You’ve all heard about Social Media and been told “You must be on Facebook”, but how do you do it?

This course will walk you through step by step setting up your own Facebook Business page on the laptop computers supplied and provide you with skills on how to use it as an effective marketing tool.

At the end of the course you will have a working Facebook business page.

The course will consist of the following:

1. Introduction – What is Facebook, how it works and example of successful Facebook marketing.

2. Facebook Pages 101 – The difference between, profiles, pages and groups.

3. Setting up your page – A live walk though setting your own Facebook page.

4. Promoting your page – Letting people know about your Facebook page.

5. Getting the most out of your page – Encouraging discussion and analytics.

The course is only $295 to Peel Chamber of Commerce and Industry members ($350 for non members). The cost is per business and you may bring two people along.

The Small Business Smart Business Training Voucher offers businesses up to $200 to access business training.

Using the $200.00 training voucher means that a majority of the cost of this course is REFUNDED to businesses by the government.

The cost of this seminar is $295.00
The Government refund to the business $195.00
BUSINESSES OWN FINANCIAL INVESTMENT IS: $100.00

For more information on the Training Vouchers contact the Small Business Centre – manager@sbcpeel.com.au

Limited numbers of only 15 bookings per session for only 2 sessions so don’t miss out.

Where: Peel Small Business Centre

Date: Thursday 12th and 19th Oct 10am – 12pm

For bookings contact the Peel Chamber of Commerce and Industry – admin@peelcci.com.au

Want to know how to use video to harness the power of social media?

On Wednesday the 22nd September at Forte Mandurah Quays Resort I’ll be hosting a seminar for the Professional Women’s Network on “How to use YouTube to enhance SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and drive more traffic to your website.

The PWN has opened its doors up to the men again so invite your partners, bosses, husbands and friends to this “too good to miss” event.

Here’s what you can look forward to:
1. Introduction – Samples of successful YouTube campaigns and channels
2. Choosing your topics – what do your customers want to see?
3. Shooting your video – How to make a great 2 min video
4. Creating you own YouTube Channel – Where you will host your epic productions
4. Optimising for SEO – (This is where the power is!)
5. Building a base of viewers – Creative ways to “seed” your video
6. Embedding videos into your website and social media – Sharing the video and creating links.

$15 for Chamber Members, $20 for Non Members
Includes canapés – drinks can be ordered from the bar.

Bookings are essential.

Please book by emailing paulinebright@actioncoach.com
OR phone Pauline Bright on 0413 739196

Bouvard Cruises in Mandurah started their journey down the Social Media marketing road late last year by firstly creating a Facebook business page closely followed by a blog called “Mandurah’s Dolphin Blog”, a YouTube Channel and a Twitter account. The strategy was to use the blog to record sightings using photos and videos then use their Facebook and Twitter pages to share the information and drive traffic to their website.

The Rewards

10 months later and they are now seeing the rewards. Over the 10 month period the Dolphin Blog has become the highest referring website for sending visitors to the Bouvard Cruises website, followed by Experience Perth then their Facebook page. They have seen a 72% increase in visitors to their site since last year and it’s still climbing!

But it gets better!

Using Google Analytics to monitor traffic to their website we’ve seen in the last 3 months their Facebook page has overtaken the Dolphin Blog as their highest referring website, it actually referred 3 times as much traffic as their second referring website. In fact their Facebook page sent more visitors to their website in the last month than the combined total of their next 8 referring sites! As far as traffic sources go only Google is higher than their Facebook page!

So what does this tell us?

A social media strategy used effectively drives traffic to your website.
A Facebook page is a powerful marketing tool. Combine it with a blog for more power.
If you don’t have a Facebook page or a blog or a social media strategy… you are missing out.
If you have a Facebook page and a blog keep using it.
Make more postings, monitor them daily and interact with your customers who make posts and replies.
Make it part of your daily office marketing routine to check your Facebook page first thing every morning and again last thing in the afternoon. Make at least 1-2 post a week and make sure respond to yours fans posts and questions.
Most importantly stick at it!

This all this proves that a social media campaign involving a clear strategy is a very powerful marketing tool that drives customers to your website. Just ask Rod!

Just recently I’ve been talking with a few of my clients about the benefits of email marketing and using it in combination with their social media strategy. We were discussing how valuable their email databases were and that they are the most powerful marketing tool they have at their disposal and if used properly with social media can bring huge returns.

So I thought I would share this post I came across on Hubspot that discusses this very topic, it’s a good read.

The following is a guest post from Amy Garland, marketing manager at Blue Sky Factory.

Social media is on the minds of marketers everywhere. With its increasing popularity, marketers are thinking, “We need to be on Twitter! Let’s create a Facebook fan page! Crank out the viral videos!” Unfortunately, this often has no strategy behind it, and organizations are flying blind on the social web. While social media isn’t “killing” email like some people seem to think, it is causing email marketing to be ignored.

Email marketing is the digital glue that holds the social web together. It’s the currency of all accounts, the only common denominator of all social networking sites. You can’t sign up for an account on a social media site without an email address, and each one has an email component (e.g. you receive Facebook friend and LinkedIn connection requests through email). Unfortunately, many marketers are forgetting about email marketing as a key component to online marketing and new media.

So why should you, as a marketer, care about email? I’ll let the following numbers speak for themselves.

• Email marketing returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009, and is expected to return $42.08 for every dollar spent on it in 2010. (Direct Marketing Association)

• 89% of retailers cited email is the most mentioned successful tactic overall. (Forrester Research and Shop.org’s Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report)

• 67% of subscribers say they’ve purchased products offline as a direct result of receiving an email from a retail company. (Epsilon – 2009 Report)

These are some convincing numbers, but what exactly is it about email marketing that provides such a high ROI and positive response from subscribers?

It’s permission-based. Well, it should be permission-based. (On a recent webinar, I heard Mike Volpe, vice president of marketing for HubSpot, say email marketing is like the phone; it can be used for good or evil. This statement is sad, but often true.) If you grow your list organically and subscribers have given you explicit consent to communicate with them via email, then you have an audience that is asking for information from you. (Sounds like a little something called inbound marketing, huh?) If your subscribers have asked to receive your emails, then they’re much more likely to open, click-through, and share your emails, ultimately resulting in a higher ROI.

It’s subscriber-driven. One of the best things about email marketing is that your subscribers tell you what they want from you, how often they want it, and in what form (e.g. newsletter, product promotions, or upcoming webinar notifications). This information can be collected at the opt-in, through subscriber preferences, or with a periodic survey sent to your email recipients. By being able to choose how they receive your information, subscribers are more likely to engage with your emails. Engagement in itself gives feedback with each send. By using your email platform’s reporting tools, you know how your campaign performs by looking at metrics including opens, click-throughs, conversions, and even unsubscribe rates.

It’s easy. Yes, folks, email marketing is easy. They key to email marketing is sending timely, targeted, valuable emails to subscribers who have asked for them. It’s not difficult to provide your audience with relevant emails based on their preferences, past purchases, activity, etc. Segmenting your database and taking a few extra steps to do this will drive more subscriber engagement and more purchases.

Now don’t get the wrong idea here. I’m not saying you should solely focus on email and ignore social media. These two channels can and should be used together, not only with tools like Share with Your Network (SWYN), but also by repurposing the content, cross-promoting the channels, and cross-pollinating your audience. More on this in a future blog post, but for now, I’ll leave the email and social media topic with these statistics:

• 75% of daily social media users said email is the best way for companies to communicate with them, compared to 65% of all email users. (MarketingSherpa – 2010)

• 49% of Twitter users said they made an online purchase because of an email, compared to 33% of all email users. (MarketingSherpa – 2010)

Email and social media are like peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, milk and cookies, the list goes on. They are simply better together.

Take a step back and think about your online marketing strategy and campaigns. Are you using email marketing to its full potential? If not, how can you better use this channel to engage your audience?

Amy Garland is the marketing manager at Blue Sky Factory, a Baltimore-based email service provider. Follow Amy on Twitter: @amygarland.

I was just discussing with a friend the benefits of blogging and how it makes your website dynamic and more enticing to customers and search engines. Our talk reminded me of this post by Hubspot that I came across recently.

Many companies have useful content on their websites, but having good content is no longer enough.

The problem with many companies is not that they are incapable of entering the content mindset. It’s that they stop having this mindset once they launch their site.

Websites are static, but blogs are dynamic. All these companies need to do is turn their static content into dynamic content.

3 Reasons Why Your Website Content Should be Dynamic

1. It Keeps Your Visitors Interested

You want people to have a reason to come back to your website. If your website content is static, visitors can just browse your site once and they’re done. But if you’re putting out new content all the time, they have reason to come back. And if your content is truly interesting, they’ll even subscribe to your updates via RSS or e-mail and refer it to others.

2. More Pages = More SEO Juice

Each blog post is a new page that search engines see, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Packing as much content as possible into a just few pages is not an effective search engine optimization strategy.

3. Incentive to Create More Content

After companies pack their websites with useful content, they often avoid adding new content to their sites. If you don’t have a blog, adding more content means redesigning the site and complicating the layout.

Shouldn’t you put yourself in a position that encourages you to provide more useful information to your site visitors?

Presenting the dynamic parts of your site in a blog will help you gain followers, improve your SEO, and encourage you to produce more useful content for your site visitors.

Your website should contain some information about your company, outside of your blog. However, this should be reserved for basic information that does not change often. The information that does change, such as news, offerings and events should be in a blog.

Many companies are already doing the right thing by offering useful content. They just need to make the change from presenting information in a static way to doing so dynamically through a blog.

This blog post is courtisy of Hubspot

Have you ever wondered if you should get a Facebook page for your business? Not sure how it works or how it can help your business? Here is a great video showing how Facebook makes it easier for businesses and brands to connect with their consumers.

While Social Media is all the talk right now and everyone is saying you must be on it, knowing what it can and cannot do is vitally important to your marketing strategy. You should always enter anything with your eys wide open so you wont be disappointed. Knowing what it can’t do will help you to unleash it’s full potential.

This article was posted on Mind Sprout Marketing Blog

Social Media Can’t…

Replace A Marketing Strategy
Social media is powerful, but it isn’t a stand-alone substitute for a marketing strategy. Effective marketing strategies can and should incorporate social media elements. However, simply launching a StumbleUpon account or Facebook Page isn’t going to cut it.

Deliver Instantaneous Success
Creating a Twitter account and expecting a few tweets to have followers flocking to you is unrealistic and highly improbable. Social media is a marathon, not a race and it takes time to cultivate a presence and following. Be patient with social media and you’ll be generously rewarded in return.

Guarantee Influence
Just because you believe that your business, product or service may be heads above the rest, doesn’t mean that others will. Social media is a jungle and it takes an expert guide to navigate the landscape. But even the most seasoned social media consultants can’t generate an interest if the masses don’t care.

Can’t Save A Sinking Ship
If a brand or business is going down, implementing a social media campaign isn’t going to make much of a dent in repairing the damage. Remember, transparency is critical with social media. Neglecting to be open an honest with your audience can permanently tarnish your reputation.

Be One Person’s Responsibility
When a business becomes involved with social media, each employee becomes that company’s social media ambassador. It’s up to everyone to promote the brand, not just the social media consultant. Social networking can greatly enhance social media efforts and it’s important to bolster initiatives by getting involved in positive and meaningful ways.

Social media isn’t a miracle worker, but it’s a definite must-have component for any good marketing strategy.

The original video was first released in August last year and has been viewed over 1.8 million times. It was arguably one of the best social media videos ever. It turns out things are changing so rapidly in the Social Media world that in only 9 months the statistics are outdated so creator Erik Qualman of Socialnomics has updated and refreshed the video….. and here it is!

This video is a fantastic resource to explain the benefits of Social Media and what the future holds for us in business. If the exponential growth in the last 9 months is any indication and the adoption of Social Media to come, expect version 3 to be coming out very soon!

Spread the word my friends, if your business doesn’t embrace Social Media what will happen to it?

Here is a great video showing the ROI of Social Media, and yes they have a name for it now…. Socialnomics!

There have been 4 major events this past year that have changed the importance and the effectiveness of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
1) Yahoo & Google announced that they no longer use key words and meta tags in their searches that effect search engine rankings.
2) Facebook passed Google as the most visited website on the Internet.
3) The phrase “Facebook” became the most searched word typed into search engines.
4) Google created their own social networking site, Buzz.

SEO is still important but not as important now as SMO (Social Media Optimisation). With Facebook recently overtaking Google as the most visited website on the internet shows that people using the Internet are the ones that are dictating where it’s future is heading and what it’s going to be used for. Searching for information will still be a part of life on the Internet, but entertainment, socialising and sharing experiences is what most users are now looking for and doing online. And the scramble is now on to take advantage of this shift.

Brands and companies need to have a social media presence. This shows that it’s now more important for brands and companies to have their message on social media, it’s now not good enough what companies and businesses write about themselves on their own website, it’s what others are saying about them and how their message is being spread through social media.

This ‘shifting of the cheese’ shows that users of the Internet are the ones that are unconsciously but effectively controlling and designing the way the the internet will be used in the future and how we will interact with it.

Businesses must now combine both SEO and SMO if they wish to be found and have an effective online presence or they run the risk of not getting their message heard.