That is, there were few drawbacks until the company changed the way visitors view business posts (and personal posts from an individual page too, but that’s another story for another day.)

Reaching Only 5% of Your Followers – What?

One of the biggest drawbacks for businesses is the small amount of people reached with every post on your business pages. At first glance, you may think you have a thriving, healthy page with thousands of followers. Business page posts, however don’t reach every single follower. Instead, Facebook calculates who should see your post, and unless you pay to play, they share it with 5 to 10% of your followers. You can’t control who those followers are, so on any given day, you have no idea exactly who you are reaching and when you reach them.

Some companies have gotten around this low number by using a combination of email marketing and Facebook pages. Jen Clothing, for example, a trendy online fashion retailer of women’s clothing, combined an email outreach with a Facebook contest to boost both awareness of its fall dress collection and visits to its Facebook page. Boosting visits is thought to correlate with better visibility for a company’s Facebook page. Interaction with the contest through likes or shares is also thought to help the Facebook proprietary algorithm determine that your content is worthier of wider distribution, perhaps reaching 10% of your followers instead of 5%. Companies like Jen Clothing are experimenting with multi-channel marketing to reach as many customers as possible.

Pay to Play

Facebook, like any business, needs to make money to fund its activities and please its shareholders. The company offers “sponsored posts” which, like an advertisement, you have to pay to promote. You set a budget the way you do for online advertising and the company then shows your sponsored post to as many potential users as it deems relevant.

Many small business owners question whether the return on investment for Facebook sponsored posts is worth it. The site’s users often complain about the ads, finding many intrusive or poorly targeted. If you have a robust budget for online marketing and your core audience seems to use Facebook often, it might be worth a test.

Should You Give Up on a Facebook Business Page?

Given these drawbacks for businesses using Facebook, should you give up on your Facebook business page?  No, but diversify your social media resources instead. Don’t focus solely on Facebook, but test various social media platforms to find the one that seems to work best for your business needs.

Social media is here to stay, and Facebook is a platform that many people, your customers among them, may enjoy. Although it has many drawbacks, offering customers a choice of how to interact on social media with your business still remains the best option.

Web Design of Palm Beach offers reliable website hosting services, website design and more. Call us at 561.262.5886 for more information.

The Pluses of Google+: Benefits for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, I’m always looking for free and low-cost ways to promote my business online. Social media provides great opportunities to network with potential customers and business partners.

Like many business owners, I first had a Facebook business page, with a growing community of followers. However as time went by and Facebook became a publicly traded company, it changed its free model to a pay-to-play model for business owners. Fair, perhaps, but now my businesses’ reach was limited as a free page.

Google+ offers no such restrictions to businesses or individuals. You can set up a page for yourself or for your business online. When you set up a business page, it also links to local search efforts, which boosts your website’s power to reach a local market – a plus for small business owners.

Google+ operates a little differently from similar social media sites. Instead of merely connecting with potential followers, you can add them to your “circles” and group circles by category. Friends, family, customers, clients, colleagues or other circles can be created so you can send customized messages to each circle rather than blast mass messages out to all.

Like most social media sites, Google+ enables users to share both links to web pages and articles as well as videos and photos. If your products are services benefit from visual marketing, that’s a plus.

Lastly, Google offers a neat feature called “hangouts.” Hangouts connect up to 10 people at a time in a sort of online video conference. You can share videos or even screen captures. Like the rest of the services offered by Google+, it’s free.

Drawbacks to Google+

For all of these wonderful features, are there are any negatives to using Google+? The two biggest drawbacks cited by users include slow adoption (also awareness) among their customers about Google+ itself, and the sheer amount of social media accounts most businesses juggle these days.

Google hasn’t done a lot to promote Google+. Sure, it’s online, and if you have gmail or other Google services you can’t help but notice it. Yet many people still don’t know what it is or why it’s a good idea to be on it. Until more of your friends, customers and acquaintances are using it, it can be hit or miss as to its effectiveness.

Many people are feeling social media burnout these days, and that feeling often extends to businesses. Small business owners juggling several social media profiles can feel overwhelmed posting, liking, sharing and managing their pages.

From a search engine perspective, anything Google does is worth noting – and participating in. While the company is mum about how much, if any, credence is given to companies using their platform for social media; most business owners are playing it safe and hedging their bets, setting up accounts on Google+ to cover their bases. Since it’s free, it’s a good idea to have a Google+ account. Be sure to manage it just as you would any other social media platform, and actively participate as often as you can to cultivate those all-important networking contacts.

Web Design of Palm Beach provides webhosting services, web design and more. Visit us online or call 561.262.5886.

Twitter’s reach is astounding. Since its incorporation in 2007, the company has ground by leaps and bounds.  Over 500 million tweets are sent daily.  Twitter recently added images and video to the things users can tweet, making it a great tool to share many types of media.

Although some people find the short burst-type messages more annoying than helpful, for those who get the hang of Twitter, it can become a valuable tool to promote a business or network with new people.

5 Ideas to Use Twitter Effectively to Promote Your Business

 If you’re confused by how to use Twitter as a business communications tool, these five ideas will help you get started. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, you can set one up at no charge. Connect with Web Design of Palm Beach as your first Twitter ‘friend’, and you’re well on your way to creating your own personal network of contacts on Twitter.

Once you’re ready to start using the social media site, these five ideas can help you use Twitter more effectively to promote your business.

1. Create a memorable profile page.  Twitter, like many social media platforms, gives each user their own personal profile page. Don’t just slap any old thing on the page and call it a day. This is your personal handshake, your business card online, your means of introducing yourself to potential customers, clients or partners. Choose a good-quality headshot of yourself or use your company logo for your profile. Write an engaging, enticing profile that showcases not just what you do, but how you can help your target customers solve problems. Such profiles aren’t easy to do, and you may need to revise it a few times until you’re satisfied with it. Don’t forget to link to your website.

2. Find and connect with the influencers in your industry. It’s fine to “follow” anyone on Twitter – you don’t need to ask their permission. Find and follow the thought leaders in your industry. Encourage colleagues, employees and others to connect with you as well.

3. Tweet regularly. Don’t let your account gather dust. Send out at least one or two Tweets daily. If that feels overwhelming, tools like Hoot Suite and other programs let you schedule your communications in advance, so you can load 14 messages on a Monday to send out automatically on your behalf for the week. You’ll miss potential interactions using only scheduling tools, but a blend of scheduling tools and spontaneous interactions leads to more frequent and authentic communications on Twitter.

4. Share the love by retweeting. Retweeting means sharing someone else’s post with your own network of followers. It’s a thoughtful way to help others, and they may return the favor, thus introducing your own content to new audiences online.

5. Don’t make it all about sales. Hard selling is frowned up on Twitter. Aim for a ratio of 80% informative, interesting content, whether original, shared links, or shared retweets. The remaining posts can be promotional. Try offering discounts or other incentives to your Twitter fans so that you can track the results.

Twitter offers great potential for many companies to engage with their customers, introduce their products and services to new customers, and build their brand. If you’d like help setting up your Twitter account or integrating it into your website, call Web Design of Palm Beach. We can get your website up and running quickly, host it for you, and get you tweeting in no time at all. Call us at 561.262.5886.

What Is Social Media?

You’re probably familiar with many of the more common social media websites. They’re mentioned on the news, they’re touted by all the latest marketing gurus, and they’re even on the stock market. Social media websites promote connections and networking via direct, personal links. Through your personal or business social media account, you share updates, links to relevant content and more. You can make connections with new acquaintances, rekindle old friendships, and keep up with family and friends.

Social media today has a broader definition than most people give it. Social media is more than websites like Twitter or Facebook. Social media encompasses any website where conversations and interactions are encouraged.

Examples of Social Media Social media includes:

• Social networks, such as Facebook, which enable users to create networks of friends, acquaintances and business contacts with which they can share updates and content;
• Question and Answer forums, such as Yahoo! Answers, which provide forums for individuals to post questions and others to respond;
• Content curation platforms such as Pinterest and Reddit that make it easy for users to share links to their favorite articles, images and more, and to curate groups of useful and relevant content;
• Photo-based social sites, such as Flickr, where images are the basis for communications, commentary and sharing;
• Video websites like YouTube that provide personal television channels to billions of people worldwide;
• Blogging, which provides platforms for individuals, companies and organizations to share their ideas, thoughts and content with the world;
• Business and networking sites like LinkedIn which focus on industry and business-specific topics;
• and many, many more.

Is Social Media Marketing Profitable or a Time Waster?

Business people often look askance at social media marketing as time-wasting, unprofitable communications. Social media, however, can provide profitable indeed. Let’s look at a few examples.

• Cadbury/Wispa: When chocolate company Cadbury announced it was retiring the Wispa candy bar, a popular treat in the United Kingdom, millions of fans petitioned via Twitter and Facebook for the company to keep the Wispa bar in production. Cadbury, reluctant at first to respond, finally sent 40 million Wispa bars to market. The bars were quickly snapped up by chocolate-hungry fans, and Cadbury kept the bars in production. Today, the company credits social media with both saving the iconic British chocolate bar and adding 30% to their annual profits.
• Coffee Groundz: Do you remember the days when door to door salesmen like the Fuller Brush Man knocked on your front door and sold items from a case? The days of a direct salesman traipsing around the suburbs may be over, but direct sales lives on today via social media. Coffee Groundz used a Twitter campaign to directly sell its products to consumers. The results netted them a 25% increase in both sales and profits. Not bad for using a ‘free’ advertising medium.
• Jimmy Choo: Shoe designer and retailer Jimmy Choo’s footwear commands prices as high as their platform heels, but that didn’t stop consumers from responding to their social media campaign. The company used a cleverly targeted campaign via Twitter to encourage visits to their retail stores and sell sneakers. The results speak for themselves; soaring store visits, positive Tweets shared among Choo fans, and 33% more sneaker sales.

Your company may not be as big as Cadbury or Jimmy Choo, but with creativity, persistence and knowledge, you too can harness the power of social media to boost sales, profits and site traffic. Get started today by exploring some of the popular social media platforms. Connect with Web Design of Palm Beach on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. Soon you’ll be tweeting, liking and commenting like a pro!

Web Design of Palm Beach offers website design, hosting and more. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more about our services today.