GOSO

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

If you thought you got to choose between looking after your search engine results and engaging in social media … think again.

Yes, as is so often the case with this kind of thing, the choice has been taken out of your hands. Social media messages and content are turning up in search results, whether you like it or not.

What does this mean?

Well, for a start, it means that Google is just dipping their collective gargantuan toes into these particular digital waters, and we should all brace ourselves for what might be just around the corner.

But right now it also means that you might have an opportunity, or perhaps a big problem on your hands.

Where before it would take some effort for a disgruntled ex-employee or customer to cause a huge headache for you, pretty soon (or even right now) it could be just a case of going on to Twitter and bad-mouthing your brand.

Real time results are not present for every search phrase but they are being rolled out. Bizarrely there is a real time result for my name. Think about that for a moment. Luckily I am not in the job market and my clients are not easily swayed by random opinions from Internet people, but if your customers are in the market for a new car and they put in the name of your dealership … well, let’s hope what they see is positive.

If your customers use Google then you need to be doing some reputation management. You need to react appropriately to social media brand mentions, either to support the positive or to mitigate the negative. Even if you are not monitoring your brand, it seems the search engines are, and this is only the beginning.

Happy New Year!

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

Email is super important to any online business. As an auto dealer you will be using email to follow up leads and customers, to send out offers, keep your fans warm and loyal, and to post news and events.

Most people who have dismissed Twitter as noise and chitchat will not have realized that Twitter can be used in very much the same way, but also they compliment each other very well too.

Twitter is also an instant alert tool in a fashion. OK, not all of your followers will get your Tweet at once, but those who do can take action right away. Try doing that with a blog post or a postcard. This means it is perfect for snap offers or breaking news.

Do not overlook the traffic boosting ability of Twitter too. Just like when you send an email out you can get a big spike in page views to your dealer website or deal pages, but also through “retweets” you can get pass along traffic just like when someone forwards your email to a friend.

That page that you send people to? That could be a newsletter opt-in form, so your twittering can drive more email opt-ins.

Of course it works the other way too. When you send an email out, either from your personal account or from a newsletter, mention your Twitter page. It will drive more followers.

One advantage Twitter has over email is people do not get as irritated when you tweet often, but send more than one newsletter email in a day and you will likely lose subscribers. So while you have to ration your email delivery, with twitter if it is useful or interesting tweet away! I send the same link up to four times a day in Twitter to catch several time zones but I would never dream of repeating an email unless I made a mistake the first time.

While social media is seen as the new shiny thing, it is far better to integrate these tools into your existing best practices. Twitter and email get along famously!

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

Many businesses are concerned about the return on investment from social media, in particular justifying the time investment with these tools.

Fact is though, online is far more accountable than many of the offline strategies that you are already using. This is because the “currency” of social media is the link. Not much happens without someone clicking something, and any time a link is clicked there is an opportunity to track that.

What does a click tell you?

• Where the link was seen (“Referrer”)
• What the person was interested in (“attractiveness”)
• How many people were interested in that link (“popularity”)
• How many more people were interested in that over an alternative version (“split testing”)
• If the link was shared, and if so how many times (“viral effect”)

Depending on your tools you should be able to take the path the visitor arrived via and record that. Later you can see which source of visitors is worth the most and which either need to be optimized or dropped. The free and extremely powerful Google Analytics is a good start. Check out how I track my Twitter audience with Google’s software here.

What if you do not have sophisticated tracking in place? Simply use unique links for each venue.

• Using a service such as Bit.ly you can share your content in social networks, on forums and in your own sites, and it will count how many times a link has been clicked and how many times it was shared.
• Many companies provide each service audience with unique offers – if those offers are taken up, maybe by using a unique voucher code etc, you know where the person heard about your deal.
• Have unique 800 numbers for each venue, so that if you get a telephone call you know the source of that sales lead.
• Failing all the above … ask!

There really is no need for your efforts to be all based on guess work, you just need to put some effort into working out what is working well and what is not working, then optimize or prioritize appropriately!