Social Media, Simplified

Looking for great ROI? Investing the time to connect and build relationships with your customers yields affordable business growth. A business is nothing without customers. And yet small business owners – consumed with the pressing day-to-day tasks of running a company — often let customers, along with their needs, ideas and loyalty, fall through the cracks. This is not the path to a growing, prosperous business.

As a growth B2B company, social media provides a window into the conversations and thoughts of your clients, their clients, your competitors, influencers within your industry and most importantly an opportunity to take a lead in the conversations that shape sales decisions. Forrester estimate that over 80% of decision makers have a social presence, be it Twitter, a blog or LinkedIn – so not participating in the wider discussion means you are missing out on real opportunity – but how do you become heard in what is a noisy crowd?

Like many business owners, you’ve gone all in with your social media efforts, tweeting, Facebooking, and generally building a loyal following. But you’re missing some of social’s best opportunities if you haven’t thought about how to integrate your social effort with your traditional marketing. In fact, proven offline strategies don’t undermine your social efforts–they complement and enhance them. If you marry online and offline efforts, and allow social to open the door for other avenues to be optimised, you can form one very impressive business development tool.

If you are running a social media company —large or small — and have had to buy an insurance policy, you have most likely encountered significant difficulty and pushback when trying to get even the most basic coverage. Why?

China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity.

Habits are easy to fall into. When you’re trying to change how you do things and you’re incredibly busy, falling back into old habits happens quicker than you would expect. While most tend to be minor habits that don’t have an overall impact, there are some habits that can be damaging, make you look lazy, or seriously hinder a page’s growth.

A recent survey has found that 71 per cent of staff regularly checked feeds from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on their phones during meetings. Reasons given included wanting to check in to location services such as Foursquare, keeping up with breaking news and over half were keeping abreast of what friends and connections were doing. The poll found that almost a half of all conference delegates now rely on their smartphones to connect and find information prior to events with 47 per cent saying they turned to Facebook and Twitter for details.