Creating contests that involve participation

1. Your Facebook page should add value to the consumer, so that there is a reason to join the page and to keep coming back. A great way to do that is to get the consumers involved! Offering coupons and contests are a few examples.

2. Big Idea: Offering something enticing to consumers to join the fan page can help build a large community. Examples might be: free shipping, offer discounts, weekly deals, and coupons.

Targeting the Proper Demographics

1. Determine who you are targeting. Who does your brand want to reach? Anyone can use Facebook now so why not get involved yourself. When you have determined your target audience, search for the demographics within the search option. Also, it is KEY to find your competitors online. Go to their Facebook page and see who they are targeting. Make sure you reach out to them as well. You can personally invite your competitor’s followers to your Facebook page which will help you get more users quickly.

2. Not all Facebook pages will grow, generally because of Facebook’s demographics. Understanding Facebook’s demographics can help you determine if starting a fan page is worth the time. According to Quantcast estimates, Facebook favors towards female youths. Also, 53% of users have kids and a majority makes $60,000 plus a year. With this, there are still 50% college age users. While these are the current demographics, these stats are constantly changing, so check on the stats frequently for change. As Facebook evolve, your campaign might need to evolve along side it for maximum potential.

3. Big Idea: Some brands cannot expect huge followings on Facebook. Of course products that target the demographic most prominent on Facebook usually expect to have the fastest growth spurt. But any followers are better than none, even if that means four followers, who may end up being perspective clients.

Creating a Resourceful Page

1. Use the information on the page as added value that connects to the brand. Make the content on the facebook page a resource that people will want to come back to.

2. Big Idea: By having a facebook page you allow your brand to reach new demographic areas, outside the familiar consumers that already know and love the business.

Network with others

1. Building a large following takes manpower, meaning you need to connect with as many other networks as possible. Example: take advantage of free Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, MySpace pages and connect them to your home page. Don’t expect your fans to find you manually, most won’t, instead add a button from your home page.

2. Big Idea: Connect as many social networks to your brand website. This can help funnel potential customers throughout your brand.

If you would like help with your next social media campaign for your business, feel free to contact me, I would love to help!

This may seem like a trivial thing but it actually has a big impact on our market exposure – and it allows us to market in a very economical manner.
Please take a few minutes and help us let the facebook community know who we are.

We are in business today in this tough economic market and we are hoping to bring brand awareness to others by having you on our list of Facebook friends/fans -

You can click here to the Sayenko Design facebook page
or search for (Sayenko Design) in the search box and click on “become a fan” – I would
love to add you to my friend list and stay in touch with you.

Thanks much – I hope your doing well!

Mike Sayenko

twitter

In a previous article we went over Blogging Basics. Now we switch our focus to the importance of weekly blogging. Blogging is about sharing your interests, desires, and experiences with others. Your blog is the central hub from which you share those experiences with others. A blog could also be thought of as your article or news section of your website. Since, you want to share this information with as many people as possible, your blog should be visible on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

This process, called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, maximizes your blog or website in order to attain higher rankings on search engine pages. If SEO isof great importance to you, blogging should be done on a weekly basis and key words cleverly inserted into your blog post. This effectively brings the target audience to your website as they hunt for specific key words on their search engines or follow links from other sites.

Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations and popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll) The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly. Permalinks are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog’s content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.

Will People find you in the search engine?

If you plan on blogging then you might as well go to the effort of doing it right. This means performing a keyword research analysis to narrow down a list of words that would help people find you on their search engines. SEO and blogging go hand in hand, complementing each other. Blogging helps with SEO by building fresh new content and strengthening your keywords. Conversely, SEO helps blogging by defining the list of key words you will use, thus setting the parameters. You want to emphasize the top terms within each post’s title, body, categories, and tags. The more often a key word appears, the more powerful that keyword is, thus potentially ranking you higher in search engines. But don’t be excessive with your keywords, rather, they should be added cleverly and creatively so that the blog flows naturally. Achieving these features correctly boosts the chances of acquiring comments from authoritative readers and gaining links from outside websites, therefore achieving better search engine rankings for your blog!

Now, get out and start blogging with strategy! Don’t know where to start? Our favorite free blogging websites include: Blogger, Wordpress, and Blog.com. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us, we would love to help.

Below are questions to take you through the process of strategic web design.

Objective:

• Before you start designing any page, what is going to be the most important feature? Is it going to be a shopping cart? Your Blog? Your Image Portfolio? Just think for a moment on what you want users to do on your website. Some things to think about: imagery, usability, information, purchasing of products.

• Is the website going to need constant updates, such as text and graphics or a blog? Or is the site just going to be static with a few updates here and there?

• Will you be needing control of your content and have users access it? This is usually in a form of a user login on a website, with a backend database (usually used for news based websites, hospitals, clinics, services based sites)

• This is a critical one that many don’t think about. How can your site generate new users or clients, think marketing on social media sites such as twitter (we have a few great articles on Twitter I suggest checking out), facebook, and youtube to name a few. You want to get your name out to as many people as possible, social media sites are great for that. Also creating social videos are a great marketing tool and usually much more interesting to people to view then to read a four page article.

You are always looking to generate new users on your site, this should always be the end goal for any site. The next step is finding ways to keep existing users/clients coming back to your site. Think about marketing – promotional giveaways, a newsletter sign up, or an interesting blog.

Are you planning on generating revenue? If so what is the process from coming to the home page to the end result of purchasing a product or services?

Content

• What is the specific services you will be offering on your site? Is it a personal site? Or a business?

• If you are providing a service, how do you see the process flow from providing information to your viewer to the viewer purchasing your service?

• Do you send out any marketing material or information to your clients? This helps with keeping people interested and involved with your services. Things such as HTML newsletters, flyer’s, blog posts, social video. The end goal is engaging in your customers and giving them something valuable.

• What types of marketing or informational materials do you send to your clients to keep them involved with your business and services?

You should have most of your content laid out before you start on any design, or at least have a good idea of your content.

Design

You might have thought this should have been first. However, this is usually the last thing that brings all the elements together, as your not just building a pretty website, but rather a strategic one that understands the user, engages, and reacts. Think of the design as your overall picture in terms of how you want it to feel and look.

• Think of the “feel” of the site, the presence, what mood are you trying to convey when a user views your website. Is your site going to be simple and clean? A high-tech sophisticated look? A fun site that might be whimsical?

• A color scheme is very important to the mood of the website. What color scheme do you envision? What sort of feel or mood are you trying to convey? Why? Is it going to be cool vs. warm, black and white, brights, pastel, organic, skin-tones, earth-tones.

• Do you already have a logo, or are you looking to create your branding from the ground up?

This is the journey we take all our clients through to get a better grasp of their end goal and to have a website that is strategic in its design. After going through these steps you will have a good feel of what you will want your website to do and feel. We encourage everyone to go through the steps carefully while really thinking about the process, as design is as much about the process as it is about design. Remember design is about visual communication. You want to communicate with the user – not just making a pretty graphic but a graphic design that works strategically.

Many differences between the two services are superficial.  Facebook is a large, robust social network that allows many types of interactions between users.  Twitter, however, is simply a status update.  These structural differences are responsible for cultural norms that require careful consideration.

In general, Facebook is a great way to strengthen your network with people you already know.  Twitter, on the other hand, is a great way to grow your network and meet people you wouldn’t have otherwise. For example - you can easily interact with elected officials on Twitter.  This is much harder to do on Facebook.

These differences are largely driven by the culture of each site.  Because Facebook involves a large amount of personal information, people prefer to only network with other people they know and are at least somewhat comfortable sharing personal information with.  Twitter, on the other hand, involves far fewer personal interactions.  This isn’t to say Twitter can’t be personal.  This is far from true.  In fact, we think the best people on Twitter are very personal with the information they share.  However, the level of personal interaction is far lower on Twitter than on Facebook due to the inability to clearly define social relationships.

The personal aspect of each site is even reflected in their key features.  To connect with someone on Facebook, you become their “friend.”  With Twitter, on the other hand, you simply “follow” another user.  Becoming a friend with someone is a commitment in real life. We associate that word with some a strong mutual connection between two people.  Following someone, on the other hand, is a far less personal one-way relationship.  It is much easier to stop following someone than to stop being someone’s friend.

These powerful cultural differences between Facebook and Twitter have made the services complements to each other rather than competitors.  We highly recommend using both services for your business, as long as you use them in different ways.  Remember: Twitter creates relationships; Facebook strengthens relationships.

We would love to get a tweet from you.  Follow us: Mike Sayenko at: http://twitter.com/Mike_Sayenko and Jon Hickey at: http://twitter.com/jonhickey84.

In a recent blog post on Flip the Media, Hanson Hosein, Director of the Master’s of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program at the University of Washington did a great job of summarizing this change:
“Effective communication in the 21st century requires us to build relationships by telling our story and providing value-added content to online community platforms, quite often with inexpensive, amateur content creation and distribution tools.  This approach reflects current economic and budgetary realities, as well as a need to engage people with entrepreneurial zeal.”

The key concepts from this quote include:

• Building relationships
• Telling stories
• Providing value-added content
• Use of inexpensive, amateur content creation and distribution tools

Building Relationships

With the advent of social networks and social media in general, the world has started to build relation

ships in new and exciting ways.  Staying in touch with friends is easier than ever.  With web 2.0 we can now connect with people we never would have met before.  Communication is cheaper, faster, and more convenient then ever before thanks to social media around the web.  These things are all positive and have helped strengthen – not destroy – personal relationships.

What is perhaps even more exciting is the change we are starting to see in the business world.  In the latter half of the 20th century, advertising was based on broadcasting to people.  Communication was very top-down.

Advancements in technology have flipped the traditional structure upside down.  If companies wish to succeed, they must have conversations with their customers through social media.  Companies are going to have to be personal, and they must actually listen to their clients.  Being faceless isn’t going to work in the 21st century

How much will this cost me?

Until recently, creating content was difficult.  Cameras were expensive and editing equipment was difficult to use.  To make make things worse, distributing content was difficult.  Television, radio, and newspapers/magazines were the only viable ways to reach a mass market, and buying ad time/space was unreasonable for small businesses.  Now you can buy a high definition camera that has editing software built into it.  Simply plug it into any laptop, and you can edit and distribute your video through free social video websites such as YouTube.  Sure, you have to have some basic video training and creativity to produce a decent video, but the barriers are far lower than ever before.  The inexpensive nature of content creation and distribution means connecting with costumers in ways unheard of in the past.

What does this all mean?

What this all means is businesses need to rethink the ways they do marketing.  Consumers are looking for personal stories and relationships, not faceless advertising.  Fortunately, telling these stories and building these relationships is far easier and cheaper than ever before.  We believe this is great for both business and consumers, as it helps connect your target prospects to your business emotionally, increase user loyalty, deliver your company’s message clearly, and confirm your credibility.

Call us optimistic – but at Sayenko Design, we believe the days of manipulative advertising are slowly fading away.  These ads are being replaced by more honest and authentic communication between consumers and businesses.   One thing is for sure – business and brand loyalty has taken leaps and bounds to help connect small businesses to their consumers.  It is time to take advantage.

• Improve your professional image
• Find new customers
• Learn more about your customer’s needs
• Provide better customer service
• Teach you more about your profession and how you can improve your service

So what are the social networking marketing basics?

Be Social!

Social network marketing is easier than you think.  Don’t worry about which social network is the latest and greatest.  Whichever networks you choose to engage with, be social.

How can marketing be social?

Internet users don’t want to be talked to.  They want to be talked with.  If you shove marketing language down their throats, they will shut you out of their world.  Show your human side.  Talk to people online like you would talk to them in your store.  Give them professional advice in a friendly way.  Talk about life on occasion.  Be a real person.  Internet users are more likely to do business with you if you have a personal connection with them.

Which networks should I join?

It depends.  The general rule of thumb is choose 2-3 networks and focus on them.  In general, Twitter, Facebook, and one other network related to your profession is a good way to go.  It is better to be active in a few networks than inactive in many.

Sayenko Design actively uses Twitter, Facebook, and the Graphic Design Network.

I want to give Social Networking a chance, but I’m intimidated.

Don’t worry – the more you participate in social networks, the more comfortable you’ll become.  Communities are generally very welcoming to new members and will be happy to have you there!

If you have any questions about social networking for business, feel free to send us a message.  We are always excited to help businesses reach their potential through social networking!