What does Social Media mean for you and your business?
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I know that this is something that @Minion-Queen and I have talked about a couple times. How many places do we really want to see her crazy crown pic?
I think the new way to do business is really being social and knowing personalities not a website that is cold and not social at all.
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Okay, so my inclination to think that was strange wasn't off base.
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Your website is minimal, which I like.
However, you have a businesses section, only has 1 type of business in it. Do you only service garages? Your technology section to me looks like a SEO grab to me. Your blog only has one post.
Please don't be offended, but it does have a "fly by night" feeling to it. Also, having a blog with only one posting from August 2011 makes it feel very dated. Having no blog should be better in this case. The default wordpress sidebar makes it seem like the website was put up very quickly and not very thoughtfully. The stock photo doesn't help ether. No careers or testimonials pages also make me wonder if this company is a real company (I know it is, just saying from the potential customers point of view.)
It's not clear to me as a client, or prospect from your website who you are, and what you do. Adding people to your website would make your website feel more welcoming for sure, and from a customers point of view would make me feel better doing business with you.
What services do you provide? What our your hours of options? Do you provide emergency support?
There isn't one social media link on the whole site. In the footer where is says "Niagara Technology Group is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)." Feels sloppy to me, I would remove it.
Having a contact from would also be a very nice.
Take a look at this: http://www.charlescomputerservices.com/about-us/team/
Now this site has many other issues, but the people section is nice.
You list a mailing address in Piffard, NY - however I know you cover many more areas then just Piffard. What is your service area? When I Google your address, there is no business listing. Having a business listing would allow you to list all your locations, and gain more search visibility.
Not trying to be critical, but I thought you would appreciate some honest feedback. If you would like to talk offline, I am always willing. Also, I pretty good with WordPress, and can give you a hand, if you want
If you do list people on your website be sure to list there name, title, what roles they preform in the company, and a little bit of personally wouldn't be a bad idea ether.
Once again, not trying to offend anyone, but I did want to provide some honest feedback.
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Is it cool if I hire some male model to take my photographs so I don't scare off the customers? In all seriousness, I do wonder if anyone has ever done that. I bet they have.
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- There is no post count or rewards.
- Everyones posts must be approved by the Interior Ministry
- Two toilet breaks per day
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Wait... oops, I thought that you meant socialist media.
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I see what @Aaron-Studer is saying and as far as structured criticism goes, that's pretty good.
I am unsure of the credibility of the person doing the original questioning.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Probably both. Having a pic and bio of all prominent staff is a common thing these days. Check out this one...
I see they've gone for the wacky photos. If you're an organisation where the majority of your workforce are young, hip and good looking then it works to your advantage. It's been proven that in business people are attracted towards looks, just like in real life, so a good looking organisation will be more successful than an ugly one. Ridiculous and pathetic, but true. So it's harder to swing if the majority are old, untrendy and ugly, although a good photographer and Photoshop can work wonders.
I originally liked the anonymity of the internet. There was no way to tell if someone was a 16 year old kid in their parents' house or a 40 year old pro. It was pretty meritocratic. But now people's images are all over the net. It seems any self-respecting blog or LinkedIn profile should have a photo of you looking cool and clever. A disadvantage to those of us who will never look either.
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What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
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The problem that arises with images is that it takes what was awesome about the Internet (anonymity) and introduces a strong potential for customers to use even something as simple as headshots to work around merit-based selection and go to racial, age or gender factors. People only wanted to hire young, white males can easily look to see what companies are loaded with them and not work with others. There is no law, nor is there a way to really make a law, to make that illegal.
The anonymity of the Internet was a huge boon for minorities, the young and women in its early days because with anonymity came equality.
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@tonyshowoff said:
What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
Hire hot people. People who own strip clubs are almost always old and ugly, but the draw isn't the owners.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
Hire hot people. People who own strip clubs are almost always old and ugly, but the draw isn't the owners.
Note to self, hire strippers. Got it.
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Here's a current snap shot of our corporate offices:
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@tonyshowoff said:
Here's a current snap shot of our corporate offices:
While that's nice and all, I'm not sure I agree with your choice of curtains.
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Interesting social media question pops up... about Instagram...
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/797834-instagram-for-business -
@scottalanmiller T2 Tea is utilising their Instagram account pretty well
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It is the backbone of the business.
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"Needing a social media presence" could accurately be described as corporate peer pressure IMO. Facebook has successfully boiled the frog, so to speak, and as of late 2013 there are significant ongoing costs for maintaining a decent presence on the site. In my days as a marketing guy, my Facebook posts as of late 2014 had an average organic reach of about 1-2% to the people who had already liked our page... it was just outrageous. This post has some recent stats, which you could use to help make the case that being on Facebook nowadays is a needless marketing expense with little business value for newcomers/small businesses. The scary thing, as one commenter points out, is that those numbers are the average for all posts, paid or unpaid. If you plan on using Facebook for "free marketing" you are going to have a bad time. They may not want to hear that, though...
With that said, if you're working with people that really want you to have a social media presence, I'd recommend going with Twitter right now. It has a large userbase, including a lot of businesses, but my favorite part about it is that you really don't need to write any novels or take a lot of photos to maintain it. A lot of your tweets can be links to information that you consider relevant to clients/potential clients, like security bulletins. Then you can put your feed on your site with a widget - there are many WordPress plugins out there to help you accomplish that goal. Then there's a part of your site that can easily be updated with new stuff without having to write out whole blog posts.
It's also easier to use Twitter for direct calls to action with the Twitter Cards feature that came out a little while ago. For example, if you have a mailing list and tweet about it you can have a link to subscribe right on the tweet itself.
If you have staff active on Twitter, you can have the company follow them and retweet things they say that's relevant to what you do. Then you can have the "look we are real people" factor without having a discrete company directory. If I were into buzzwords I would describe these people as brand ambassadors but let's not go down that road...
Long story short, social media for businesses is most likely going to be seen as one of this decade's ridiculous tech fads in retrospect, but at the moment it is still going strong. In my opinion, Twitter has the best effort/expense to results ratio right now.
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@WingCreative said:
. In my days as a marketing guy, my Facebook posts as of late 2014 had an average organic reach of about 1-2% to the people who had already liked our page... it was just outrageous.
That's because Facebook purposely limits your post to viewing by a percentage. If you want more viewing you have to pay. If you pay for more likes you are just shooting yourself in the foot as 1.) most of the ones liking it are fake accounts, 2.) you then have to pay more for the real people to see the posts.
