There’s been a meteoric rise in the number of people going online to interact with others through social media channels. In fact, it’s now a way of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Whenever people are focused on interacting with a wide variety of social media sites this is also an opportunity for the smart business marketer to engage. So even though you may feel as if you’re lucky enough not to need to “push” for new business, you should still be interacting with your present customers online at the very least.

To begin with you need to determine your best course of action. You do not necessarily have to dive right in and sign up for each and every social media network or site under the sun. Some may simply not be appropriate for your demographic or customer base, although it seems to be a really good idea to have a Facebook presence no matter what kind of business you’re in these days.

As Facebook is by far the dominant social media site it’s not surprising that such a high percentage of the population is involved. This is a truly great platform, especially if you use it wisely once you’ve created your own business “fan” page, thereby providing a platform to interact, inform, educate and entertain your clients and prospects.

Professionally, LinkedIn is the dominant business-to-business network and this is a site you should consider to help generate leads, good business contacts and to find new members of staff.

When you create a YouTube channel you have a fabulous repository for all of those videos you should be creating, to help educate people in your niche and to effectively showcase the products and services that you have available.

Of course the ideal mouthpiece for any business these days is the blog. It’s relatively straightforward to set up one of these, especially if you use the dominant WordPress platform. However, you need to be sure that you are populating it on a regular basis and publishing a mixture of self-generated content, as well as other content gathered from around the Net, modified to promote your particular point of view.

As a small business owner, however, you have to ask yourself a very pointed question. How much of my time is this going to take? The answer is quite a lot. In addition to the amount of time you’ll be investing in setting up and configuring a presence on all of these sites, you may find that you are allocating valuable time on a daily basis to do one job or another to help maintain your presence. This is why you should put the entire series of projects in the hands of your virtual assistant, who is experienced in the vagaries associated with each platform and who will allocate a specific schedule, based on your exact requirements, to interact with each one.

In fact, Tumblr is more of a hybrid, in a manner of speaking. Anyone who signs up for the service can gather together a listing of followed blogs within what is effectively a dashboard. This is something similar to the typical newsfeed page that we are all familiar with on Facebook. Here, you get a collection of the latest news from all the blogs that you sign up for, gathered together into an easily viewed list. The dashboard feature is what many online marketers find to be attractive. It allows organisations to post commercial offers such as coupons without being seen to be obtrusive.

Tumblr appears to attract a particular type of demographic. More than 50% of monthly visitors to the platform are in the up to 34 age group, almost evenly split between male and female. This can be a very profitable demographic as we know and thus if you have a business approach that’s tailored toward this market, Tumblr should certainly be a consideration alongside other social media initiatives.

Evidently, more than 25 million people visit Tumblr to access the various blogs within their personal dashboards. Remember that Tumblr blogs are all hosted at the parent site and unlike WordPress, for example, cannot be self-hosted. Furthermore, there is a limit to how much you can manipulate the look and feel of your blog pages and there’s definitely a difference between this platform and the other, more established programmes when it comes to configuration.

Another statistic may be of interest according to your particular business model. The company tells us that more than 7 million of the 14 million daily posts are centred on imagery, rather than text. We should all know by now that graphics and videos represent the most appealing type of content these days and according to feedback from Tumblr, these image-based content posts get the most traffic and bookmarking.

Tumblr may not be for every business and may not represent a sophisticated blogging platform for those who have a somewhat serious story to tell. However, it’s worth investigating if you’re able to spread your message by using more dynamic forms of media. Just as Twitter has proven to be successful by adopting a simple approach, Tumblr may have found another niche by being something of a cross between micro-blogging and social media sites.

If you do make the decision to jump on board this bandwagon, remember that regular and consistent interaction is required and this is again an ideal task for your virtual assistant.

Do you have a Tumblr blog? If so post your link below.

The fact that WordPress has grown to become such a powerful CMS means that it is even more of a “no-brainer” when it comes to your platform of choice for your blogging activities. There are so many different themes available now and your blog can be configured to look infinitely professional and as an integral part of your branding objective.

Why does any organisation need a blog? Principally, because it provides a way of dynamically connecting with your visitors and prospects. Before blogging became so powerful as a business tool, traffic to an organisation’s website might well have been wasted. Unless you had some means of collecting visitor names through a squeeze page solution, the vast majority of your traffic may have simply bounced somewhere else. After all, there’s only so much of a message that you can portray through all those static pages and people do want to learn something different each and every time they visit a particular site.

By creating a blog and making sure that it is regularly updated, at the least every other day, you can create an ongoing stream of information, opinions and insights into your specific niche of operations. This is the perfect job for your virtual assistant. All you need to do is initialise a system whereby you keep on top of any industry developments or breaking news and then create an informative blog post using your branding strategy as part of your plan.

You should always host WordPress rather than using a website created and hosted at the WordPress.com site. This gives you far more control and looks a lot better from a branding perspective. You will also be able to take advantage of the open source nature of the platform itself. The product is in a continual process of “evaluation and update” and new versions are released frequently. With each update, functionality improves and this product becomes an even better solution for any online endeavour.

Some other things to bear in mind include the fact that WordPress is very well configured for search engine optimisation right out-of-the-box. You can use your WordPress blog to display many different types of media including the increasingly important video. There are also many different plug-ins available which are produced by independent developers, loaded with cool features. Many of these features are designed to help you ensure that you get more from your blog.

Whilst there are other blogging solutions available on the market, nobody else comes close to providing this standard within the platform, along with the resources and ongoing development. Understanding that a blog should be a centrepiece of online business promotion, WordPress should be the next tool for your toolbox.

Do you have a blog? If so please share you link below.

It should come as no surprise that YouTube is the third most popular site in the world according to the Alexa rankings. You may not know however that YouTube is owned by the company that owns the number one ranking, Google. Putting two and two together it also should come as no surprise that YouTube videos show up quite often in relatively prominent positions within search engine result pages. People love to view a moving image and it has been proven time and again that people would much rather watch a video online than read a lengthy article that essentially says the same thing. This is why video promotion has become so popular online and why we should look at integrating video whenever we have an opportunity.

Embedding videos is only part of the plan however. You can make even more of the potential associated with video by creating a branded “channel”. This can become a repository for videos produced and you can establish a concerted plan, building a logical database of video archives surrounding your particular products or services. The bywords here are creativity and standards.

Whenever you establish a YouTube channel it is possible to focus a little bit on branding, at least as far as the background is concerned. It is certainly possible to work some SEO magic into all of this and your virtual assistant will help to ensure that the appropriate keywords are positioned correctly.

Clickable links can also be inserted into videos to help with direct traffic potential. Underneath each video is a place for comments to be made. This is where you can get responses from visitors or customers and with some creative effort you can establish some kind of feedback generating project such as a review or even a contest.

Many organisations choose to use YouTube as a platform for hosting their videos – the material that appears on their individual Web pages. This can get around the problem of having to host potentially large files on your own server, although yet again in most cases the videos viewed through the YouTube portal may well show advertising generated by Google.

It is however possible to set up a partner agreement with YouTube through what can be unfortunately a little bit of a lengthy process. However, by doing so you retain the rights and copyrights to all the content that you place within your partner channel and you can make a certain amount of money associated with the AdSense ads placed on your channel page.

We are not likely to see any slowdown in the popularity of online video content and as such video generation and placement should become part of a concerted effort for you and your virtual assistant. It is of course vitally important to ensure that the content is of the highest quality possible and always remember that the primary goal is to supply useful information, rather than creating an out and out sales pitch. Today, it’s remarkably cost-effective to outsource the creation of the videos, as well.

If you thought that Facebook was a relatively new promotional tool for business, then it’s certainly true to say that Google+ is a bit wet behind the ears. Nevertheless, many of the world’s biggest companies have jumped feet first into the programme; companies such as Ford Motor Company for example. It’s a good idea to delegate your virtual assistant to look into what your competitors and others within your field of operations are doing, to see how they may have addressed the potential. You do want to make as big an impact as possible and it’s always a good idea to see how others may have refined their initial messages to give you a good idea about best practice.

Without a doubt, one of the big selling points associated with Google+ is its integration with the search engine. As you know, more than 70% of people use this particular portal whenever they are searching for information and we can assume that Google will be trying to integrate their other online products and solutions as time goes forward. Now, those little +1s we are starting to see everywhere online are coming into play.

Essentially, you need to make sure that your branded page is so well put together and has such high quality content that people naturally want to ”+1” your page. There are some hidden benefits associated with this. More and more people have Google accounts and surf the Web when they are logged in. If they do so, any search that they make on a day by day basis in the future will be customised by the search engine according to what they have previously ”+1’d.” Remember that it is their intention to personalise the search experience as much as possible. When your page contains the relevant fields to enable commenting, integrate your general social media influence-building activity and a result of this will be that your Google+ page receives higher ranking points.

You may be aware that a Facebook business page can be configured to really reflect your brand imagery and positioning. You should ensure that your virtual assistant takes time to look beneath the surface at the opportunities presented by Google+ to do the same thing. It’s also worth remembering that by placing the ”+” ahead of their search term, users will in future be directed straight to the Google+ page most closely linked. This is a way of directly connecting searches to something that in Google’s estimation is the most logical solution. Finally, as Google owns YouTube it should be no surprise that the giant video site should be fully integrated into Google+ through the use of a YouTube widget.

Have you set up a Google+ business page? If so, please share your link and we will add you to our circles.

Apparently, something in the region of 65 million tweets are sent each day on every single subject under the sun. It really is remarkable what you can say in 140 characters or less, but in business terms the main draw is the fact that you can attach a special type of link to a particular webpage, essentially “for further information.”

As such, so many people engaged in the business world have not been slow to recognise the opportunities associated with having an account. Yet as this medium is still developing and as people are really still coming to terms with such a new form of communication, many business owners are simply not sure how to approach it.

Some of the more successful online marketing campaigns over the past few years have involved forthright, open and honest customer service. Rather than treating customer service as a delicate and very personal interaction between business and customer, those on the cutting-edge of this marketing revolution understand that there may be significant branding and positioning opportunities associated with honest and open interaction with a client.

As business owners we may well have seen that the very ethos behind customer relationship marketing is in the process of a significant change. Businesses are now expected to be more contributory and more of a good “citizen,” especially when they are seen to be interacting within what is still basically a social media platform.

There are many sophisticated tools available to help configure and set up Twitter to any particular liking. It is, for example, infinitely possible to locate people who have specific interests and who could represent good marketing prospects. You can proactively use the fact that you have a Twitter account in your outgoing marketing, so that your existing clients can opt to receive tweets from you, enabling you to keep them in touch with important developments.

Twitter is indeed an amazing bridge in our global communications network. People from around the world can literally make news when they tweet in messages of less than 140 characters and we have seen this in spectacular style during major world news events in recent years. Thus we can see the power of real-time interaction and communication and can start to see how important a business presence should be.

There are many programmes and tools available for your virtual assistant to use as he or she helps you to maintain a dedicated presence online. Whilst it’s fair to say that there is a significant amount of “noise” and a lot of information that is simply not of interest, there is nevertheless clear potential for exposure. The secret is coming up with a strategy and making sure that it is regularly developed and maintained.

Has Twitter helped you win business? I’d love to read your thoughts.

There are many different ways that you can use LinkedIn to benefit your business. For example, you may be looking for a specific type of employee, someone who has skill requisites that are difficult to find. LinkedIn is the place to set up CVs and provide information for millions of professionals from around the world and you will be able to quickly see if there is common ground for discussion, or whether there are any connections you need to investigate.

You can use LinkedIn to tell the business world about your products or services. For example, there is a specific application called Slide Share, where you can roll out your range of products and your specific knowledge base. You can request information from your market, share specific blog posts and provide information that could be of value within the industry. Remember that one of the cardinal rules of being in business these days is to try your best to help others. This will involve a fair degree of generosity on your part, as you build a reputation for being contributory, knowledgeable and forthright.

LinkedIn can today be linked to all your other social profiles. Once you have set up your presence it should be populated with comprehensive information about all the connections that you have in the social media world, the presence of your website, where your blog is located and so on. Remember that in the business-to-business world, many individuals and organisations treat LinkedIn as a one-stop shop.

This is not the place to be shy and retiring or to hide your light under a bushel. Remember that this particular “social media” network is aimed at business professionals. Whilst you do have to be a little careful how you promote your business on other social media networks so that you don’t step on people’s toes, here it pays to get your name out there. This is why you need to stay active when it comes to your LinkedIn profile and it’s not simply a case of setting it up and seeing who may find it. Your virtual assistant can help you to search for specific discussions relevant to your field, can post information, ask questions and provide good quality and good value as an investment in your business future.

Once you’ve been able to collectively build a solid stance and following you will find that opportunities start to flow. When you’ve achieved something constructive, don’t forget to use LinkedIn as another valuable resource as well, by asking for recommendations or testimonials appropriately.

Do you use LinkedIn? Has it won you business? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If we all agree with the fact that an online presence is absolutely critical for any business of any kind, then we shouldn’t really need to answer a question that asks why we might need a Facebook page. Whilst the site itself is, despite its massive size, still maturing and developing, it is very important that each and every business has its own focused page and strives to keep in touch with existing clients and reach prospects through this site.

If you don’t have your own personal page on Facebook then it’s highly recommended that you do create one, just to see what all the mania is about. What you will notice is that the personal page has certain limitations. Whilst you’re limited in the number of friends you can have as part of your own individual community, there are fewer restrictions when it comes to a business page. There are ways to use this page so that you can specifically create your image and customise it so that it looks like a part of your brand.

It’s possible to use specific tools and resources to include HTML coding of your own design so that you can use a Facebook business to capture leads, display specific branded messages and so on. Remember that there is an incredible network of people engaged here and hundreds of thousands of different groups related to your product or service in all probability.

The main idea is to ensure that you keep in touch with prospects and customers by providing them with news and information, industry related discussions and by being as proactive as you possibly can be. Once a page is created you have to remember that it’s like a living, breathing thing and you shouldn’t just leave it until you remember that it hasn’t been updated for a long time.

It’s not that difficult to set up the bare-bones of a business page on Facebook. However, if you’re going to make the most of it and to brand it so that it looks like an extension of your website, this is a perfect task for your virtual assistant. The VA can be engaged to update the page on a daily basis with relevant business news and insights. Don’t forget that Google indexes these business pages and as such this resource could be an additional way of driving presence on the other search engines, and as a result, traffic as well.

Do you have a Facebook page? Like my page and I’ll like yours back.

Let’s take a look at one of those New Age platforms and consider just how advantageous it could be to engage their philosophy.

Hubpages has a very specific place in any small business promotion. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up an individual page on this platform, the “magic sauce” comes from creating what is effectively a rather sophisticated link wheel of individual Hubpages.

Your VA should follow along with a specific philosophy if you want to get the most benefit from creating a miniature network of Hubpages. In fact, the people who run this particular platform are quite open and honest about it. There’s very little advantage to setting up an individual Hubpage and just expecting it to provide you with you the SEO benefits or traffic.

What you should do is create what is essentially a “commercial” Hubpage of high quality, outlining your business operation. This page will link to your website, but any advantage is deferred. Methodically, you should then create additional Hubpages. Some of these will be commercial by definition, but others will be categorised as non-commercial. The commercial pages will contain different and more focused information about a particular product or service of yours perhaps. Some of these pages will link to your initial Hubpage. Some of the other “non-commercial” Hubpages that your VA creates will not link to your website, but may link to other Hubpages owned by other people, but based on similar keywords or subjects.

As you can see, we’re looking at the creation of a quite sophisticated link wheel, but one that follows along with the very philosophy championed by Google and the other search engines. The links created are logical, never spammy and not of poor quality. When you create a network that is deemed to be acceptable by Hubpages, then the initial link that you created from your very first Hubpage will be re-categorised to enable important ranking “juice” to flow through to your site. Yes, it’s a little bit involved but it is well worthwhile. Remember that you are creating high quality and very focused Hubpages relevant to various components or elements of your business and you are also ensuring that you are a good Net citizen at the same time by adding and distributing value.

These days it is felt that quality has a lot more bearing than quantity, however. It is also thought that diversity is a good thing and this is why it’s important to have a presence of some kind in a number of different locations other than just your own blogs or websites.

This has led to the growth of a number of proprietary platforms to give online marketers an additional “soapbox.” Squidoois one such platform and it has a number of benefits for those involved in online promotion. Essentially, when you create a Squidoo “lens” you are creating a way of promoting your business in a different environment. The platform offers you free Web hosting and a distinct way of building what is essentially a promotional page that gives insight into a particular part of your business operations. Many successful companies have a number of different Squidoo lenses, focused on individual keywords or categories. There’s no limit to the number that you can create and indeed the company actively encourages you to create as many lenses as possible. There is however one caveat – they have to be of a very high quality and the regulators have an internal moderating system to make sure that this is the case.

One of the big advantages of Squidoo is that due to the sheer size of its reach – there are several million lenses – recognition here can create its own flow of traffic due to the fact that it is a search engine in its own right. The major search engines such as Google frequently index and display Squidoo lenses according to specific keyword searches. It’s also possible to display various types of media on a lens. Therefore, you should focus on the creation of several YouTube videos, a photo gallery for services and products, or you can even create a lens to stream podcasts about various programmes or solutions.

Squidoo is a perfect complement to online marketing and a virtual assistant can actively help you to create a number of lenses according to the different programmes and solutions that are relevant to your small business. The VA can ensure that high quality content composition is a top priority. The lenses created can help to drive ranking positions for various keywords and also generate direct traffic to your website. Each lens can be one of a number of external “outposts” under your control, pointing to your site.

Do you have a Squidoo page? Its a great way to get your name (and your keywords) out there. Here’s mine. What do you think? I would love to read your comments.