1 Know your voice.

Everything you post from your business page should “sound” like your business. For many small businesses, you, the owner, are the voice, so make sure what you say sounds like how your customer thinks about your business. Is your business fun or is it serious? Do you sound like an expert in your field? Just remember, in social media, your business now has a voice and what you say reflects on how people think and interact with you.

2 Time your content.

Think ahead. Time your content to what is important for the current time of the year. You don’t want to talk about Santa Claus in January, but you sure know people are interested in sales during that time of year. One other great tip is to head over to google.com/trends to see what is hot right now. You can even search keywords to see how the topics are trending.

3 Know your audience.

Why are they following you? Why does someone like your page? It’s because you are offering something your audience in interested in. Remember, in social media, and in all marketing in general, it’s about connecting with your current and future customer. Are you solving a need or providing a solution? Make sure you get to know your audience a bit more, then craft your content to engage with them.

4 Solve problems.

We all have problems, and we all look for answers. Help your audience solve the problems they have. If you are a clothing store, I’m sure you know we all look for a solution when we get a tear in our shirt, so how do we repair that? Just a simple example of thinking about the problems that your audience has, that’s within your business category, so go ahead and provide some solutions. They’ll not only thank you, but most likely share the solution with their network of friends as well.

5 Be true.

We are human, and now with social media, your brand has a personality as well. Don’t be fake with content, be real. Your brand also has a point of view, and hopefully one that resonates with your audience. Your audience will sniff out if you’re pretending. But if you’re fun, honest and relevant, they’re going to recommend you to their friends. Isn’t that what social media’s all about? Once again, Happy Good Friday. We hope these tips give you some “good” ideas. Maybe next week we’ll focus on being bad – but in a good way (of course). Until then!

Google Places

This is a big one.  Think about how many people use Google Maps for directions to your business (or to find out where it is).  Entice the heck out of them with a sweet deal!  Get bodies in the door my friends!

How to create an Offer on Google Places

Bing Local

Same idea here.  Your customers are looking for you on Bing Local.  Reward them with a deal.

How to create a Deal on Bing Business Portal

Yahoo! Local

If you’d like to promote deals on your Yahoo! page, you can upgrade to a Premium account.  We don’t think this is necessary.  Feel free to simply click here and learn how to update your basic (free) page.  That way you can let your customers know about things happening at your physical location or on your website – Come in for a spring sale this weekend!

Foursquare

What a great place to do deals.  Foursquare has a deal for almost every type of situation: reward new customers, reward loyoal customers, reward groups – the list goes on.

Check them all out here.

Facebook

Not to be confused with the Groupon-type service that’s been discontinued, the 800-pound gorilla of Social Media lets you post deals for individuals, groups – even deals to support charities.

Here’s a great white-paper on how to post, and best practices.

Yelp

Yelp no longer offers free deals (they have gone to a Groupon-type model) but they do still offer free Check-In offers (to reward your customers that check-in on their phones).  Check out this cool little video to see how.

Citysearch

Another listing service.  Make your page stand out from the crowd.  Click here, then log-in and you will be able to add an offer for free.

Happy posting – let us know on our Facebook Page how it goes!

Source

Here is a nice little article on Mashable about the Google +1 button.  As you’ll see – it’s different than the Facebook Like button because it does not post the content directly to the user’s profile.  However – it will help in search as the more people that “plus one” something, especially people in a user’s network – the greater chance they’ll click on it.

See the link here for the full story.

And we can understand why! Our inboxes are bursting at the seams, we don’t have time, it’s not interactive, yada yada yada. And we agree! However, email marketing – now more than ever – has reason to wipe off the tears and soldier on!

Think about your email marketing not as a full story you’re giving your customer, but rather a quick tease to get them to go somewhere else. Where else? Depends on your business – if you’re a restaurant, the new spring menu. If you’re a store, your Facebook page to comment on that pictures you took at Fashion Week.

It’s easy to fall in the trap of thinking it’s either Email Marketing (bad) or Social Media (good). It’s not! Use both, my friends.

Email Marketing companies (including our favorite, which we use – MailChimp) have wised up to this fact, and are including more and more Social features. For example:

• Social Media Sign-Up Forms
• Auto-tweeting or Posting to Facebook of your email
• Ability to quickly and easily share the content of an email

And more. For a really interesting article on both how and how well Small to Mid-Sized Businesses are using Email Marketing, see this article, from one of our favorite sites, Marketing Profs.

Oh, and while you’re at it – we practice what we preach. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter here.

Happy reading, and happy sending -

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be rolling out our new Website product – it will incorporate a full Website, Social Networks and Mobile Site in an easy, intuitive package. It is so cool. Be on the lookout for some changes to multibrain.net as we release the full details.

Still, it’s fun to throw out some jaw-dropping numbers from time to time, isn’t it?

Last night, according to Twitter, during the last three minutes of the SuperBowl – there were 10,000 tweets – per second.

What were all those tweets about? Which Manning brother is better? Gisele’s outfit? We can’t tell you, but we can say that Twitter is the place to go to share opinions and to hear reactions to massive events all around the world.

See the source article on TechCrunch here.

Here‘s the original post from TechCrunch about the IPO.

And an interesting follow-up article is here – so many people wanted to check out the details the SEC website crashed!

Moneytime!