make sure to share personal patient info privately
Research has been done where patients choose providers based on seeing the doctor’s human side, as opposed to experience

Recommends reading Entrepreneur article on “How to reach your target audience”

This was one of the five of the eight seminars for Burlington’s Social Media day on June 2 7th, 2013 that the Advantage Creations staff attended. More notes to follow, keep posted.