EyeSee

Traditional advertising is costly and these days it doesn’t seem to be very effective.  So what are the alternatives if you don’t have a large budget for advertising but want to let people know about your brand, business etc.

The answer to this dilemma is Social Media. So what is Social Media anyway? Social Media is a term used to reference sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn and more.

Currently there are 12,381,640 Canadians on Facebook. Statistics Canada’s  population clock estimates that the total population of Canada is 33,760,010.

That’s a significant amount of Canadians on this one social network. This does not take into account the number of people spending their time on social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogs etc…

Based on all the statistics it’s very apparent that social media is here to stay and is not just a fad. So as a business how do you advertise or market yourself in these sites? It’s through social media marketing.

Then what is social media marketing?

Marketing is about building relationships and social media tools help you achieve this in an online world. Social media marketing is about using sites like Facebook, YouTube et. to create awareness and credibility about a brand. This is indirectly translated to growing revenues for your business.

These sites are free however it’s very important to

• tie your business goals into your participation in these spaces
• not spam your audience
• use these sites the the way they were inende, entertainment
• start a dialogue with your customers (build relationships)
• incorporate this  into your business processes

Participation online takes time, effort and consistency.  If you are spending time online building your business then take time to track your efforts and tie this into your website analytics.

So before you participate in social media start paying attention to who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. This will give you a baseline to start from. Then track the difference between the traffic to your website before and after your participation in social media.Tweak this as you go.

I have been debating the merits of becoming a LION and have finally decided to take the plunge.  No I am not referring to the lion from national geographic below?

I am becoming a LION on  LinkedIn.  It means LinkedIn Open Networker.

By adding LION to my name I am letting the world know that I am going to let anyone and everyone into my network.  Yup total strangers.  The main advantage of doing this is that I will grow my network rapidly.

History of the LION

Back in 2006 Christian Mayaud and John L. Evans rapidly established the LIONs group on Yahoo.  Below is the LIONs badge on Yahoo.

John applied to LinkedIn for a Badge of recognition and invented the LION concept in members names.  This made it easy for other LIONS to find them.  LinkedIn did finally gave this a go unoficially.

LIONs™ Badge as carried by LIONs™ on LinkedIn Given LinkedIn’s move to monetize their social network I can see this as being a bit of an issue.

Christian Mayaud has used this to suceeed in his business ventures.  He liked LinkedIn as he never forgot a face however not remember the connection.   Being part of the VC community and participating on LinkedIn sparked the whole interest from other people and recruiters.

Becoming a LION could affect your LinkedIn SEO and makes it somewhat confusing.  I will give this a go and report on this at a later date.

Have you bookmarked your favourite websites and check them on a regular basis? If you find this rather time consuming and frustrating when the website you look at has the same information from a couple of months ago then?RSS is for you. ?

RSS aka Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication?is a format for delivering regularly changing web content like headlines, update notices, blogs, wikis etc…?directly to you.?It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quiclky, after it was published.

Another analogy is a magazine subscription, only in this case it’s delivered to your RSS reader everytime there is an update?

For you geeks out there, RSS is an XML-based format for content distrubution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines?and descriptions of specific information.

A lot of websites these days offer RSS feeds. It’s easy to see if a website has an RSS feed, it will have the orange button in the link window.

RSS is a free and easy way to promote your website without the need for complicated contant sharing partnerships.