getting started with social networking

You wouldn't jump out of a plane without a parachute, don't create your business a Facebook account without knowing how to use it. ideal is a great resource for information on building and developing a social networking strategy. Before you get started with using social media, you need to understand the tools you'll be using, your starting point is going to be to secure your brand.

The first step of a successful social networking campaign is to grab your brand everywhere you can, regardless of whether or not you plan to use it. It's important that you have control of your identity all over the web. It's always better to have the username that you never use than to see someone else using it and regretting it.

Having a universal social network username is very important in building your brand and rapport with potential clients who may belong to multiple communities with you. You want them to know that you're the same company everywhere you represent yourself. For example, if we were to appear as idealthismarketing on one network and ideal8458 on another we are not clearly going to be representing ourselves as the same source of information.

Some potential sites to jump in and reserve your brand would be Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace, etc. You can check the availability of many sites and even register all at once at a site called knowem.

You should not jump out of the social networking plane until you know where your target landing zone is. You need to know what your goal with your campaign will be before you even get started. There can be many reasons for running a social media attack from creating more brand awareness, getting more traffic, finding out how your market views your brand, generating buzz on a particular product or service, etc. Once you know what you want out of it you need to know how you plan on measuring your social networking campaigns success.

Depending on your what your overall goal there are many benchmarks you can set for your campaign. First you need to identify your challenges, goals and concepts to determine how you will assign value to your progress. If you are looking to get feedback on your product you can measure that by levels of blog comments, or if you are looking to increase sales you can look at your campaigns conversion rates, increase page rank you could look at how many back links you are developing and so forth.

You need to know how you intend on measuring your goals before you get started or you are setting yourself up for failure and a lot of wasted time. Setting goals and recording data will help you implement changes in order to optimize your social networking progress and if the campaign is a valuable use of resources.

Just remember if you don't take the time to figure out your goals and you will measure success you will likely fail in social media. Hiring a professional like ideal with experience managing a social networking campaign can help you define your goals and become a cost effective way to reach them.

4 reasons your business should be blogging

Why should your business be blogging? Blogs are a great way to get regular and good quality content in front of your customers and search engines. They can be used to market to existing customers with regular updates as well as to attract prospective customers through their great SEO properties. And with today’s ever growing need for building a relationship with your customer blogs are a great tool in building your brand and developing a customer network. Here are 4 of the top reasons that your business NEEDS a blog.

Keeps your business in peoples mind.

Part of the reason for blogging and any other type of social network is to stay in the forefront of the customers mind. If you get people that subscribe to your blog (or facebook, twitter, etc.) they will receive updates when you put new information on. This is advantageous for branding your business as you will stay fresh in their mind.

Get More Traffic!

It is an undeniable fact that blogging will increase your traffic. According to information gathered in Top Rank and HubSpot studies businesses that blog average 55% more traffic than businesses that don’t. A couple more interesting facts, Companies that blog have an average of 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links than companies that don’t! Granted building up that many articles is going to take time, but blogs aren’t just a long term solution. According to the same surveys 94% of businesses reported seeing measurable benefits within 12 months of hiring a consulting firm to run their blog, and over 50% within 3 months!

Gather valuable information from your target audience.

Being part of any social network has its benefits with communication and blogs are no different. One often overlooked benefit to blogging is the value of using it as a social network. As your blog develops readers you will be able to use it as a way to gather their opinions though comments. You will gather opinions as they have them and you can also directly ask for feedback on particular services or products you are offering. This is invaluable to help you adjust your product to suit your consumer needs.

Blogging for SEO.

Blogging is a great way to improve your sites rankings within Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. The more quality content you have directing people to your site, the more likely there are to find and work with you as well as to feel comfortable that you have established your business as an industry expert. At {ideal}this we strive to implement all of our experience to make sure that your blog efforts are successful.