Just sent out a press release through PRLog: Stand out from your competitors with a great website. Smack Happy Design offers small businesses a complete set of design services at affordable prices, including user-friendly website design, complete WordPress customization, and user interface design.
Using social media for business marketing is a relatively inexpensive but very effective method of spreading the word about your work. If you manage to get the right connections on Twitter, you can actually have these connections do the advertising for you. At the very least, you will have a cheap means of communicating a few updates to your customers. Whatever your aims are, here are a few but simple tips to help maximize Twitter for your business:
Getting a little informal
Using twitter for businesses rarely works if you are overly intent on marketing alone. People rarely read tweets that so blatantly aim to advertise or promote something or someone. While it is unavoidable to get into tweeting good things about yourself or your company, it helps to blunt such an obvious method by getting a little personal in your tweets. If you want to tweet about something, hang back a bit and read it all over again. If you come across as gimmicky or something a salesman would say, drop the whole tweet and rewrite it from scratch.
Tweet something useful
While getting a little informal helps to draw readership, posting about useless personal stuff will turn off the readers. Nobody will read anything that they consider a waste of time, so make sure your tweets are relevant, informative or helpful to the readers who follow you on Twitter.
Balancing responses
Replying to comments is a double edged sword. You can either strike up a very interesting conversation and use social media for business, or you can rile up your readers against you and use twitter for arguments. Think carefully before you respond to a comment if you do not want to end up damaging the reputation of your business.
Keeping track
Internet search tools keep track of what people say about your company, and these are powerful tools to help you gauge just where your business stands in the wider world. www.search.twitter.com is a good place to start if you want to keep track of your company’s reputation around the world. There are other sites and applications that let you check your company’s standing, just look and ask around for them.
Indirect tweeting
Indirect tweeting, or having others tweet for your company, is another double edged sword when you use Twitter for business. They can paint a pretty picture of your company, or they can blast your reputation to bits if left unchecked. This is particularly true of employees, whose posts about their company could not only affect reputation but internal security as well.
Be careful
The last but definitely not the least tip is to be very, very careful when making an official post on any social media site like Twitter. Most everybody can follow you on your Twitter profile, including competitors, and can use the information you provide in ways you would not like it to be used.
Keep these hints and tips in mind, and you’ll be able to use Twitter for business marketing that is cheap, effective and fun as well. Just try not to get addicted to tweeting, okay? So go get tweeting now!
I recently redesigned a web site for my client, Berkeley Sourcing Group. The site is setup and customized in WordPress.
Help my client out by bookmarking the site in delicious or digging it on Digg.
You can check out the new live site here.
I also illustrated some graphics for their process map:
From our newsletter…
Halloween is just around the corner, which means Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa – or as I lovingly refer to the holidays, ChrismaHanaKwanzikah – are soon to follow. It always amazes me how fast the year flies by.
So, have you considered sending out a holiday greeting to your clients and prospects?
The holidays are a great time to get in touch with your clients. In addition to saying, “Hey, I haven’t forgotten you!”, you are also reminding your clients and prospects of your services. This may prompt them to contact you about work they’ve been meaning to get done, or that friend who asked about your services. You’ll be fresh in their minds in January when work starts picking up.
Typically I like to send a card online to my mailing list, including clients, potential clients, family and friends. But you can also send printed cards (for a pretty good price) or simply add some festive graphics to your web site from the end of November to the beginning of January. In addition, you can offer a special promotion in your holiday greeting.
Contact us to get an estimate on creating a customized greeting card for your business. We’ll not only design your greeting card, we’ll also handle the printing and mailing (or e-mail delivery). All we need is a little direction for the design, and a list of clients/prospects. We’ll take it from there.
If you decide to contract us for a card or graphics before November 15th, 2009, we’ll give you 30% off your design order (not including the actual printing and snail mail). We do need about two weeks to create and mail out each design, so act soon for your cards to reach your clients before ChrismaHanaKwanzikah.
We recently added a few more pieces to our portfolio collection. A new logo along with concept for Achievement Advisors, and an illustration of Dr. Cloud for HealthLoop.
I recently got an email from ThinkGeek.com about getting their anniversary tee for free with a $10 purchase. When I clicked on the link to look at the offer I scrolled through the page and noticed the gradient in the background moving. Upon further inspection I discovered that the gradient revealed two different graphics at the bottom of the page. On the light part of the gradient you could see robots and aliens; on the dark part screaming zombies. The affect is subtle, clever and utterly delightful. You can bet money that I’ll be using this technique as soon as the opportunity arises for such a fun and playful design.
To see the affect make sure your browser is displaying at its maximum width (needs to be 1280px wide or more). Then move the scrollbar up and down to see it. I’ve included two screen captures below in case you can’t make the browser wide enough.
Well done ThinkGeek designer, I like your clever ways!
Slaving way on some new logos; web site designs to follow shortly. Also finished up a small, one-page web site for El Buen Comer, who offers home style Mexican food in San Francisco. Check out the new work…
Just added some new pieces to the portfolio. Some new logos, new ads, and a new user interface example.
There are plenty of hosting companies to chose from out there. One of them is Lunarpages. I’ve been using them for at least five years now.
They have great webmaster tools and as a person who doesn’t know a heck of a lot about hosting they make it extremely easy for me to add on new web sites, add email accounts and a plethora of other things I don’t even take advantage of.
The few times I’ve had to contact support they’ve gotten back to me in a reasonable time frame and with a good solution to the problem.
If you’re looking for hosting I highly recommend Lunarpages. If you’re looking for both hosting and a web site, I recommend contacting me!
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