what Social Network Should I use

what social media network should I use: Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn?
The reality is that there are four major networks — there is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube. Which one should you decide to use? If you are the type of person who likes to make friends, and wants to communicate fast online, within 140 characters — that means that you don’t like to write too much — then Twitter is the social network that you should use. watch the video to get the answer.

In this video, Fadi Semaan of Financial Social Media by Solution416 discusses the need for your business to have strong social media strategies. As he outlines, being active on social media creates wide business opportunities: you can dominate the search engine result page, achieve better ranking for your website, and establish yourself as the expert in your field. Social media is the space where you connect, converse, convince and convert people into loyal clients – and Financial Social Media by Solution416 can show you how.

As a professional, you know your social media— Facebook, Twitter – you’ve got it covered. But aren’t you forgetting LinkedIn? Or are you like many other businesses and professionals: unsure how to use LinkedIn, unable to build your presence to its full potential – and perhaps subscribing to common misconceptions surrounding the site? To truly be social-media savvy, each platform requires personal exploration to determine how best to apply it to your own situation.  Fallacies amass around any and every type of social media out there. Let’s take a hard look at some similar misconceptions about LinkedIn: with a little reconsideration, you might be surprised at what LinkedIn can do for you.

1. LinkedIn:  Only a Job-Seeking Site

A widespread belief about LinkedIn is that it belongs to the “job-seeking” category of websites.  This is not entirely untrue, as there are jobseekers out there and business to be found.  To see it only as job-searching site, however, is to misread the concept behind the site– LinkedIn began as, and remains, a professional networking site.   By virtue of this networking, this communication, business relationships and offers are forged. If you see LinkedIn as a site only for job-seekers, you’ll miss out on valuable conversation, and consequently, business.

2. It’s Intimidating!

In comparison to Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn’s environment can seem “stuffy” and less dynamic: it does not have a Facebook-like chat function, nor will other users respond to you with the quickness of Twitter. Even more off-putting to some is the large professional demographic on LinkedIn; initiating or even participating in a discussion can, understandably, be daunting.  But LinkedIn, though its interface might be less casual than Facebook or Twitter, attracts many of the same users – if you can engage them on Facebook or Twitter, you can surely engage them here.

3.  Email Overload!

Like all other social media sites, LinkedIn sends a barrage of emails when you first sign up. But YOU can take control! By going to Settings – Email notifications – Receiving Notifications, you can easily determine what email s and notifications you receive. As an example, check out these default settings below.

A helpful tip about Groups:  if daily digests seem irrelevant to you, move on to weekly digests or disable the function altogether. Whether you receive digests or not, the Groups will always be there, full of discussions for you to partake in!

4. So I Signed Up and…Nothing Happened

Fundamentally, LinkedIn just is a huge database of profiles with some additional functionality and applications; the real bonus is that key decision makers from any industry or company are on it. Just as at networking events you can’t be a wallflower, the same is true of LinkedIn – you must go out and engage with other professionals.  Not sure where to begin? Try joining relevant Groups and participating in discussions that interest you or that you would like to contribute to. Having trouble finding appropriate groups? For some tips, check out my post: Which LinkedIn Groups Are Right For You?

5. Social Media Marketing: Facebook Only

For the B2B company in particular, LinkedIn can be a much more useful tool for social media marketing than Facebook or even Twitter. Moreover, even if you are a B2C company, your company has B2B components (distributors, vendors, etc.) that would be best marketed on LinkedIn.

Monitoring your social media efforts is an important part of achieving success – knowing if your followers are increasing, when they are (and at what prompts), and who they are, will allow you to truly tap into the needs and wants of your clientele,  and create targeted social media content.

There are several types of software that can help you both determine this vital information and then develop and monitor the content that you create based on these results. Let’s take a look at some of these tools.

Radian6:

Pricing: This software offers a range of price options. One topic and the first 10,000 content returns costs $600 per month. At the higher end, for $4,000 per month, you will get 200,000 results on six topics.

Features: The analysis dashboard is a comprehensive and thorough tool, amassing results from social media outlets across the web; it also collects all your mentions in one place. The engagement console allows you to see and monitor responses to these mentions and other inquires – it also allows for easier information sharing between your departments.  The summary dashboard and the mobile versions also quickly distill the main points for when you need information fast!   Other user-friendly features include training videos, web support and webinars.

Additional Features: The advanced package comes with Google Analytics, Webtrends and Omniture, as well as providing the option to get sentiment analysis through Insights and work with salesforce.com

Big Name Customers:  American Red Cross, H & R Block.

Spredfast:

Pricing: Flexible. Contact them to discuss your business needs and available options.

Features: Error handling; content review scheduling option; White Label option; Top Ten Lists. Error handling is a particularly important tool, as it prevents you from losing your work due to possible site outages. The option to schedule content for review before publication is also important as it allows you to check the consistency and accuracy in all your content before it hits the Web. For comprehensive branding, White Label is the offered option. Finally, Top Ten Lists cover a range of topics, helping you to incorporate new options into your strategy.

Additional Features: Like Radian6 and others, Spredfast offers integration with Google Analytics, Omniture, and salesforce.com, and mobile features. It also allows you your own content management in publication and promotion across your departments.

Big Name Customers: Nokia, AARP.

Simply Measured:

Pricing: Plans start at $500/month, with the option of a free trial.

Features: Comprehensive and thorough for social media monitoring. Allows you to track keywords, hash tags, video mentions, locations of users, etc. What’s more, all data accumulated is reported to you via an Excel file: organized and easy accessible . You can also combine multiple accounts into one report.

Additional Features: Facebook analytics and Twitter analytics.  These options allow you to track your growth on these two sites down to minute detail;  you can track Fan Pages, search comments for keywords, and, on Twitter, observe your success tweet by tweet.  They also offer you a brand comparison option, to see how you match up to your competitors.

Big Name Customers: Levi’s; Alaska Airlines

Crimson Hexagon:

Pricing: Flexible. Contact a sales representative to discuss your options.

Features: Claims to offer “mathematical precision” in a “sea of opinion, information and data available in social media.” Standard sentiment analysis here is pumped up as CH reports their analytics are so thorough they can discern patterns in content with a 97% accuracy rate.

Additional Features: Gives the option to calculate your return on investment from any of your marketing and promotional campaigns.

Big Name Clients:  CNN; monster.com; Johnson & Johnson; The Huffington Post.

Sysomos:

Pricing:  Flexible. Contact for options and pricing plans.

Features: Provides information from more than 8 million posts per hour, in a variety of languages – perfect for the business looking for global attention.  The dashboard allows you to run Facebook Pages, Twitter,  and format data while filtering spam messages.

Additional Features: Automatic sentiment analysis which focuses on the groups most talking about you, providing you with all the know-how to create further content aimed at these users. Also uses Boolean search tactics to achieve search results that are most relevant to you and your brand.

Big Name Clients: the BBC; Coca-Cola; Microsoft.

As you can see, there are multiple software programs out there, ready to help you make your social media networking easier and even more successful. Play around, and see which one is right for you!

Are you using social media to get your product out there to the public? If not, you would probably cringe when you realise that most of your competitors ARE and when you find out just how much potential business you are missing out on. The idea of using social networking websites to promote your business or blog is something that should form part of your marketing plan. Do you know why social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter are designed for?

The Purpose of Social Media Websites

Online communities like Twitter, Linked In and Facebook are great ways to meet new people and stay in contact with people that you do know. So why wouldn’t you have business accounts on all of them? Yes, OKAY, they can be very time consuming – but the rewards you can reap from a well organized social media account, website or even a blog can increase your database AND the number of sales you make.

Social media websites make it much easier to establish and maintain relationships with friends, family and even clients. If your clients can contact you on Twitter or Facebook, as well as through your website or blog – that can only be a good thing, right? Most people are online everyday and there are millions of people with Facebook and Twitter accounts, just waiting for you.

You should be taking advantage of this.

What about your blog? Does your business have one? If so, are you aware that you could be using your social media website to promote your blog? Not only can you gain fans and followers, you can drive more people to your blog or website.

Promote Your Blog!

The purpose of a blog is to document your opinions on particular topics and issues. Obviously, you want people to read your blog, because you have something valuable to say. But, what’s the point of having a blog if no-one reads it? If you want to make money from your blog, you could always organize some affiliates or Google AdSense. If you already have those affiliates, naturally you will want to promote your blog.

Did you know that Google (and other search engines) will index the content of your blog and rank your website or blog? If there are certain keywords or phrases in your blog, you will generally get a higher ranking. BUT, it is highly advised that you do NOT solely rely on Google and other search engines to promote your blog for you. Not all search engines will successfully rank your blog, so you need to take the promos into your own hands.

Using Social Networking Websites to Promote Your Blog

Do you love talking to and networking with people online? Why not take advantage of that and start promoting your blog on these social media websites? After all, the people that you are networking with are probably the kinds of people who will be interested in the same things are you and will be more likely to read your blog.

There are a few different approaches when it comes to promoting your blog on social media websites. Perhaps the easiest way is to simply include the link to your blog on your Facebook or Twitter page. Doing this will increase the traffic to your blog, but maybe it isn’t the best way to promote your blog. Perhaps a better way (if you have time that is) to promote your blog on social networking sites is to send each of your fans, friends or followers a private message notifying them of your blog. This approach is usually a lot more effective. You need to keep in mind that it’s not as efficient, but it’s more effective!

There are other ways to promote your blog, but using an online social networking website is something that you should keep in mind. Not only can you promote your blog – you will probably make some new friends or customers too!

Social media has been widely embraced by a variety of sectors in recent years. But how can social media specifically benefit financial advisors? Consider the four Cs of social media success.

Connect

Connecting is the most widely recognized value proposition of social media tools. By their very nature, social media platforms enable advisors to connect with existing clients and potential prospects. While most advisors understand the potential of these tools, many struggle with proper implementation. Specifically, financial advisors often don’t know how to address privacy regulation concerns. By focusing on intelligence gathering and relationship building opportunities, social media enables financial advisors to connect with prospective clients in a compliant manner.

Convince

There is a major social media opportunity to provide quality content to your niche without selling yourself or your service. By providing advice with regards to the essential financial services, best fit investment strategies and avoiding bad investments and advisors, you can demonstrate your financial expertise. This effort also helps to demonstrate your care and consideration for the particular needs of your clients. In this sense, social media can help you to convince your prospective clients of your trustworthiness and encourage them to engage your services without generating overtly sales-oriented content.

Convert

Social media can be used as a tool to convert prospective clients into long term clients. This is achieved through an enhanced understanding of preferences gleaned through online interaction. Social media users share a great deal of personal information online, offering a window into how they prefer to interact, what sort of communication style they use and where they derive their motivation. This information is critical to the development of a successful advisory relationship. Indeed, advisors often invest a great deal of time and energy through initial client meetings to build trust and understand these personal dynamics. By gaining an understanding of these important factors through social media, financial advisors are much better equipped to convert clients through effective interactions on and off line. The result is a more responsive advisory relationship that facilitates swifter action on your recommendations.  Moreover, inspiring trust in your clients adds another dimension of professionalism and credibility that converts prospectives into long term clients.

Carry-on

An often neglected component of the social media toolkit, these platforms can help financial advisors to continue to build long lasting relationships. Financial advisors are well aware that ongoing relationship maintenance is a key part of their business success. Generally, advisors try to stay at the top of their clients minds by sending birthday and holiday cards, issuing newsletters and scheduling an annual review meeting. While these strategies are sometimes successful, they represent a one-way flow of information rather than a genuine relationship building tactic. Social media opens the door for two-way relationship building opportunities. Why not keep abreast of recent developments in your client’s life? An engagement, the birth of a child or the purchase of a new home are both key life milestones and major financial decisions. Social media platforms can help inform you of these developments and leverage your services appropriately.

Finally, carrying on a good relationship requires great communication. Social media opens one more channel of communication between you and your clients. Making yourself available through LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook can help facilitate seamless communication between you and your client.

Connect, convince convert and carry on – four ways social media can help you become a better financial advisor.

As a highly regulated industry that deals with sensitive personal information, financial services face some unique challenges in participating in social media. When considering a move into the social media arena, it is important to identify, evaluate and mitigate potential risks.

A common risk identified by financial service providers is the potential for exposure to additional liability by offering recommendations publicly. It is conceivable that well meaning advice targeted at a particular audience could be misinterpreted and used out of context by a social media user. While advisors can offer useful information about products such as investments, insurance and plans, as a professional service provider, advisors are responsible for performing due diligence when making recommendations. When offering opinions in the social media arena, it is important for advisors to seek to inform prospective clients rather than making a recommendation which could be used out of context.

Privacy is a major concern for financial advisors. Trusted relationships are the key to business success and any infringement on privacy could harm an advisor’s reputation. That said, a few rules of thumb can help to assuage privacy concerns. First, do not encourage clients to share confidential information via social media sites. Even direct messaging services offered by these platforms should not be considered confidential. While platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn can be useful for initiating and building a relationship, advisory discussions should take place in a secure medium such as email, telephone or in person meetings.

Finally, some advisors perceive risks to their reputation through online attacks and complaints. Does participation in social media create an opportunity for competitors or disgruntled clients to malign your reputation? It’s important to remember that complaints can be shared online whether you have developed a presence for yourself or not. By participating in social media, you create an opportunity to engage and dispel misinformation or to demonstrate actions taken on past mistakes. Many clients satisfied with a job well done are happy to share their praise with a public audience – participating in social media allows you to receive and leverage these accolades.

By acknowledging and addressing some of the risks associated with social media, financial advisors can confidently pursue the multitude of benefits associated with these platforms.

Many financial advisors are wary of involvement with the world of social media. Do sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube present an untapped opportunity? Or are they likely to turn off potential clients from engaging your services? Uncertainty surrounding the appropriate use of social media can be attributed to some common misunderstandings of the demographics of users and the nature of online marketing opportunities.

With 16 million Canadian users and 130 million American users, Facebook is the largest social media site on the web. While many associate the site with a younger audience, Facebook reports that over 50 per cent of its Canadian users are older than 30 and 6.6 million users are older than 40.

That said, Facebook is probably not the arena to connect with potential senior clients looking for help with estate planning. For more conservative market segments, conventional marketing strategies may be a better fit. Social media is not substitute for your existing marketing efforts. Rather, it is an important tool for diversifying your strategy and consequently your potential clients.

For those still wary about the risks involved with marketing via social media, consider the unprecedented intelligence gathering opportunities these platforms present. The ability to better understand client preferences may be one of the strongest arguments for financial advisors to enter the world of social media.

As you weigh the risks, remember that postponing a decision on how to approach social media will not serve you in the long run. While you wait, your competition is moving forward and establishing themselves as experts in your field. Avoid the up hill battle to win back your competition’s followers by engaging a social media expert today.

Lots of businesses use Google Adwords, right? Of course. However, only a small percent of these businesses know how to use Adwords to their best advantage. Here are a few tips.

Firstly, a lot of people don’t realize until they go to set up their account that they can actually suggest what websites they’d like their ads to appear on. Making the most of this function is easy: If you have a craft store, Google some of your keywords. Click on the top ten or so links of the results list and look to see if each site has Google ads. Write down the URLs of the ones that do. Now go back into your Adwords account and choose a “placement targeted” campaign. Now submit the list of websites that you’ve researched and would like to appear on and – voila! – You’ve got yourself some site-specific targeted advertising.

One of the most important parts of Adwords to be aware of is the difference between CPC and CPM. CPC is Cost Per Click, while CPM is Cost Per Mille (or Cost Per Thousands). That’s the next part of our process and we’re going with CPM. This means you pay Google anything from ten cents to three dollars for every time your ad is shown.  You’ll probably end up paying about one tenth of what you were paying Adwords previously for much more specific advertising. Does that sound good?

Quality Score

Now, your Google Adwords campaign is measured by Goggle through your quality score, which you can find in your Google Adwords account and it will be poor, good or great. If your quality score is poor, you can improve it by re-vamping your website. This goes back to content, the holy grail of your online presence.

Content

Improve your quality score by overhauling your content. How is your webpage laid out? Is there a good mix of pictures and text? You should aim to have at least one photo and all of your most important information on the homepage of your site, and your customer should be able to see the majority of it without having to scroll. Make sure they can navigate their way through your site easily; the best way to do this is to have a navigation bar at the top of the page. It even comes down to the colours you use throughout the site, make sure they’re consistent across the different pages so that there is a sense of uniformity and the person clicking through your sites knows they’re still on your site and it doesn’t feel like they’ve clicked through to something different.

Traffic

And now we’re back to Google Adware because of course, you can have the most amazing content in the world and it won’t mean a thing if you have no one looking at it. One of the added benefits of a CPM campaign is that you get “expanded text ads” – in other words, the larger version of your ad appears on the site as well. This option is put through automatically when you click CPM in your Adwords account.

Generally, people in financial markets think a daily return of 3-5 per cent is excellent… how does a daily return of 50-100 per cent sound? Not bad, right? Well, if you follow these tips, there’s no reason why you won’t achieve that kind of return. It’s all about spending money wisely, not just in big sums. The better placed and targeted your ads are, the higher your return will be because you’re not wasting time advertising at people with no interest in your product. Remember that and inform yourself as much as you can about Google Adwords to make the most of the program.

The financial community tends to approach social media with both interest and trepidation. Many financial institutions have cultivated strong customer relationships and powerful brand loyalty with conventional marketing strategies. So while social media may appear to be the latest marketing bandwagon, executives are justifiably concerned about jumping on.

In an industry which takes online privacy very seriously, financial services organizations are also concerned about the privacy implications of online communication. Moreover, financial marketers worry that social media is little more than a resource drain, taking valuable time and dollars away from tried and true strategies.

While valid, these concerns are founded in some common misconceptions about the nature of social media. While social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are very popular, they are not representative of the diversity of social media options. Broadly, social media includes any online resource that helps to build relationships through sharing, communication and interaction. In contrast to traditional websites which maintain a one-way flow of information from website to customer, social media sites allow users to interact with a brand and with each other – building a sense of community and ultimately, a relationship with the brand in question.

Financial institutions may choose to broaden their social media strategy by engaging with a variety of social media platforms including YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, StumbleUpon, TripAdvisor and Twitter. While these tools are not new, they can be overwhelming. For this reason, financial institutions should consider consulting an expert when planning to wade in to the world of social media.