Search Results for: feed

The best way to drive engagement and build traffic through word of mouth about your brand is to run a social media contest via social media platforms. Not only do contests engage customers with your company in an exciting and fun way, they also result in a treasure-trove of customer preferences, feedback and information you can then mine for improving your business. The best part about launching a contest via social media channel is that it can be quite easy on the pocket.

However, there is an elusive art to social media contests. The brand you want to promote shouldn’t appear too ‘salesy’ or too ‘cheesy’. You should give a prize, which people are really interested in. It could be a gift card, a standard item, or a notoriety prize like to publish a video of the winner. Moreover, the contest needs to be easy and fun for the audience member to get involved.

Here are a few strategies for launching and managing a social media contest.

Set your marketing objective
Every contest that you launch must meet your particular marketing objective, so first you must establish what it is. Do you want to engage in social media to drive awareness of a new service or product, or do you want to generate traffic to your website? Or are you engaged in social media to encourage new participants to use your firm’s social networking platforms? There are a number of reasons for launching a contest but it is essential for you to know beforehand what you are trying to achieve and how you will know when you have reached it. This goal will define the tone of your social contest.

Get creative
This is the fun part. When it comes to creating your social media contest, you can set the sky as your limit. Here are some ideas for you:
• A video contest where you invite your participants to create a commercial for your product
• A content contest where the best personal experience story will be rewarded
• A photo contest associated with your service or product
• A contest associated with inventing a new product or product feature

Leverage social media platforms
Promote your social contest in channels like Twitter, Facebook, your corporate blog and other social media platforms, as well as via traditional marketing channels like email, print, etc. If you search by the word ‘contest’ on the social media channel like Twitter, you will come across a number of contests that are going on presently. The best contests are social by nature, so make sure your contest is easy to share. Embed ‘share this’ links on the contest site, on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and all other places where people have chances of coming.

Complete the contest
Don’t drag the contest too long. Typically, a social contest runs for about a month. However, contests that are associated with inventing a new item, etc., may take a longer time to finish. After the winner is selected, it is essential to do a PR push to publicize the win. You also need to use Twitter and Facebook for promoting your winner. Also use social media tracking tools and find out which social sites and people are talking about the winner the most. After identifying this, post comments on those networks to drive more interest in the victor and your brand.

Evaluate the contest
Don’t just launch a contest for fun, aim to achieve a particular marketing goal via your launch. During, and after you have finished with the contest, measure the impact the posting had on brand engagement. Use social media tracking tools to measure your per-defined success metrics. They can be of great help to you in letting you know the traffic you gained from the contest, whether the traffic turned into paying customers, and so on.

A number of brands have come up with great results with social contests. Just follow the above-mentioned tips and you will see the results! Good luck!

Author bio: :
Nancy is a blogger. She is passionate about writing articles on topics that relate to social media tracking tools, SEO new updates and digital marketing strategies. She recommends her readers make use of social media branding tools to improve their social network management.

With the economy stalled and a lot of families struggling financially, many stay-at-home moms are looking for work to supplement the family budget. Telecommuting is more prevalent than ever. Global Workplace Analytics estimates that telecommuting in general has risen more than 26 percent since 2005, and by more than 73 percent in government agencies and nonprofits. Working from home is ideal for moms with young children, and the internet has made it easier than ever to find work that can be done right from the comfort of your own home. Here are five ideas to help stay at home moms get back into the workforce and bring in extra cash while still being there for their children:

Online Data Entry and Transcription

Legal, medical, office and closed captioning are just some of the types of transcription services that are needed. You should possess good typing skills as well as the ability to meet deadlines. Visit work-at-home job boards to find freelance jobs. If you’re fortunate, you might connect with a client who really likes your work and you could receive steady projects from them. One word of caution (for all online job opportunities), never pay a fee to work for a company. It’s likely a scam.

Virtual Call Center Rep

Call center work allows you to do customer service right from the comfort of your own home. Call center representatives are needed for businesses such as online retailers, help desks and IT solutions. If you have a pleasant phone demeanor and like helping people, this could be the ideal work-at-home job for you.

Freelance Work

If you like to write, do graphic buy legit adderall online design or create computer software, there are a wealth of freelance opportunities available online. From businesses that allow telecommuting to online content provider hubs, it’s easier than ever to break into freelance work, no matter what your interest or experience level. Pay will be commensurate with experience and skill level, but freelancing is an excellent way to work from home and earn extra money. Start with guru.com, elance.com and odesk.com. Even Craigslist can be a source when you search under “Gigs.”

Child Care

While obviously not an online job, offering child care service in your own home is an excellent and flexible way to earn extra cash while still spending time with your own children. You’ll also bring in built-in playmates for your kids.

Continuing Education Online

If you’re just not sure what line of work to pursue, consider taking classes in an online school by pursuing early childhood education at pennfoster.edu or another accredited online school. Choose a degree or line of study in something that interests you, pays decently and has good hours for moms.

Product Reviewer or Survey Taker

Believe it or not, these are legitimate ways to earn extra cash online. Businesses are always looking for feedback about their products and services, and product reviewers and survey takers can help them to accomplish this. Look for a hub service like MySurvey.com that will find out your interests and product usage patterns in order to connect you with review and survey jobs for which you’re a match.

So you’ve got a great idea, a good market and some investment – but how do you evolve your business into a game-changer? With only one in twelve start-ups now hitting the big time, the lofty heights of successful start-ups like Microsoft and Virgin might seem a world away. But fear not, there are many hints and tips you can use to make sure your small business is moving in the right direction.

Streamline Your Processes

Your business may be ticking over perfectly, but things change rapidly in any industry and it’s up to you and your employees to continuously ensure that your procedures are as efficient as possible. You can either do this yourself or get outside accreditation, ISO 9001 is an industry-recognised standard; but either way you need to ensure suggestions for improvement are actively encouraged from your whole team.

Have Conversations

When you first had that eureka moment, you will have talked to just about anyone who would listen about your product. This is fantastic for validating your initial idea and helping to iron out any initial issues.

Just because your business is starting to thrive, don’t stop this process. Speak to your existing customer base – they are a hive of untapped information. This is vital in developing your start-up to suit your market and can result in some great suggestions you hadn’t even thought of. Even if all you receive back is positive feedback, it’s always great to hear you’re moving in the right direction and this should inspire you to keep plugging away.

Identify Your Procedures

If your business is starting to sky-rocket, you will probably soon need to hire your first employee. This is a very exciting time for any new company, but before you post the job vacancy, you need to be prepared.

Write down all of your procedures so your new staff member can get started straight away. Making sure the frequent tasks in your business have a how-to sheet (with plenty of screen-grabs) filed away will make sure new-starters can hit the ground running.

Decide on Your Marketing Plan

You may subscribe to the ‘build it and they will come’ ethos, but creating a great product or service is only half of the battle. Great marketing is a vital tool for even the most innovative start-up.

In the same way as you decide the framework for how your business will function, you also need to map out your marketing approach. Whether you will have the budget for an agency, or rely on in-house content marketing to begin with, this is an essential step in your business strategy.

Making yourself an authority in your sector is a fantastic place to start. Social media is free, so use it. If you don’t already have a blog, start one today. Make it relevant to your business, but not too sales orientated, ensure it contains valuable, original content for your audience and you will have a loyal readership and client base in no time.

This article has been written by Jennifer Acton, on behalf of QMS International who provide ISO 9001 certification to businesses of all sizes.

Everyone will tell you that you must use social media to promote your small business and in turn attract new customers who will buy the goods that you supply or sign up for the services that you provide. There is merit in this argument as there are currently over 1 billion active users of Facebook and over 500 million people have signed up for Twitter accounts with 135,000 new users signing up everyday. The statistics sound great and it is easy to see that there is a huge online market out there waiting to be tapped into but the single most important question for me has always been how do I actually find new customers for my business and which social media platform works best?

I have read many articles which suggest that all small business owners should hold accounts with each of the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These articles recommend that you should post useful information to each of these accounts on a daily basis to help keep your audience engaged and tuned in to your brand. However from experience I do not believe that this is the best approach to adopt and what I call the “scattergun” approach can be very time consuming and is likely to yield very little in terms of new customers or clients for your business.

I started my online business from scratch and the only promotion technique I use is promotion via social media. Like most other small business owners I began with the scattergun approach and attempted to publicise my services to as many people as possible but I soon began to realise that all of this effort was producing very few new customers and I was considering giving up. I persisted and by luck I stumbled upon an approach which is very simple and not at all time consuming and best of all actually works when attempting to attract large numbers of new customers. So what is my approach I hear you asking!

I do not use Facebook and I do not use LinkedIn. I have used both of these websites for business promotion purposes but I consider both sites a waste of time. By all means continue to use both sites for your personal enjoyment but when it comes to business can u buy adderall in thailand there is only one social media platform that really delivers the results you and your business can thrive from. The key to my success and the one platform that I use and recommend you use is Twitter. Twitter has provided me with a very significant number of customers and is the single most important element of my business promotion efforts and has contributed towards my business growth and profitability above anything else.

There is a specific technique that I use to attract new customers on Twitter and I will conclude this article by explaining my approach and what works so well for me. My strategy is to follow as many small business users as possible in an attempt to gain a reciprocal follow from these users. This increases my follower count and my perceived popularity and also allows me to engage with my target market for the services I provide. I actively seek business community hashtags (#) and include my favourite hashtag after the majority of my tweets. A particular hashtag which has yielded excellent results is #bizitalk. I also re-tweet the tweets of the #bizitalk community and in turn I more often than not receive a re-tweet from the community in return which extends my reach to other Twitter users.

I now have more than 11,000 followers and I simply maintain my account by tweeting daily business news articles every weekday morning. I don’t put in much effort to engage directly with other Twitter users and I don’t tweet about what I had for breakfast. My strategy here is to simply post tweets that link to business articles which people may find interesting and most importantly of all I ensure that I am seen within the news feed of all of those who follow me. This is the way in which I ensure my follows keep seeing my business and my brand and ensure that they contact me when they need my services. I now spend five or ten minutes a day promoting my business on Twitter as I’ve explained above and the customers keep on rolling in.

About the Author
Emma Simpson is the owner of a firm of Cheap Accountants who have gained a reputation across the UK for providing quality yet affordable accountancy services to small businesses.

What does creating the perfect working environment mean to you? Is it a motivational, engaging equilibrium where you and/or your employees can be openly creative ? Is it one based on a rewards system? Perhaps it’s a brightly coloured, glass partitioned office. Whatever it is, it’s an undeniable fact that a cleaner, better looking environment can inspire us, it helps us to be more comfortable and ultimately it helps us to concentrate on the task in hand with greater success. But how on earth can we create that environment in a bustling office, complete whirring, buzzing, heat emitting computers and various similar technologies and the luminescent of hum of the avenues of light bulbs? Even the home office can feel a stuffy box devoid of inspiration or motivation. NASA, though, reckon the answer lies in plants.

They’re not lying when they say the greenest places on Earth are also the cleanest and healthiest; of course, that’s due to the work a certain range of plants carry out as their natural photosynthesis process involves purifying and distributing the air, essentially making the environment nicer. Bingo. Naturally though, you can’t just bung a hundred plants into your office and hope for the best; aside from the irritating physical obstruction they’d create there’s still such a thing as too much greenery.

So the big question is, which plants should you choose to adorn the office with, utilizing moderation and a keen sense of the fact that you don’t work in a technologically superior jungle. How do you know which plants are best going to clean the air and help to create a better environment for you and your people? Luckily, NASA are one step ahead of you, as always, and have compiled a list of the best plants for the job!

The test itself featured over a hundred plants and gave each a purifying score, differentiating their cleanification prowess and allowing you to choose the best! Whilst we regrettably don’t have time to comb through every single participant, here’re three of the best performers buy adderall rx from the group and some background information so you know just what kind of plant you’re inviting into your place of work!

Peace Lily

Purity Score: 7.5

Polluted indoor air fears for its life in the face of the deftly Peace Lily. Its name my sound gentle and temperate but with the ability to efficiently remove methyl alcohol, benzene, ammonia, xylene and a ton of other peculiarly named chemicals from the air, replacing them with nought but unadulterated oxygen, it’s certainly not a plant to underestimate. It loves the shade and well-drained soil, as well as a touch of humidity – perfect for the office!

Dracaena Purity

Score: 7.8

The best thing about the Dracaena family of plants is their low light dependency and their adeptness for surviving in dry environments – something that makes it ideal for thriving indoors. Not only that but it is, of course a brilliant purifier, coming in at number 5 in NASA’s rigorous testing program. Reportedly they ‘scrub the air for pollutants’, which sounds like serious stuff for to us!

Areca Palm

Purity Score: 8.5

The Areca Palm stormed to victory in the trials, placing first and as a result being officially crowned the most efficient air humidifier. They can reach an astonishing 30 feet tall, and have always been well suited to indoor environments for a number of reasons; similar to the Dracaena, their low light requirements are among these. The plant grows well in low soil moisture conditions too, needing only a slight amount of water based feeding to allow it to flourish. If you’ve got the space, the Areca Palm is undoubtedly the biggest hitter.

So there we have it! Three of the best air purifiers around, perfect additions to any office, home, shopping ccentre or similar indoor environment! They’ll make the atmosphere cleaner and more pleasant to be in, and they could even help improve efficiency; for the best results, choose a mixture of these and get creative!

This article was written by Rob Vicars of Perimeta planter systems. They can be found at their website www.perimeta.co.uk