If you haven’t noticed the trends, you must be in a CAVE! Facebook has become in the most visited web site on the internet in less than 4 years!!! Did you know 91% of the Fortune 500 companies have at least one social media channel?

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One of the biggest hurdles that general contractors have to get past is the trust factor. Are we who we say we are? Will we do what we say we will do? Can we produce what we say we can produce? As a contractor we expect a total stranger to call us, schedule to meet, enter their home or business, tear something apart, then rebuild it to look awesome. That’s asking a lot from someone we just met or talked to on the phone.

That’s what it is all about in the service business – trust.

Today the property owner has ways of getting to know the contractor before ever meeting them face-to-face.

Thanks to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter, the general contractor can be “checked out” long before ever meeting him. Before the internet boom, you had a square box in the yellow pages, or a flyer shoved into your door as a first impression to the contractor.

Today we can look at companies and people in a different way. We can see the contractors work, comments they have posted, who they associate with – and maybe that trust can be increased a little by getting to know them better. And there is more that we can do.

In searching for the right contractor that you can trust you probably want someone near you. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that we could finding someone that we could trust nearby. There are ways to look up general contractors in your area. Here are a few popular sites.

Google , Yahoo, and Bing all have local search directories. Yelp is another. These local searches may help pinpoint contractors near you to help get started on your quest for the trusted contractor. Are there any other ways to finding a service business? Many more. How about the most trusted source of finding a contractor ever – Word-Of-Mouth.

That’s right, people are most comfortable getting a referral based on what their friends and family have experienced. Someone they know has already tried using the contractor and was happy with the results. Don’t have friends and family that have used a general contractor?

Example: Customer Testimonials

Maybe the contractor has a list of past customers for you to contact. Don’t be afraid to make contact with the past customers, it may help you build that trust. And in this business, trust is very important to both you and the general contractor.

What is Social Media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It’s more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people. – Ron Jones, SearchEngineWatch.com

Why do you care?

FaceBook is the internet’s number one most visited website, exceeding Google Search. It’s rapid growth is explosive. Started in 2004 in a dorm room at Harvard, it was a way for a group of college kids to interact. Today, FaceBook is the definition of how customers are interacting with companies. It’s real time, and social. Companies can no longer dismiss it as just another time suck! Yes, I did say that Let’s face it, we all want results without wasting our time. How would you like to grow your business like this?

FaceBook allows people to connect with friends and associates on a professional and personal level.
On a personal level, you create a profile for all to see for the purposes of:

• sharing with family and friends*
• with members of special interest groups
  (small business owners, religious, hobby, sports, political, etc.)

This information can be shared with a select group of friends or everyone who stumbles upon your profile.
On a professional level, FaceBook is used to promote your company. Through advertisements, company updates, photos of your work and ongoing conversations to your connected fans.** Most importantly, it’s a tool to drive visitors to your company’s website.

3 Major Componets of FaceBook

Personal Profile – Your FaceBook Account
Groups - Network of like minded individuals sharing a common interest
Pages – Your company’s profile.

Implementation

1. Setup a FaceBook account
   • Personal email and password
   • Add a photo of yourself
   • A brief bio
   • Add info about where you went to school, your work, hobbies, etc.
   • Do you want to share this information publically or privately?
   • Do you want to be updated via email, text messaging, or when you are online?
   • Send out invites to people in your address book.
2. Setup a FaceBook Page
   • Create a business profile complete with logos, photos, contact information, etc.
   • Invite all who will help you to spread the word about your company.
   • Invite customers and associates to interact with your company by offering special discounts, event invitations, cross promotions, etc.
     Cross promotions – is a non traditional approach to expanding your company’s reach. As an example, let’s say you have a favorite hair salon or barber you frequent. Tell your friends and colleagues about their wonderful service. In turn, they will do the same.
3. Connect with Groups
   • Join other groups, this can be both professional and personal.
Note: This is not necessary to get started.

Conclusion

It’s time to embrace social media as a means to gain credibility and authority for you and your business. With active participation, you will be able to promote your company and gain new customers. Additionally, you will be able to increase your sales to existing customers by offering additional products and services that they might be aware you offer. Lastly, you will be able to expand your network to industries and other companies who’s customers would benefit from your products and services.

WARNING: Don’t let this scare you, by thinking it will take time away from your busy schedule. There are tools available to integrate with your company’s website and cell phone to make this as painless and non-techie as possible.

FaceBook is a necessary ingredient to business survival. Having a business website will not get you customers without promotion.

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Download your FREE copy of 3 Components of FaceBook mind map (Adobe pdf).

Unlike the thousands of other website out there, this series of articles will give you a layman’s overview of traffic generating principals without getting too technical. Working with contractors, I try to encapsulate information regarding online marketing, simplifing it to easily understood discussions and checklists.

What are some of the sources for you website to gain new visitors?

By clicking on the image, it will open to a larger view that is easier to read. At the end of this brief article, you can download a copy in Adobe Acrobat’s pdf format.

In this example, the shaded area is what we are all used to when it comes to marketing our small businesses. If you continue to market your company with only these, you won’t be as successful. To survive in business today, one must embrace all of the tools in our online toolbox.

In the next article. Small Business Owner’s Overview of FaceBook, we will start introducing you to individual items shown in the chart above.  Real world examples and simple steps to increasing your online presence and gaining new customers.

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Download your copy of the Website Traffic blueprint. FREE – no signups required. (Requires Adobe Reader)

The Lists feature of Twitter is an excellent way of organizing your friends and followers, and we have integrated the building and maintenance of lists into SocialOomph to give you even more power and convenience.
For Free and Professional Users

When you vet your new followers, you can also select the Twitter list to which a follower must be added for each follower that you approve. This functionality is only available if you’ve turned on new follower vetting on your Twitter account entry.

For Professional Users Only

As you probably know, with Friend Finder you can find potential new friends who tweet about keywords of your choice.

With our Twitter Lists integration, you can instruct the system to add new friends (after they’ve been approved) to a list of your choice.

You can connect a Twitter list to one specific keyword, or to several keywords.

For example, you could define a keyword of “@yourusername” (which will find people who mention you) and create a private list called “Mentioned Me”, which you connect to that keyword. Friend Finder will then add (after approval) the people who mention you to your Mentioned Me list.

We will maintain the list for you and automatically rotate the oldest entries out when the list reaches its maximum size of 500 Twitter users. In other words, your list will always contain the latest 500 (or less) friends that were found and approved by Friend Finder.

Nothing prevents you from manually adding Twitter users to the same lists in your Twitter web interface. Our system will not touch those entries in the list when the list reaches its maximum size. We rotate out only entries that were added to the list by Friend Finder.

As always, this Professional feature is included in the low monthly subscription fee.

Thank You For Using SocialOomph

Best Regards,

Dewald Pretorius
http://www.socialoomph.com

There are many articles online that will explain how to setup an account and the importance of Twitter for generating business for your company. Many are hesitant to join in the conversation because they feel Twitter is spammy or takes too much time.

Here’s a tool that can help build a following for your Twitter account, automatically. How, by automatically following people with the same interests or occupations. The tool is called…

Twittgeek -” Automatically Follow Geeks Like You”

By simply creating a search based on a term specific to your industry or location, Twittgeek will search Twitter and automatically follow those people or companies that it found for you.

The importance of a tool like Twittgeek for anyone just starting out with Twitter, is you can have targeted followers for your company. Similar to back links with websites, you wouldn’t want to have a Shoe store linked to your website if your main business was home remodeling. So too with Twitter, you will get the most out of Twitter when you target your audience. Note: The very nature of Twitter allows anyone to follow anyone, will not preclude having anyone from following you.

Having a target audience will improve your authority within your industry.

I hope this helps in getting your company noticed online. It’s one of the many free resources available to leverage technology to promote your company.