Yellow Dog Consulting

Sales & Marketing Consulting for solo-preneurs.

Social Media: Stop Doing it All

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engage with your networkI just had a call with someone this morning who was feeling over whelmed with social media. The first thing I heard? “I know I should…”

Stop That!

  • Where’s your target market?
  • Where do you enjoy engaging with your clients and demographic?
  • How much time to do you have to commit?
  • What works for you?

Social media is great, my philosophy is that small business owners needs to manage their own social media (it’s why someone didn’t hire me last week!) You know your business better than any consultant does, and YOU need to know what people are asking and saying.

Make sure your blog posts are getting posted to social media, and as I mentioned last week, make sure your newsletters get posted to social media as well. Make sure you ENGAGE. Follow people on Twitter you meet, connect with them on LinkedIn, like/fan their Facebook page, follow them on Instagram, pin the crap out of their Pinterest pages. Where ever YOU are online, connect with your network and your target market there too.

Don’t Forget you can repopulate with old content

You may have notice recently on the blog some posts that are from a ways back – and that’s correct. I’m cleaning up my content and bringing it back from 4 years ago. Take older content on a topic you’ve recently talked about and share that with your network.

The more you can be active, engage, and educate your network (instead of selling them on HOW to work with you) the easier it is for folks to hire you.

Increasing Your Content Traffic

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Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 10.51.33 AMI’ve talked with a few clients lately about increasing blog and newsletter traffic. One of my favorite things about Mail Chimp is that I can easily automatically tweet my newsletter when it goes live, and if I were a sellout on Facebook – I would post to both my business & personal pages (and for most of my clients, we do this). And that’s great. What’s not great is that’s where it stops with Mail Chimp. So, in my newsletter (and my client’s) you’ll always see the Social Share buttons – this is so if you find my newsletter compelling and you want to share with others – you easily can. AND it’s also for me – to remind me to tweet the newsletter again later, make sure to post it to my G+ pages (business & personal) and share it on LinkedIn.

Something else I’ve been doing is about a week later, I take that newsletter top 3 list (because my newsletter always has 3 things)  and I write it up as a post on LinkedIn. It gets great traffic from LinkedIn and since I don’t post my newsletter to my blog (which I know some people do) this is a good way to get somewhat original content out there.

I also really like this blog post and social media sharing timeline. Frequency is the key to success with content sharing – once is not enough – if your blog traffic is low, this may just help you. Don’t bombard me with your blog posts but don’t think I caught your one tweet about it either.

No, You DON’T Understand

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no you don't understandI was listening to The Nerdist podcast this weekend, Chris Hardwick had Jen Kirkman on and they were talking about customer service. Evidently Jen Kirkman LOVES customer service as much as I love good follow up. They had a great conversation about customer service with some great points, take a listen if you’re in customer service. There were a few points worth repeating…

Here’s the deal – you don’t always know how someone feels, so don’t lie. Hardwick mentioned how he had a device malfunction and then break and he was being charged for it by his service provider. When he called to get it taken care of the customer service rep said “oh man, I totally understand, I’ve been there.” Really? Please don’t lie.

Good customer service is about being a real person. YES relate to the customer, but don’t make something up. “Wow, I’ve never heard that one before” is OK to say – “let’s find a manager and get this figured out because I know none of these questions I’m supposed to ask you are going to do anything and will only make you angrier.” WHY don’t companies empower their employees to do this?

No one says anything nice about Comcast, except my dad. He believes he’s found the secret – he goes to the store. He walks in, he gets helped faster than if he was on the phone, AND the real human in front of him is always competent and has the power to fix any issues he’s having. This has happened ZERO times for me on the phone with Comcast. WHY?

Your front desk admin, your call center, your help desk team: Give them the power to be a real person, to acknowledge and be honest when they don’t have the answer. Don’t put me on hold for 10 minutes while you Google the solution, I did that you idiot. Tell me you need to research it and when it’s figured out you’ll call me back. (And obviously then call me back!). Educate and train your team so that they do have the answer, and they can help and really think instead of just following a script that leads to angry customers.