How to Blog for Business: What is blogging for business, blog marketing

Ruthless Gardening – Can It Teach You Anything about Social Media Marketing?

Actually I think that gardening can teach us a lot about life and specifically a lot about how to approach social media marketing. One of my friends once called me a ruthless gardener and told me I should start a blog about it. Why? Because my approach to gardening is a bit ruthless. If something isn’t growing or it’s over-growing all the other plants or it just isn’t working for me, I rip it out. That’s right, I may spend some time trying to fix it, but I don’t dwell too long. I just rip it out and put in something else. In a lot of ways, your approach to marketing and social media needs to be like a ruthless gardener. If it isn’t working, get rid of it and try something new.

Does this mean you should just throw out everything you’ve done so far to get started in social media? No, of course not, but it should make you think about what is working and what’s not working and what you need to change. For example, if you market to consumers, take a serious look at your Facebook page. Do you have people actually interacting with you or do you just have idle followers that never talk about you? If it’s the former, then that’s great, but make sure you don’t get boring. Change things up and run a contest for example. People love to win stuff and if your contest is designed right, it will cause a significant increase in your Facebook fans and attention. If your page falls into the latter category and no one interacts with your site, it’s time to rethink your strategy and change things up. Read more Facebook for Business tips. If you are a business to business company, do you get leads from LinkedIn and do people actually interact with you? Are you participating in groups appropriately? Are you actively seeking contact to broaden your network? Read tips on finding and building LinkedIn contacts.

In order for a garden to flourish, it requires consistent and frequent tending. People who don’t garden see a beautiful garden and they may not realize all the effort that goes into a garden staying that way. You have to weed, rake, stake, cut, dig, mulch and much, much more. Social media marketing is a lot like that. It is not something that you do once and walk away. It has to be worked every day in order to flourish. You are building relationships, you are not selling, and relationships require consistent and sustained effort.

Even if you don’t know a daisy from a dahlia, you can probably appreciate a beautiful garden. It didn’t get that way by accident. Someone made deliberate decisions about what stays and what goes and someone tends to it all the time. Take a hard look at your social media marketing efforts. Are they driving the results you want and need for your business? If not, it may be time to step in and be ruthless. If you would like help evaluating your social media marketing efforts, please contact me.

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5 Rules That Help Make a Great Small Business Website

When I get requests from small business clients to help them break into social media, the first thing I do is start by looking at their website because I know that that’s probably the first place their customers will go to evaluate their products or services. One of the most common things I find on their home landing page is that I can’t tell what they do or what they could do for me as a customer. It may sound silly, but the problem is when a business owner looks at their own site, they do it with a lot of knowledge in their head. To get an objective view of your website imagine you know nothing about your business or better yet, get someone else who doesn’t know about your business to look at your website.

To improve your small business website, follow these 5 rules:

Rule 1: People’s attention span is extremely short, don’t test it. If they can’t figure out what you do or what they should do, they will leave your site.
Rule 2: Make sure that anyone who visits your small business website can immediately determine what you can do for them and what action you want them to take. The latter is called, “the call to action”. You don’t want to hit them over the head with what to do (like too many pop-ups), but you want it to be clear. See rule 1.
What this means is that by just looking at the home landing page, a customer should be clear about what you sell, what applies to them, and what next step they should take. For example, if you sell dog and cat food from a brick and mortar store, you want the dog owners to find the dog food and the cat owners to find the cat food and you want them to easily be able to find directions, hours of service, and a phone number to call you. That’s a simple example, but all too often I see a lot of industry jargon and mission type statements on a home page. Those don’t mean anything to the average visitor. Take that content off your home page and focus on what’s in it for the visitor.
Rule 3: Make sure your site is logically organized. Do you hide the Contact Us under the Products menu item? Why? – that isn’t where you would normally look for that type of information. Think carefully about the items that are included in your top level menu and then make sure that everything that comes under each of them makes sense. See rule 1. If visitors can’t easily find what they want, they will leave.
Rule 4: Don’t use industry jargon and too much “marketing” speak. See rule 1. People tire of “best in class” and other such over-used terms. And remember that acronyms can mean different things in different industries. For example, IMS has a very different meaning if you are in IT, finance, communications, or healthcare. It’s better to spell things out and don’t assume your audience will know what it is.
Rule 5: Does your site pass the “so what?” test? This is something I learned quite early on in my career. I wrote what is called a product bulletin, an announcement of a new product. I thought I did a great job, but my manager sent it back to me with the words “So What?” written in red all over the page. At first I was crushed, but I came to understand that what I had done was to simply list all the great features of the product without explaining why the customer should care. I was thinking that of course they would know why the new feature was important to them, but my manager was right, it’s more important to explain the “so what” than the “what”. Don’t make people guess why something is important to them. See rule 1.

For additional information on small business websites, also see 5+ Pitfalls to Avoid for Your Local Small Business Website

OK, so by now you know that rule 1, well rules. Your small business website must be intuitive, concise, well organized, and free of jargon with a clear call to action or you risk losing your customer to confusion. Good luck and if I can be of assistance, please let me know.

What’s the Best Way for a Small Business to Handle a Customer Complaint on Facebook?

You have a beautiful Facebook page, you have lots of fans, you are engaging with your fans daily and things are going great until one day you get a customer complaint right in the feed on your fan page. At first you are frustrated. You didn’t even get any warning – they didn’t send you an email or call, they just put it out there on your fan page for all your fans to see. Now what? Take a deep breath and follow the recommendations below and not only will most likely satisfy the customer, you’ll impress the rest of your fans too.

First and foremost, don’t choose to hide the post no matter how tempting that may seem. It’s already out there, people have seen it, and if you hide it, your fans will wonder if that’s how you’ll respond if they have a problem. You may be a small business, but you need to respond as if you have lots of staff.

As quickly as you can, acknowledge the customer complaint and let them know that you would like to speak to them about the issue.

Something like “Hi, this is (your name), thank you for bringing your issue to our attention, I would like speak to you try and get this resolved. Please let me know how I can contact you or call me at (your number)”. Some people hesitate to give out their number, but really you have your business name and your website, I’ll bet it would only take 2 minutes on your website to figure out how to call you, so go ahead and give out a number where the customer can reach you.

Assuming the customer calls or gives you a way to contact them of course you will speak with them and try to resolve the issue.

If you can resolve the issue to their satisfaction, then it’s pretty straight-forward. Ask them if they will post on your fan page again stating that the issue was resolved. If they don’t want to or don’t post within 24 hours, then you should post an update to your fan page. Something like “Thank you (customer) for your business and bringing your issue to our attention. I’m glad we were able to solve it you your satisfaction.”

What if the customer’s issue isn’t reasonable and you can’t resolve it to the customer’s satisfaction or they don’t respond with a way to contact them and they don’t call?

In this case, it’s a bit more challenging. It’s great that you acknowledged the problem, but now what? If the customer drops it, then I suggest you just let it go. Your other fans will see that you responded and assume it was solved.

If the customer continues to complain publicly then you will no choice but to address the situation as positively as possible.

Let’s say the customer bought a product, broke it, and wants to return it well after the return date. You might accept the return for a very loyal customer, but most likely it will turn out that you simply can’t afford to accept the return and absorb the cost. In this case, you will need to provide a status in your feed that reads something like “I’m sorry (customer), as a small business we try to be as flexible as possible with our customers, but we simply cannot accept broken items 2 months after the return date. I hope you understand this and will continue to do business with us.” You have responded honestly and your fans will see that.

In summary, respond quickly, be honest, and communicate the result. Handling customer complaints on Facebook is a lot more public than it is via email or a phone call, so remember that you can impress your small business fans or turn them off with your reaction and since you have a fan page to build loyalty, make sure you respond properly.

5 Steps to Take Advantage of Mobile Marketing for Your Local Business

Mobile marketing is big and growing rapidly, but how do you approach mobile marketing for local business? It’s a trend as a local business that you simply shouldn’t ignore because it can be very cost effective and it’s not expensive to get started, but of course you need a plan and you need to thinks about your tactics.

Here are 5 steps to get you off and running:

Determine the goals of your local business mobile campaign. This is no different than any other marketing effort, you need to think in advance about what you want to accomplish. Goals could be to:
- Drive traffic to your local business
- Increase calls to your business
- Drive traffic to you website
- Update you customers on current events, deals, sales, etc.
- Increase SMS and/or email opt-ins to improve communications with your customers
- Increase sales
Decide what’s your customers will get out of your mobile marketing efforts. That’s right, if there isn’t something your customer will get out of your efforts, you might as well not start at all. Customers want to save time and/or money. You could:
- Save them time by providing location based information such as maps and directions to your local business, click to call numbers, store hours, product information, etc.
- Same them money by providing: mobile coupons, recognition such as VIP treatment for repeat customers
- Create social interaction with check-in applications on Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and other social media sites
Be creative and keep your customer in mind when you are deciding how to reach your goals.
- If you are trying to drive people to your website, consider creating a mobile website specific for your mobile visitors. There is a vast difference in usability between a mobile website and a regular website viewed on a mobile phone (try looking at this with your mobile phone and look at the example at the top of this post). There are many mobile themes for websites and it can be easy and cost-effective to do this.
- Be Social. Make sure to claim your location on Google, Foursquare, Yelp, and other sites used by smartphone users. Think about promotions you can run to increase interaction and sales. Read about how to use foursquare for local business .
- Create customer lists for your campaigns using mobile advertising, QR (quick response) codes (more on QR codes for small business), and even promotions in your local business. Simple things like collecting business cards with mobile numbers for a free monthly drawing can really work to build a mobile customer list.
- Engage your customers and build a lasting relationship with them: Use SMS and Text messages with mobile coupons or rewards directed to loyal customers (e.g. text DEAL to 99000 to receive your 2 for 1 offer), drive them to you mobile or full website for more information or deals, remind them you are there and that you care, but don’t over-communicate or you will drive opt-outs.
Provide what your customers need or want (save them time and money) and use proven methods to draw people in and build your mobile marketing lists. You could provide:
- Mobile coupons and discount offers
- Hours of operation
- A map and directions to your site
- A click to call phone no
- Your menu or product and/or services list
- Customer reviews and testimonials
- Upcoming event information
- Interesting and relevant content
- Fast facts or FAQs about your business or service
- A link to you website
- A link to recorded message
Use Opt-in/Opt-out and never, ever spam your customers. Mobile marketing for local business is about building relationships, you wouldn’t spam your friends, so don’t spam your customers!

Why Use Mobile Marketing for Local Business?

Is mobile marketing for local business worth implementing? It probably depends on whether or not you believe in the growth of mobile devices. I’ll share statistics with you, but if you look around at your friends, family, and customers, you will see that they all carry around phones and if you still have a few friends and family who don’t, they will. Pair that with the fact that the open rate of text messages is 95% compared to 8-10% for email and you’ll see that mobile marketing is a growing trend you simply cannot afford to ignore.

Mobile marketing for business is huge and growing. Want to know why?

MobiThinking shows that over 77% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone, that’s over 5.3 billion mobile subscribers. In places like the US, it’s 9 out of 10 people.
It is predicted that mobile internet will take over desktop internet by 2014. Lots of people now carry iPads and other tablets instead of computers. That trend is just going to increase.
According to Wikipedia, Apple has sold over 145 million iPhones worldwide including over 1 million 4S models that were sold in the first 24 hours after release. Google’s Android OS is growing at 886% year on year and they are now activating over 160,000 devices a day.
Americans spend over 2.7 hours/day on their mobile devices.
So the numbers are compelling and it should be obvious that you shouldn’t ignore mobile devices as a tool to communicate with your customers and prospects, but does marketing on mobile devices really drive results? In a word, yes.

Bring on the proof.

50% of all local searches are performed on mobile devices. That makes sense because often people are trying to find local places when they are out and about.
According to Mobile Marketer, 70% of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour. So if you build a list and advertise, you can expect to get rapid results.
Borrell Associates says that mobile coupons get 10 times the redemption rate of traditional coupons. Why? Because customer have them with them on their mobile device when they arrive at a local business. How many times have you forgotten a coupon at home or just not bothered to cut it out?
The average person takes 90 minutes to respond to an email and 90 seconds to respond to a text message.
Once again, text-messages have an opening rate of 95% compared to 8-10% for email.

So, mobile marketing has tremendous growth and it drives results. Isn’t it time you considered adding mobile marketing for local business to your overall marketing efforts?

Providing an Excellent Customer Experience thru Social Media

Customer experience can mean a lot of things, but when I talk about customer experience, I mean the end to end interaction that your customer has with your company from the time of first contact until they are no longer your customer. If you pay attention to your customers, they may well become a customer for life. You may not want every customer to be a customer for life, but that’s a topic for another day. One of the important tenants of a good customer experience is that the experience has to be what the customer expects and even better if it’s more than he or she expects. In short, to provide an excellent customer experience to everyone, you have to provide a choice that works for your customer and that most certainly extends to your social media interactions.

Choice in social media means that you need to know how your customers want to interact with you via social media and you have to provide them that venue. Does that mean you have to participate in every form of social media? No, but you have to know your customers and their demographic and you have to provide them with the form of social contact that they want and will engage in. Not sure what that is – why don’t you try asking them?

Beyond choice, you and anyone who represents your company via social media have to understand the “rules of engagement” of that form of social media. Almost everyone knows that Twitter is a social network made up of people communicating with mere 140 character messages, but there are other rules that apply to communication on Twitter and there are personalities on Twitter. The same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, foursquare, and every social network out there. To provide an excellent customer experience, learn the rules of engagement for any social media network that you and your customers participate in and follow those rules.

Beyond just following the “rules” of using a particular form of social media, the experience that your customers have there needs to be an extension of what they experience with you via your storefront. You want the “tone” and “image” that you portray on social media to be similar and familiar.

You also have to be consistent in your participation. There isn’t anything much worse than providing a presence on a form of social media and then not responding when your customers interact with you. It’s like walking away from them when they are standing in front of you talking to you. I know of one company that makes a point on Twitter to tell people that they do not respond to customer messages via Twitter. Is that a bad customer experience? No, because they set expectations and they also tell customers how to get in touch with them outside of Twitter. However, if you found out that 60% of your customers would like to communicate with you via Twitter, you probably need to reconsider.

Provide your customers a choice in social contact, follow the rules of engagement, be consistent with your interaction, and I’ll bet the excellent customer experience you provide in your storefront will extend into social media and create a deeper and more lasting relationship with your customers.

Social Media Madness – Where Should You Start Your Social Networking Strategy for Local Business?

There are so many social media avenues today, where on earth is do you start with a social networking strategy for local business? In this post, I’m talking about the largest social networking sites and methods today: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and also blogging. When I discuss where to start with clients, my answer is of course, it depends. It depends on how much time you have, how much resource you have, your target audience, and of course your social media goals.

Everyone wants to attract more people to their business to make money, but as I’m sure you have read, social media isn’t about selling, it’s about sharing information and building relationships. In time your prospects will come to trust you for the reliable resource you are and eventually buy from you. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling a product or a service; a sale often comes down to trust and relationships. So when you think about your social media goals, you need to think about them slightly differently that your business goals.

Example of social media goals include:

Increasing brand awareness
Deepening customer loyalty
Driving website traffic
Establishing yourself as a trusted resource on your topic of expertise
Supporting customers and answering their questions
Keeping customers up to date on your company news

Once you know your 2-3 top goals, think about your target audience. While social media changes constantly, each site or method has a use that’s most prominent right now:

Facebook tends to be more of a business to consumer marketing site. Businesses create pages and fans interact with the pages by giving the page a “Like” and participating. If you expect fans to be involved, you will need to offer them incentives. Most fans only like a page to get discounts, but if you keep your fans engaged with interesting content and fan-only discounts, you can use the Facebook questions capability to gain valuable input and some of the content from your page will make it to their page and expose their friends to your business. Also, advertising on Facebook can be very targeted because all of the information that people provide to Facebook (gender, age, etc.) is used to target ad placement. Read more in Facebook for Business

LinkedIn tends to be more of a business to business marketing site. While brands do have pages and advertising on LinkedIn is picking up, LinkedIn still tends to be more of a site for people to exchange business details, find connections for jobs, find prospects in LinkedIn groups, and for recruiters to find prospective hires. Groups can be an excellent source to find people in your target demographic. For example, if you target people in small business, there are lots of groups where people in small businesses go to exchange and share information. Just remember, don’t sell right away, build relationships first. Read more in Find Contacts Using LinkedIn

Blogging can be extremely useful to establish yourself as an expert. If you are an accountant, for example, you can blog details about bookkeeping, taxes, etc. If you own a wine store, you could blog about different wines, what wine goes with what food, etc. Blogging allows your customers to recognize the expertise you have and they often appreciate it when you share it freely with them and go to you when they need a related product or service. Read more in How to Blog for Business

YouTube is the second most searched site after Google and there is a tremendous amount of value than can be provided in a video. You don’t need to be a professional or have a studio; you just need to have good content. It’s like blogging by talking. Video also does well in search results, so having a video that you host on YouTube linked from your website is a good thing if it delivers valuable content that keeps people on your site longer. Read more in Video Marketing Done right

Twitter is extremely diverse and quite frankly I think it can be a challenging place for a small business to start. It can absolutely be useful to see what people are talking about and to see what’s trending (meaning what people are tweeting about) and you can establish relationships there. Read more in Twitter How To For Business

There is plenty of choice for moving your business forward in social networking, but make sure you set and track you goals. I hope this helps you think about your social networking strategy and be sure to look at some of the referenced links to get more details.

If I can be of assistance creating your strategy or implementing your social networking strategy for local business, please contact me.

Are You Risking Your Reputation by Not Using Google Alerts for Small Business?

Here’s a simple tip – use Google alerts for small business. Why? Because it is a valuable, free tool to quickly and easily find out what is being said about you, your brand, and if applicable your products. While you are at it, monitor your competitors too.

Think monitoring doesn’t matter? What if someone says something great and you don’t thank them? What if someone says something negative and you don’t respond? What if one of your competitors announces a price drop and you don’t find out about it? What if there is bad press on a product you carry? You get my point, it’s good to know what’s going on and Google alerts is a very easy way.

What is Google alerts? It’s a really simple application that you reach here: https://www.google.com/alerts. You set it up and Google sends you the information you requested in the time frame you request.

There are only 5 pieces of information that you need to provide to start using Google alerts for small business:

The word or words you want to be alerted about: company name, your name, your products, etc.
The type of search: news, blogs, video, discussions, books, or everything
How often: as it happens, once a day, or once a week
Volume: only the best results or all results
Where the alert should be delivered: email address or feed

I can almost see you rolling your eyes thinking “but I get SO many emails already”. Well go back and read my 2nd paragraph and see if this isn’t something you want to spend 5 minutes a day to check on. I suggest using your email client to set up a folder for the alerts and then create a rule to send your alerts to that folder each day. Each email client does this slightly differently, but if you go to your email client and use help, it is typically very easy to set up. Maybe you only want to check your competitors once a week, but your name and your company name, you should check once a day. Put a reminder in your calendar program until you get used to checking this each day. By the way, this is a good way to tell if nothing is being said about you too. That’s not very good either.

If you see something – act. Thank someone who gave you a good review or respond if you see a complaint. Small gestures can go a long way towards building good will.

Google alerts scours web pages, but it won’t monitor what is being said about you on Twitter and Facebook. There are plenty of tools for that and you should be using one of those too. As a small business, you need to leverage technology to help you manage your brand and reputation. It’s a fact of life now that people can say things about you and it can spread quickly – right or wrong. Google alerts certainly isn’t just for small business, but it a great tool that small businesses with limited resources can easily leverage.

I’d appreciate it if you let me know in a comment if Google alerts for small business helped you protect your brand or reputation.

How Do You Measure Results with Foursquare for Local Business

Every marketing effort requires that you measure your results to determine your payback and foursquare for local business is no different. Before you dive in to creating your specials, you should think about what your goals are and what you are willing to spend to achieve those goals. With an application like foursquare what you are trying to do is to bring people into your business and get them to spend money – both new and repeat visitors. The important thing is to think about your goals, write them down, and then review results to see if you achieved your goals. If not, you need to make adjustments in your efforts.

In terms of what goals to set, you might want to set a goal of 20 new visitors a month, 20 repeat visits from existing customers, 5 new tips, and 40 mentions in Facebook. The numbers will depend on the volume of your current business, but if you start that way, then you can think about what specials you want to provide to reach your goals. You should also set revenue goals associated with these check-ins to make sure that your revenue increases as a result of your effort.

With specials, it’s great to be creative, but you can always look at what other merchants in your area provide simply by opening the foursquare app on your smartphone and exploring the area around you. You might want to start with a newbie special and a friend special for new business (although friends can also be repeat business) and a loyalty special and major special to reward loyalty. As a merchant, you should create a code associated with each type of special so you can track spending against the code. Foursquare will provides a lot of statistics, but you need to track spending vs. what you have given away.

Statistics provided by foursquare for local business:

Total daily check-ins over time
Unique visitors
New visitors
Gender breakdown of your customers
Age breakdown of your visitors
What time of day people check in
Portion of your venue’s foursquare check-ins that are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook

This information coupled with the spend tracking will help you to understand if you are meeting your goals, if the effort is profitable, and if you are trending up or down in terms of visits. Looking a bit deeper, you can see when people are checking in and perhaps shift that to a time when you are typically less busy by making a special time specific. For example, you could create a special that is only valid between 2:00 and 4:00 if you are trying to drive more business at that time. You do have to be a bit careful because you don’t want to discourage visits by only offering specials at times when people can’t get to your location.

Remember to be a bit patient. Social media takes time and you should plan to try a new marketing method like foursquare for at least 6 months before you decide if it makes sense. Make use of the tools that foursquare provides in terms of signage in your storefront. People might not automatically check to see if you are participating in foursquare if you haven’t been in the past, so place signs around your store on tabletops too. Foursquare for local business can be powerful, but make sure you treat it like any marketing investment and measure your results to ensure success.

Is it Time to Use Foursquare for Local Business?

Lots of people talk about how to use foursquare from the consumer’s perspective, but what advantage does foursquare for local businesses provide? First of all, foursquare is a social network with over 10M users. Like most social networks, the strength of this platform is that people share information with their friends and thus a simple check-in can get broadcast across Facebook, Twitter, and to the person’s foursquare friends. While not all these people will be local to your business, it’s a good bet some are, so it’s a form of advertising. Read on to learn how to set up foursquare and take advantage of it for your business.

If you aren’t familiar at all with foursquare, here’s a very quick overview. Essentially people download the free foursquare app to their smart phone and when they arrive at a destination, they check-in. They accumulate points for checking in, bringing friends, repeat business, etc and cash in on specials. They also earn badges which are created by foursquare and kept a bit of mystery as to exactly how you get them. Check here for a current list of active badges.

Getting started with foursquare for local business can be done in 4 simple steps done on the foursquare website:

Set up a foursquare account if you don’t already have one
Find your venue using their search form
Claim the location of your venue
Verify that you have the authority to manage the venue (by phone or email)

Once you are set up, foursquare provides you with free tools to promote and manage your presence. One of the best ways to encourage people to check in and bring their friends is with specials. Specials are simply offers that you give to new, frequent, or loyal customers when they check in at your establishment (called “unlocking” a special).

Typical specials fall into the following categories:

Discount: Get 20% off on the purchase of one item, get $10 off when you spend $50
Free offer: e.g. Get a free silk tie with the purchase of a suit, Get a free water bottle when you sign up for 3 months at Joe’s Gym
Special treatment: Check-in on foursquare to get a behind the scenes tour of (kitchen, wine cellar, special exhibit)
Reward: Free cupcake on 5th visit, free movie rental after 5th visit

Specials reward people for new business, repeat business, and for bringing their friends. Below is a graphic that show the range of specials that a merchant might give. The content and terms of the special are up to the merchant. It is a good idea to offer a newbie special and a loyalty special, but how about getting friends to bring friends – it’s all business and all you have to do is figure out the ROI on offering such a deal.

Types of specials on foursquare for local business:

Newbie: First time someone visits, offer a discount, free item, etc.
Friends: Bring a friend (or 2 or 3, you choose) and get xxx
Flash: Similar to a door buster – first 20 people to check-in get xxx, everyone who checks in within 30 minutes gets xxx
Swarm: Determine a number of friends it takes to qualify and offer a deal – Bring 20 friends to Sally’s Kitchen and get one free cocktail or beverage with meal purchase
Check-in: Just for showing up – get a 10% discount off the purchase of a blouse or shirt
Loyalty: Offer something free on the 5th (or any number) visit
Mayor: This is the person with the most check-ins at your place in the last 60 days. Only one check-in per day is allowed. This is one of your most loyal customers, so be creative – a special table, no standing in line, private tasting, whatever you think will make that person feel special. You want people to compete to be the mayor because every check-in adds to the popularity of your business.

Part of the social appeal is that people can see what their friends are up to when they launch the app. What badges they have, how many points they have, and if they are the mayor of anything. Also by using the Explore capability on the mobile app, users can see what is close to them and what tips have been provided about the place. Tips are things that people who check-in say about your business. “Great place for lunch” or “Always find something new here”.

There are many advantages of using foursquare. It’s free to sign up, you create specials for free, your business shows up in Facebook and Twitter timelines, and more. The cost? The only cost is your time to create the specials and the discounts or free items that you provide. Not a bad tradeoff. Is it time you join the over 250,000 merchants and start using foursquare for local business?

Creative Angle Marketing

Maximizing Business through Social Media