Tuesday, July 31, 2012

How Can a Company Move "Followers" and "Fans" into Sales Prospects Using Social Media?

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How Can a Company Move "Followers" and "Fans" into Sales Prospects Using Social Media?

Written by Bill Pojunis on 28 July 2012. Posted in Social Media Marketing & Strategy

Social media is a great tool to market various products and services. Companies that utilize a Facebook page or manage a Twitter account have a wide audience for potential customers. However, any business that is using a social media site needs to provide content valuable to their target audience. Once this has been done, an online strategy for the generation of revenue is needed. 

Updating fans of a Facebook page or followers on Twitter allows a business to reach prospects early on in the sales process. Getting a potential customer's attention early is the key to successful conversion to a paying customer. To do this a company will need to post a description with a preview of their product or service being offered. 

Potential customers for your business need an easy way to find your product. To do this an example for the type of product or a link to a web page needs to be included with any posted message. Make sure to keep extra clicks to get to the link for your product to a minimum. The link on a Facebook page or your Twitter account needs to go directly to the product. If a link simply goes to a main page for a website, a business may miss out on converting fans and followers into a sales prospect. 

Utilize a Facebook or Twitter page to create soft leads. Potential customers that follow your pages enter the sales process at an early stage and may not be at a buying stage at this point. However, a business is able to create a new lead or sales prospect by using an email list. This allows a business to use an email marketing campaign to promote their product and other offerings. 

The sales prospects being nurtured on fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter are different than those of a traditional sales lead. This means that a traditional email campaign for this type of prospect is not a good choice to drive a purchase decision. These emails should include basic information of a product to keep up interest. 

Measure the effort to convert a fan or follower into sales prospects. This can be done by tracking how many visitors click on a link the is posted to Facebook or Twitter. Compare the number of clicks on your links to the number total number of potential leads following on Facebook or Twitter.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Google debuts "Vault" Archiving and Records Management System

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Google debuts "Vault" Archiving and Records Management System

It seems like everything is moving to the cloud and with the advent of the Google Vault, business communications are headed there as well. The company recently announced its archiving service for users of its chat and email services. This service costs $5 per month and is geared toward any organization that might benefit from an archiving system during times of litigation, investigation, and compliance audits. We think it's a strong addition to the company's other business services, which you may already be using, including Cloud Connect, Groups, Sites and Docs.

Water cooler talk has been positive. If you already rely on Gchat or Gmail don't need to make any changes. This records management system simply archives the data that is already being communicated in those channels. It offers an easy solution during a difficult time. Legal processes that require a retention period, or hold, on such data go that much more smoothly when it's easy to locate and save that data.

Google explains that its Vault service allows businesses to comply with those legal holds and the system will hold the chat and email data until the retention expires. Although you can manually save some of this data, the automated records management system ensures that it is preserved for longer than Gmail or Chat may usually allow.

Even when litigation and compliance aren't an issue, this new service allows small company owners to quickly search through archived data to find specific information. The search tool is handy because it allows you to locate data based on message content and meta-data such as labels. It also promotes collaboration between users for message management purposes. Plus, there's no need to move your sensitive files between hard-drives, a practice that can sometimes result in corrupted files. This new service is just one more way to ensure that important information never becomes lost, even in the event of a hard-drive or network failure.

Google wants business owners and IT managers to sign up with this service right away. What is its reasoning? Vault provides an easy-to-access method for quickly finding data. The archiving service is a small fee, the company says, especially when compared to costly data retrieval and wasted man-hours when the auditor makes an appearance. Operations quickly return to normal, and audits become less painful. It's certainly a convincing argument and we think it's always better to be safe than sorry.

Friday, July 27, 2012

New Media Plus Relaunches Blog

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Written by Bill Pojunis on 27 July 2012. Posted in Blogs

 

New Media Plus is now re-launching our blog onwww.newmediaplus.net.

 

During the next few weeks, you will notice our re-energized commitment to providing valuable information on all things relating to social media, website development and online advertising.  We now will be providing information and an enhanced emphasis upon how public companies can more effectively manage their investor-related materials through social media and new media. We will be bringing our readers trends and new developments, industry news and best practices from sources to complement our own staff of contributors and experts.

We are back, better than ever, and raring to go!  The new content is on schedule to begin release in the next few days.

We hope you like what you see, and that you will give us some feedback so that we can continue to improve things going forward.  In addition, we would greatly appreciate it if you could help us by sharing articles and posts you like or find helpful to your business!

As the saying goes, we are ramping up for success! Glad to have you join us!

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