Building your Brand on Social Networking Sites

With everyone jumping into social networking, it has never been more important to make sure that you use these channels to help build your brand.

Did you know that you can customize your social media channels to help build your brand? 

As an online marketing company, we continually monitor how small businesses are utilizing social media.  One thing that really jumped out to us is that many small businesses are not taking advantage of the ability to fully customize their pages and promote their social networks.

For example, you can customize your Facebook Fan page or Twitter page to incorporate the same graphics that you use on your website, business cards etc.  Your branded background can also include your website, blog and other social media information.

Click on the link for an example of a custom Facebook Fan page Belly Up Tavern

This custom page helps to reinforce their brand image and engage their fans.

Now take a look at their Twitter page.  Belly Up Tavern

If you are interested in finding out more about creating custom pages, please contact us at OrganikSEO.com

Time saving tips for social networking

I recently wrote about how much time the average consumer spends on social networking.  If you read that blog you know that , in the U.S., it is an astonishing 6 hours per day.

As a small business owner, you probably know that you need to have a social media campaign and that you need to attend to your social networking sites on a daily basis.  But, if you are like most people running a business, it can be difficult to find the time to effectively manage your social media campaign.

One question we get all of the time is, how many hours per day should be spent on managing a social media campaign.  There are many opinions about this and, of course, it depends on many factors including the campaign goals, number of social media channels being used, and how well organized the campaign was set up in the beginning.  The good news is, in our opinion, that you don't need to spend 6 hours per day.  Our experience indicates that a social media campaign, once properly set up, can be effectively managed with 5 - 10 hours per week.  This would be the average for a basic campaign that includes 3 - 5 channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Blog, YouTube and LinkedIn.

There are a number of time saving tools to help you manage your social networking sites. Below is a brief summary of several these tools.

Hootsuite - Allows you to create one message and post to multiple sites.  Includes the ability to schedule posts for future dates.  Handy for monitoring activity on multiple sites.  We love this tool and couldn't live without it.

FriendFeed -This site allows a specific group of people to share anything from photos and links. It also features the ability to pull in updates from other websites.  You can use this tool to publish your feed to other social networking sites.

mysocial247 - This is a column that runs alongside the Firefox browser.  It allows users to manage all of their social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. in one place

TweetDeck - This site provides statistics and local trends. It features the ability to schedule posts in advance.

These are just a few of the tools out there.  Let us know if you've found one that you really like.

If you'd like to find out more about these tools and other services for managing your social media campaign, get in touch with us at www.OrgainikSEO.com

Tap into customers online: Social networking's explosive growth

How consumers are spending their online time

Not surprisingly, consumers are spending more and more of their online time using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  According to The Nielson Company, global consumers now spend nearly 25% of their online time in social networking activities.  However, the percentage of online time spent on email continues to decline.  But wait, don't give up on email yet. The exception to this trend is that email use on mobile devices is on the rise.

As a small business owner, it is important to follow these trends and follow your target customers.  As your customers spend more and more of their time on social networking sites and transition to accessing the web via mobile devices, it becomes clear that you want to increase your presence in these areas.

The Nielson Company also reported that U.S. consumers are spending an average of 6 hours per day on social media sites.  Wow! Only one other country spends more time on social networking - Australia.

Again, not surprising, Facebook and Twitter were the fastest growing social media sites.  Of the sites included in the Nielson report, only MySpace showed a decline in terms of consumer's time spent on the site.  And with Apple's recent introduction of their Ping social networking site, the decline in MySpace is only expected to accelerate.

The information from this report is just one more piece of evidence why, as a small business owner, it is so important that you develop and manage a social media campaign - with Facebook and Twitter as being the essential building blocks.

These stats on how/where consumers spend their online time also peaked our interest. 

How much time do you spend on social networking per day?  Are you a power user pushing the averages higher or are you on the other extreme of the scale?  Post a comment and let us know.

If you have any questions about this blog or your social media campaign, please contact us at www.OrganikSEO.com