Indispensable Online Business Services For Website Development Success December 20, 2009 at 6:16 pm
When it comes to online business services, did you know that according to our friends at econsultancy.com, social network interaction and blog reading represent the fourth most popular online activities, beating out personal e-mail. 10% of the time that we spend when interacting on the web is spent within social media sites. As a measure of the importance of social media sites, search engine giant Bing revealed that second in its list of the top 10 world trends for the year was Twitter. This just goes to show the sheer level of interest in social media and in this case, the new boy on the block Twitter. Just as it is important for you to “be” on Facebook, you must maintain a proactive presence on Twitter as well.
Twitter really occupies its own niche and is essentially a micro-blogging engine. Pretty much everyone now knows that you can send status messages of up to 140 characters through Twitter and this has really caught the interest of the business world. It is possible to notify clients about special deals, to handle customer relationship matters and to exhibit a sense of visibility that was previously unheard-of.
You need to think quite creatively about your Twitter presence and understand that innovation will help. For example, create a dedicated background design and never accept the generic offerings and profile settings offered by Twitter, while also configuring your links correctly and deciding how you are going to build a followers list. There are a number of tools available to you, many based on straightforward keyword research, enabling you to accurately target people who have said they are interested in your niche. Once again, as with Facebook, management and maintenance of your Twitter account will take a concerted effort. You should allocate time, ideally again on a daily basis, to create meaningful messages, a.k.a. tweets, and interact with others through direct messages. If you think this is quite a lot of work, just realise that a majority of corporate members do not meaningfully interact through these mediums, and you can set yourself apart. You should aim to be one of the educated few, who really take advantage of what this fantastic medium has to offer.
In the world of Internet marketing, the entire arena has changed quite significantly over the last couple of years. Web 2.0 heralded the arrival of the social media revolution and this changed the very mindset of marketers online. Great emphasis is now placed on establishing your operation and your name, so that you are viewed as expert and authoritative. It is never advisable to try and hard-sell on Facebook and Twitter or other social media channels, and you should be very careful! In addition to your main sales hub, why not set up a blog to feed into it? You can certainly link them and you can even create a subdomain within your website development to actually host your blog, but you should maintain an element of separation.
Consider your core operation. You need to educate prospects about your product or service, whatever it may be. You certainly have no problem in convincing yourself how much of a deal your products represent, but remember that people in the real world know nothing about them, as yet. However, you need to convince others and this is where you must establish yourself and your organisation as experts. A blog is so important and must be well-designed, thought out and presented professionally. Generally, website development platforms such as WordPress are invaluable here, or you could choose to set up a content management system to start off with.
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF today!
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