This year on Valentine’s Day, people are taking full advantage of all that social media has to offer to build on their special relationships.

What does Valentine’s Day have to do with social media? What they have in common is relationships. Social media is about building relationships. Valentine’s Day is about paying attention to relationships and strengthening relationship bonds. There are several important aspects of social media relationships that apply to all relationships: listening (knowing what your clients are saying about you), empathizing (connecting with your clients and trying to understand why they feel the way that they do), being transparent (honesty builds trust and without trust, your business will not succeed), showing appreciation (express how much you value your clients), and being passionate (long-lasting and valuable relationships are filled with passion, dedication, and hard work).

People use social networks to connect with people with whom they have existing relationships. In the process, they also form new relationships. Social networks allow you to share media and to customize your look and feel online. People can form online groups that consist of people who all share common interests. Special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, create a whirlwind of activity on social networks. People are looking for the perfect gift for that special person or for themselves.

Searching online for Valentine’s Day ideas produces a huge volume of new articles, social networking suggestions, commercial offerings, and live twitter feeds. Before social media was available, the standard flowers and chocolates were gratefully accepted. Now, social media is ensuring that everyone tries to get more creative and exciting gifts to show how much they care. In today’s difficult economy, people are trying to be generous without hurting themselves financially.

Here are some fun gifts and gift ideas for your sweetheart using social media:

• Create a personalized Facebook ad—You can create an ad that will only be seen by one user. You can make it as special as you want without any fear that you are sharing it with the whole world.
• Upload a karaoke cover of your song on YouTube—It will be considered very romantic if you sing a song for your sweetheart in a room full of people. In fact, in this case, you will be singing in front of the entire World Wide Web. Share your recording on social media channels so that it is perfectly clear who your sweetheart is.
• Schedule new @replies by the hour through HootSuite—Send a new reason for loving him or her every hour for 24 hours. You can set it all up in advance and HootSuite will automatically work its magic.
• Buy a generous Facebook gift (for charity)—Facebook’s online gift shop has an entire collection of gifts for charity. Whatever you spend will go to the charitable organization of your choice.
• Use the Sweethearts iPhone app to share personalized Sweethearts candies via Twitter—You can create, order and share Sweethearts with creative and special messages.

Of course, Valentine’s Day gifts are not the only things that are dominating the social media world. Ideas for celebrating Valentine’s Day cards, dates, surprises, proposals and other inventive ways to light a fire in a relationship or add something different and sweet to a friendship are all around us. In addition to gifts and ideas on how to celebrate, people are making plans to do something special within their budget.

Many popular sites, including Amazon and Oprah, have released lists of affordable gift ideas. Most websites offer a filter where items can be sorted by price. If you don’t want to guess what your sweetheart would like, Amazon also offers a wish list option where people can choose what they want, which avoids the recipient being disappointed as well as the giver not having to stress over whether he or she has bought the perfect gift.

For those people who find Valentine’s Day annoying, there are humorous gift online, such as fun things to do if you are single and broken-heart cookies. There is also a list online of the top worst Valentine’s Day gift ideas along with a list of the most unoriginal ideas and the worst Valentine’s Day dates.

With social media continuing to be a networking and economic giant, nobody will be left with a bad Valentine’s Day gift this year. Whether you love or hate the holiday, there is something that will please everyone. You should definitely take advantage of social media this Valentine’s Day, whether the result is a feeling of softness and sentimentality or amusement. In any case, a whole world full of possible gift ideas is open to you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You might also like:

1. How to Use Social Media Effectively
2. Key Strategies for Implementing Social Media Marketing
3. Reflecting on Social Media Marketing in 2009

Simply by being on social media sites does not necessarily mean that you are using them effectively. The following is a list of social media red flags as far as proper and effective use is concerned:

Your business and personal Facebook friends are one and the same

As with all of the social media sites, you should consider quality over quantity when using Facebook. There is a high probability that you have your own real customers on Facebook and don’t have to use your personal connections as a substitute. Many businesses don’t put enough emphasis on proactively promoting their social media sites to focus on their customers and to strengthen their relationships with those customers.

Your Twitter page contains only newsfeeds

Social media is mostly about interactions among people and one-to-one contact. There should be some personality in your Twitter discussions, not just business-like, automated responses that don’t feel human. With that said, it is certainly appropriate to have a valuable mix of offerings on your Twitter page.

You have passed your social media responsibilities onto others

If you want to have a successful marketing campaign, you need to integrate it through your entire business. In order to accomplish this, everyone in your business needs to opt in. Many top-level business people feel that they don’t need to be involved with social media and have absolutely no knowledge of how to use the various sites or why they are so important. You don’t want one of your higher ups communicating to outside people that your company is on “MyFace” or “Spacebook”!

You feel as though your social media profile is ineffective

Social media is a marketing tool, even though it also works in areas like search engine optimization (SEO) and public relations. Some people may have lost site of the fact that the purpose of marketing (no matter which form it is in) is to generate sales. With that in mind, social media should be connected to business objectives. Those business objectives should generate revenue. One of the great advantages of social media over traditional marketing is that you can track statistics. Those statistics help you to calculate your return on investment (ROI).

You tried to use social media and it didn’t work for you

Maybe you feel as though social media dilutes your branding message. Maybe you feel that it is not a perfect fit for your business. Most likely, the reality is that you aren’t really adept at using social media and you didn’t properly integrate it into your marketing campaign. Possibly, after a few tries, you gave up on using it and walked away. You are missing out on a great deal of potential business opportunities if you don’t engage in social media. Among other things, being connected will help you to get into the customer’s head, which is vital for the ultimate success of your business.

Conclusion

If you are using social media effectively, that means that you are using an intelligent strategy that is tied to very real objectives and that strategy is carried out consistently over a long period of time. Hopefully, the advice given here makes sense for you and your business and it will help you to cultivate new relationships with potential customers as well as continuing to strengthen the relationships that you already have with your existing customers.

We are pleased to provide you the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You might also like:

1. Reflecting on Social Media Marketing in 2009
2. Key Strategies for Implementing Social Media Marketing
3. Retailers Hit the Mark With Social Media This Holiday Season

2009 was a great year for social media marketing and how far we have come. There are so many success stories to be proud of and to celebrate.

At the beginning of the year, social media was only understood and used by a select few. Now that we are at the end of 2009, there is a huge amount of buzz around Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, and most companies are trying to figure out how they are going to use social media to their benefit or to improve on how they are currently using those sites.

The leap from traditional marketing to social media marketing is truly profound. Businesses were and still are hungry to get involved with this new and exciting marketing and the seemingly endless possibilities that are presented.

The big question surrounding social media marketing has always been, “how are sales converted?” Everyone wants to know that. It is important to remember that social media is not a sales tool. It is a marketing tool. Social media marketing can increase the likelihood of a sale, just like any other well thought-out marketing campaign. However, you still need a quality sales person to close the sale.

As with any marketing campaign, there are 3 simple principles that must exist in order to ensure success: awareness, interest, and sale. The marketing effort creates awareness and interest in the goods and services and the salesperson closes the sale.

Let’s look at awareness in a little more depth. It has been said many times that any publicity is good publicity. Gaining awareness is the Holy Grail of marketing professionals. There can be occasions when negative publicity doesn’t have a positive impact on brand awareness. However, in the majority of cases, people noticing and believing in a brand leads to increased sales.

Along with awareness (and following closely behind) is interest. Once customers are aware of a product or service, they will be interested in it. The difficult part is to get them interested to the point of wanting to buy it. Of course, that ties in with the skill of the salesperson.

An important element of social media marketing (as is also the case with traditional marketing) is being able to measure the value that it brings. Return on investment (ROI) is very important. Quantifying the value of the marketing efforts must be measured in terms of increasing the probability of closing of the sales, while reducing the time that it takes to close the sales.

There are several contributing factors that link social media marketing (and marketing in general) with successful sales. Some examples are new product releases, new channels, new features, and new sales team members. All of these factors can have a positive impact on increasing sales. Marketing generates leads and influences sales.

With social media marketing, we want to get the customer’s attention, attract them to our offerings, have them to prefer our products and services over anyone else’s, want them to become our loyal followers, and want them to promote our products and service to others.

As exciting as the emergence of (or coming of age, if you will) social media has been in 2009, it will be even more exciting in 2010. All companies will want to get more and more involved. There are tricks, tips, and wisdom available that can help small businesses to increase their brand awareness and engage their targeted customers. There are many opportunities and challenges that will be presented for all businesses in 2010. Business owners would be foolish if they didn’t take advantage of them.

We are pleased to provide you the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You might also like:

1. Key Strategies for Implementing Social Media Marketing
2. What Social Media Marketing Can Do for Your Business
3. Social Media Marketing: What Is It?

• Start Social Media Marketing right away. If you don’t begin leveraging social media websites to promote your business, and, especially, if your competition is already doing so, your business could be negatively impacted.

• Dedicate some time to Social Media Marketing. You must either put the time in yourself for Social Media Marketing or outsource the work by hiring an expert to do it for you. This should be a person who knows the ins and outs of social networking.

• Create the right impression. Online networking has reached a new level and you need to show your networking savvy by creating a more lasting impression on the readers. This will result in further opportunities and, ultimately, new clients.

• Maintain a level of professionalism in your Social Media Marketing writing. Professional behavior should be the norm, especially for business social media writing. Prospective employers, prospective clients, current clients, and anyone who wants to look you up, can and will. Once you’ve put something out there, it is out there, and you will be held responsible for what is presented.

• Frequency matters just as much as content: Blogging once a month or writing a tweet once every week or posting a FaceBook update once every other day will not significantly affect your visibility. All marketing activities, including online marketing, require frequency, consistency, and long-term effort.

You might also like:

1. What Social Media Marketing Can Do for Your Business
2. Using Social Media to Promote Your Business
3. Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

In an era of tweets, pokes and friend requests, keeping viewers attention to your Web site, which may not have features such as these, can be challenging. But learning how to use social media can be beneficial to your Web site and company in bringing traffic to your site and viewers interested in your products.

The A, B, C’s (or F, M, T’s) of Social Media
Facebook: Facebook has quickly grown to be one of the most used and most influential forms of social media. If you are hoping to master only one form of social media, I strongly suggest Facebook. It originated in the early 2000s as a social tool for college students, who were separated from their hometown friends or perhaps looking to meet new friends, to keep in touch. Originally, you needed an accredited college or university e-mail address to even log on to the site. Shortly after that, it expanded, allowing community colleges to join the network and soon, it expanded even more to what it is today, allowing adults, high school students and basically anyone who wants to be on Facebook to do so.

MySpace: MySpace was one of the very first social networking Web sites. My Space allows its users to not only to communicate through postings on each other’s pages, but to share music and other forms of media as well. Once upon a time,  MySpace was not strictly monitored and became the subject of many legal debates about the dangers of social networking with strangers and child abuse via the Internet. Since then, MySpace has become a lot more restricted, allowing its users to register their profiles as "private" so that only their friends, whom they must accept personally, can view their profile. There are also now age restrictions, as well as content restrictions like on any other Web site, that apply to MySpace.

Twitter: Twitter is a new form of social medium that was developed not only as a social networking tool for its users to use at home, from their computers, but for the BlackBerry generation, or Gen. B as I like to call it, to use from their cell phones. While Twitter does not have as many features as Facebook or MySpace, the basic premise is that from the Web site, users are able to update short posts about what they are doing, called a "tweet." Someone who is following you on Twitter can then see your tweet, along with all the tweets from people they are following, on their home page.

So how can I make this work for me?
By taking advantage of these forms of social media, which are free of charge to use, you are allowing yourself to spread the word about you or your company. Joining these networks, and then obtaining as many "friends" as possible, allows you to keep your company’s name fresh not only in the minds of people who are familiar with your company, but those who are not as well. As often as you update your social networking pages is as often as your name pops up on their screen. Consider it free advertising that you can do from your own home on a daily basis with minimal effort.

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