When preparing your content for social media updates and blog posts, it is worth considering who the audience is likely to be and preparing with them in mind.

Besides the natural target audience for your own industry, there are two kinds you should prepare for.  (Also see this post on our sister site – Social Media Solutions.  “There are two ways to be found online“)

Your ‘tribe’

Your tribe are your existing clients, customers, fans, followers, friends, connections, leads and prospects who are watching you and your posts.

You write for them to educate them, entertain and enlighten them, ensure that they understand your product or service and are using it to its fullest extent.

As they are your primary audience, your priority is to ensure that your posts meet their needs first.

If your content is good, then it is likely that these folks will forward it to others and your message will spread and your tribe will grow.

People who find you online

Your second audience are those people who find you without any direct action on your part.  Direct action would be if you reached out to them, sent them an email, added or invited them to follow you.

These people find you when they search for certain terms online and stumble across your posts, or see their friends commenting on social sites.

Writing for this audience is also important because you always need to be adding to your database as there is a constant turnover of followers and a healthy database should be growing all the time.

Preparing your content with this audience in mind means that you have to explain to them how your product, service or industry works; why it is important in their lives or business and what you can do for them.   Your posts should be rich with the kinds of key words and SEO that needs to be included so that they will find you and not your competitor.

It is unlikely that you can meet the needs of both groups in every post, so just bear it in mind when preparing and then you will be able to write different posts at different times to meet the relevant needs.

~by Charlotte Kemp

We are delighted to announce the Winners in the first Niche Training Social Media Awards.  All of these winners have taken what they have learned and got the most mileage possible out of their social media marketing opportunities.   The winners come from financial, networking and Non-profit arenas.

Cheri von Wielligh from Three Peaks was given the Most ROI from a Social Media Strategy Award.  Three Peaksis a

Cindy Pivacic, Debbie Jones, Charlotte Kemp, Cheri von Wielligh

short term insurer and debit order bureau that helps SME businesses with their cash flow.  They operate nationally.

What we can learn from Cheri

• Cheri was systematic in both her learning and application.  She learned all that she could from the training courses and then supplemented that with her own online investigations and experiments.  This means that her understanding of social media is comprehensive and she and the management of Three Peaks are confident in her application of what she has learned.  In fact, she even sends a few titbits of new information back to me as trainer and she is proficient in LinkedIn.
• Cheri then worked through a checklist of things to achieve online.  She used social media to promote the launch of the new Three Peaks brand, for their events that are held on a regular basis and also for extending the name recognition of the managing partners.
• When systems are not right for the purpose of connecting or promoting information through social media, then Cheri will negotiate for changes to ensure that the business has the best possible online presence.  She also keeps management informed and educated so that they are aware of the potential and feed her with appropriate information.
• Cheri anticipates needs online in the future and prepares her social media marketing schedule well in advance so that opportunities can be maximised instead of seeing them missed.

The Shout Out Award was given to Hilary Teal and Carmen Teal from Corporate Network, KZN.  Corporate Network is a networking and marketing business that helps local businesses to meet and interact.  It operates in KZN and has monthly meetings in Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

What we can learn from Hilary and Carmen

Lee, Charlotte, Kate, Bill, Hilary and Carmen

• Amazing resilience, the willingness to learn and grow, and the unflagging support given to their supporters:  these are some of the qualities evident in this mother and daughter team who have taken their casual network into an effective business that has created spin off business for so many attendees.
• Hilary and Carmen call on various businesses to invest some effort into Corporate Network to ensure that it remains vibrant and effective.  Those sponsor businesses get a great deal of promotion at the meetings and on Facebook, Twitter and their blog.
• They never fail to follow up and thank people for their support and attendance, referring them always back to their social media sites so that their numbers keep growing.
• Both they and their members also look out for local charities, supporting children’s homes, women’s shelters and others.

Cindy Pivacic of AID My Journey has created the most Social Spin (Award) by taking the circumstances of her condition and using to educate others around the country, about HIV and AIDS.  She speaks at Corporate Wellness Days and other opportunities, and is incredibly busy this time of the year leading up to International AIDS Day on the 1^st December.

What we can learn from Cindy

• She does not shy away from a difficult, uncomfortable topic because she knows how vital her message is.
• She works tirelessly at ensuring that accurate and comprehensive information is shared on her site about HIV and AIDS so that people can be educated about their condition and not passive in managing it or at risk for lack of knowledge.
• Anticipating the demand of this topic around the 1^st December, she prepared all her marketing material, online resources and personal diary to meet the needs of anyone who needed to hear her speak.
• She has taken full advantage of her social media to connect with people, build relationships and share her story online.  And one of the most important lessons in social media is borne out by Cindy – she backs up her online efforts with face-to-face meetings.
• The result is that Cindy has bookings for her talks in KZN and Gauteng and enquiries from other parts of South Africa, has had media interviews and runs a group support meeting in KZN as well.

You can find out more here, and please follow her Facebook Page.  If you wish to support Cindy in her work, there is a Donations option here.

Should you wish to learn how social media can support your marketing efforts, please feel free to contact Charlotte on info@nichetraining.co.za

1. Make sure your profile is in your name.  Your profile should not be your company’s name but your own.  Not only is this in violation of LinkedIn’s rules but also bad branding.  LinkedIn have provided excellent Company Pages that can be individually followed, have status updates and receive your blog feeds.  Leaving your personal profile under your name means that people cannot form a connection with YOU and is poor online strategy and marketing.
2. Add your photo.  Profiles without photos seem distant and cold.  Social networking is about being social, not aloof.  People should be able to see who they are connecting with and it shouldn’t be a butterfly image, company logo or picture of your dog.  (Again, all things that LinkedIn frown on in their rules.)  Read here for more about this and then why you should add it.
3. Personalise your Website Names.  Don’t leave your websites with the anonymous “Company Website” tag, but edit them to reflect your own company or blog name.   This is essential for comprehensive branding of your page.  See here on our sister site about how to do this.
4. Ask and Give Recommendations.  Even when we claim that we get business from social media, we still know that so much of our business comes from word of mouth and personal recommendations.  Ensure that anyone reading your profile, knows that people who are connected to you appreciate your value by requesting some strategic recommendations.  And these can’t be faked or made up as we sometimes fear with other recommendations.   Be generous and offer recommendations to your connections where appropriate too.
5. Add your Blog feed.  Use the Applications option from the Menu to add either the WordPress application or BlogLink.  If you are writing about anything relating to your professional life, then it should be accessible to your LinkedIn contacts and not restricted to your website.  If you are not blogging, then we will address that soon.

One more …

If you have accidentally created more than one profile, here is how you go about correcting that situation.  Having more than one profile is messy and unprofessional and wastes the collective value of having your contacts in one place.

Breast Cancer is a very scary thing to have to go through and it does not only effect the person diagnosed with the dieses but their whole family.  By making women aware of this disease and have them go for check up and mammograms regularly I could be saving a life ………. Or many lives.

Pink Fishing is that vessel for me.

In the USA, two women who loved to fish and who have also been affected by breast cancer thought it would be a great idea to show their love of fishing while helping out a great cause as both ladies have a history of breast cancer in their families. Thus Pink Fishing was born, we sell t-shirts, hats and other items to raise Breast Cancer Awareness and raise funds for Breast Cancer Research. 20% is donated to Breast Cancer Research  and in South Africa this 20% will go toward CANSA and their Mobile Scanning units.

I was approached in February this year to join their Pro Staff team as they noticed my dedication to the sport and my wanting to grow the sport amongst South African Women as there is a small handful of Professional Women Angler is South Africa.

Apart from my passion for Bass Angling I also have a great passion for promoting Breast Cancer Awareness as I had a lump removed at the end of 2009.  A lump which was, luckily, not cancerous.

The best part of Pink Fishing is that we are helping the lives of many women and men by fishing…….yes, fishing. To make Pink Fishing more public we are approaching Professional Woman Anglers, like myself, to promote the Brand and the Cause.

Although I concentrate on Bass Angling we have many ladies in all sphere of angling in South Africa, and it is my mission to contact them all. Get them all on board so that we can fight this together.

A fact which is not that well publicized is Breast Cancer in men, According to CANSA, recent research found that men with a faulty BRCA2 gene have a 1 in 12 chance of developing Breast Cancer before the age of 80.

So, every time you see someone wearing a shirt or hat with Pink Fishing,  they really are “Reeling in the Cure” one shirt or hat at a time.

Debbie Hartman

Hometown: Johannesburg, South Africa

Occupation: Executive Secretary

Years of Bass Fishing:

I come from a (Trout) Spinner and Flyfishing background and I started bass angling in September 2009.  My need to learn all there is to know about these little green fish had me scouring the internet for information. I happened upon www.Bassing.co.za , a forum where I have been welcomed and have learnt so much from my fellow anglers. I am the only active woman on this forum of 3109 members. I am now a moderator on the same site which is a great honor. I am a Kickboat, Inflatable and bank angler. My life partner, Rikkie, supports me in what I want to achieve. He is always willing to wake up early, load the pontoon, his canoe and our fishing tackle to go fishing. He catches the odd bass too.

Competitions:

I fish the KBBC (Kick Boat Bass Challenge) and the SBBC ( Small Boat Bass Challenge)

I fished the IBC ( Inanda Bass  Classic ) in April 2011

Highlights:

Started Pink Fishing SA ( www.pinkfishing.co.za)  Facebook

Being made a moderator on www.Bassing.co.za

Organizing and arranging two Lure Workshops during 2010

Landing my PB of 2.84kg

Goals:

Organize another two Workshops for 2011

Participate in a major Comp (Inanda Classic)

Film my endeavors using a Hatcam to share with others

Get more women in South Africa to take up Bass Fishing through PinkFishing

Promoting Breast Cancer Awareness

Raise funds for Breast Cancer Research

Statement:

Pink Fishing’s Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign lies very close to my heart as I had a scare a year ago.  Thank goodness the tumor was not cancerous but I still need to be careful and be tested every six months.

I have realized that many people leave that little lump and ignore it rather then go and have it seen too. I was one of them …. I put my head in the sand thinking it would go away, it did not, it grew !!

Making people aware of the importance of having check ups can save their lives.

Being able to participate in my passion, which is Bass fishing, and using that to promote Breast Cancer Awareness is a dream come true.

** Debbie Hartman won the October book hamper of 3 books that was drawn from the talk that Charlotte presented in Johannesburg at the Kumalo Green Secretaries Day Conference.

We have been so impressed with what some of our delegates have achieved this year, and realize that they need to be recognized for their use of the tools and skills that they have acquired.  So we are announcing the First Annual Niche Training Awards.

Go ahead and nominate yourself, or ask your friends (or tell your staff) to nominate you in any of the following categories.  You can also nominate other people or business that you know who have been on our training or who are clients of ours.

These are the categories:

1. The Facebook Fundi
2. The LinkedIn Leader
3. Best Blogger
4. Most Creative Use of Social Media – Art and Skill come together
5. Proudly Shameless Self Promoter Award – Not ugly bragging but demonstrating expertise so that the client knows your value to them
6. Most Social Spin out of an unexpected opportunity – Can you be quick on the draw?  Social media is real time.
7. Good ROI from Social Media – This is where strategy and follow up count.
8. The Shout Out Award – For online support of other businesses’ social media activity.
9. Special Mention for anything, well, special

In the Special Mention category, please feel free to mention anyone in South Africa who is using social media well, whether we have anything to do with them or not.  We want to recognize and hold up good standards to strive towards for ourselves and for our clients and delegates.

Nominations are open until the 15 November.  We will then look at the entries and choose winners in the various categories.

To Nominate someone, please send us an email with the name of the nominee, business or project name and relevant social media account.  Then add some motivation why that person deserves to win.  This is me writing (Charlotte), so blatant self promotion is totally acceptable.  Step up and proclaim what you have learned and why you are proud of it and nominate yourself.  The prize is worth thousands, of smiles.

Please also feel free, in fact it would be anticipated, that you also mention the nominations on the Niche Training Facebook Page and / or Twitter account.

We are really looking forward to seeing the nominations rolling in.

“I can’t come to your course because it is in the morning and I work in the morning.  When you do it in the evening then I can come.”

I replied “Social media marketing is a work related training course.  There is no reason not to attend during working hours.”

Her reply? A stunned “Really?!  For business?  How come?”

I carried on with the conversation and explained it to her, but it seems that it may take a while to convince that young lady.  And that in itself is an irony.  It is more often older individuals who cannot see the application of social media to business, that in spite of many businesses diverting their advertising budgets to their online spend and social media interaction and physical newspapers and print advertising closing down.

However many people still cannot see the value of social media marketing.  They cannot see; cannot fathom how to engage with their market in an online social environment and create a market there to sell their product.  That is simply short sighted and will be felt in their bank accounts in time to come.

Wherever your market meets is a place where you can engage with them, solve their problems, market to them or sell to them.  This arena should not be ignored and if you don’t understand it then you should find out how it works and find out soon.

I am not afraid of offending this particular person by writing this article, because I fear she will not encounter my blog or my business page any time soon.

Social media isn’t time consuming.  It is an investment of time.  In the same way that payments to your home bond is not a waste of money but an investment into an asset.

Of course both investments assume that you have made good strategic choices in the first place.  If you have purchased a house that you simply cannot afford on your salary, or purchased before you are about to be retrenched or your business is going to fold, or purchased far beyond the realistic value of the property, then you will pay what you like and you will eventually be wasting money.  But a good property investment is always a good long term choice.

If your social media plan is to throw out quotes, post wild links to funny YouTube videos and randomly repost other people’s blogs on your topic, then please don’t be surprised when your efforts fail to yield results.  There is no return on investment when you waste your social media time on froth.  And you won’t win the affection of followers either by posting content they can find elsewhere instead of something unique.

But if you have a real strategy, with an actual goal in mind, always in mind, then you can aim towards it and measure success.  Then you can post relevant content and respond to people appropriately.  You can find material that will be meaningful and that people will want to engage with you on.  People will follow you because they want to know what you are about and how you think.  That makes your social media investment valuable, and that return is worth its virtual weight in gold.

In the Social Media Marketing course and Developing the Art and Skill of Social Media, we present techniques for being intentional about your social media.  If you would like a social media editorial planning calendar, please request here.

With the proliferation of social media interaction these days, and the fact that people really do turn to your LinkedIn profile to get a sense of who they are dealing with, a profile without a photo implies someone who is either

• Too lazy to load a photo
• Too incompetent to work out how to load the photo
• Hiding something awful that can’t be revealed by making the photo public

And it’s no good trying to claim false modesty.  It is normally quite attractive people who do so anyway.

LinkedIn is not a beauty pageant.  It’s a professional social network site where we are trying to build relationships of trust so that we can do business together.  Interacting with other people, who have profile photos while being without one of your own, is the equivalent of having a dinner party and you are the only guest with mirror sunglasses on.  You get to see everyone else’s reactions and emotions while disguising and hiding your own.  Now that’s just not playing nice.

A few tips to get your photo right:

• It should be of you.  In other words, not of you and your partner, no matter how much you love them, especially if your partner is the same gender – then it is next to impossible for viewers to work out which one of you they are connecting with.
• It should not be of your business logo.  That is for your Company Page.
• It should not be of your pets.   Gosh they are cute!  But no, we don’t want to see them.  And they have their own network.
• You should get someone else to take the photo for you and have a decent background.  Holiday snaps and t-shirts are for Facebook.   And don’t be tempted to take the photo yourself while holding the camera and pointing somewhere towards your face.  We can tell!
• You could change your photo every so often for fun.  But leaving it the same, especially the same across social media platforms, helps with recognition and branding opportunities.   You want to be top of mind and recognizable, not confusing people or overlooked because you seem to be new.
• Trust that you look good.  We almost all worry about how we look in our photos which means that everyone is more concerned about their own look than about how good you look, so don’t worry about it.  Put in a decent photo, update your profile and then do good business.  That is what counts in the end.

To learn how to load the LinkedIn photo, please see this post on our sister site at Social Media Solutions.

Our problem in South Africa is that the social media landscape is so new that we have two extremes; people who are using the tools to the maximum and getting the benefit because they understand them, and others who become defensive and dismissive because they perceive the barrier to entry to be too high.  What is this barrier?  It is the learning curve that they have to experience in order to grasp a new concept.

That old adage will always come into effect in cases like this: social media will work, if you work social media.  It is not a silver bullet or a quick fix.  It most definitely takes time and requires learning new skill sets.  It is about have a relationship with your community, your advocates online and not just trying to sell through a different channel.  And now it also means putting up with the people who want to revert back to smoke signals and candles and quills as a fear-filled gut reaction to advances in technology.  Our children already communicate more effectively on BBM (Blackberry messenger) than we ever will; so if we don’t keep up with them then not only is our communication gap going to get ever wider, but we will lose our opportunity to influence, converse and market to them as well.

I know, as a trainer, as a member of the Digital Immigrant Tribe, that it is difficult to face the prospect of learning a new technology, especially as they come ever faster.  But although we need to choose what we embrace, we cannot turn away from them completely without unplugging from the grid.

There are enough extremes in South Africa.  Let’s not willingly participate in creating technological ones for ourselves as well.  We have got to be part of the online, connected world.

Through our training courses and coaching we can make sure that you have a handle on social media.  Feel free to contact us.