How To Use Facebook Groups With Tremendous Success For Your Small Business

One of the most looked over Facebook Training opportunities and strategies is Facebook Groups! You may actually have had some bad experiences trying to take part and prospect in other large groups. You may have felt that most people posting in that group were trying to sell you something.

This is NOT the experience that we are training on in this webinar! What if you could create a community around your business? What if you could have it appeal to prospects and your most loyal clients equally as well? What if it took away a lot of the burden of working one-on-one with prospects and clients in order to keep the relationship alive? What if it actually added value to your business, mostly from others? HOW NICE WOULD THAT BE?

Facebook groups can be a strategy for your business that you wish you had started a long time ago!!

What You Will Learn

• The Pros & Cons of Facebook Groups
• How To Create A Facebook Group
• Selecting The Right Type Of Group
• How Facebook Groups Work
  • Creating Community
  • Creating Accountability
  • Dos & Don’ts
  • Business Benefits
  • When to start?

Helpful Links

• Facebook Training Home Page
• The Marketing Role Of A Personal Profile Versus A Business Page
• Back To All Webinars

This is a webinar that unlocks even more of the tremendous benefits and opportunities within Facebook for your business. And it doesn’t add time to your busy schedule, it will actually help free it up in the end!

The total length of the Webinar is a half hour. You may have to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. Many members are finding it very advantageous to watch the Webinar all the way through and then keep it open in a separate window to review while executing the recommendations.

To watch this Facebook Training Webinar, simply click on the play button below.

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An Introduction To The All-New Timeline Based Version Of The Facebook Profile

NOTE: The “Timeline” version of the Facebook personal profile is to be made public very soon. This post will get you up to speed quickly so when it is announced…you are ready! You will be notified through your existing personal profile.

Directly below you will find a link to an all-new Facebook Training webinar on the new timeline-based profile. Scroll down further on this page for a quick overview of the “TOP 5″ new features.

VIEW THE WEBINAR NOW

What You Will Learn In The Webinar

• What Is The Timeline?
• Managing Your Timeline
  • Your Cover Photo
  • Managing Stories
  • Adding To Your Past
• Setting Your Sharing Options
• Creating Lists
• Other Useful Tools
  • Newsfeed
  • Ticker
  • Subscribe

The Top 5 New Features

There are five major new elements to the timeline-based profile on Facebook. For a good example, please check out mine at http://www.facebook.com/stevensmacdonald. Read the rest of this post to get a quick review of them all!

New Feature #1 – The Timeline

This is a very unique way to organize a profile…over time. It use to be that the important events in our lives, and then the resulting status updates would quickly fade away and out of view on Facebook. A personal profile should be more than just what’s currently happening, plus some basic information on the back end. Now, you can add photos, videos and standard status updates on your timeline to showcase any point in your entire life. This could represent anything small to the larger milestones of life like your first car, job or child…to business events like starting your company, new product launches, expansions, etc.

The new timeline is also a great tool to start to understand more and more about your prospects! The more that you know about them, the easier it will be to ignite the conversations and relationships!

New Feature #2 – The Cover

The cover is a big billboard at the top of your profile. And I do mean big when I say it. You cannot miss it. The cover is an area where you can place a huge image of you, your family, you playing a sport, exploring one of your hobbies, or just the best picture ever taken of you!

You will start to see why a picture is worth a thousand words. These new covers are adding an incredible opportunity to create instant emotion and a real sense of connection to your profile. This is really good if you are prospecting for business and want to build relationships one-on-one from the start.

New Feature #3 – Story Management

It use to be that your updates, or stories on Facebook, just stacked up chronologically on the page… much like newsfeeds. Now, stories can not only be added onto a timeline over any point in your life, but they can even be highlighted as “featured” stories. Never before did you have the ability to tell Facebook a prioritization of what stories were more important than others. Now you can!

New Feature #4 – List Options

The ability to create custom lists has long been a part of any personal profile on Facebook. And those lists have been extraordinarily useful for prospecting since you can filter your newsfeed by any customized list. Now, Facebook has added two new categories of lists. The first is a set of  ”Default” lists covering categories of friends that Facebook thinks will be important to you. These include Close Friends, Acquaintances, Family and one for your work if you have included it in you basic information.

Another category is called the “Smart” list. This takes information from your personal profile like the high school you attended, or university and puts all your friends that say they have graduated from there as well into these lists automatically. Also, they will give you a list of people that live in the same city as you! Pretty nice that this happens without you lifting a finger.

New Feature #5 – Applications

Facebook has added applications to your profile. Similar to the apps for iPhones or Droids, you now can use apps that automatically put new updates onto your Facebook profile. These apps will update the activities you do in life from running, to watching movies, listening to music, reading books and more. The list of available apps should be growing hugely in the near future!

Other New Tools

You can also see important stories that you would have missed if you hadn’t checked in for a few days. Previously the stories would have just faded away as new stories appeared. Now Facebook knows how long you have been gone and saves Top Stories for you.

You can also subscribe to an individual profile. You never before had the ability to tell Facebook that you wanted to make sure to see updates from a specific person in your newsfeed. Now you can by simply subscribing to that person, even if they aren’t a friend of yours on Facebook.

As you can see, there is a lot of great new features in the timeline-based personal profile on Facebook. Make sure that you watch the webinar to get all the details and implications for you and your business!

VIEW THE WEBINAR NOW

Helpful Links

• Facebook Training Home Page
• The Marketing Role Of A Personal Profile Versus A Business Page
• Back To All Webinars

The Top Ten Reasons Why Every Small Business Should Be Using The Free Tools Online

We have all heard of the amazing success stories of companies using the world of social media. In fact, Inc. magazine says that the nation’s fastest-growing private companies are making use of social media. Forbes magazine calls social media a foundational shift that is here to stay.

The question still remains, is it appropriate for a smaller business? It may be great that JetBlue is using Twitter for customer service, Dell has an incredible Facebook presence or BestBuy is training all sales associates to use social media. But what about the 20+ million companies in America that have no payroll? How about the companies that have employees, but no significant marketing budget? Is social media appropriate for them?

The answer is yes. Social media is a new marketing fundamental that encompasses strategies that no company should operate without. There are tremendous opportunities for every business with the knowledge and desire to use social media as a competitive advantage.

Below is part one of a list of the Top 10 reasons why social media is a marketing necessity for ALL companies – from solopreneurs all the way through to Fortune 500 companies.

1. Getting Ranked High In Google Is A “No Brainer” For Your Business

People don’t surf the net, they search. 40% of all consumer spending and 85% of all B2B transactions begin today with a web search. Every business needs to come up within search engine rankings for those keywords that surround what it is that you do or offer as a company. There are over 18 billion searches that happen each and every month in this country. If you are not represented in the search engine rankings, you are missing out on one of the largest opportunities that is proven to embody people searching for brands that have the right products and services to meet their needs. They are hot prospects!

2. Marketing Exposure For Little To No Budget

Most people and companies have in common two extremely precious treasures, their money and their time. In this economy, for many companies, placing more money behind marketing is no longer an option. Thus, ideas that can be implemented with just the appropriate know-how and simple elbow grease are critical. This is the case for social media and why it is such a hot topic. Tremendous new marketing opportunities are unfolding daily for every business through the use of social media. And all they require is an understanding of the ever evolving online tools and how to get started.

3. Social Media Prospecting Is Easier Than Ever

Finding the right highly targeted audiences is easier than ever with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. People identify themselves and their needs by what they say online. If you are using the tools to listen well, you can intersect with them at the time of their need. This is a highly relevant way to find the highest quality of leads…and with tools that are the best at then following up and starting a conversation. These tools are social networks aren’t they, specifically designed towards one-on-one and viral communications!

4. It Is One Of The Fastest Ways To Build Your Expert Reputation

As long as you have been successful in business and have customers or clients that believe in you, you have the means to establish credibility, and trust in your brand online. These are critical factors to closing your fair share of the prospects discussed above. One out of two new people you meet in business will search for you online. The search engine results are a third party opportunity for you two shine by controlling the top page of rankings with everything you want people to know about you. Top page rankings aren’t as hard to “own” as you would think because the combination of your name and business name are not only the most popular search combinations for you, but are very low competitive search phrases. Thus, it is very easy to manage what people see. Especially those that you are directly prospecting!

5. A 180 Degree Change from Traditional Marketing

I call it PUSH versus PULL marketing. Traditional marketing (radio, newspaper, direct mail, etc.) is like casting out big marketing nets trying to catch the right people, or pushing your message at intended recipients. Sure, you can target using demographics, past behaviors, geography, etc., but how can you ever tell if you are reaching those prospects that are truly interested in what you offer as they have determined that they need it most? And traditional marketing costs money to reach each and every prospect, no matter their value to your business. In social media, interested prospects find you by typing keywords into a search engine or by you listening to what they are saying. They PULL themselves towards you by taking a specific action on their own that identifies their needs. This is a highly qualified prospect versus one blanketed by traditional marketing. They are literally raising their hands and identifying themselves as great prospects for your business. And the best part is that with social media, these hand-raisers don’t cost you a dime. Prospecting, blogging, writing articles, posting video, etc. are all free social media strategies to intersect with highly qualified prospects, allowing people to pull themselves towards you.

Look for the second half of the Top 10 reasons to to be posted soon!

An Introduction To The Video Chat Service, Hangouts, For Business

There are some tremendous tools and differences versus Facebook for business that you need to know!

This Google+ Training Webinar is exciting on a number of levels. What the Hangouts video chat service can do for your business is to bring you closer together with your prospects, team, partners and clients. It is like having the ability to have a face-to-face meeting without being there in person.

This means that all the ways that you passionately train, sell or promote to your business audiences can have all the added benefits of sight, sound and motion. In other words, you can sell with passion and emotion! This is really huge. Relationships get formed easier, reading the group’s reactions get easier, and closing the sale or creating effective training gets easier too.

There are still some observations that we have that keep it from being the best thing since sliced bread, but it is well on it’s way. And the business tools that they have provided, make it so much more powerful than anything offered by Facebook! They offer a load of what they call “extras” that we review from screen sharing, notes, sketchpad, on air, named hangouts and more. Watch the webinar and get all the latest updates!

What you will learn:

• What Are Hangouts?
• How to Start A Hangout?
• Conducting A Hangout
• The Top Ten Business Benefits
• The Top Features We Wish They Had For Business
• Observations

This webinar is 34 minutes long and provides an in-depth view of Google+ Hangouts that takes you through everything you need to know to start using this tool for your business!

Watch the webinar now by clicking on the video player below! It may take 30 seconds to a minute to begin playing.

[Access protected for members only. If you are a member already, please log in and return to this page. If you are not a member, then please click on any "Enroll Now" links to see current enrollment specials. ]

More Google Training resources.

Don’t Miss Our All-New Google Analytics Webinar! These Are The Advanced Features That Are Easy To Apply To Your Business

We are just finishing up our all-new, two-part webinar series on Google Analytics Training. This is the second of two webinars, all focused on the things that you can do to customize Google Analytics for your particular business. You have a unique brand, target market, keyword strategy and content…right? Then why should you be using Google Analytics as it comes right out of the box?

We’ll show you how to customize segments of traffic that then get applied to every report available in Google Analytics. Custom segments are slices of your traffic that have unique meaning or value. An example would be new visitors versus returning visitors. Or you might want a custom segment for all Facebook referral traffic to your site. Or anyone putting in a certain set of keywords into the search engines.

This and so much more is all included in this second of two all-new webinars on Google Analytics.

VIEW THE WEBINAR NOW!

Return to the Google Training home page.

How Do I Create A Sidebar Image Or Ad That Links To Another Page When People Click On It?

To create a graphic in your sidebar that links when clicked on to another destination page, just follow these easy Blog Training instructions.

You simply add the graphic you want to a text widget that has the right embedded HTML code sending people to a new page when the image is click upon! Sound difficult to do? It really isn’t! Just follow these easy three steps:

Step 1 – Upload the graphic that you want to put into your sidebar directly into your Media Library on the back end or dashbaord of your WordPress blog. Go to the “Add New” link under your Media Library within the left-hand side bar of your blog’s dashboard. When you upload the graphic it will provide you with a URL for that graphic as well as the dimensions in pixels. Just make sure those dimensions fit within the width of your sidebar or post. If they don’t, then change the width of the graphic to an appropriate width and adjust the height by the same percentage change so that the image scales down properly and looks perfect. If you don’t know the dimension of your blog’s sidebar then you can see what dimensions work best. Most sidebars are between 250 and 300 pixels wide.

Step 2 – Go to the widgets area of your blog under “Appearance” in the dashboard and drag a “text” widget up into the location on the sidebar that you want. Now paste in the code from directly below into the body of that text widget.

<a href=”http://www.linkingurl.com/“><img title=”Name of Your File” src=”http://PasteTheURLofTheGraphicsFileItselfRightFromYourMediaLibraryHere” alt=”" width=”300″ height=”300″ /></a>

Step 3 – Take the URL from your media library and replace it with the graphic URL from the code above. Then insert the linking URL. Last, change the dimensions as appropriate. Below is an example of the code for a clickable sidebar graphic with actual URLs in it. The example HTML code below takes users who click on the sidebar graphic to my site at http://stevensmacdonald.com/.

<a href=”http://stevensmacdonald.com/“><img src=”http://practicalsocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/new-graphic.png” alt=”" title=”new graphic” width=”300″ height=”300″ /></a>

It is really that simple!

Click through here for more Blog Training resources within the Practical Social Media University’s blogging curriculum.

Advanced SEO Strategies That Will Help With Search Rankings For Your YouTube Video And Your Blog!

Last Thursday night’s webinar is now up and archived with all the latest information about how to use video for search engine optimization that will amaze you. If you have not seen this webinar before, then you are not going to want to miss it! Click through to the YouTube Training Webinar now!!

This is one of the most popular webinars, and one of my personal favorites. What you can do so simply to help promote your business is no less than astonishing. – Steve MacDonald

Click here for more YouTube Training resources.

The World Tour Of TweetDeck For Business

In this Twitter Training Webinar you will learn all the options and opportunities to manage, monitor and prospect efficiently online with TweetDeck. Included are five power tips that will help take your prospecting effectiveness to the next level. Anyone serious about promoting their business through social media needs to be using Twitter. And TweetDeck is one of only two tools on the market (the other is HootSuite) that allow you to make sense of not only the raging river of tweets that happen each and every day, but also to manage your other social media activity on places like Facebook.

What You Will Learn

• Getting Started With TweetDeck
• User Interactions
• Adding Accounts
• Adding & Managing Columns (prospecting)
• Sending Tweets (linking, attachments, scheduling)
• Tools & Settings
• TweetDeck Mobile
• TweetDeck for the Chrome Browser
• Five TweetDeck Power Tips

We highly recommend that you watch the two Twitter webinars listed under “Helpful Links” below before reviewing this webinar! It will help to set your strategic plan and vision for Twitter prior to diving into the TweetDeck. Remember, TweetDeck is a tool, not the strategy itself!

Helpful Links

• Twitter Training Home Page
• Webinar: Getting Started With Twitter For Your Small Business
• Webinar: Twitter Pospecting And Advanced User Tips For Business
• Back To All Webinars

The total duration of this Webinar is a little bit over 50 minutes. You may need to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the webinar to start playing. Also, many members are finding it very advantageous to watch the Webinar all the way through and then keep it open in a separate window to review while executing the recommendations.

To watch the Twitter Training Webinar, just click on the play button below.

[Access protected for members only. If you are a member already, please log in and return to this page. If you are not a member, then please click on any "Enroll Now" links to see current enrollment specials. ]

The Top 5 Reasons Why It Makes Great Sense For Small Business

Part one of this article series covers the reasons why any small business or solo entrepreneur should consider creating a Facebook group. The second part addresses the best practices regarding how to start a Facebook group! Stay tuned for part two.

One of the most useful and unique Facebook Training opportunities involves online marketing strategies with Facebook groups. In fact, I just recently sat next to a successful entrepreneur on a plane ride who had seven Facebook groups up and running for her business. This article outlines the top five reasons why it makes sense to start a group for your business; and, it explains precisely how you can benefit!

Reason #1 – Involvement

With an online prospecting campaign for your business, you want to connect, build a relationship and then start adding value that leads prospects to becoming a customer or client further down the path. That “path” may take some time to travel for your prospects. So what is your strategy to keep them involved and interested in your business?

You need an active way to get them and keep them involved with your business. Facebook groups are a great solution. Your groups can be made up of all your best prospects! Each prospect has been identified to have similar needs and you, as a business, can provide a solution(s).

So what happens when you get a bunch of them together into a group? Not only can you start helping them, but they start to help each other! The group turns into a way that your business is supplying value to them, building a relationship with them, and involving them regularly with your business. Sound like a pretty good strategy for your prospects?

Reason #2 – Community

When you build your group, a community forms. Wikipedia states this about communities, “In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common.” This is the special sauce that creates bonds, interactions, and the desire to help one another…all within a branded Facebook group that you created, offered and now oversee. It is quite simple to see how groups can add value on an ongoing basis from within the community itself.

Reason #3 – Targeting

Part of the beauty of these groups is that there can be more than one group or community formed around your business. Remember the small business woman who had seven Facebook groups? You may have unique target markets that should each have their own group. You may want to have a group for customers or clients as an ongoing retention strategy. The opportunities are limitless depending on how you run your business.

Reasons #4 – Learning

You may think that you know everything that you need to know about your business, your prospects, customers and their needs. However, what if you had a live, interacting group of them that you could watch and monitor? You can listen to how they interact, what they struggle with and how they help each other. Then, you can add in lots of questions to help you understand their needs and preferences. Plus, I guarantee you’ll be more in the know for current events around your industry, as well as nuances and updates. You will always learn from your group(s) as long as you have the intent to listen and learn!

Reason #5 – Efficiency

This reason is the one that will get you hooked on Facebook groups! You don’t have to spend a ton of time on them. If created properly, with enough participants, they can run themselves for good stretches of time! Because people love to learn and provide help themselves, most questions get answered by the group itself! You need to stay involved to spur things along now and then or answer a specific question or two. But 95% of the interaction and value should ultimately come from the group members themselves! What a great marketing strategy!

Conclusion

It is pretty hard to find a marketing program that takes such little time to manage, adds so much value to prospects and/or customers, and takes just a few minutes to set up! Be sure that you have enough group members to invite into the community initially. The group dynamics start to really kick in with at least 20-25 people to start. Then, your group can continue to grow from there!

Please click here for the full Facebook Training curriculum within the University.

A Solo Entrepreneur’s Best Place For Getting Started Right With Social Media

This Social Media Training webinar is meant for anyone who is just starting out, has been dipping their toes in the social media waters, or is more advanced…but feeling overwhelmed! Social Media Marketing for your business doesn’t have to be complicated, but there certainly is a recipe for success.

If you have never had an overview of how social media works, the right tools, their unique and individual roles, how they work and integrate together, and how they should each be deployed on behalf of your business…then this is absolutely the right place to get started!

We will explain everything that you need to know in order to have the best chance of succeeding with social media for your business, including a detailed explanation of the “7 Elements of Social Media Success.”

The total length of the Webinar is just over 46 minutes. You may have to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. After watching the webinar, please make sure to review the recommendations below for how to plan out the training for your next two months. And remember, month one is all about setting your social media foundation. Month two is where you actually start prospecting!

Below is a timeline For laying out your first two months of activity. Make sure to follow them in priority order!

Things You Do Once (your first month)

Week #1 – Review the webinar on Branding Strategies. This will show you how to create your brand (even providing templates to fill out), how to identify your target market niche and develop your keyword strategy.

Week #2 – Take the time to refine your brand strategy, target market and keyword strategy!

Week #3 – Watch the webinars and create your Facebook personal profile, YouTube and Twitter accounts. Even if you have these accounts already up and running, you will still want to take the time to review these since they are focused on using these tools for business! Make sure that you are providing the right information on each account so that it is a balanced reflection of both you as the individual and you as the business owner.

Week #4 – Review the two webinars listed below which will help you create a rock solid reputation online, and help bullet proof your credibility as a businesowner that people can trust!

• Google Training Webinar – 20 Minutes To Top Page Google Rankings
• Yelp Training Webinar – The Top 5 Strategic Uses Of Online Reviews You Can’t Ignore

Your Second Month (all about prospecting)

Week #5 – Start reviewing the three Prospecting Training Webinars in the University. This will give you an extremely solid foundation to start generating new business leads!

Week #6-8 (part one) – Continue to refine your prospecting strategies and tactics as you put the University’s lessons into action. Make sure that you have hooked up with an accountability partner during this process. If you need one, we can help!

Week #6-8 (part two) – Start to build your blog. As you will learn in the training, this is the hub of your social media activity! You will find a complete Blog Training series for your review. This may take you past the first two months, but is well worth the effort!

FINAL NOTE: If you spend the time to dedicate to your success through social media marketing, you will find all-new ways to achieve growth for your business that you never even knew existed before. As you will find as you go thru our training…Your personal brand, influence and ability to find and convert prospects from anywhere, anytime will be easier to accomplish than ever before.

Click through to return to the Getting Started series home page.