1. Continue to invite connections to play the latest Zynga game on Facebook
2. Use your new linked in connection as a job reference because they are an executive in a high profile company.
3. Send invites to your latest social media platform using a canned email.
4. Make it difficult for a users to delete their profile from your social platform.
5. Collect fans for your corporate facebook page to make up for poor customer service.

Social media is a great tool for research as well as customer service. Used effectively  social media can improve your profit margin.

There is a flip side is that it can become a distraction when using it as a tool for for employees. Sometmes it’s tough to see how stopping to read twitter or browsing the Facebook News Feed can be productive to business.

Social media is just like any other tool. Used right  it can make a major impact or wrong become a time sink. The challenge is to formulae a good strategy to use this as tool and minimize the distractons.

Make a Plan, Set Goals and Execute

Do you need more traffic to your website, or are you looking for more brand awareness? Do you want to prevent bad press before it happens, or are you more interested in creating a community that will generate good press? Decide on the goal first.

Once you have a goal, set a plan. Set up metrics to measure success and implement tools that will help you measure ROI.

Execute. Don’t be afraid to reach out, make mistakes, and be vulnerable. Even if you make a mistake.

Avoiding Social Media as a Distraction

- When you need to concentrate on an intensive tasks close social media windows and apps.

- Dont use the tools when your bored. This is for business not recreation.

- Prioritize. Focus on the tasks at hand before using social media to create more.

Provide a clear call to action. Whether you use graphic buttons or hot-linked text (or both), tell your visitor what they need to do. Copy tests here will give you the biggest bang next to testing headlines.

Write in the second person – You and Your. No one cares about you, your company, or even your product or service except as to how it benefits him or her.

Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity. This is business not a creative writing contest.

You can write long copy as long as it’s tight. Rule of thumb: Think longer copy when you’re looking to close a sale. Think shorter copy for something that doesn’t necessarily require a cash commitment..

Be crystal clear in your goals. Keep your body copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Every digression is a conversion lost.

Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs.
Most visitors are skimming and skipping through your copy.

People read beginnings and ends before they read middles. Make sure you keep your most critical, persuasive arguments in these positions.

Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines (lines not sentences.) Vary your paragraph line length from here. It breaks things up makes it easier to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines long.

Write to the screen. Take a piece of paper wireframe where your text, buttons, and design elements will go. Consider how much of your content will be seen “above the fold” or at the first screen. If so, you’ll want to make sure you repeat essential calls to action.

Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page. This includes navigation bars, visual clutter, and links to other sections. You want the reader focused solely on your copy and the offer you’re making.

Don’t ask for what you don’t need. Ask for only enough information to complete the sale or the desired action.

Assume nothing. Test everything.
These tips and techniques will get you started. Design elements are critical as well as video, audio, and other interactivity elements tomore deeply engage the reader and boost response.

Over the years many of us have use the business axiom “In Niches Are Riches”.

I’ve come to realize that there is even one better rule when deciding what to promote and develop in this industry.

Follow the crowd.

Pick a very crowded genre and create your promotion or content designed to feed a starving crowd in what is an established and sometimes saturated genre.

Why develop a new untested genre or a microniche when you can create a promotion where there are plenty pf people already looking for what your going to offer?

Why do you think there are so many sites for genres like celebrities or blow jobs? There are millions of people who what to get their jerk on to what may seem quite vanilla to the rest of your peers.

In the past I have recommended for people to get into business or wanting to expand on the web  to find a little niche that you can completely own.

But  you have to take into account how many people potentially will be interessted in what you have to offer.

There is also the copycat fear where competitors find that your making money off of a new micro niche and will will hastily run to clone what your doing and ruin your chance to make a honest buck.

What Im saying is you have to move out of the realm of get rich quick and live in the dawn of reality where competition and solid and ethical business practices will carry forward the next 3-5 years.

Besides developing a micro niche sets a limitation on how large your business will ever grow.

And gets back to my point  that going after obscure niches means you’ve got to put lots of feeder traffic sources together to make the financial picture work. This makes it hard to develop any kind of real relationship with your customer and in the end leads to the sleaze-and-squeeze  get rich quick business plan where you shake your new customer hard and hope for prechecked cross sales or  selling your maling list or even more questionable ways to stay afloat.

Consider Your New Genre Carefully

These days its very hard to stand out in the search engines even with paid placement. You can score a top page ranking for an obscure term but it’s near impossible or very expensive to get a page-one ranking for “sex” or “porn.”

Instead of being a big fish in a small pond become a small but crazy evolved and rare “standout fish” in a great big pond.

And make sure your unique angle isn’t overdone either.

If it’s not working, get weirder

The key is to be relatively on topic but have a standout offering among those massive schools of guppies.

Want to hear more that applies to your end of the business  then email me here and maybe we can fry up some good ideas for your to munch on.