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Amp Up Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

OMA-Comp-Social-Media-MarketingSocial Marketing is a cost effective method to advertise your business and routinely stay in touch with customers or clients outside of the standard points of contact. There are a few key points that need to be cared for and taken advantage of to make social media marketing work for your business.
Search Engine Results

The best way to begin marketing using social media is to gain ranking in search engine results. In a perfect world, when a potential customer or client types in any combination of key words to search for your type of business in your area, your website will be the top result that shows up in the search engine. Next, let’s say your social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter are loaded with content that is updated frequently. Not only will you have your website show up on a search engine as a top result but now your social media websites will show up as top results as well. By keeping social media websites updated often, it allows for the business to create dominance on search engine results.
Social Media as Two Way Communication
Using social media allows clients and customers to stay up to date on current productions, trends and sales specials going on with your business. It allows people to communicate directly with the business by asking questions about products or promotions. It is important to view social media sites multiple times throughout the day to keep the lines of communication open to avoid delays in responding to questions.

Last But Not Least…Gain Followers
An effective way to gain followers to your social media websites is to leave a laptop or tablet at the front desk. Ask customers to log into frequently used social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter and ask them to “follow” or “like” your social media pages. You will find that the majority of your customers will happily do so as it will allow them to connect with your business much easier. Ultimately, your connections to people will grow very quickly as your social media marketing will ultimately drive more traffic to your business.

Pinterest and It’s Gain in Popularity

pinterest_badge_redPinterest is gaining speed on the train of social media very recently behind Facebook and Twitter. Starting in 2009, Pinterest is a website that allows users to share photos on “Pinboards.” Users can organize their photos based on themes they choose such as food, clothing, home decor, etc.

With the know-how, Pinterest can be an extremely useful and profitable marketing tool for businesses as a lot of referral traffic can be obtained through the site.

Why Pinterest Is So Appealing

People are visual-based creatures and they like to see beautiful photos that catch their interest. People are more likely to post photos of things that strike their interest and will share these images with their friends via their individual Pinboards. The trick to effectively use Pinterest for marketing is to share captivating photos and allow users to share the photos.

At this point, you may be wondering how Pinterest will drive referrals and traffic to your business. Each photo is a link to the source of the image — i.e. to the business website thus leading potential customers directly to the site to gain more information.

Professional & High Quality Photos Are Important

The quality of your photo can make or break driving traffic to your website. If you are posting photos that are of low quality with poor lighting, most Pinterest users will pass over your photo. Using only high quality photos is vital to capturing customers. The image should appear professional with each space shown clean and organized. The size of the image is also important because the image needs to be easily accessable by potential customers. Keep the resolution of the photo around 800 x 1000 pixels.

Build Pinboards For Your Business and Keep Customers Coming Back

If your business is selling a product, there is no excuse for you not to create a Pinterest page with Pinboards to assist with selling your products. The first step is to create an attractive account with attractive pin boards. This could take some time but it will be well worth it in the end once you notice an increase in customers. Keep in mind that people tend to be more inclined to follow an individual versus a business as an individual tends to be more believable unless the brand is well-known. Create your Pinterest board under your own name to increase your followers.
As you gain followers, you can create Pinboards that are in relation to your product or idea. For example, if you are selling skincare products, then you should create Pinboards with titles “DIY Skincare,” “Moisturizers” or “Healthy Skin Diets.” You can then pin images back to your website that are related to these ideas.
With millions of users on Pinterest daily, gaining new customers is quite easy. Keep in mind that people are on Pinterest to discover and learn new things so take advantage of this and make this wonderful marketing tool work for your business.

Social Media and Handling Negative Comments About your Business PART 4 of 4

By checking and answering to your clients you are creating good bonds and providing great customer service for your clients.OMA-Comp-Positive-Feedback

Since social media is extremely public these days, you are letting your clients see how good of a job you are doing for other people. With showing people how good you are doing through social media you are establishing a good brand reputation and showing that your company is a social business.

Everyone likes to think that they run a terrific business, but that is not true every business has its flaws. By being open minded to your customer complaints allows you to notice problems that you wouldn’t have noticed on your own.

Noticing your business’s problems can help prevent issues in the future.

 Remember…

Social media can help your business blossom. Acknowledgment of rational criticisms can be benign by making your reputation grow and making your business out to be social.

What can you say about feedback on social media? How do you respond and why? Let us know!

Social Media and Handling Negative Comments About your Business PART 3 of 4

OMA-Comp-Negative-Feedback-3customers, you should at least consult the issue positively. Thanking them would also be helpful.

What you can take from all of this

As your business expands, you will gain more customers; hence, more opinions and feedback. What a business does with this feedback dictates the character of the business. The feedback could either be accepted and lead to changes, or ignored and forgotten.

There are businesses who avoid using social media because they wouldn’t know how to handle the negative feedback the right way. Social media offers a lot of ideas for improvement, and not all of these ideas have to be used. It helps to keep your options open.

Negative feedback is inevitable. Just because some businesses don’t want to use social media and see criticism publicly, doesn’t mean that the negativity isn’t out there.

Listening to your customers and making changes in their favor can help gain major company supporters. Customers love a business who cares about what they have to say.

 A 40/100 is better than a 0/100

The people who keep quiet and don’t give feedback aren’t being as involved as those customers who point out flaws. Disinterest is worse than concern.

Complaints are just another part of owning a business. There are always going to be customers that aren’t fully pleased.

Acknowledging the concerns of customers can turn them from judgmental to spokespeople who only praise your business. Ignoring them can either not to do anything at all or make things worse. Getting a customer to support your organization can help with the development of it.

 Social media is making customer interaction that much more important

These days, if clients have a question or complaint, there is a greater chance for them to contact you using social media, instead of email phone or using a contact on your site.

Apple WWDC 2013 – New iOS, Mac Pro, Buzz

On Monday at its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC),New iOS 7 for Iphone, coming out later this year. Apple unveiled a number of upcoming upgrades for various products that we’ll be seeing later this year. One of the more subtle announcements was that of the Mac Book Air. All around there were upgrades you’d expect coming from Apple around this time. With an all new, flash-based memory model, the new Mac Book airs will be faster than ever before. Better battery life, WI-Fi reception, and processors are also in line for the new Mac Book Airs.

On the more exciting side of things, Apple also gave a sneak peek of its newest powerhouse computer, the mac pro. Sporting a revolutionary cylindrical design, the computer uses unified thermal cooling at its center, where it is blown out through the top by a large fan. This is the almighty Mac Pro, so you’d better believe Apple didn’t skimp out on its upgrades – everything is pretty much double from its predecessor, giving you the most powerful Mac Pro the market has ever seen. Expect to see it out in the fall sometime.

Another big hit during the keynote was the upgrade of Apple’s mobile UI, iOS. The iOS 7 was a real breathe of fresh air compared to a rather stagnant aesthetic between the last few updates to the software. An all new minimal, modular grid system has everything more unified than ever. We’ll wait and see if third party developers follow suit with what they’ve done. I have a feeling they’ll keep making the crappy icons they’ve always made, but at least Apple gave an effort. Another new feature is the control center, a swipe-up addition that, you guessed it, allow you to control everything from the WI-Fi to the brightness. Airdrop is also an exciting new innovation, allowing fellow I Phone users to share files wirelessly. This is also due to be out later in the year.

Innovate much? Apple really seems to have taken the remarks of their critics to heart, showing them that they can in fact re-invent themselves, product by product. As exciting as their keynotes have become (I feel like I’m watching a magic show sometimes), let’s hope that the products themselves hold up to the Cupertino computer company’s name.

Life, work, and how mobile phones are changing both

Treat your phone as you would your computerAs life and work blur into one another more and more every day, it’s important to consider how we can better prepare ourselves, and our devices, to better be in cohesion with one another. Losing a mobile phone or tablet can be detrimental to one’s privacy, and potentially their client’s if precautions have not been taken to hide such information in an event such as this. Roughly $30 billion dollars’ in mobile phones go missing every year, and as much as 70% of those phones aren’t password protected. Just imagine all of the information on those phones that can possibly be stolen and used at the original owner’s expense? Imagine walking into work and realizing you phone isn’t in your pocket. Is it in the car? Is it at home? Did you lose it?

It used to be primarily desktop computers hackers were after, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Mobile phones are now being targeted more and more by hackers and it is becoming increasingly alarming. What they do is attack from an external network, and they then breach data files with valuable information such as an address of credit card number.It isn’t just one party that’s always guilty. At times it is that of a fellow employee, of even an employer. While it might not be released intentionally, companies tend to release large amounts of data out into the world through all of their outlets and devices. This makes them that much more vulnerable to some of that information being stolen and used. Having a set group of people that manage and maintain such a system can make these kinds of situations a thing of the past.

Malware and illegitimate programs are becoming extremely common amongst mobile phone users. Download the wrong app and boom; you’ve successfully downloaded Malware onto your phone. This also makes your phone susceptible to data extraction, handing your friends and contacts to phishers and scammers.
Ultimately, what is needed is an all-device-dashboard, so if your phone is stolen or compromised in any way, you can go back and erase anything of value. Client records, bank statements, social security numbers – the devices we carry are truly becoming part of us in more ways than we realize. It’s about time we start treating it as such.