Social media is just that: social. So start being social and make new friends, link to groups and people who could be potential customers or Brand Champions. Having all your platforms linkedwill greatly assist you in this process. Ask questions, answers questions, make comments, repost cool relevant items and be nice.

Ok, not nice all the time. Nice people online are boring and often forgotten. Ruffle the feather every so often with a personal opinion on some topic or a short editorial on a hot issue. This will get people talking and sharing a little about what you say.

The main rule for chatting is to lead people back to your website to get them to engage with your product or service. To make this effective, make sure you have a ‘landing page’ for people to click through to. A landing page is a web page specially designed for a specific task, such as selling, promoting, gathering information and the like. Design a landing page that will promote a specific product offering, add a capture form and then blog about it. Add links to the blog to take people direct to the page and not your home page. Add to this by posting shorter posts on FaceBook and Twitter with the same link. Give people some incentive to capture their details and then sit back and see what happens.

It may not work well the first time you try it, but keep at it, change a few things and try again. Keep promoting the page until you have gotten enough response, and then do something else.

Your strategy here is to collect people’s details who have found your offerings appealing. This is what we call your Sales Pipeline. Keep their interest peaked by following up with emails, phone calls and personal visits.

By this stage you should be online on a number of platforms each with their required profiles fully completed. Working online can be very time consuming and become a huge time thief for you in the day. What you need to do is to use some of the tools that exist to ensure that your social media is consistently updated and run well. You also need to know when people comment and reply on any of the platforms. Gulp! I hear you say, but this is not that complicated. Just a few tools and a few minutes each day will keep you in the driving seat.

So here are some of my all time favorite saving tools for you to use:

• RSS feeds. This is a bit technical, so if you are not a techie, ask your web guys for help here. If you want to give it a shot, useFeedburner from Google, it makes it a whole lot easier to set up and use. What this does is to replicate your blog posts to subscribers and to a number of publishing platforms automatically every time you publish a new blog.
• IFTTT – stands for IF This Then That. This has to be the best tool invented since forever. Register an account and then set up a number of recipes to use on your platforms. Essentially it will post on your FaceBook page or Twitter each time you blog. Or the other way around or both. Look at some examples and just do what others have done to learn before you start designing your own recipes. Be careful not to create loops and fill your profiles with junk.
• Hootsuite – A simple way to keep track of replies and new comments. Take some time to learn all the features and once set up it will work for you forever.Get these up and working for you and your life will be just that little easier with regard to your social media management. This will then allow you more time to run some campaigns and marketing strategies.

Once you have all the required platforms registered, ensure that your personal and business brands are properly represented on each of them. Here is a short check list:

Get a professional pic of yourself. Head and shoulders or waist up os good. Make sure it is clear and edited if required. DO NOT use your logo for your personal pic. And never use your dog, baby scans or children as substitutes. People want to get to know you as a person, not as a picture of someone else.

Put your brand logo as the profile pic on FaceBook page, Twitter and YouTube. This will give your brand an identity when your post on these platforms.

Create a cool banner that can be used for both FaceBook Page and YouTube. The sizes are slightly different but they should look the same. Twitter allows for w full wall paper backing as well as a banner. Get a designer to do these for you if you do not have the right tools, but PowerPoint works well for most. Create a design, group it, right click and save as a pic. Then just upload the pic to the required platform. For a more professional look, pay someone. Remember to save your logos with your business name, this helps Google to get to know you

Enter in a business profile in each platform. It is best to write these out in Word first, then just copy and paste them to ensure a consistent brand identity. Keep them short and to the point. Most people want to read these in less than 5 seconds, so work on them to get them right before posting them.

Ok we are getting there, more tomorrow.

This week we will publish a social media tip each day to assist you in developing a more focused strategy for your business using low cost ideas that work.Today’s strategy is simple: get online. So many of our clients have not yet gotten themselves or their business online. Here is a short list of must haves for any small business owner and their business:

Get a personal FaceBook profile Click here

Get and complete a LinkedIn profile Click here

Register your company domain name: Click here

Put up a website and a blog for your business Click here

Register a FaceBook Business Page, set this up with a logo, header banner and business info Click here

Register a business Twitter account, add your business info and a logoClick here

Get a business Gmail account. This is not for receiving mail but gives you access to all the Google tools and platforms though a single access point, more on this later in the week Click here

Register a Youtube account and set it up with a channel banner and info Click here

Enough now? These will form the basics for what we will share later this week. These we see as the essential requirements to start getting your business and personal profile out into the web and to attract new customers.

What if you had an idea? What if the idea was so good that you just had to share it with everyone, not just everyone you know but everyone everyone?

Problem: Your social network is just 0.000001% of the everyone who needs to hear what you have to say.

Solution: Thunderclap: a very awesome platform that gives voice and penetration to causes, messages and new innovation. This is just simple maths of exponential marketing and explosive messaging.

Need to know more: check out the video, it explains it far better than we could.