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Welcome to our guest blogger Andy DeBrunner. He is a social media manager at Godfrey, and has worked with Fortune 100 companies to tackle their social media needs. He was also a contributor to Godfrey’s e-book, “Jumpstart Your B2B Marketing.” Follow him @adebrunner .
Your customers are using social media. That’s no surprise. So is it appropriate for you to join in on the fun and get your business on board? I know what some of you are thinking. “Sure, I know everyone’s using social media, but my company sells products that cost a ton of money and sales can take years to close. I can’t generate a sale, or even a lead, for any of my products using Facebook or Twitter.” If you just said some version of that to yourself, let me reframe the way you might want to think about social media for your business.
All too often, Facebook and Twitter dominate marketing meetings and boardroom conversations about social media, both in B2B and B2C. But social media is far more expansive than just these two behemoth sites. There is almost certainly another platform that will suit your company’s specific needs if neither of “the big two” fit. To shift your social media paradigm, consider the following types of social media outlets and how they might benefit a company with a long or complex sales cycle:
- Photo-sharing sites. Is your product visual or design-related? Help inspire your customers early in the sales cycle with a photo stream on Flickr or Instagram, a Tumblr blog or maybe even a board on Pinterest.
- Video-sharing sites. Does your product have killer demonstrations? Would side-by-side product comparisons help close the deal? If so, video sites such as YouTube or Vimeo could be your golden ticket to capture interest early.
- Message boards. There are message boards for nearly every industry under the sun. If you don’t believe me, check out coffin-talk.net. All you need to do is find out where your target customer goes to ask questions about his/her job and help answer them. This is frequently overlooked, but can be unbelievably successful in finding customers who are ready to buy. The key is to understand the message board’s particular tone before jumping in with a sales pitch.
- Industry blogs. You are probably already reading a few of these to stay on top of industry trends. Why not reach out to them to see if you can write a guest post as a representative of your company? This is a great way to get exposure to new audiences and another effective tactic for early in the buying cycle. If you’re skeptical, consider that you’re reading an example of this right now. Of course, if there are no great industry blogs, perhaps you could create your own. Nothing says “thought leadership” like creating the best content in your industry.
- Professional networking sites. There’s nothing wrong with cold calling or e-mail campaigns, but a sales team who isn’t engaged on a professional networking site (let’s be honest, we’re talking about LinkedIn) is missing out on a potentially huge opportunity. There is a right way to use LinkedIn, so be sure your sales team knows what they’re doing before they let loose on their own. If done correctly, LinkedIn can be used to generate leads and nurture them all the way through the sale.
- Social networking sites. I can’t just ignore this. After all, sites like Facebook and Twitter are quite useful for a lot of companies with long sales cycles, but you need to be smart about how you decide to use your account. Using Facebook and Twitter for customer service or simply as a platform to answer customers’ questions is often a great way to get started, though there are countless other ways to use social networks effectively to hit customers at all points during the sales cycle. Before moving on, I need to mention Google+ too. Recent changes to Google search have made it all but necessary for companies to create a G+ page. As always, research is key, so make sure you go in with a plan if you decide to create a page.
- Location-based games. If you have trade shows in your marketing mix, location-based games are a great way to engage an audience and capture early leads. Perhaps you could offer deals or contests for people who check in at your booth.
- Group buying/couponing sites. Group couponing sites have struggled to find their way into B2B, particularly for a complex, expensive sale, so if you have a great idea on how to apply it, I’d love to hear about it!
- Podcasting. Allured by the idea of owning their own radio show to brand their company, many businesses jumped into podcasting without realizing how difficult it is to create and manage a radio show and quickly gave up. But there are more ways to get involved with podcasting than creating your own show. For example, sponsoring a podcast or volunteering to be a guest interviewee on a popular industry podcast are two “early cycle” ways to take advantage of podcasting without the commitment.
- Slide-sharing sites. Do you sell to a target who needs to get approvals from an endless line of executives before he/she can sign on the dotted line? Why not create a sharable slide show (or several) that help your customers sell your product up the chain of command. That way, they have the tools they need to make your case when your salespeople can’t be in the room. Done correctly, slide shows can help you generate leads, then help you again to close the business at the end of the cycle.
In the end, social media may or may not be right for your organization for a lot of reasons, but if you think creatively it can often prove to be a valuable part of your overall B2B marketing mix.
Check out this comprehensive article about connecting Google+ to your other social media sites by PC Mag writer
Jill Duffy.
The trick to connecting the three social networks, for now, is daisy-chaining them in the right order.
Social networking fiends have been lamenting the lack of third-party apps on Google+, which, among other things, has made it impossible to synchronize Google+ with Twitter or Facebook. When you synch Twitter to Facebook or vice versa, whatever you post on one account automatically repost to the other. You can implement special rules and tags so that not every single post reappears on the other site. Linking and syncing makes social media management way more efficient than manually updating each site.
But a Twitter management tool now makes it possible to connect all three accounts! The trick is that you have to connect them in the right order. Here’s how.
Setting up the Connections
1. Go to ManageFlitter.com/plus to connect Google+ to Twitter.
2. Fill out the form that’s provided.
a. It asks for your Google+ account URL, which you can retrieve by clicking on your profile picture on your own Google+ page in the upper right corner. The URL will start with “https://plus.google.com/” and will then have a string of numbers before ending in “/posts”. Copy and paste that URL into the first ManageFlitter field.
b. It also asks for access to your Twitter account. Enter your Twitter username and password when prompted.
c. Optional: Enable advanced settings that let you use tags (i.e., only share Google+ posts including the tag #twt; add “G+” to the start of tweets to indicated they originally were posted to Google+; tweet when you start Google+ Hangout sessions, that is, multi-person video chats; and always include a link back to the original Google+ post).
3. Connect your Twitter account to automatically repost to Facebook.
a. Sign into Facebook and find the Twitter app page.
b. Allow Twitter to connect to Facebook. It may ask you to sign into Twitter if you’re not already signed in.
c. Again, you’ll have some options for enabling hashtags and rules for what should be automatically reposted from Twitter to Facebook.
4. The chain should now be complete. Anything you post on Google+ will now appear on all three sites (following any special rules you’ve also implemented, if any).
How it Works
After I set up this string and sent a few test posts, I found that a post I had written on Google+ about an hour earlier had already appeared on Twitter and Facebook. It did not find older posts (from yesterday, for example), just the one I had written about an hour before.
There may be up to an hour time delay between when you post on Google+ and when the message appears on Twitter, although there should be no delay whatsoever between when it appears on Twitter and when it posts to Facebook. The delay is a result of Google+ not having an API for developers to use to tap into your posts quickly and elegantly.
I sent four additional test posts through to verify the system works (with mixed results): 1) a text-only tweet posted on Google+ to the public, 2) a text-only tweet to a limited Circle only, 3) a post with a photo attached to the public, and 4) another text-only post to the public. Post no. 3 came through first, and the photo link worked, but there was a 15-minute delay before it appeared on Twitter and Facebook. Post 4 came through with a short 10-minute delay. The other two did not come through, and I’m not sure why, although they were in rapid succession shortly after I enabled syncing.
Obviously, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I’ve been able to find so far. Another con is that it keeps you on Google+, which isn’t necessarily the platform everyone wants as their primary source. Additionally, Google+ doesn’t give you a 140 character count. If you post something that’s too long for Twitter, it’ll link back to Google+, which, again, is good for Google but not necessarily what you or your followers want. If you’ve got different solutions or ways around these problems, let me know about it a comment.
I just set this up, so I will let you know how it worked out for me.
As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use , the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design . A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design. Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across . Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed .
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything !
3) Pop-up windows
Pop-up windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of pop-up windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my pop-up blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a pop-up window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
Welcome guest writer CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Here is an article that she published on July 22, 2009. I think that it will enlighten you on how social media and Twitter is not just for fun anymore. See how small business are driving customers to their stores.
Enjoy, Jackie
SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on
Twitter.For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for
an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.
“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.
Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.
Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.
He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.
Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.
Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.
“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”
Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.
The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”
Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.
Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.
In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.
Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”
Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.
According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.
More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2009, on page B6 of the New York edition.
Since the early days of Twitter, users have had the ability to upload their own background images. From photos of cute kittens to jaw-dropping mosaics, the Twitter background has been a key medium for self-expression, personal branding, and personal fulfillment.
If you’re new to Twitter, or just never took the time to create your own Twitter background, this HOW TO guide is for you. This guide goes step-by-step into the rationale for creating a personalized Twitter background, takes a look at some amazing Twitter designers, and provides a list of useful Twitter design tools and resources. Your artistic juices shall soon be flowing.
Why create a custom Twitter background?
Some of you might ask: is creating a custom Twitter background worth the effort? While this is a valid question, and the final answer is up to you, there are a range of benefits to making your backdrop your own. Both the creative and the brand-conscious can (and have) benefited from unique background designs.
Here are a couple reasons for why you might want to build your own:
1. Personalization and expression: It’s a chance to express yourself and who you are. Are you an artist, a musician, a blogger, or a cook? Do you love Macs or the beach? A new backdrop can really help people understand who you are.
2. Contact info: It’s an easy way to add additional information you can plug into your 160 character bio.
3. Personal branding: Having your contact information, your face, or additional bio information within your background is a common practice. It helps potential followers understand what you do and why you are someone people should follow. Check out HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter for more.
4. Artistic creativity: Twitter is a great opportunity to push the limits of your talents.
Some great examples of custom Twitter background designs
If you’re looking for some inspiration for your Twitter background, look no further. These are some of the most unique, most inspiring, and best-branded Twitter backgrounds around. There’s not enough time or room to showcase the thousands of great backgrounds that exist on Twitter, so be sure to check out some comprehensive lists and discover some on your own.
And remember: you don’t have to spend an obscene amount of time to make a great background. It’s all about making a background that’s perfect for you, not for anyone else.
Doug Cone (@nullvariable): Doug, a web designer and consultant, brilliantly integrates his face with his brand and contact information in this spacey theme.
CoolTweets (@cooltweets): CookTweets, which collects, well, the coolest tweets on the web, gets an A for its simple and clean layout. Perfect for many brands.
Justine Ezeraik (@ijustine): The popular new media star has a balanced theme that perfectly reflects her brand.
Kristi Colvin (@kriscolvin): Kristi, a favorite tweeter of mine, opted to create a beautiful mosaic of color and life. I could stare at it all day.
Loic Le Meur (@loic): No, it’s not that Loic’s background is the most amazing, most complex, or most visually appealing image in the world. It’s that his background reflects who he is – a smiling, personal, fun-loving guy…who also happened to found Seesmic. You just have to love the picture of him kitesurfing, too.
There are literally hundreds of great Twitter backgrounds. Part of the fun is discovering on your own.
Creating your own background: the basic requirements
Now that you understand the reasons for creating a background and you’re feeling inspired, there are a couple of things you need to know about custom Twitter backgrounds.
First, you need to know how to actually change your background. This is a simple process: just go to settings, then design, and then click “change background image.” You can now browse your computer and add any image you’d like, so long as it’s under 800k in size.
Next, the actual dimensions. This is important because improperly-sized images can be covered up by your Twitter profile or can start to tile, which often leads to an undesired effect. In most circumstances, you want your background to be large enough not to tile. To achieve this, the total image size should be around 1600px wide by 1200px tall. This encompasses almost all screen resolutions.
If you build a left-hand column, popular on many Twitter backgrounds, make sure that it’s small enough not to be covered up by the central Twitter content – many designers suggest smaller than 200px or 235px. For more information on dimensions, check out Croncast and their numbers.
In the end, building your ideal background often requires trial-and-error. But if you’re not a designer, that’s not a problem – there are tools to help.
7 helpful Twitter background resources
What would a Twitter resource guide be without some useful Twitter apps? Not only do many of these tools provide pre-designed backgrounds, but many can also automatically update your background, provide detailed information and FAQs, and even fully-functional image editors. Here are a few of the best:
1. MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort. It allows users to create badges, add graphics, play with text, and more to create elegant backgrounds and left-hand text columns. You can even log in with Twitter and MyTweetSpace will automatically update your background.
2. TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background. The templates come in PSD (Photoshop) form. In fact, my Twitter account utilizes a TwitterBack template as the basis for my design. Can you guess which one?
3. TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.
4. Free Twitter Designer: This handle little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.
5. TwitBacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds. This one specializes in left-hand column-based backgrounds.
6. TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category. You can even click the “install” button under any theme, log into Twitter, and poof!…your background is ready.
7. Peekr: If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go. Click on the bookmarklet once to show only the background, and press it again to bring everything back to normal.
Start customizing and share your background
With this knowledge and these tools at your disposal, there is no reason you can’t build a killer backdrop for your Twitter account within minutes. So what are you waiting for? Try out some different designs, and be sure to share your artistic flair with the rest of us by linking to your newly-designed Twitter account in the comments.
See you on Twitter.
Jackie Tulos
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