Twitter Retweets and The Role They Should Play in Your Social Media Plan

Posted on February 22, 2012 by jenny

What is a Retweet anyways? Twitter offers users the ability to generate their own content, reply, favorite, and retweet. Retweeting is when a user copies another user’s tweet verbatim and sends it out again to their own followers. When someone retweets your content it means that they liked your content enough to share it as their own with their followers.

You may be asking, why are retweets substantial to your social media plan? With the variety of components that are put into a social media plan retweets may seem minuscule. However, this is not the case, the reason this is key in every social media plan is that can retweets can get your original tweet and the content linked in your tweet considerably more impressions. Which will drive more traffic and increase your followers.

: Look How Far A Retweet Can Go

The Facts - A HubSpot study found that news accounts for 80 percent of retweeted content and over 50 percent is entertainment related. The study also found that 50% of retweets include links. Meaning your tweet has a higher chance of being retweeted if it is about news or entertainment and contains a link.

According to Dan Zarrella, social media scientist, only 1.44% of all tweets are Retweets. He also found that the most retweeted words are you, social, free, media, help, please retweet, great, and social media.

For more statics on retweets check out this power point by Dan Zarrella

Viral Capabilities – Retweets play a role in making things go viral. For example, Adam Toporek wrote a blog post about Google+ and privacy. Then Gail Gardner of GrowMap quoted in a tweet from the blog, that was seen by Tony Robbins who decided to retweet it. This mean his 2 million followers saw the quote from the article, giving the quality content the opportunity to go viral. Check out Adam’s account of how a retweet made his blog post go viral.

Retweet and be Retweeted - Not only should your social media plan include attempting to get your content retweeted you should also retweet relevant content to your followers. Retweeting relevant content shows that your mission is to provide your followers with content they want and shows that you are not just about self-promotion. Also, if you retweet someone they are more likely to retweet you.

If you want more information on getting your content retweeted check out these articles:

Okay the retweet is important, but how do I do it? You can use the retweet button that Twitter provides, but some argue against it. The alternative is the old school method of doing it by hand. Each methods has pros and cons, I personally use both depending on how much time I have and the content that is getting retweeted. The message here, no matter which way you prefer to retweet, is to ensure that you are utilizing the retweet in you social media plan.

In conclusion, retweets are a vital part of a successful social media plan. The should be incorporated into you fan engagement section right next to responding to questions and providing quality content.

Do you have any retweeting success stories? We’d love to hear them! Happy Retweeting!

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Free Solutions for 6 Common Small Businesses Challenges

Posted on February 21, 2012 by jenny

Everyone knows that running a small business is hard work. However, there are some things that you can do to make it easier. Some solutions can be confusing or expensive which is why we’ve compiled a list of free resources that will help you conquer 6 of the most common challenges small businesses face!

1. Communication: Podio is a site that lets coworkers access an online platform that changes the way people communicate and work. Inside Podio there are a variety of different apps you can add to your workspace depending on your needs. For example, you can define projects and set milestones, keep records of meeting minutes, develop a contact list, schedule vacations, store client information or even give virtual high fives.

With Podio, you can even connect Podio to your Google account granting access to your calendar, mail, and documents from Podio.

Google Docs is another great communications solution it allows you to upload documents and spread sheets which can then be accessed from anywhere you have internet connection. Google Docs also lets multiple people work on the same document from different locations. This is helpful because you can see the edits others are making on your screen as they make them. Google Docs makes working with people in different locations a lot easier.

2. Social Media: Ever business should be on Facebook and Twitter. Some Social Media sites are negotiable depending on your business type. For example, Pinterest can help drive traffic to your blog or your website via photo sharing on virtual “pin boards” if you use it strategically. If your business is not visually appealing, this may not be the social media site for you. For more information on Pinterest check out “30 Resources, Tips and Tricks for Marketing Your Business on Pinterest” by Jeff Bullas.

Since there is a multitude of social media sites available, it can be overwhelming at times. FanTools is a resource that guides you and allows you to manage social media marketing for your business. It assists you with creating and publishing content. FanTools helps you schedule and develop coupons, flash deals, group buys, informative posts, and poll questions for your social media followers. FanTools is available for free for the first three months get FanTools here.

3. Hiring Quality People: 61 percent of small businesses consider finding and retaining qualified workers as the most significant challenge to the growth and survival of their business. If you face this, get on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is basically an online resume that lets you connect with colleagues and see thier connections, thus expanding your network. You can create a group for your business and join groups focused around your industry. You can even post job openings on LinkedIn. LinkedIn lets you see how people are connected to each other meaning you could discover a potential employee went to high school with your someone you know meaning you could get a recommendation from trusted source.

4. Feedback: Survey Monkey is an easy to use site that is perfect for getting feedback from your employees or customers. It allows you to create a short survey and then gives you a URL link to that survey which can be shared via e-mail or online. Survey Monkey’s free version includes up to 10 questions per survey and up to 100 responses per survey. If you need more you can upgrade to one of their paid versions.

5. Presentations: We all know that power point presentations can get dull. Liven it up with a free text to poll question in your next power point. SMS Poll lets you post a poll question directly in your power point. And the cool part? You can instantaneously see the results appear in your power point as your audience casts their votes!

Spice up up power points even more with free power point templates from Microsoft.

6. Photo Editing: Picnik is a great photo editing website that used to have free editing tools and premium editing tools for a monthly fee. Now until April 19^th you have access to all of the editing tools because Picnik is moving the editing tools to Google+. You can upload photos and add text, graphics, frames, lighting, and special effects.

What other free resources and tools does your business use? We love hearing from you, and spreading the good word!

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Four51 Web-to-Print: All About Project File Management

Posted on February 16, 2012 by elsie

Do you ever feel like your desk looks like this?

Or maybe your computer monitor looks like this? (I’ll admit it, I’ve been here before)

Well, we don’t ever want you to have to deal with that in CommerceTools while you are balancing your customers varying products and ongoing corporate design changes. That is why we are talking about the setup of variable data products and the project file upload utility. Join our panel of experts on how you can get setup and organized today.

Case Question:
My customer frequently changes their corporate logo, and has over thirty variable data products that use this logo. Is there a way to setup these products so that I can swap out one image, rather than maintain thirty identical images for each product?

G-Ray:
Absolutely. From an operations efficiency and customer solution development viewpoint, it is important to understand how variable data products are setup, and how the project file upload utility works to make decisions on how to optimize your workflow. Some key considerations include:

Can a project file work for more than one product?
Will images be shared across multiple products?
Does more than one product use the same data source?
How often does the project file require change?

Ski-Dog:
These considerations are exactly why hands on training is required to gain access to manage projects in CommerceTools admin. We demonstrate the relationship between the Pageflex template design tools and a CommerceTools variable data product. We also walk the trainees through the installation of the project file upload utility, which maps the data found in the Pageflex project to a CommerceTools variable data product.

Headphones:
It is important to note that the upload utility requires a desktop computer installation and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

Ski-Dog:
We do get a few cases on installing the utility when someone completes instruction and returns to their work desktop. Should an install fail after following the instructions in the article right here, we provide another troubleshooting utility that Headphones created.

Once you get the utility working, you can follow the instructions to share a project file with multiple products here.

Headphones:
Don’t forget about the project file web service if you need to manage frequent changes to the project file. The web service allows updates and additions to those projects so that your admin user does not need to repetitively login and manage the project via the CommerceTools admin interface. We commonly see the web service used to replace a data source with a nightly update. Take a look here for specifics on the web service.

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Accepting Credit Cards using PayPal Processing

Posted on February 8, 2012 by elsie

Does this ring a bell?

You: “Hi, this is So-and-So from Company ABC and you have an outstanding balance with us.”

Them: CLICK!

Tired of acting like a debt collector? Stop chasing down outstanding bills, improve your cash flow, less your bad debt, and get automated and improved reporting! Now, more than ever, people are preferring to do business with plastic. Read the case question and explore the credit card processing options Four51 offers to get your customers set up today.

Case Question:
My customer now wants to pay with credit cards on CommerceTools, but I don’t know where to begin. What should I do?!

G-Ray:
Times have changed, and customers expect an online shopping experience that includes credit cards as a payment method. Once credit card processing is setup on CommerceTools, you can enable it for any of your customers. This is a great opportunity to take additional functionality to the rest of your customer base, while streamlining your own accounting practices.

Ski-Dog:
CommerceTools supports the PayPal Website Payments Pro and the PayPal Payflow Pro products for credit card processing. The Website Payments Pro product is easy to setup and cost effective for supporting low volume transactions. When you have customers requiring high order volume, it is better to use Payflow Pro because of the lower transaction fees. Here is a Knowledge Base article comparing the two products and exact steps on how to get started with choosing a product.

Headphones:
As you begin the process of accepting credit cards, include your customer in expectation setting, because the majority of issues that arise are during initial setup and testing. Payflow Pro can be implemented in as little as a day, or up to two weeks depending on configuration and testing.

There are some common mistakes made that can cause the implementation to become delayed:

Take the time to complete ALL of the getting started steps when setting up your PayPal account.
If you decide the right product for you is Website Payments Pro, be sure to choose the “Pro” version instead of Website Payments Standard.
If you plan on using Approval Rules or the Saved Credit Card feature in CommerceTools, you will need to choose Payflow Pro, with reference transactions enabled.

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All I Really Need To Know About Social Media Marketing I Learned In High School Physics

Posted on February 3, 2012 by ryan

Originally published as Four51 contributing content to Business2Community.

Back in the 1980s, Roger Fulghum inked All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Do you remember reading it? It was very basic life principles put forth such as “share everything, play fair and don’t hit people.” I came across it painted on a plaque in a store recently and it made me wonder what other lessons from my school days could be applied to my world today. High school physics, for whatever reason, came to mind.

For a right-brained individual, physics was not easy, but my teacher Mr. Miller had a way of aligning life lessons with the laws of the universe. Three lessons from his class come to mind as a thoughtful reminder about how to good approach to social media marketing.

Social Media Physics

Social Media Marketing, Lesson 1

This lesson is completely unrelated to the curriculum of Mr. Miller’s physics class, but a recurring theme in class discussions and serves as a great starting point for putting all three of these tips into practice. Mr. Miller would carry around in his pocket, a piece of scratch paper, always recycled. On it he would scribble his daily to-dos. Mr Miller felt it was imperative to teach 9^th-graders the importance of organizing our day to day life. (I’ve kept a list ever since Mr. Miller, you’d be proud) My point here is this, no social media success will come without jotting down a plan to keep reminding you to act.

Plan your approach, put it down on a calendar and commit to doing it everyday you can.

If the idea of list keeping stresses you out, I’ll share Mr. Miller’s secret. The first item on his list everyday was: to make a list. That way everyday at least one thing was crossed of that list and he felt productive.

Give it a shot; let the list be your guide. Ashley Zeckman from Top Rank Marketing has a great post about effective social media planning.

Social Media Marketing, Lesson 2

There are very few laws I recall from my physics class, sorry Mr. Miller. However, when it came to Newton, his laws of motion are on ready recall for me. Newton’s first law, perhaps the most recognizable states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. The same holds true for social media marketing.

You have to get it in motion.

Get it going and keep it regular. Once you do, it’ll be hard to stop your exponential growth and returns. So make your list, and start executing the list. Tina Cook is a champion of this law in her post on social media marketing consistency.

Social Media Marketing, Lesson 3

Newton’s second law of motion is a bit less recognizable but perhaps the biggest take away from this little exercise. It states that the acceleration of a body is in tandem with the amount of net force. Ultimately, this little lesson works great in all avenues of life stating simply: you get out what you put in.

The more force, or effort you put into social media marketing, the more return you’ll see.

In a nutshell, here’s what I learned about social media marketing (and really any marketing effort) from my high school physics class.

Make a plan. Build your list and remind yourself of your necessary actions.
Get going. Just start doing it. The more you do it, the harder it is to stop it.
Do more. As your “body” gets in motion, keep adding “force” for increasing returns.

Thanks Newton and Thanks Mr. Miller, I was paying attention.

How about you?

Any lessons you can tie from your school days to executing good online marketing tactics today?

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Alternatives To Daily Deal Sites, Do It Yourself.

Posted on February 2, 2012 by elsie

Daily Deal Sites have been making headlines for almost two years now. However, in 2012 it may not be the case. Is 2012 the year of decline for daily deal sites?

Marcia Kaplan points the brutal commission cuts daily deal sites impose on merchants in a post at Practical Ecommerce stating that “The daily deal sites take 40 to 50 percent of the already discounted revenues, leaving merchants with roughly 25 to 30 percent of the retail price.”

How long will small businesses tolerate this? Daily deal sites are simply taking too much, and as more emerge among the most popular (Groupon, Living Social) the competition will only get stiffer.

Businesses are starting to get over the hype and they are looking at the bottoms lines. Here is what Kaplan thinks we’ll see going into 2012:

More focus on return on investment by merchants. The novelty of daily deals has worn off and merchants are looking at the bottom line.
More visibility into consumer behavior. Groupon is making it easier for merchants to get customer feedback by adding a feedback component to its Merchant Center. Groupon recently began surveying all customers about their Groupon experiences immediately after redemption. Merchants can now see the overall percentage of Groupon customers that would recommend their business and scroll through customer comments added in real time.
A more competitive market as new, well-funded competitors enter the daily deal fray. When Google rolls out a nationwide daily deal offering, it will affect the two big players, Groupon and LivingSocial. Google has lots of cash and will not incur the customer acquisition costs — it has millions of customers already with its pay-per-click ad products — that saddle Groupon and LivingSocial. This may put pressure on Groupon and LivingSocial to increase revenue share for merchants.

Merchants can continue using the “big guys” and constantly fight for a following, but evidence is suggesting this is becoming a harder battle, and they aren’t gaining measurable ROI or insights to their customer base.

As a business owner, wouldn’t it be easier if you could have your own fans, the power of word of mouth, and control at your finger tips? Last week Ryan pointed out that a key to social media ROI comes from tying it to commerce. Welcome to the evolution of the daily deal, the power gets given back to the small business.

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We’re Hiring! Account Executive

Posted on February 1, 2012 by ryan

Job Description

The Account Executive will work within an assigned geographic territory to generate new business, manage an activity plan, and perform account management duties as required.

Main Areas of Responsibility:

Develop product competence and a thorough understanding of Four51 solutions.
Identify, contact, qualify, and close new business within an assigned local geography.
Meet and exceed monthly activity targets.
Develop and maintain an excellent understanding of the needs of prospects in the SMB social marketing space and determine how those needs are best addressed by the Four51 solutions.
Use knowledge of technology, products, processes, industry expertise, and consultative sales skills to educate prospects on the Four51 value proposition.
Proactively participate in local networking events, trade events, shows, and conferences to build relationships and heighten visibility of Four51 solutions.
Update CRM system to generate activity, pipeline, and sales reports.

Desired Skills & Experience

Requirements:

Four-year college degree (3.0 or greater GPA).
1-2 years sales experience in marketing services, advertising, or Software as a Service.
Proficient with MS Office products and familiarity with CRM systems, social media, and eCommerce.
Ability to work independently and manage activity plan.
Strong verbal, written, and communication skills, as well as strong attention to detail.

Company Description

Four51 is a Bloomington, MN-based cloud computing software company in the fast growing ecommerce industry. Founded in 1999, our solutions help thousands of businesses around the globe better distribute their various brand messages to their customers and employees. Our latest application called FanTools, launched in late 2010, is experiencing significant growth in user acceptance and we are therefore experiencing solid growth in our business. FanTools is a social media marketing platform that allows marketers to create, publish, and share preference-based deals and sound content to a merchant’s Facebook page.

Four51 offers a competitive starting salary and incentive bonus program, fringe benefits including health/dental Insurance and 401(K) with match, an outstanding working environment including free (covered) parking, access to walking/running trails and exercise rooms/fitness classes, and is located in a convenient close-in suburban location. Four51 has a challenging workplace team with smart, experienced individuals who can provide the opportunity to help you grow and develop.

Please submit resume to Kari Weiss, kweiss@four51.com. Please title subject of message with “Account Executive”.

Additional Information

Posted:: January 10, 2012
Type:: Full-time
Experience:: Associate
Functions:: Business Development, Sales
Industries:: Internet
Compensation:: Competitive Starting Salary

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“I didn’t know that?!” Training at Four51

Posted on January 30, 2012 by elsie

“That is new to me… I didn’t know that… You can do what?… Neat!…” These are all the phrases that make us smile when we have new trainees in our classroom, and we hope to hear some of that this week!

At noon today we kick off our newly revised free training format and are welcoming 12 people to frigid Minneapolis! (c’mon, only 7 miles away from Mall of America!) So you may ask yourself, would this benefit me? Of course it would, unless you are better than our very own tech guru, Steve Davis. We have many trainees that attend our program because they are new at their place of employment and need to learn the basics; but we also have a large audience who come to expand their knowledge so they can provide more for their customers and co-workers.

Many of you may have already attended a training session here at Four51′s headquarters, but this week marks the first week with our new format in place. In the past, we offered a one week course lasting M-F. This allowed a lot of classroom time for Mike Moebeck to crack his famously old stale jokes, but meant people had to give up their weekends catching flights in and out of town. We’ve changed that.

Here is a breakdown of our new training:

Monday Noon to 5 pm: CommerceTools Administration

Tuesday 9am to 5pm: Variable Text Products, Pageflex lesson 1 &2

Wednesday 9am to 5pm: Pageflex lessons 3-6 and Lesson Challenges

Thursday 9am to Noon: Pageflex lessons 7 & 8, Summary, and Goodbye!

Stay tuned for an announcement on our next training session so you can start planning your visit.

And please tell us! Have you attended training at Four51? What are your thoughts on the shorter program we’ve put in place?

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How to decide whether “daily deal” sites are right for you via The Business Journals

Posted on January 27, 2012 by ryan

Originally published in The Business Journals by Linda Bryant.

Many industry experts say daily deal websites such as Groupon and Living Social will continue to grow as long as Americans are focused saving money and cutting back on frivolous purchases. Continue reading →

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