Tag Archives: Social media

Making a noise is only half the battle

Many businesses have kicked off their social media activity and then struggled to make the impact that everyone keeps telling them they should be. They are sharing pictures of their plush offices or the Friday morning bacon rolls on a very regular basis, also posting the ‘deal of the week’ or the odd bit of industry-specific information here and there, then waiting for the phone to ring with new sales and enquiries from customers and clients.

The reality is that it takes a lot more than this to make the right kind of impact and the work is in not only creating content and shouting loudly about it, but building communities around this content and growing loyalty and trust in those who follow you and your brand.

Think about car alarms. If you’re in a city centre, there is hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear one going off. When was the last time you actually stopped what you were doing and said, “Wow, listen to that car alarm! I’m going to go and find out where it is and see what’s going on”? When they were first developed, the sound of one blasting would often cause a commotion with a crowd gathering around the car to see what the problem was, but after a while, as people got used to the sound and frequency of alarms going off, they began to be ignored.

The noise generated by social media is now starting to work in the same way. Most businesses have their website, Facebook page and Twitter account and a great deal of fuss is made about the content that is created in the early days of their online presence. But as time goes by and the level of contact and engagement with followers on a regular basis dwindles, so do the interest of followers and the impact of the page decreases. That key marketing message you want to share to your followers six months down the line of creating your pages becomes just another car alarm and falls on deaf ears.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, whose ideas have shaped the way we interact online as businesses and consumers, wrote ‘The Impact Equation’ back in 2012 and its key premise still holds true today, perhaps even more so – we need to be thinking about a mix of things to make people truly care about what we have to say when communicating with them online. A good idea will get us so far, but add an audience that trusts you and a following that can help spread our ideas and we are much more likely to make the kind of impact that gets results.

Take this idea to your own digital marketing efforts and think about where you are right now. Are you engaging with those who follow you and building their trust in your products and services over and over again? Are you regularly communicating your ideas to your followers or only when you have time? And do you have followers who actually read your content rather than just pass it by in their bulging news feed? If you feel you are hitting the right spot on all of these points with your target audience, well done and keep it going! But if you would like some help in getting better results than you are today, let’s talk about how I can help.

Picking the right tools and platforms for you and your business

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The pressure to start using social media to promote yourself and your goods and services is coming from all angles. If you aren’t posting pictures on Instagram, are you going to miss out? If you don’t have 10,000 Twitter followers, are you going to be less successful than other competitors who do? How do you decide which platforms and tools are best for you and which ones will give you the best results for your time and effort?

The first thing to assess is where you live online for your personal profiles. If you are a happy Facebook user who is comfortable with the way that it works and you post a solid stream of updates there on a fairly regular basis, it might make sense for you to add a business page to Facebook and use it to build your business profile. If you have never used Twitter, don’t really understand how it works and find it hard to write short posts, jumping into Twitter for your business may not really make sense. Best to stay where you are comfortable while you are starting out and then try more things later when you are more confident.

Next, consider what kind of content you are going to be producing as this will have a big effect on the tools you use to deliver great results. If you’re an accountant, it’s unlikely that you will produce a lot of photos of your work and it is much more likely that you will be writing a lot of ‘how to’-type posts. In this case, jumping straight onto Instagram and creating a profile there may not be the wisest move to make and a WordPress blog supported by a Twitter account to enable sharing with your followers may make much more sense.

It would also pay huge dividends to look at your competitors and other key players in your sector and identify what is working really well for them. Using infographics to share highly factual and statistic-heavy chunks of information could mean that Instagram is worth a try but it might also be relevant to look at using infographics with lots of colour and images as one-off posts to give some variety to your written posts and draw in some new followers on a Facebook page. The competitor review is a key step in working out what is the best approach to take with the kind of people you are looking to engage with and will help you come up with a great plan. Results tend to be much stronger when you go to places where people are already engaged and then use similar tactics yourself than try to convert people to something new.

The key here is to avoid opening accounts on every platform in a rush to cover all bases and then use one account over all of the others and leave the rest to die a very slow and painful death. The other accounts will look very sad and empty when your customers or clients look you up online before deciding to do business with you and the impression you want to create is quite the opposite – regular, recent posts showcasing your products, knowledge, skills and services that encourage followers to learn more and start to engage with you and your brand.

Small businesses – get your message across to the right audience online

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I have been developing my own ideas about personal branding and making the most of your opportunities to market yourself and your business online for a number of years now. I worked in the US in 2009 and got myself a Twitter account, then began to follow the likes of Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and Gary Vaynerchuk as they paved the way for many digital marketing experts to emerge into a market that had no idea what the internet was capable of and how it would change everything we do. I then began video blogging about my running training and grew a small but loyal band of followers and then used my knowledge in my other entrepreneurial activities in recruitment, careers and coaching ever since.

Fast-forward seven years to today and the internet rules when it comes to marketing. Print media is dying a slow death and the traditional marketing budgets of the big players have moved online many years ago, catching our attention at every opportunity and creeping into our favourite tv shows, our news feeds on Facebook, our Twitter timeline and so on.

The early adopters are reaping the benefits of this captive audience – once you’ve liked a page, you’ll be seeing that brand’s every move and the offer you’ve been waiting for is surely not all that far behind. But it’s the small businesses and solo entrepreneurs who may be struggling to keep up with this runaway train – time is best spent on actually shipping and selling your product or providing your expert services and any time not spent doing this simply doesn’t pay the bills.

So I’m launching IMOFO Digital this week, with the sole aim of helping small businesses and those who work for themselves or in small teams to build their personal brand online to increase awareness and sales using the platforms we all use to connect and communicate every day. The power of the internet is there for us all to see but the ability to harness that power is sometimes a tricky task for those building their businesses and that’s where I can help.

You need compelling content to tempt new customers, leading to them pay attention to your message over the long term and get results.

You need to engage with your audience and show them that you’re listening and are there to help them.

You also need to stay aware of how and where your clients and customers are spending time online to be a part of their conversation and be at the front of their mind when it’s time to buy.

There will be a lot more on this topic coming as time goes by but I’m very excited to share my knowledge with some new clients and help them develop some spectacular results. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch via +61 (0)477 841 630 or mountford.ian@gmail.com.

Personal branding – make the most of what you’ve got

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Everybody’s specialist subject is talking about themselves. We know more about ourselves than anyone else and it’s a subject we have endless experience and knowledge of. How we use that information, especially when it comes to social platforms and our identity on the web, is massively important in relation to our own personal brand. With some thought on what we are trying to achieve we can be sure to make the right kind of impact in the right places.

Each social platform has its own reason for existing as defined by its user base and it is very important that you make sure you are using the appropriate approach for each platform. A bio that talks about how much you love acid house music and playing Sunday football is not going to hold much weight with people looking at you on LinkedIn, for example, so be sure you’ve worked this out first.

Make sure you’ve also got a really strong profile picture. A shot that captures your head and shoulders is ideal and you can get a friend to take one with your phone if that’s the best camera you can get your hands on – camera phone lens quality is excellent and a good shot will be fine for this job.

Now think hard about your strengths and make sure they are front and centre in everything you say about yourself. The majority of articles and other content you share or comment on should make it easy to see what you’re all about and your profiles should list these strengths. Search engines are also picking up keywords within profiles and it’s imperative that you get these things working in your favour.

And finally, be authentic and keep your target audience in mind with everything you do and say. Your passion for a particular topic will stand out for all to see and your highly likely to get the results you want – a strong and solid personal brand with new followers, new clients or new connections of any kind – if you use your authenticity to stand out from the crowd.

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Ian Mountford is a Strategy Coach providing motivation and guidance to entrepreneurs, wannabe or fully-fledged. He draws from his own experience of building businesses from the ground up and spending many years helping clients to consistently achieve their goals and aspirations. Ian works with clients face-to-face and internationally.

Still digging their heels in

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At dinner a while back I sat next to a very smart professional person who is a friend but not one that I’ve spent a great deal of time with. We got onto the ‘do you/don’t you’ discussion re social media as the night wore on and it turns out that they use no social media tools at all. The actual fear of the tools was huge and the negative things that ‘could’ or ‘might’ happen rolled off their tongue as easily as a shopping list.

I understand and appreciate social media isn’t for everyone and there are also professions where communication of what’s going on in your life, work-wise or otherwise, can be misinterpreted – my friend is a doctor, for example. But there is still a stigma around using the web for things like personal branding and sharing interesting articles using social media and I find this a problem.

Our lives today are very different to the way they were in previous decades and the lives of those in Generation Y will be different by even greater degrees year-on-year from here on in. The way we communicate is different. The way we work is different, too. It does seem that many in my age group (40+) ‘want things they way they were’ but are also very quick to whip out their smartphone and send emails from anywhere when it seems like the right thing to do.

I think it’s even more important to cement your own personal brand online now, no matter who you are and what you do. Embrace technology rather than just knowing about it or trying it out to see if you like it. You don’t need to become so hell-bent on self-promotion that you dilute the quality of your own story, but you have a story and you have the means and power to get it out there in the digital world of today. Your personal circumstances could change in a flash (as they have for many over the last few years of financial turmoil) and the time you need to start to promote yourself could be closer than you can even imagine right now. If you’re also in the market for a new job and you’re ‘digitally invisible’, you are missing out on opportunities and this is a situation that’s easily avoidable.

Those of all ages and backgrounds that I meet that don’t have any kind of social media presence are now standing out as the minority. Most have made a move or are at least taking a watching brief before launching their own new profiles. The tabloid press will always push out horror stories of those who have suffered/caused loss or damage as a result of a facebook post or misguided tweet but no system is perfect and common sense has to always be applied. Please, don’t fall for the negative hype and get yourself moving. Create a profile or two, start following your friends and let us all know who you are.