Bobby Owsinski’s Social Media Promotion for Small Business and Entrepreneurs The Manual For Marketing Your Products or Your Business Online Social Media Promotion for Small Business and Entrepreneurs The Manual For Marketing Your Products And Business Online by Bobby Owsinski Published by: Bobby Owsinski Media Group 4109 West Burbank, Blvd. Burbank, CA 91505 © Bobby Owsinski 2013 ISBN 13: 978-0-9888391-4-4 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form and by any means graphic, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted in Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission to use text or information from this product, submit requests to [email protected]. Please note that much of this publication is based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. Although the author and publisher have made every reasonable attempt to achieve complete accuracy of the content in this Guide, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Also, you should use this information as you see fit, and at your own risk. Your particular situation may not be exactly suited to the examples illustrated herein; in fact, it's likely that they won't be the same, and you should adjust your use of the information and recommendations accordingly. Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if we use one of these terms. Finally, nothing in this Guide is intended to replace common sense, legal, medical or other professional advice, and is meant to inform and entertain the reader. To buy books in quantity for corporate use or incentives, call 818.588.6606 or email [email protected]. __________ Introduction Through the years, the ability to reach an audience quickly and cheaply has grown in ways unavailable to previous generations of small business owners and entrepreneurs. Not only do we live in an age where the resources and technical power available for creating a business is far greater than ever before, but the small business owner or entrepreneur also has new abilities in developing an audience for that business as well. In fact, a small business owner or an entrepreneur can now reach out directly to his business’s fans, followers, customers or clients, and they’re able to reach right back. What this means is that it’s now possible to communicate, promote, sell to and generally keep in touch with your customers and clients without the need for a middleman like was needed in the past. In order to do that, you need to use the many online tools available to you, like the various social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and the like) coupled with a website, blog and email list among other things. The problem is that all these tools at our disposal can be virtually useless, not to mention time-consuming, without a strategy. The whole premise of what I outline in Social Media Promotion for Small Business and Entrepreneurs is the use of social media for promotion, not just personal use. Personal use is casual while promotional use is professional, and that makes a big difference when it comes to your online approach and mindset. You’re not just reaching out to your family and friends, you’re communicating with customers and clients (although some may also be your family and friends). There’s a right way to do it, and there’s a lot more that goes into it than meets the eye. When it comes to using social media for promotion, the general idea is to keep the discourse professional (although it’s okay to vary from that occasionally), provide your clients and fans with the latest information about your business, and measure how well that exchange of information takes place. The measurement part is at once the easiest and the toughest of the three. There’s a lot of data available to you from all sorts of sources that you can’t get from traditional media, but evaluating that info to see just how well you’re doing isn’t always easy. Likewise, there’s a timing issue to social media that’s many times overlooked. It’s not only important how you communicate, but when you do it as well. For every online communication method, there are certain times during the day and week that you’ll most effectively reach the most people in and out of your network. This is one of the main issues in social media promotion and you’ll find quite a bit about the latest studies in this book that can prove quite helpful to your online strategy. Of course, the more information you have, the more efficient you become, which is important if you’re a creative person of any type. One of the problems with social media is that it can be a runaway train of time and energy if you’re not careful. Hopefully the information you find in this book will help you have more time to do the thing you do best and probably enjoy the most - create. Social Media Promotion for Small Business and Entrepreneurs looks at every area of your online life and shows you how to use it as a promotional tool. You’ll learn the ins and outs of services and features that you didn’t even know existed, and you’ll learn exactly how to use them to your benefit, as well as the latest concepts in using social media for promotion. So settle back and enjoy the book. You’ll find a lot of information in this one place that you won’t find anywhere else, and hopefully you’ll find it most helpful to the growth of your business. __________ Chapter 1 It’s Called Promotion There are a lot of books and articles that you can read that will provide some excellent information about using just about any social media service available online today. The trouble is, casually using a social network is not using it for promotion. Let’s say that again: Using Is Not Promotion Promotion requires a much different set of tactics, which we’ll cover in depth as we go along in the book. Not only are the methods different, but so is the mindset, since we’re not talking about any kind of promotion, we’re talking self- promotion, which can be singularly uncomfortable for many people. The Meaning Of Self-Promotion I grew up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania (population around 5,000) in a middle class family that believed in hard work as the means to get ahead in life. In my family (as well as many others in the area), you never unnecessarily talked about yourself with even the tinniest hint of self-satisfaction. If you were commended or received an award, it was expected that those outside the family would discover the fact through the natural buzz of people personally interacting, so there was no need to ever broadcast it yourself. To put it simply, self-promotion was the ultimate dirty word because it was somehow connected with an expanded ego. Self-promotion doesn’t have to be ego-induced bragging though, and that’s exactly what I mean in the context of your online presence or that of your business. It doesn’t require you posting how great you are, trying to sell yourself, or an exhibition of any kind of elevated self-esteem. Most of us hate that kind of behavior online or offline anyway, and the results are mostly negative as a result. That said, self-promotion using social media is about three things: communicating, interacting, and measuring. It’s more about telling your fans, friends, customers and followers the latest news about your business, rather than how cool it is because of those facts. It’s about letting your fans, clients and customers know you’re still around before you’re forgotten. It’s about informing them that your new product is being released instead of trying to sell it to them. It’s all about context. It’s not about you as much as it is about the information about you. That’s the first part of self-promotion. The second part of self-promotion is about them - your friends, fans, followers, clients and customers. It’s about you soliciting their opinions, answering their questions, listening to their views, and asking for their help. It’s not about you, it’s about us. We all move forward on this journey together. They move with you because there’s something they really like about you or identify with (hopefully your products or service). You help keep the process moving by providing as much information as you can about your journey along the way. The last part of self-promotion is measurement. This is something that could never be accomplished before in the detail it’s done online today. Every measurement about your audience is increasingly granular, and that can either cause analysis paralysis or provide a better picture of just who all those fans and followers are. The measurement stats can show how many times a page on your site was visited, how long the viewer stayed, who viewed your post on any social network, how the person found it, where they live, and what computer operating system they use, among many other things. It can get scary how much we can learn about a fan, customer or follower, or can be learned about us. Although this sounds ominous, the bottom line is that the more we know about our customers, fans and followers, the easier it is to give them what they want, nothing more or less. There are certain things they might love about your business, but if you’re unaware of what those thing are, you’re likely posting the wrong content, which can lead to online follower attrition. The measurement tools are easily available and they’re mostly free, it’s just up to you to use them in order to take advantage of their power. Why Fan Data Matters It's difficult to read a tech-related story these days without a reference to user data, metadata, or the latest popular term "Big Data" (large data sets controlled by mostly large companies), but there are a number of good reasons why this has become a major concern for entrepreneurs and businesses everywhere. The biggest reason is that the more data you have about your fans and customers, the more you can take advantage of it for promotion as a result. That’s because we’re moving into a new era of marketing and promotion. The future of marketing is micro-targeting. The more you know about your customers and the people following you online, the easier it will be to send them only the information that they care about. Why inform a customer in St. Louis of a sale that only applies to your retail store in Boston? You’d be a lot better off concentrating your efforts locally, and micro- targeting allows you to do that. What if you have a product that's aimed at your female customers in cold weather territories? Do you think the guys care much about it? Do you think your female customers in Florida and Texas care much about it? Micro-targeting allows you to adjust your campaign accordingly. And it makes measurement easier too. With a more precise user sample, it's much easier to tell if and how a campaign is actually working. If you shotgun a post to 3,000 subscribers to your mailing list and 15 respond, it looks like a response rate of only .5%, but if that same campaign was more precisely aimed at only 30 of those fans and you found that 12 responded, that's a whopping 40%. In the first example with a .5% response, you'd think that your campaign might have a serious flaw in it. In the more targeted second example, we can see that the same campaign worked smashingly well. It all depends on targeting the right fans in the first place. The old advertising days of "50% of advertising works. We just don't know which 50%," may soon be over, thanks to micro-targeting and better measurement techniques. It’s all part of social self-promotion. Lessons From The Music Business I’ve been in the music business all my life, first starting as a guitar player, then later graduating to playing on records in the studio, to making them as a recording engineer. I eventually became a producer of both music and television, working with some of the biggest names in the business along the way. One of the things that I learned early on is that in order to be successful in the music business, you’ve got to think like an entrepreneur. I’ve since gone on to teach thousands of musicians, engineers, songwriters, producers and music execs how to discover and develop their brands, how to think like an entrepreneur, and how to operate like a small business in my coaching programs, blogs, podcasts, and the 20+ books that I’ve written. People in the music business are artists at heart and resist anything business-related like the plague, but I’ve helped to get them over the hump when it comes to taking care of their careers in a way that they can grow and thrive. Just like any other business, marketing was much more difficult in the past since you were forced to work with the traditional media, mostly through a third party. Today a small business can reach its audience much faster, easier and cheaper through its online presence. In fact, the music business led the way in doing this way before other businesses took the plunge. What worked for them will also work for you. The process is no different, but you can benefit from that business sector being ahead of the curve. There’s been a lot of trial and error that you won’t have to go through as a result. A Personal Story Throughout this book I’ll be giving you some personal experiences that I’ve had with social media promotion. The first I’d like to provide can be found below in Figure 1.1, which is a picture of me on ABC’s 20/20 news show. Right after the second Obama inauguration, I was asked to come on the show as their “music and recording expert” to provide a definitive answer to whether Beyonce lip- synced the “National Anthem.” Figure 1.1: Bobby Owsinski on ABC’s 20/20