Welcome to our brand new weekly Twitter roundup. We’ll be highlighting some of the key news stories from the world of social media and beyond each and every Friday.

9 Ways Your Business Needs To Change To Become Social

As this post points out, social media has changed the way we do almost everything. It talks about how traditional business need to evolve to become social:

1. The concept of an audience is outdated.
2. Size (alone) does not matter.
3. Empathy and caring trump strategy.
4. You can’t get people’s attention with marketing messages.
5. Writing is more important than copywriting.
6. It’s personal.
7. Speed matters. A lot.
8. Results require patience.
9. Influence is the new power.

5 Steps to a Successful QR Code Marketing Campaign

A fascinating article about QR codes and how to use them successfully in your business; the main points being:

1. Plan your QR code campaign strategy
2. Create quality codes and test them
3. Link your codes to mobile-friendly or mobile-optimised sites
4. Track your scans with code management systems
5. Deliver value and a favorable user experience

Also, check out this video for some interesting ways of using QR codes to drive traffic to your website.

How to Use LinkedIn Mail to Connect With Your Contacts

Have you used LinkedIn Mail? This article shows that it represents a powerful way to stay in touch with important people (when used properly).

Twitter rolls out user galleries, which show every image you’ve tweeted

Twitter has announced it’s rolling out “user galleries” which aggregate the images you’ve uploaded in your Tweets into an organised page for your viewing pleasure.

In the space of three months we had achieved page 1 status for 5 keywords and the website went from receiving 100 hits per month to over 750 unique hits per month as of August 2011.

Google Places SEO

Here we can see that not only have we managed to get Ca Pepe into the Google Places listings at the top of the results page (meaning they appear on the map), but we are the only restaurant that has managed to get into the organic results on the first page. This means that Ca Pepe are currently the only restaurant to appear twice on the first page – this has been instrumental in getting masses of traffic to the site and more bums on seats.

From zero to hero in 4 months

Here is a screenshot taken directly from Google Analytics (an invaluable free tool that allows us to track all visitors to a website). You’ll notice that the website has seen steady growth each and every month since the restaurant opened for business in April 2011 (the spike at the very end of the chart was actually due to a website relaunch – aided by the power of social media obviously!)

How we use social media to reach out to holidaymakers

Alongside their custom Facebook fanpage design, Ca Pepe also have a growing Twitter following. With BKR now managing their social media presence, Twitter is being used to discover people who are either in or are about to visit Moraira; and making contact. Social media users are extremely receptive to this kind of communication when it comes from a reputable source, and our success rate is delighting the restaurant owner no end!

Take time to think about what you’re looking to achieve through the use of social media. Are you looking to engage with your existing customers to improve the service they receive? Or perhaps you need more traffic to your website? Maybe you’re just looking to monitor what people are saying about your company so you can better protect your brand. There are plenty of reasons for embracing social media, and there are a tonne of ways you can go about implementing your social media strategy once you have it in place. That’s where BKR can help.

BKR Solutions are proud to announce the publication of the Social Media Blueprint, available as a downloadable ebook as well as in paperback format. Written with the small business owner in mind, it helps the reader formulate a social media plan and teaches them how to implement it to maximum affect. With over 70 social media tactics, it’s the perfect guide for those that know they need to embrace social media but don’t know where to start.

You can download a free extract of the book by visiting the website below. From there you can also order the ebook version or purchase the paperback version via Amazon.

Visit the Social Media Blueprint Book website for more information.

Everyone’s jumping onto the social media bus – left, right and centre. But awesome as the use of social media in business is – there are faults creeping in. Here are things that you should steer clear of:

No venture, especially in the corporate/business scenario, can ever succeed without a well defined goal. And yet, it is surprising to see the number of businesses that enter the social media arena without knowing what is it that they want out of their social presence. Haphazardness in your updates, little or no interaction and not giving any exclusive scoops can soon result in you losing the few followers that you do have.

Many businesses start off with the impression that they’ll have followers by the thousands as soon as they jump on the social media bandwagon. Using social media in business is not as easy as it seems and “fans” are not as gullible as you think. Be patient, interact, stay updated and keep them updated – their numbers will grow.

Do not ignore traditional forms of media such as newspapers and television. This is especially important for businesses whose products target people who aren’t technologically savvy, for instance, the elderly.

Being a Facebook or Twitter account holder does not make anyone a social media pro. Also, do not relegate the responsibility of updating your company’s profile to one person alone. Research has revealed that if different people from within a business were to post updates (including the CEO), different facets of the company are portrayed – and readers like that.

Remember, social media in business promotions may have worked wonderfully for some brands, but for every one brand that took off to a flying start, there are a thousand others that have steadily made their way up. You can too – all you need is patience, personal involvement and a smart strategy. Good Luck!

So how do you get this completely free targeted traffic to your site? The first, and by far the most important thing you can do is submit the URL of your website to the search engines so that it will be included in their search results. After your site has been indexed by the search engines, it is time to implement important SEO techniques so that your site will get better search engine placement. SEO, known as Search Engine Optimisation, is an important step to take when building a website. When optimising your site, it is best to make little changes over a period of time. Search engines like to see changes to websites, and it keeps them coming back regularly to crawl your site for new content. Making little changes at a time to enhance your optimisation will go a long way with the search engines and will give your site better search engine placement as well. If done properly your website will receive traffic from users searching for the topic that is related to what your site is all about. This type of traffic is called targeted traffic because the user is already interested in what you are offering and will be more likely to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter or whatever else you have.

For businesses based in Surrey SEO services should be a priority when building your website and you should work hard to achieve better search engine placement. Free targeted traffic will slowly begin to make its way to your site. Remember though it is important that your site has been submitted to the search engines before you tackle SEO strategies.

BKR Solutions provide SEO services in Camberley and the rest of Surrey – call today for a free website appraisal and to see how we can help your business succeed online.

Tel. 0844 686 8880
Email. enquiries@bkr.uk.com

In today’s climate it’s not only important that marketing is done in the first place, but that it’s done effectively. During tough times, some businesses choose to reign in their marketing spend, whereas others choose to increase their marketing budgets to solidify and enhance their position in their specific market. We’re now seeing more and more companies turn to the Internet as a way to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty, and in particular social networking sites such as Facebook.

Facebook continues to grow in popularity, and as such, is attracting more businesses with each passing hour. Companies both large and small are using Facebook as a way of connecting with their customers, as well as attracting new ones. When you consider that Facebook now has over 500 million active users, 200 million of whom access the site through their mobile phone you’ll start to get an idea of the huge potential that business owners are getting so excited about.

If you’re ready to build a solid online social networking presence and attract new fans to your fanpage resulting in more business, we’d love to discuss your individual needs. We offer the setup of your Facebook fanpages, Facebook advertising and many other services for your business.

To get started please give us a call on 0844 686 8880 or email us at enquiries@bkr.uk.com.

And of those backups how many are stored away from the server that the website resides on? I’d hazard a guess to say not that many! Of those that do actually have a backup of their WordPress installation, how many generate regular backups? Again, not that many!

There are a number of reasons you should be making regular WordPress backups:

• Your hosting company runs into problems and your website goes down for a period of time that will affect your business.
• Or worse, your hosting company suffers technical problems and they cannot recover your website.
• You install or upgrade a plugin that causes your website to go down.

I’ve tried a number of WordPress backup plugins but the best by far is BackupBuddy, which not only allows you to backup your database content (so your pages, posts, comments etc) but also the actual PHP code that the website is built on. It backs up your entire website (including files and directories that are nothing to do with the core WordPress installation) and zips them up ready for you to either download them, email them somewhere or upload them directly to Amazon’s S3 storage service.

In my video I show you how to setup BackupBuddy to automatically backup your WordPress database every day and take a complete website backup each month.

I highly recommend taking a look at this wonderful WordPress backup plugin, if you own a WordPress website it’s invaluable, and if you’re a web designer with multiple sites on the go it’s a huge time-saver – I used to spend at least an hour every time I needed to set up a new client website; now it takes a matter of minutes. And when I’ve finished work on the website and it’s ready to launch it’s as simple as taking a backup, uploading it to the live web server and running the importbuddy script that comes with the plugin.

But starting a blog is a commitment and one that should be taken seriously. Starting a blog and leaving it with just a few articles will give the look of a company that is no longer active, which clearly isn’t what we want.

So before you make the decision to start blogging (which I highly recommend you do by the way!), you should take a few moments to create yourself a blog plan.

It’s important to know what you’re going to be blogging about in advance so you can pull all of your research together.

It’s really important that you consistently create good content, so don’t release three articles in as many days and then leave it sitting there for weeks. Decide whether you’re going to blog every day, twice a week, once a week or twice a month (once a week is usually a good goal), and really stick to it.

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To remain focused on your commitment to blogging add events to your calendar on the days you’re going to publish posts.

Add extra events to your calendar for the days you’re going to actively promote your blog using your social media accounts.

Putting a little effort in each month to plan out your blogging activities will go a long way to keeping you focused on the task in hand – creating relevant, quality content on a consistent basis.

If you run a blog and you have any other tips please let me know, I’d love to hear them!

I gained a huge amount from the talk, and have already implemented a number of things off the back of it. There’s a particularly interesting section on up-selling that has completely changed the way I’m running my businesses.

A few days after the event I actually purchased both of Geoff’s Marketing Takeaway books – highly recommended!

I hope you enjoy the videos!

I thought I’d share some of my favourite videos from the event, the first of which was by James Woudhuysen who talks about the importance of forecasting in business. It’s a fantastic talk and well worth watching.

You can download James’ presentation and get a little more background information from the Sage World 2010 website.