How to promote your business during the holiday season 2015?
October is one month of the year where promoting certain products becomes more important than at any other time of the year. There are special sales days and of course the winter holiday season. If you have followed our series “Promoting your business online” you may have found some useful tips and tricks. If you may have misses an article let us provide you with an overview. In our series we have published the following article:
Promoting your business online: Website
Promoting your business online: Online Marketing
Promoting your business online: Website Structure
Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
Promoting your business online: Social Media
Promoting your business online: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Promoting your business online: Blogging
Promoting your business online: Facebook
Promoting your business online: Twitter
Promoting your business online: LinkedIn
Promoting your business online: Social Media Advertisement
In the following weeks we would like to follow up our series with additional posts starting with “Social Media Management” followed by “Social Media Management Tools”
If you are located in Vancouver and like to learn more about promoting your business online, we offer our Online Advertisement Seminar again and would be happy to welcome you in our consultation location. More information about our seminars can be found via the event list link or simply by clicking here https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
But unfortunately the upcoming holiday season also attracts those how like to find ways to trick you into providing your money to them. Those who will try to steal your identity and credit card information. Just like last year we have also for this year planed to host some events regarding Internet Security. We offered last year two different seminars with overlapping topics and combined the two into one seminar we like to call Internet Safety Seminar. You can find the seminar details at our event list or by clicking this link: https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
To learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Twitter
Twitter can be a challenging social media platform, but also one of the most beneficial for your business. With only 140 characters per message, Twitter is certainly one of the fastest social media platforms. We experienced that many small business owners had difficulties getting into Twitter, just because of the character limitation. But with the right strategy Twitter can become a fantastic tool. Today we would like to post some of the first questions we get asked when we introduce Twitter to new clients.
Why using Twitter?
Twitter can be a very powerful tool when promoting your business, services, products or events. You can update your audience on Twitter more often than on other platforms and this can be a huge advantage. But be careful not to tweet to much or you will loose your audience faster than you were able to build one.
How often should you tweet?
It does of course depend on the nature of your business, your current situation and also a bit on the tweets you are sending out. General speaking you want to keep the updates relevant and shouldn’t tweet to many updates in a short period of time. You may find yourself in a situation where you will tweet more on one day than another, which is absolutely fine. If you are using Twitter to promote your business, services, products or your event try to schedule tweets so you can have them send out at different times. There are many tools available and we would be happy to assist you finding the right tools for you.
Who to follow?
When searching the internet for this question you will find some posts where you will get the advise that a good strategy to get more followers is to follow people back who started following you. But we think you should follow only those accounts that are relevant for you. After all your Twitter Newsfeed should be relevant to you. It is of course advisable to check out new followers once in a while to see if they have updates you like.
In our opinion it is more important to interact with your audience than trying to get more followers. Having an active community should be your goal. Providing updates relevant to your audience and to interact is what will help you grow a healthy follower base.
With our series Promoting your business online we try to give you an overview what you may want to check out. In future posts we also would like to get into more detail for certain subjects. You can contact us if you have questions and we will do our best to answer them.
If you like to learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below:
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Social Media
Social Media became in the last couple years more and more important also in regards of promoting your business online. With so many platforms to choose from it is understandable that especially newcomers can feel a little overwhelmed. Today we would like to post a few general questions business owners often have and answer them.
Why should I use Social Media to promote my business?
There are many reasons to use social media to promote your organization. One very important is transparency. This may sound wired but this is actually one of the most important reasons especially for new businesses. Just imagine you find a product on a website you have never heard of, provided by a company you don’t know. Would you give them your address and credit card details without hesitation? Now imagine you find the same company on Facebook and see that they have a lot of fans plus a lot of great reviews. It is now so much easier to trust them. If the same company has not only Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube and some other accounts were they are actively post and interact with their audience you will feel much more comfortable to use their website.
Another reason for using Social Media is feedback. As soon as you have build an audience you can ask them for feedback. For example: You have a bakery and your blueberry muffins are the best. Now you feel it is time to introduce muffins with a different flavour, but before you go and buy the ingredients you can ask your customers if they would like to buy them. And later you can even ask them how they liked them.
Last but not least you can use various social media platforms to advertise. Depending on the platform you may be able to place a banner, text or even video ad. We compared text, banner and video ads in our post Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
Should I use every single platform?
Well, it doesn’t hurt if you secure an account with the mayor platforms, just in case you want to use them later. However, if you don’t use a platform frequently you shouldn’t mention it on your website nor encouraging people to follow you when you know you won’t use it.
Which platforms are best for my business?
General speaking you may want to have a Blog and a Facebook Page, even if you are a B2B business, a LinkedIn Page might also be a good idea. We know some business owners who really like using Twitter, while others don’t know how. Google Plus and YouTube are also great platforms and there are of course various location based services such as Foursquare and Yelp you want to check out, especially if you are a restaurant or pub owner. Depending on the nature of your business you may want to plan which platform to concentrate on and which you can keep for later. In our free consultations we help you to figure out which one might be best for you.
Social Media Expert vs Do It Yourself…
This is not easy to answer. Some business owners love to use social media and to update their audience while others prefer to leave it to an expert. In our consultation we often bring up the example of using an accountant or doing accounting on your own. Some may find it easy and do not want to use an accountant while others prefer to have one. It is up to you what you feel is best.
How much does it cost to have an agency managing my social media needs?
It largely depends on the kind of platforms you want to use, the amount of updates you would like to provide to your audience and also how many platforms the agency has to manage for you. Another factor is if you need someone for setting up the account as well as your goals. Many of our clients like to combine related services such as Social Media Management and Social Media Advertisement.
All our packages are tailor made, this is why we offer free consultations to get to know you, your goals, your needs as well as budget. We also offer flexible packages so you can increase, decrease or even pause our services depending on your current situation. To learn more about us feel free to follow the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
The teccrab 2013 Online Marketing and Social Media Management Seminar
Promoting your product and services can be challenging. For many small businesses and startups the internet seems to be a good and cheap way to do advertising. But before investing a lot of money in the wrong platform, you should know a bit more about the many different ways to promote your business, product and services online. Often a combination of more than one platform leads to a higher success than just putting everything into one online advertisement campaign.
Our weekend seminar is designed to help you to find out which platform is the best for your business. We will talk about Online Marketing in general and also talk about Social Media integration into your Online Marketing campaign. To secure that you will get the most out of our seminar we keep our groups small, only a max of 10 participant per weekend. We also decided to offer this amazing two day seminar for a very discounted price. Only $129.00 for two full days.
Included are the following topics:
Online Marketing
We will talk about Online Marketing in general. Mention the most popular platforms to promote your business, products, services or events online. Plus talk about possible combinations.
SEO and SEM
You may have heard a lot about those two. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM for Search Engine Marketing, but what does it mean? We hope we can help to get a bit more light on this subject for you in our seminar.
Blogging
In our experience Blogging is especially for small businesses a great way to inform customers about your business, products, services, special offers and events. A Blog can be a very powerful tool to help you reaching your goals, even with a very low budget.
Keywords / Tags
To help your customers finding your Blog or website you will need to add keywords so that your site pops up when someone uses a search engine. Let us guide you a little by explaining how important Keywords and Tags are.
Social Media – Overview
Our second day is all about Social Media. We will start with a little introduction and we will also combine things we learned the day before into this topic.
Facebook
What is the difference between a Facebook Profile, a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? How can you integrate them into your Online Marketing Strategy and more important should you?
Twitter
Telling a storey with only 140 characters is not easy. Is Twitter really the right platform for you? Or is it just a waste of time? Let us help you to find out.
LinkedIn
We like to call it the professional Social Media Platform. You can find here professionals from around the world, but can also use it to introduce not just yourself, but your business, products and services.
Google Plus
The Social Media Platform from Google. Some love it, some like it, some think it is not worse spending time and money on it. We would like to introduce it to you and maybe you will be surprised that you can find your audience here.
YouTube
Videos are a great way to introduce your products and services to your audience. Let us show you how you can use YouTube as a fantastic advertising platform.
We will close each day with an hour for your questions. We believe, because our groups are small, you can be sure that your questions will be answered. We are offering this seminar for this amazing price only until the end of December 2013. If you are interested check out our Event Calendar to find which weekend is best for you. The location of the seminar will be our consultation location in Downtown Vancouver.
We are looking forward to see you soon.
How to generate a more secure password?
You may have heard the news about Twitter and that many accounts got hacked. This may raises the question now, how YOU can protect your accounts and how to create a secure password? There are many tools available to generate a random password, but let’s be honest, who can remember those? It becomes even more complicated if you have a different random password for every single account. By the way, you most definitely should have different passwords for different accounts. So again the question, how to create a strong and secure password which you can also remember?
The answer isn’t as complicated as it may seems. One rule you should have is that each password should be at least 7 characters long, should include a number and should have one capital letter.
Before we now go and generate our passwords, sort your accounts into groups. Email, Bank, Social Media are some group examples, but you can also go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or how about Business and Private?
The next step is to come up with a sentence you can remember. Like “My zip code as a child was 555”
Based on this sentence we generate now our basic password by using the first letters combined with the number. Our basic password looks now like this “Mzcaacw555” and now, to have slightly different passwords for our different accounts, we add the group to it. Here some examples:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email = “Mzcaacw555-EM”
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