In this article we’re going to be look at whether or not your website is useful, or useless. If you’re impatient, submit your website to our Website Grader tool and we’ll send you a detailed performance report of your site after you’ve finished reading this article.

1. Why Do You Have A Website?

 Many small businesses I speak to have a website but aren’t sure why they have one. They were either talked into it by a colleague or worn down by the mass of articles  and people telling them that they need one.

If you have a website but aren’t sure why, chances are it isn’t going to be very effective! As with any marketing endeavour, you need to start with the objective.

2. Do You Measure Success?

 Are you measuring the performance of your website? Do you have Google Analytics setup? If not, then you won’t have any data to determine if your website is effective or not. 

Think of Google Analytics as an accounting system for your website, it gives you detailed metrics on how many visitors you get, where they come from and what they do once they’re on your site.

Using Google Analytics you can measure the following:

• How many website visitors you receive
• How many of these visitors are unique
• Which devices they are viewing your site on
• How long they spend on your website
• Which actions they take (form submissions for example)
• Where they leave the website

What makes things worse, is that many small businesses are convinced they have Google Analytics setup when they actually don’t! If you’re not sure, we wrote an article on this which shows you how to check – Is Google Analytics Setup On My Website?

If it turns out you don’t have Google Analytics setup, not to worry, we got you. We also wrote a simple guide on How To Setup Google Analytics On Your WordPress Website. Not on WordPress? You should be! Talk to us about converting to WordPress.

3. Is It Responsive? 

It baffles me that there are still businesses without a responsive website. It’s 2017, everyone and their grandma has a smart phone and is browsing the internet. If your website isn’t responsive, you are losing out on two fronts:

• You’ll show up lower down in search engine results compared to competing websites that are responsive (mobile friendly). This means you’ll receive less visitors from search engines and less potential customers.
• You’ll lose large portions of mobile site visitors who are unwilling to try and navigate your website on their phones or tablets. These are potential leads for your business.

There is a simple tool you can use from Google to check whether or not your website is mobile friendly (besides the obvious test of getting out your mobile phone and having a look). Here’s the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool.

4. Does It Have A High Bounce Rate?

You’ll need Google Analytics setup to determine this one. Bounce rate is defined by Google as: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates and reports the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.”

Your website bounce rate can be found in the Home section of Google Analytics and is defined as a percentage figure.

If you have a high bounce rate this generally suggests there is an issue with one of two things:

• The content and usability of your website is poor
• The traffic you are sending to the website is not the right traffic website and is bouncing as a result.

Bounce rate varies depending industry, typically anything consistently higher than 60-70% suggests there is a problem that needs addressing. If you’re seeing a bounce rate of 80-90% I suggest you look at refreshing your website pronto!

5. Does It Reinforce Your Brand?

Is your website unique and it does reinforce your brand? If you have brand colours, fonts and terminology, does your website reinforce this and distinguish you from competitors?

If I asked what colour springs to mind when I say Netflix, you’d immediately think Red. What about Spotify? Green. Apple? White and grey, clean colours.

Look at the Netflix homepage below. It’s striking, in their signature red colour and strongly reinforces their brand.

Having a strong brand can help you in the following ways:

• Brand consistency ensures customers that you are thorough and professional.
• It helps distinguish you from competitors. Customers will ‘recognise’ you through your brand.
• If your website is branded correctly, it’s a more pleasant browsing experience for your customers and they are likely to spend more time browsing your site and evaluating you as a provider, as opposed to say a shoddily put together site that was hard to navigate.

6. Does It Send You To Sleep Waiting For It To Load?

If your website is slow, sluggish and takes a long time to load, it’s going to be costing you business. This could be a contributing factor to high bounce rate, you have less than 10 seconds from when someone lands on your site to grab their attention and provide them with enough info for them to navigate further into your website.

If it takes 10 seconds for your website to load for a first time visitor, large chunks of traffic may choose to just close your site and try a competitor instead. Remember, there’s always someone else hungry for the business!

7. Does It Generate Leads?

The litmus test for every business website is, does it generate leads, or does it make sales (if ecommerce). For B2B websites where the objective is to generate leads, correctly configuring Google Analytics will allow you to determine which leads are coming via the website (you could also look at call tracking).

If you are using an ecommerce platform like Shopify or Woocommerce, you’ll be able to track orders and sales via your ecommerce dashboard, and connect the dots on where these sales come from using Google Analytics.

If your website isn’t generating leads, it may time to start asking why and what can be done to change this.

The post Is Your Website Useless? 7 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What’s Wrong With Traditional Web Design?

Traditional web design is a very non-agile and bloated process. Everything is front loaded and needs to be signed off at the outset, any revisions or changes during the process are billed on top of the agreed upon budget. The reality is, you just won’t get things perfect the first time round. I’ve managed multiple web design projects this way and the process just never works the way you envision. These are the biggest problems with the traditional web design process:

Scope creep. Stakeholders change their minds often and will request changes both frequently and seemingly randomly. This results in the project going over budget coupled with a wealth of other unseen delays.

Aiming for perfection. Any marketer worth their salt will understand that you almost never achieve optimum results with the first iteration of anything. This is an unrealistic expectation and one that generally causes big delays to the completion of a website project, whilst generating no return on investment for the stakeholders.

When it’s done, it’s forgotten. Most websites are created and then left untouched for several years before the next redesign. This is detrimental to the companies sales & marketing results as your website is the most important sales & marketing asset you have. If you can’t constantly improve it and change it, you are missing out on huge gains to your bottom line.

It’s not data driven. The traditional web design process is carried out in isolation from marketing and sales. A business will request a new website and a web design agency will provide a quote based on their own costs, in terms of billable hours. Data Driven Design involves building a website that is tightly aligned with the sales and marketing goals of the business, and built with their buyer personas in mind.

5 Steps to Becoming a Data Driven Designer

Data Driven Design is an agile method of website building involving constant live improvements, functionality and UI changes based on real-time data. With Data Driven Design you don’t have to try and cram two years worth of business and marketing predictions into one month, each month you’ll make changes to your site, add content and improve its performance based on the data gathered.

1. The Process

The Data Driven Design process integrates tightly with marketing and sales and generally the first month of a Data Driven Design approach will be spent analysing the data and performance of your existing website, mapping out buyer personas and establishing marketing goals to build the site around.

2. Spread Costs Over Time

Instead of a huge upfront cost, Data Driven Design costs are lower and broken down into monthly payments to account for the ongoing nature of the design process and to allow for future design changes based on the data gathered from your site.

3. Launch Quickly and Improve

DDD focuses on building a customer-friendly design framework and expanding the site slowly over time. Instead of waiting 3-6 months for an imperfect site, Data Driven Design allows you to launch an effective version of your site quickly and then make changes based on data rather than assumptions.

4. Grow ROI

The worst feeling for a business owner is to spend a load on a website then find it’s generating mediocre results. With Data Driven Design your site is constantly dynamic and changing based on actual raw data. If you decide you need to restructure the site to focus on a new service or product, no problem. With traditional web design, this would likely cost you significantly more and be a lengthy drawn out process.

5. Cover All Bases

If you use a Data Driven Design provider to build your website, they’ll be able to generate more leads for your business. One of the biggest challenges marketers face is improving ROI with a static website. Ultimately anything you do that involves online marketing will play a role in how you continue to design your site. Take for example, if you notice users coming from a Facebook ad are bouncing after 41 seconds on page, you’ll know to decrease the size and amount of text on your page to keep users engaged. It’s small changes like these that turn a bounce into a lead!

If you’d like to read more about this topic and are unsure if your website could be hampering your bottom line, feel free to leave a question in the comments!

The post Getting Started With Data Driven Design & Why Your Website Needs It appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

For the past few years, the core focus for website marketing has been all about bringing in as much traffic as possible through organic and paid search. With the recent growth of tools seen at HubSpot, inbound marketing has filtered down to be more prevalent among small businesses who are looking to adopt simple (and budget friendly) tactics to pull leads from their traffic.

The Aftermath of the Mobilegeddon

We’re at the point where users expect a mobile friendly site by default. As a rule of thumb, if you have to use more than one finger to properly navigate a site on mobile, it’s probably not well designed. Not only will not having a mobile friendly site cost you business, it will now cost you traffic after Google’s Notorious Mobilegeddon update.

You can check if your website is mobile friendly by using this simple Google tool. Put yourself into the mindset of the viewer. Think about what will cause them to bounce early and optimize for it. Shoot for minimalism and leave only what’s completely necessary. Knowing that typically a mobile viewer spends less time on page than a desktop user you have to adjust to the mobile perspective.

One thing I like to remind people is that the average mobile user is usually using web browsing as a distraction or in between real world tasks.  Think about your own mobile viewing habits; if you’re like me you’re probably stuck in traffic or sneaking in some ‘me time’ during a bathroom break at work. Your site has to appeal to the mobile user in a quick and simple way, even the smallest flaw or bloat will cause them to switch over to instagram.

Working With What You Have

Traffic is useless without having some sort of collection tool in place. Many websites seem to settle for having a small email capture box in the footer but that’s just not going to cut it anymore. The past couple years have seen an explosion of integrated site tools spawning a new era of lead generation. Users are getting smarter and getting that sacred email is becoming somewhat of an art in itself. Here are just a few methods to make the absolute most of your traffic.

Zopim Chat Plugin – Have you ever seen those little green chat boxes at the bottom of a web page? Some people don’t have the time to pick up a phone and might not be quite ready to send you an email, but they likely do have questions. If you’re available to provide them with the answers they want right away, you’ll see a dramatic increase in conversions. Personally, I’ve picked up several pieces of work this way. This tool in particular plays off a fundamental rule of marketing – just be available for your customers. Google Analytics & Goal Conversions – If you haven’t got Google Analytics set up with goal conversions configured, you need to do that immediately! As I wrote in this article, Google Analytics is essential for any small business looking to generate any kind of success from its website. You can read all about setting up goal conversions in this article by SME Super Star Morgan Lucas. Once you’ve got goal conversions in place you’ll have some solid KPI’s to shoot for in the future. Like any other work in life you have to give yourself a goal to work towards to see real results.

Conversion Overlays – A conversion overlay is a website plugin that can be used to generate conversions in exchange for a valuable piece of content. A conversion overlay works by serving your targeted customer a tailored piece of content in exchange for their contact information, thus helping you generate leads and build your pipeline. What’s it worth to your business if you can achieve even a 1% increase in conversions? If you’re generating 10 or 20 new leads a month as a result? Lately these are being seen as a ‘necessary evil’ in marketing. We all find them annoying yes, but at the end of the day they will bring in leads. Rather than paying for leads in cash the old fashion way you now pay for them in views.

For example, we designed a conversion overlay specifically to help recruitment companies build their database of candidates. It can be customised to their brand and linked to a custom piece of content to help them convert potential candidates.

The Welcome Mat – Speaking of conversion overlays, we’ve found a way to make them more annoying! Just kidding…sort of. A welcome mat is a large overlay that instantly fills the screen of the user when they enter a specific page. You might be rolling your eyes right now wondering how anyone could think this is a good idea and normally you’d be right but the cold hard numbers speak for themself. Welcome Mats are working incredibly well generally seeing an even higher conversion rate than traditional overlays. Couple this method with a small overlay in the right rail and you’ll have two reliable lead generation tools funneling emails into your mailchimp account. Talk about simple.

Now Get Learning!

If this article has raised any questions for you and you’d like to investigate inbound marketing and the inbound model further, I would highly recommend starting with Hubspot Marketing Academy. It has everything you need to begin making the transition to inbound, and a tangible accreditation available at the end of your learning. This post is just the beginning and many concepts have been highly simplified.

The post Here’s Why You’re Throwing Away 90% Of Your Traffic appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Over the past couple of months, LinkedIn has made some small, but significant moves towards increasing the stickiness and usage of its mobile app. The most significant of these recently has been the ability to endorse a LinkedIn connection via mobile.

What do these developments mean for us as social marketers?

The Guided Tour

This is a nifty bit of functionality for social agencies and SEO Agencies alike to take advantage of for their client base. I see this as a move towards activating and monetizing the more traditional, old school segment of the social market who are still resistant to fully embracing social media. This could also be a strong hint that large areas of LinkedIn functionality aren’t being utilized properly, or perhaps completely neglected by large chunks of the user-base.

As a provider of Social Sales Training, one thing I see an abundance of is poorly completed, or incomplete LinkedIn profiles. Achieving that All Star profile status isn’t just for bragging rights, though it does hold power and social proof in this respect, but it actually helps LinkedIn index your profile more efficiently and will increase your chances of showing up in LinkedIn searches that pull relevant key-phrases or topics from your profile.

For instance, if a Chief Exec decides to run a LinkedIn search for ‘SEO’ or ‘SEO Agency’, and he’s a 2^nd connection of mine, there’s a better chance my profile might top his list, after his 1^st connections.

This is a clever move in my opinion and by baby feeding executives and those who may not be as socially savvy, LinkedIn is not only embracing and growing its mobile platform, but essentially beginning to monetize what was previously a dormant or non-existent user base.

It might seem trivial, it’s just a guided tour right? Sure to social marketers it might seem like no big deal, but for those social marketers out there who offer social media training, you’ll appreciate how much we sometimes take stuff like this for granted.

The Mobile Seal of Approval – Endorsements

Mobile social behaviour is different to that of desktop social behaviour; we’ve known this for some time. The mobile experience, in those cases where it’s done well, is minimal, cleaner and trimmed down. Arguably in many instances this is a bad thing as it’s stripping away the true functionality and power of many browser based applications, however, for social networks where users tend only to use a small chunk of the features (after initial set up and optimisation) the mobile experience is, in many instances, superior. Less is more. Which is why optimising the Endorsement feature for mobile is a smart move.

What’s the significance of this feature in particular? The endorsement is a powerful piece of LinkedIn functionality. In terms of stickiness, it’s great. Think about it. You’re browsing LinkedIn on a mobile and a notification pops up to inform you that your profile has been viewed by John Smith, Director at an SEO Agency and Peter Jones the Sales Director of a big fortune 500 company. The natural reaction is to then, out of curiosity, see what these individuals have been up to.

The mobile experience of LinkedIn is so slimmed down and clean that after a quick scroll down you’re presented with a one click endorsement process. The endorsement, it seems, is akin to a ‘like’ on Facebook, even though LinkedIn also boasts this feature. Not only is the recipient notified of this process, but it’s then displayed in the LinkedIn newsfeed for your shared connections to witness.

This action not only further connects two LinkedIn users, but generally will then spark more endorsements amongst the shared connections of the users. So a one click action on LinkedIn’s mobile app is now generating a huge spike in engagement, bringing two users back to the app, and potentially creating reactive engagement amongst those who witnessed the endorsement then followed suit. Very clever.  Not only this, but it’s arguably more powerful than Facebook’s like, which LinkedIn also boasts, as the action holds more social sway and requires more work on the user’s end to deliver.

How to take advantage of this? Get out there and start endorsing your professional colleagues in the evening on your mobile! Just don’t abuse the functionality and endorse people you don’t know, nobody likes that person!

For more social news and tips make sure to connect with me on Google+!

The post Mobile, Mobile Everywhere appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

But Facebook isn’t slowing down or letting up, oh no. The past month has seen some more fantastic developments for brands and advertisers alike.

O.K. Great, But We Still Don’t Trust Facebook

One of the commonly cited problems amongst business owners with social media is the ability to accurately measure the results of a campaign and the return on investment seen. A lot of the time, this is due to ignorance and a lack of broader marketing knowledge.

This is why the SEO Company has remained king for so long in the eyes of many small business owners. They understand SEO, SEO is safe. SEO means spending x amount of dollars and seeing  x amount of visitors and leads, nice and safe.

Facebook is still scary and foreign to many. It’s hip, it’s trendy and it represents change. Obviously as marketers we don’t feel the same, but for many local or traditional small business owners, adoption and acceptance of social media platforms like Facebook is still a ways away (unfortunately).

Change, What Change?

Whilst I think the updated Facebook insights are a big step in the right direction, it still isn’t drastic enough to sway the apathetic business owners who still refuse to embrace Facebook. However, what it will, hopefully, do is push more on the fence marketers and SEO Companies towards integrating Facebook into their marketing mix, due to the move towards simpler, yet equally more relevant, metrics.

Facebook is rolling out some pretty damn appealing advertising initiatives at the moment, and they are too lucrative to ignore anymore. With the unveiling of their Cost Per Action ad buying and their foray into remarketing, Facebook now represents a more holistic and integrated marketing medium, but I’ll cover those developments later this month.

What Do The New Insights Mean?

Facebook’s New Insights were cited to be tackling two problems. The first objective of the revamped Insights setup is to simplify the system; Facebook wants to make it easier for marketers to get to the bottom of who’s doing what and why.

Ironically, the new Insights attempt to achieve this by adding in extra layers of sophistication and detail to the metrics available to page owners. This is a move that should not only resonate with social marketers, but SEO’s and SEO Companies alike.

The People Talking About This metric for example has been split into four new metrics – Page Likes, People Engaged, Page Tags and Mentions, Page Check-Ins and other Page Interactions.

In an interesting move Facebook has already rebranded its ‘virality’ metric as engagement rate, in a move to conform to more traditional advertising and marketing parlance.

Perhaps the most important development is the evolution of the Page Reach metric, with page owners now not only being able to see who they’ve reached with each post, but who they’ve engaged, a valuable insight for content creators looking to tailor their content creation to particular audiences to ensure a greater deal of resonation.

What’s Next?

Hopefully this development along with the string of other powerful new advertising initiatives will help sway those businesses and business owners who are still distrusting of Facebook into seriously considering this social media platform as a viable and lucrative advertising platform for their business. The level of sophistication being developed, in particular the recent foray into remarketing and Cost Per Action ad buying is certainly something should make integrated marketers and SEO Companies sit up and take note as well.

For more social media tips and how to’s make sure you connect with me on Google+!

The post Facebook’s Insights Get A Makeover appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

However, there are two sides to every story. While Mobile App Discovery might be rampant and working well, Mobile Stickiness is not proving so effective. Mobile marketing and development is still relatively nascent, given the grand scheme of things. This is a field still looked at with caution by SEO companies and social agencies alike.

As Facebook’s social commerce / platform monetization product manager, Deborah Liu, had to say on mobile app installs: “This has been an offering that has been important to our developers and marketers. We’ve doubled the number of developers using this product. Now it’s being used by businesses and brands. The reason this was called out is that mobile is this huge problem for marketers, users are adopting it at a faster pace than marketers can catch up with … it’s very different than what they’re used to. This is really the early days in mobile engagement and advertising.”

What Do You Mean, Not Working?

Mobile is proving extremely lucrative for some, there’s no denying that. Facebook is case and point for that argument, as 78% of its U.S users are now mobile. There’s also no denying the huge impact that Facebook’s Mobile App Installs have had recently, driving over 145 million app installs from the Apple App Store and Google Play.

That’s not in question here, the problem, lies with stickiness. Stickiness is a term usually used to describe a social network’s retention rate. It’s what drives social growth, how often do users log on per day, per week or per month? How many actions do they take when they log on? How long do they stay logged on? These are metrics that no longer only pertain to social marketers, they are now of importance to the SEO company and the small business owner too; mobile is too important to be ignored any longer.

This is the problem facing the majority of companies and brands using mobile apps at the moment. Mobile App Discovery has seen great developments, but what happens after your app is downloaded and then shelved, never to be used again?

According to Localytics, one of Facebook’s Mobile Measurement partners, 66% of apps are only used between 1 and 10 times, ever. What does this mean? It means that the lion’s share of people producing apps still don’t know how to monetize their app. From a monetization stand point, having someone use your app once is far from great.

What’s The Bigger Picture Here?

The whole point of creating a mobile app in the first place, is to elicit a return on investment. Return on investment might not be the right word to use here, so I’ll use it loosely. Only a small fraction of mobile apps will be looking to drive purchases, the goal of many apps might be to encourage users to consume content, to play a game, to listen to music, or watch a video.

Whatever the goal in mind, the point is, this goal is still not being met by a huge chunk of apps out there on the market. The problem can’t be dumped on discovery anymore, as the figures show Facebook has been making leaps and bounds in that area, with their Mobile App Install ads driving over 145 million app installs.

The problem lies with stickiness, as discussed above. Facebook has been aware of this for some time, which is why they’ve recently unveiled their new App Engagement & Conversion strategy, at the forefront of which lies their new Mobile App Engagement CTA’s.

What’s A Mobile App Engagement CTA?

First of all let’s define a call to action. Most social marketers, SEO companies and businesses owners are probably well aware of what a call to action is, but it can’t hurt to refresh. A call to action is exactly what it sounds like; it’s asking someone to take an action. This might be to click on a link, watch a video, or a platform specific action, like ‘share’ a status.

Now to the Mobile App Engagement CTA’s. You might by now be familiar with Facebook’s Mobile App Install Ads, they’ve been around for some time now. You might have seen them previously but been unsure of what they were, or of their purpose. These little adverts appear in your mobile Facebook news feed, and are advertisements to prompt you to download an app, as shown below. These ads, I think it’s safe to say, are what has prompted the big increase in mobile app installs through Facebook.

Mobile App Engagement CTA’s are effectively the missing piece of the puzzle. The Mobile App Install ad prompted a surge in app discovery and installs, the engagement calls to action have been introduced to now follow up and monetize those installs.

These CTA’s are extremely powerful, as they allow brands to deep link users into their app direct from Facebook. Even from a search perspective, this is something that needs to be looked at. Google+ has become increasingly important for the SEO company as of late, this new development is too lucrative to ignore, especially with the rise of local search and much of this being done on mobile devices.

Facebook has rolled out 7 custom CTA’s, below are some examples cited by Facebook on their developers page, probably because they believe these will be the most widely adopted and most successful:

• Shop Now – A retailer advertises a 24-hour sale for purchases made within its mobile app.
• Play Game – A game wants to bring existing players back to its app to play newly updated levels.
• Listen Now – A music app wants to bring listeners to a newly updated playlist.
• Book Now – A travel app wants to promote cheap fares and getaways.

From these four examples, you can immediately see the potential for businesses and brands looking to monetize their mobile apps. If brands can allocate a mobile ad spend to drive increased engagement and retention for their app, they can begin to put dormant apps to work, and not only that, they can begin to bring in some major bucks from their existing apps with increased usage rates.

What’s Next For Mobile?

It’s hard to say at this point what impact this development will have on the bigger picture for mobile and mobile monetization. My personal opinion is that this is a clever move and one that will pay off big time, both for Facebook and the millions of apps out there. It’s now down to the brands and companies behind these mobile apps to determine how best to utilize these new mobile app CTA’s, and only time will tell how well they will be utilized.

What do you think of this new development, and of mobile marketing in general? Will this have significant impact for the 66% of apps still sitting on the shelf? I’d love to hear your feedback, so connect with me on Google+ and share with me your thoughts!

The post Why Mobile Isn’t Working appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

With the recent roll out of the new Facebook for Business hub, it seems that Facebook has definitely decided to strap on its business hat, and strap it on firmly.

Post IPO Facebook has been an interesting creature to observe. Facebook has made leaps and bounds towards monetizing it’s 1 billion+ user base, it seems this recent roll out, along with the new mobile app love, is yet another big step toward realizing it’s monetization strategy. Not only this, but the new interface is a great development for any SEO Company or business owner looking to get their hands on a simplified method of managing social ad spending.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I love simplicity. As a business owner, simplicity is something I’ve come to cherish above anything else. Time is a commodity, and one that’s in short supply. Naturally, this development for me is fantastic.

A ton of small business owners still struggle with social and see it as a waste of time

Likewise this is a great development for small business owners in general. The move toward a simplified advertising platform is going to save time and encourage more users to begin spending their bucks on Facebook. A ton of small business owners still struggle with social and see it as a waste of time; this is definitely a step in the right direction to ensuring this previously skeptical audience begins to rethink their opinion.

Previously, to advertise on Facebook, you had to delve into ‘ad units’ and all sorts of detail to configure your ad correctly. Naturally, this is something that is going to turn off a lot of small business owners, the obvious targets of this development.

The new advertising platform is objective focused and it looks to be a hell of a lot simpler. To start the process, you’re now presented with a list of objectives, ranging from website conversions to app installs, which personally I think is awesome.

How Does This Make Me Bucks?

As business owners, social media agencies, seo companies, whatever, the name of the game is still, and always has been, self-interest.

The significance of the new advertising platform is simple. It empowers your Joe Bloggs business owner with limited social knowledge to dive into Facebook and start putting his page to work. Granted it isn’t a miracle cure by any means, but it is certainly a step in the right direction to bridging the knowledge gap between small business owner and social success.

Generally social ad spending would fall under the remit of a paid social media manager, or agency. Granted there will be socially savvy business owners out there, but there has been a huge knowledge gap for many that up to this point, has been hard to bridge.

For small business owners with consumer facing businesses, this is great news. Facebook is a platform with tremendous potential for those in the consumer goods industries. I can see this being very beneficial for restaurants, café’s, small ecommerce outfits, independent stores, and local businesses.

To my knowledge this new advertising platform has been recently rolled out in the U.S and is en route to the rest of the world soon. For the full update, and to begin taking advantage of the new ad platform, check out the full story at Facebook’s Business Centre.

Are you going to be taking advantage of this new development? Let me know via Google+ if you’re already taking advantage of this new development or plan to in the future!

The post Facebook Puts On Its Business Hat appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Keyword rankings are my bone to pick for the day. Accurately assessing where a particular URL ranks for a particular keyword is something that is rarely done well, or even correctly. The importance of being able to accurately measure where you rank for your chosen keywords is very important, if you can’t measure it, you can’t master it.

What Does Ranking Actually Mean?

This article is written primarily for the business owner and the integrated marketer. I’ve no doubt that die hard SEO’s have their own opinions and various technical definitions, but I like to keep things simple. I define ranking as: “The current position of your chosen keyword in your region-specific version of Google”.

To use my own company as an example, we rank number 1 for the key phrase ‘SEO Norwich’ in the UK SERP results of Google, or the UK version of Google basically (any excuse for self-promotion, eh?). This means if somebody is located in the UK and using Google.co.uk, Square Social will appear in the number position 1 for this keyword.

I’ve illustrated this below using Moz’s Rank Checker (more on this shortly).

Teach Me

Now that we’ve defined our key term and provided a little context, let’s dive straight into the ‘how’ of the equation.

There are some very complicated methods of tracking keyword rankings out there, but for the majority of us these aren’t necessary. The simplest methods are the most effective, in my opinion, and are generally enough to get the job done, unless you’re working on a very high value account or particularly tricky campaign.

I like to use what I call the Two Step. This, unsurprisingly, contains two steps to check a keyword ranking.

Moz’s Rank Tracker

There are tons and tons of ‘keyword rank checker’ tools out there, the majority of these are junk and unreliable.  Moz’s Rank Tracker is by the far the most professional and reliable tool that I’ve found for measuring and tracking keyword rankings.

Here’s how you use the Rank Tracker to figure out where you rank for a particular keyword.

• Open up Rank Tracker.
• Type your keyword, or keyphrase, into the keyword box. For example – [SEO Companies].
• Paste in the URL of the page you want to determine the ranking of.
• Select your search engine of choice, Google, Yahoo or Bing.
• Configure your location by selecting the country you wish to check the ranking within. For example – United States.
• Hit get ranking.

Nice and simple, the process is seamless and only takes 30 seconds. Once you’ve run your initial rank check, you can ‘track’ that keyword so you can measure the fluctuation of the keyword over the month. This will allow you to better measure what’s working in your current SEO campaign, and what’s not working as well. This is a fantastic tool for SEO companies, marketers and business owners alike.

Google Webmaster Tools

Part two of the Two Step is to use Google Webmaster Tools. A bit techier, but still well within the remit of business owners and non SEO’s alike. This process allows you to combine simplicity with a bit of analytical data; this should be enough to appease most.

A lot of the Webmaster Tools content is fairly technical; it delves into crawl errors, URL parameters and page indexing. The section you want to focus on is fairly simple to get a grip on. Follow these steps:

• Log into Google Webmaster tools. If you don’t have it configured, run a few Google searches for ‘How to use Google Webmaster tools’ to get started. Kiss Metrics also has a pretty awesome guide to Webmaster Tools for any marketers looking to get a real handle on it.
• Click on the web property you’re looking to analyze
• On the left hand navigation bar, click on Search Traffic
• Click on Search Queries

This will provide you a breakdown of search queries pertaining to your website. The key metrics you need to pay attention to are clicks and avg position. Combined with your Moz Rank Checker, you can accurately determine where you are ranking for any given keyword and determine how many clicks this keyword is converting for your site.

Water To Wine, Rankings To Rent Checks

To finish up with, let’s quickly cover how you can take this new information and put it to work for your own business. The best thing to do with this information is first of all, audit your SEO efforts.

One of the first things we do as an SEO Company when working with a new client is conduct a full audit of the current SEO strategy. There have been numerous occasions where an in-house marketing manager, or more notoriously the ‘IT Guy’ will be tasked with managing the SEO and be completely ignorant of what they are doing.

Doug Kessler, a fellow Social Media Explorer columnist, recently wrote a really good article titled; It Won’t Work, We Tried That. That article struck a chord with me, because he’s completely right. Don’t take everything you hear as gospel, it’s our job as marketers to question anything that sounds suspect. The next time you’re dealing with a company and the marketing or IT guy claims to have their SEO covered, don’t be afraid to question this if you’ve done your research and know otherwise, just remember to back any assertions up with data and evidence.

For the marketers and business owners out there, hopefully you are now better equipped to assess your own SEO efforts. Once you’re able to measure how your website is performing, you can set to work on plugging any gaps or ramping up your efforts to drive more traffic and sales.

Are there any other easy methods of tracking your keywords out there you’d add to this list? Connect with me on Google+ and let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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October saw the release of Moz’s 2013 Future of Search report. For those of you unfamiliar with this report, this is pretty much the Holy Grail for SEO’s. This report combines the findings and research of hundreds of the best SEO practitioners in the world, to deliver an overview of what makes a search engine tick.

Basically, it’s a check list to search engine success. If you could somehow develop a strategy to miraculously conquer every single ranking factor in this report, I have no doubt there’d be no key phrase or industry you couldn’t conquer.

The thing is, this report churned out some pretty interesting findings. Guess what came out on top of the list as the number 1 factor most correlated with search engine success? (beneath page authority). It was Google+1’s.

What Is An SEO?

You might be wondering, what the hell is an SEO? SEO is the abbreviated form of the term search engine optimization, right? Well, that’s just SEO parlance. The term is used interchangeably to describe the actual process of search engine optimization, and to describe somebody who practices the art of search engine optimization, somebody who offers seo services. So an SEO is the equivalent of a social media manager.

Ah, right, context. Patterns might be forming in your head now. If you’re a social media specialist, you might have believed that up to this point the two were interchangeable practices, well, not anymore.

So, I’m An SEO Now?

Google+ is a social media platform, so it falls under the remit of the social media manager, right? A year ago I still would have agreed with you and said sure. Even the SEO Companies and SEO’s I knew weren’t fantastic at Google+ and were using it primarily for syndication and to boost their campaign with a few social signals. Now it seems to have gone completely the other way.

This is great news for social media marketers and small business owners. This development is effectively a big step toward empowering the small business owner and making him an unintentional SEO. Google’s goal has always been to provide the best possible user experience; recently they’ve aimed to do this by placing the focus on context, relevancy and trust.

Many small business owners use social media as a method of marketing and growing their business. This new development means that on top of the gains they receive directly from social media platforms, they are also going to be receiving SEO gains, which will in turn lead to more site traffic and sales for their business.

This is hugely powerful and I don’t think the gravity of it is still fully understood by many. A Google+1 is a social signal that is very hard to fake, it certainly can’t be manipulated in the same way as an SEO article, press release or any of the other older, out dated methods of link building.

How Do I Take Advantage Of This?

If you’re already a social media marketer or responsible for managing this area of your businesses marketing, keep doing what you’re doing. If you aren’t currently active on Google+, or don’t have a strategy in place, develop one and start reaping the rewards success on this platform yields.

SEO Companies or practitioners, if they haven’t already, are going to want to fully embrace this area of social. It can’t be treated as a standalone silo or an ‘add-on’ to an SEO campaign anymore. Unfortunately the two are very different arts.

Technical SEO requires logic and an analytical mind, whereas social success requires creativity and the ability to write awesome content. This means that generally you aren’t going to be able to excel at both.  My advice would be recognize your strength, and hire someone to handle your weaker area.

What do you think about the increasing importance of Google+ to a social search campaign? Connect with me on Google+ and let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The post Did Google Just Make You An SEO? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What Is A Reactive Purchase?

You might have some idea of what a reactive purchase entails from the wording of the phrase. There doesn’t seem to be one clear cut definition, but I define a reactive purchase as: “A purchase initiated by a spontaneous need, or desire, for a product or service”. The key word here is ‘reactive’, which means to respond to a stimulus.

Why Are Reactive Purchases Important?

Humans are impulsive by nature. The majority of us, contrary to what we’d like to believe, aren’t all seeing, all powerful decision makers with the kind of clarity usually bestowed upon deities. A purchase will only generally fall into one of two categories, a meditated purchase, or a reactive purchase. A meditated purchase is exactly the opposite of a reactive purchase, but we’ll talk more about the distinctions between the two shortly.

The key question is why are reactive purchases important and why should you care? The simple answer is, the majority of purchases are in fact, reactive.

Is My Product Or Service Considered A Reactive Purchase?

The concept of a reactive purchase is fairly simple, differentiating between a reactive and meditated purchase can sometimes be trickier than you might think.

Let’s use a simple example that any business owner will be able to relate to. The end of the year is fast approaching, and that also means your financial year is coming to a close. You’ve been receiving letters from the HMRC, or IRS, informing you that you need to get your affairs in order and file your annual return as well as all your financials for the year.

Up to this point, you had given taxation no thought and had been focusing on growing and scaling your business, as such, this creates a spontaneous need on your part, a need to either spend a lot of time and effort getting your affairs in order, or the need to hire an accountant, and fast.

The thought process of the individual in question will be simple. I need an accountant, I better find one, and I’ll run a search on Google for ‘accountants’ and start picking up the phone.

Another simple example would be a company experiencing declining sales. They decide on the spur of the moment that they would benefit from SEO Services, so decide to enlist the help of an SEO Company to rectify this.

What Isn’t A Reactive Purchase

The distinction between a reactive and meditated purchase, comes down to subtle distinctions between the two. I will use the same instance of a business owner requiring an accountant to illustrate how this need might fall under the reactive purchase bracket, or be considered a meditated purchase.

The end of the year is fast approaching, which also means your financial year is coming to an end. You’ve had this in mind for several months now and have been considering how best to approach resolving this problem. After attempting to wade through the mountain of financial information at your desk personally, you decided this wasn’t the most valuable use of your time and that outsourcing the task was the best option. You’ve asked around a few times if any of your colleagues could recommend a good accountant, and you’ve been referred to 4 or 5 different providers, which you’ve run a bit of due diligence on and agreed to meet when you have some free time. As the final month of your financial year rounds the corner, you pick up the phone and call one of the accountants you were referred to and agree to outsource the task to them.

As you can see, the defining factor here isn’t the type of product or service itself; rather it’s the buying process and the stimulus that prompts the buying decision.

When the decision is meditated, the route to purchase is often very different. Recruitment is a great example of a B2B service that is very often, a reactive purchase. A company makes a huge sale and as a result needs to hire more skilled workers to cope with the work; they immediately need the services of a recruitment agency to handle this quickly and efficiently. Queue a reactive route to purchase.

Many B2B services may in fact actually be meditated purchases, however, the route they take to market is often the path most commonly taken by the reactive purchaser, which is a Google search then a point of contact. As such, SEO services and SEO companies play an increasingly important role in helping businesses capture these purchases, as they effectively hold the keys to reactive sales success.

From these examples, you can see how important it is to effectively understand what a reactive purchase is and why they are so important to the sales strategy of any business.

How To Capture Reactive Purchases

Now that we’ve covered what a reactive purchase is and the distinctions between a reactive and meditated purchase, it’s time to look at how you can begin capturing reactive purchases if you aren’t already.

A reactive purchase is a warm lead, it’s a qualified buyer, and it doesn’t get much better than this. The buyer knows what they want, they want it now and if you can give it to them at a price and delivery point they are happy with, you’ve got a sale.

Reactive purchases are primarily only captured in one of two ways, in my opinion.

Search Engine Optimization

The way we buy things has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Today the buying process for a reactive purchase usually looks like this.

• Spontaneous need for a product or service, triggered by an impulse.
• Open Google, run a search query for the desired product or service.
• Open product or service provider websites in tabs, usually only the first 3 or 4 links on page 1 of Google will be opened.
• The buyer will briefly assess each provider then make a decision to contact them for a quote, or a purchase.

Search Engine Optimization is an industry that has been ubiquitous in the business world for over a decade. However, it’s also the fastest changing and evolving online marketing industry in the business world, and one that is misunderstood by 90% of those who believe they understand it.

We’ve probably all approached, or have been approached, by an SEO Company, or SEO Agency, at some point in our professional career. This experience may have been good, it may have been bad, and in some occasions it may have been soul destroying. Ahem, blanket sales pitch for position 1 Google success for all your keywords within a month or your money back.

The point I am trying to emphasise here is that a huge chunk of purchases are reactive. 90% of these reactive purchases use Google as their route to purchase. This means that when there’s a reactive purchase, 90% of the time it’s going be Google that wins you the business, unless it’s a proximity driven purchase, which we’ll cover under footfall next.

The next point to emphasise here is that almost 50% of the traffic for any search query goes to the top 5 keywords. If you’re familiar with click through rates, more commonly referred to as CTR’s, you might have come across material on this previously on resources such as Moz. If not, the CTR study carried out by Slingshot is a great place to start.

The image below illustrates how clicks are distributed when somebody types a key phrase into Google.

To use the accountancy example again to illustrate, were you to type the key phrase accountancy into Google right now and your company wasn’t ranking in the top 5 positions, chances are you’re going to reap very little reward and win little to no business.

This is where things get tricky; thanks to local search, many business owners and marketers may believe they are achieving a high level of search success, when in reality they aren’t ranking for their keyword outside of their local area. The best way to determine with any level of clarity if you are ‘ranking’ where you think you are for a key phrase is to use Moz’s Keyword Ranking Checker.

If you combine this with regular review of your Google Analytics and Webmaster panel, you’ll be able to get an accurate picture of how you are ranking and which search terms are driving traffic to your site and trigger purchase, or contact decisions.

Proximity

The second primary driver of reactive purchases is of course, proximity, or more simply, footfall. We walk past something shiny; we walk into the shop and buy it. Footfall is the lifeblood of many B2C industries. Food, fashion, entertainment, health and beauty, these industries and others are still primarily powered by proximity and footfall. It’s rare, but not uncommon, that a buyer will run a Google search for ‘café Boulder’ for example, before deciding to grab a coffee.

The other end of this spectrum is of course the meditated purchase, a family planning a vacation, holiday, or just a special night out for the family. This buyer might do their research and read up online about the best places to eat or dine out.

Capturing proximity based reactive purchases is a separate art in itself, but one that can also be driven by other marketing initiatives, such as a well thought out social media campaign designed to funnel social media visitors from a Facebook page into a café for example. To prevent myself from diverging too much, I’d recommend you check out SME’s own Social Media section for more on this.

I’m sure there are other effective methods of capturing reactive purchases out there, and I’d love to hear feedback from you all on which you have found to be the most effective.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a reactive purchase is a purchase initiated by a spontaneous need or desire for a product or service. The majority of purchases if you look at the bigger picture could be classified as ‘reactive’, so it’s extremely important to have a strategy in place to capture these reactive buying decisions.

I’d love to hear your feedback on how you qualify, and as a result capture, purchases and sales.

The post How Much Business Are You Missing Out On? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What Is Social Media Management?

There are countless definitions of what social media management actually entails. I value simplicity, so I define social media management as: “The act of growing, developing and monitoring a social media platform to meet any number of business, or personal, objectives”. Simply put this can mean anything from the intern you hired to update your Facebook page, to a full team of managers, designers and developers running campaigns across multiple platforms.

At this point I think it’s fair to say that most people have an inkling of what social media management entails, what they don’t have however, is a thorough understanding of what it should entail and how to differentiate between Black Hat Social Media Management and White Hat Social Media Management. This is where things get tricky and where the new Edgerank updates are going to hit hard.

Black Hat Social Media Management? Isn’t Black Hat An SEO Term?

‘Black Hat’ is a term that we have begun using interchangeably to describe unethical, or ineffective, methodology in the online marketing world, it’s no longer just a term to be used by an SEO Company. There have been debates raging for years now about what effective social media actually entails, what are your vanity metrics, how do we measure and present a real ROI in terms of leads, sales, repeat purchases and so on.

Thankfully, over the past couple of years there have been some big leaps in terms of connecting the dots and plugging social into the bigger picture. I’m talking about advancements in Facebook’s own insights and measurement capability, as well as the ability to effectively plug in social referrals to Google Analytics, using Google’s URL Builder and more recently Google’s further focus on social signals and the introduction of ‘Contributed Social Conversions’ and ‘Last Interaction Social Conversions’. These last two metrics can be found under traffic sources in your social overview.

But back on point, what does ‘Black Hat Social Media Management’ actually entail?

The Black Hat Checklist

As Facebook succinctly describes unethical social practices; black hat social media is designed to ‘game’ the system. Black hat social media entails:

• The posting will consist primarily of low quality content that delivers little to no value to its audience, i.e memes, poorly constructed posts and content that does not resonate with its proposed audience.
• The posting will focus primarily on calls to action and ‘forcing’ an engagement from its audience, i.e “Make sure you like this picture”.
• There is little to no original content being produced, rather the focus is purely on syndication of others content.
• When content is shared, it’s shared from untrustworthy sources or communities with ‘low quality’ followings when taken into context with the sharer’s own audience.
• The primary objective of the posting will be to elicit ‘likes’, ‘shares’ or engagement at any cost, effectively chasing vanity metrics. This results in a poor experience for the user and a disconnect between organic page fans and the page itself.

Facebook, it seems, is effectively moving in the same direction as Google. These initial changes have been introduced to crack down on social media practitioners ‘gaming’ the system. As with Google, simply blasting a website with thousands of links is in no way a good indicator of context, or value, to the producer of a search query.

The typical example here with Facebook, is the page that is built primarily on ‘likes’ which hold no value to the page, or page owner, itself. It has become regular practice for many black hat social media practitioners to ‘share’ memes and other posts in groups, or online communities, with a large number of fans in order to generate engagement for their clients. As a result, these pages are being built on false hope and pure vanity.

For example, a local coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, has no need of thousands of fans from Portugal, Spain, or Europe, unless they plan on exporting their coffee there in the very near future! Page size and engagement when taken secularly offer no value whatsoever, to the community or the page owner. These metrics need to be looked at with scrutiny and integrated into the bigger picture so to speak. A good place to start if you are looking to offer real measurements to a client is Nichole Kelly’s book on How To Measure Social Media.

The White Hat Checklist

Now that we’ve covered what’s considered black hat, let’s run through what we consider to be white hat social media management:

• The underlying objective of any social media campaign is to deliver value to its audience. Value to be defined as any content that will educate, inspire, or enrich the participants Facebook experience on a particular page.
• Posts will not attempt to game the system, or the end user, into taking action purely to generate an increase in engagement or activity.
• The focus will be on creating original, unique and valuable content for the fan base.

Running a white hat campaign is simple, and these principles will be familiar to any veteran social media marketer out there.

The Changes

After defining our key terms and putting the recent Edgerank developments in context, I’ll now present my take on the recent changes:

• Is this timely and relevant content? The key word here is relevancy. As with Google’s continuing quest for relevancy and context, it seems Facebook is now placing a heavier emphasis on relevancy when developing its own algorithm.
• Is the content genuinely interesting to you, or is it trying to game News Feed Distribution? This is by far the most important development, in my opinion. This update is focused on quality of content and a heavy crackdown on vanity metrics. While it might seem great for a small business page to post a funny meme and have this shared in multiple countries and regions, it’s generating no affinity with its real fan base and thus ultimately hurting the pages ability to generate any real value to the owner.
• Is this content from a source you would trust? Vanity metrics might seem great to the uninitiated executive. They get to take a great progress report to their CEO, hundreds of thousands and likes and impressions, everybody wins, right? Wrong. When using the above black hat methods to generate engagement and results your pages Trust Rating is going to drop dramatically. Not only that, but any fan of substance, what I call an ‘organic fan’ (someone who is genuinely a viable prospect for you) is going to begin to disconnect with your page over time because they aren’t receiving any real value, and by now most people are aware of when they are being gamed by ‘forced engagements’ in the news feed.

You can review the full summary of the Edgerank updates here.

What’s Next?

As with any batch of algorithmic changes, the impact will be small to begin with, then all of a sudden the social hammer will drop and thousands of black hat practitioners will be out of a job when even their black hat practices fail to generate any kind of result for their clients. Ultimately however, these changes are a good move in the right direction and should mean nothing but good things for all of the small businesses, agencies and practitioners out there who are working their butts off putting in hundreds and hundreds of hours to deliver engaging and informative social media campaigns to their audiences.

The post Did Facebook Just Kill Social Media Management? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The hard sell is dead. That’s subject to opinion, of course, in this instance however; it’s not just my opinion. It’s an opinion being touted by innovators, sales people, corporates and small businesses alike. In this article I’m going to be prodding an angry bear with a stick. I’m challenging the opinion still held by thousands of sales teams and companies across the world that cold calling and telesales is still king, and I’m bringing friends to the party.

What Is Social Selling?

Before we get too into any marketing and sales metrics, it’s necessary to define our key terms. First of all, what is Social Selling? It’s a term that seems to be thrown around a lot, but without any clear cut definition. At Square Social we define Social Selling as – “The act of using a social media platform to generate, nurture or close a sale”. To illustrate, we’ll use a simple example – generating a lead on LinkedIn by sending a targeted inMail message to a high level decision maker. A lead is of course whatever you personally qualify a lead to be. Now we know what ‘Social Selling’ entails, let’s move on and look at the emergence of the ‘social sales force’.

Smart Funnelling

Smart Funnelling is another term coined by our sales department at Square Social. Smart Funnelling, as we see it, is building a funnel in the most time, cost and effort effective method possible. We’re a B2B provider, essentially we sell our time and social media skillset to other companies, so building our sales funnel is heavily reliant on LinkedIn. Using the functionality that LinkedIn provides us, we’re able to build a targeted lead list with filters such as company size, location, seniority level of decision maker all the way up to degree of connection. Not only can we apply super specific filters to our LinkedIn lead searches, we can then save and automate this process. If you can find me a sales person who can save and automate their own lead generation process without being present, I’ll eat my hat.

Hard Sales vs. Social Sales

The easiest way to define the difference between the two is – hard sales are hard, social sales are easy. A hard sell is unnatural, it’s like to trying to eat a chicken before you’ve cooked it, or take your date home before you’ve bought her dinner. That’s why they are so hard. A hard sell is one person trying to disregard the fundamental rules of human psychology and interaction. We’re hardwired to fear strangers, our croc brain makes sure of that – that’s why we’ve survived so long and been able to get to this very point of debating why our croc brain makes it so hard for us to cold call.

A social sale is easy because if you approach it correctly, it’s a warm sale. If you successfully add a connection on LinkedIn, you have common ground. You’re no longer John Smith the random stranger from X Company, your John Smith the guy I spoke with on LinkedIn about our shared love of fishing or amateur wrestling. Don’t get me wrong, going out on a random adding spree will generate nothing, in fact it will actively work against you. However, if you apply the same social rules of etiquette you would when networking and meeting people in the real world online, the results will blow you away.

How would a sales force apply this? Easy. Fluff your leads before you contact them. It might sound harsh, but that’s exactly what 90% of sales are, building relationships and developing common ground. That’s exactly how Eloqua’s sales reps were able to see a 30% increase in engagement between them and the companies they were targeting, an increased conversion rate of leads to opportunities of 25% and over 15% of their sales reps began over exceeding their sales quota. For more hard data check out the case studies here over at slideshare.

The bottom line is the landscape is changing, has changed, dramatically. Cold calling is not an effective method of generating sales in today’s multi-layered sales process, with multiple decision makers sometimes spanning multiple continents, using the old ‘tie them down for a face to face’ trick just won’t cut it anymore. Even if this process was still generating moderate results for you, why would you want to continue using an outdated process? It’s like purposefully refusing to remove the stabilisers from your bike because – “I’ve always done it that way”. Your bike is a lot quicker, easier to drive and breaks down a lot less without your stabilisers on.  Why would you spend hours upon hours expending effort on the phone, bypassing gatekeepers, overcoming objections, when you could just as easily use a Trojan horse approach and slip through the back door, so to speak?

The Proof Is In The (Social) Pudding

To draw on popular hip hop parlance, at the end of the day – talk is cheap. For those still unconvinced, I’d love to hear your opinions and reasons why. If the case studies provided haven’t opened you up to the concept of Social Sales, and I can’t see why they wouldn’t, get out there and try it for yourself first hand. Read up on LinkedIn etiquette and put together a concise strategy, if it doesn’t start impacting your bottom line you’re either doing it wrong, or selling Ipecac.

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