So many of our clients tell us they can’t compete with the big corporate goliaths when it comes to advertising and marketing budgets. Social Media levels the playing field by offering any size business innovative, FREE ways to get ahead of their competition. Our Social Media series & Content Writing workshop gets you on the fast track by showing you simple yet effective tools to create a Social Media marketing plan.

Social Media For Business Series & Workshop

Today’s marketing is a two-way communication between the seller and the buyer. The consumer wants to know the business they are buying from and feel a personal connection. Social media is not only a compliment to your website and traditional marketing efforts, but it can turn your site browsers into site sales.

What You Can Expect From The Classes:

• Videos and audio clips to guide you on “How To…” set up each of the Social Media tools that we will be covering in these classes.
• Attend these classes on your own time schedule & in the comfort of your own office or home
• Pause and rewind to hear key points again
• BONUS links to our on-line Learning Center which is filled with invaluable material to create a successful online presence
• BONUS access to our community of experts and guru’s

Series includes:

• Intro To Social Media – This class is an overview of all the social media tools available on the internet, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and more.
• Social Media For Business - With the tools learned in the intro class, you will learn how to use the best social practices for your business including what to say and how to brand yourself as an expert in your field.
• Facebook For Business – From account creation to marketing strategies, we show you “how-to” get in front of the 500 million Facebook users.
• Twitter For Business – Taking you from logging in to broadcasting your message, this class shows you how to use Twitter to grow your business. We teach you how to target your niche audience and build an effective “following” base. You will also learn how to build a strong networking list.

Content Writing Workshop

We have extensively researched information available to the business owner on content writing and discovered there is nothing else on the market like this workshop! Our team copywriter helps the non-writer crank out amazing copy like a seasoned professional. Even if you have a knack for writing, you won’t want to miss the valuable insider tips on the in’s and out’s of social media copy.

What You Can Expect:

• How-To Instructions & Formulas to easily plug in your copy
• Examples of successful social media pages
• Guided audio with tips and expert advice access 24/7
  
• Simple tips & techniques to take your Social Media pages from average to amazing!
  
• BONUS material to help you identify your target audience
• BONUS material to help you zone in on your industry’s SEO Keywords
  

In this workshop, our team copywriter reveals her secrets to creating copy that it not only WOWS your fans, but also includes keyword-rich words that puts your information in the forefront of search engine ranking. This hands-on lesson will leave with a customized, valuable marketing tool that you can quickly add to all your Social Media pages AND your other marketing efforts.

Workshop Includes:

• Social Media Short Copy – Those couple of sentences you read on social media sites are powerful tools. A polished profile is one of the most important aspects of your social media page. Our customized short-copy formula will help you write your bio, information and description boxes (”About Us” and “About Me” sections) so that they effectively connect you with your clients.
• Best Social Practices - Now that you have learned the nuts and bolts of social media, we will take you a step farther by showing you “how to” build social relationships for your business.

It’s Simple to Get Started:

This is not a season to be putting large prices on products and services that people need to grow their business. It is of great value to us to help other businesses succeed and rise above this tough new economy. The best way we can do that is to offer our service at a price that everyone can afford. Our Social Media How-To Series plus bonus Social Media Content Writing Workshop is priced at only $149.96.

These programs are valued at over $700.00 and even higher on other sites. This small investment will more than pay for itself when you are able to showcase your business via Social Media to millions of people.

Not Sure if this Series is for You? Take a Test Drive for FREE!

Our experts will be offering a FREE Assessment of your existing Facebook Page, Twitter Page or Website. Our 25+ years of experience has helped numerous businesses create a powerhouse on-line presence. On a teleconference call, we will review your on-line marketing efforts, answer your questions and offer expert advice on improvements that will help convert your browsers into buyers. This service is valued at $99 but for a very limited time, it is yours for FREE.

Our teleconference calls are scheduled for July 12, 2010 so hurry and sign up today!

What Else?

Once you make your purchase, you will instantly have access to:

• The Virtual Business Series 24/7 Online Learning Center - this is where you will find your Series & Workshop material including recorded audio from group calls, videos and screen captures
• Forum Board – this is where you are able to interact with our experts by posting questions and getting additional support.
• 4 Tele-web conference group calls with the team experts.

Sign up for our Social Media For Business Workshop Today!

P.S. – Don’t forget to take advantage of our FREE Website or Social Media Page Assessment Offer! We are going live with teleconference on July 12, 2010 so, hurry and sign up today!

Meet Your Workshop Team:

Laura Gonzalez, Business and Website Consultant and Coach with 18 years experience, is Founder and President of Virtual Business Solutions and Virtual Meet and Greet. Laura’s passion is to provide solutions for business owners to succeed in this new economy. She provides resources, training, online tools and sales strategies that simply work. As a consultant and coach, she views clients’ entire business operations and helps them break through business barriers and mind sets. Laura helps clients realize immediate results, achieve lasting success and teaches them new tools to permanently raise their bottom line.

Sharon Higgins has over 15 years experience in copywriting, conceptual ad design, business writing, editing, event planning and marketing strategy. Sharon is skilled in creating attention-grabbing writing pieces such as newsletters, web pages, e-blasts, promotional material and ads designed to compliment a company’s existing or emerging marketing plan. Sharon is a focused team player who strives to create more than just a simple writing piece, but a working tool that will define her clients’ message and help their business achieve optimum success.

Viddler

Here is an example of how you can customize the player and add your brand logo to the player.
You can also add your website url to the player so that if the video is embedded somewhere else they can find your website.

You Tube
You can customize the player bar to different colors, decide if related videos will play after wards.

Blip.Tv
Allows for multiple players – Standard Web based player and Iphone players
Player can be customized by colors, brand, link to website
You can also distribute your video to many locations.
Allows you to turn on or off advertising which you can also get paid for the advertising that is placed on your video.

This afternoon Facebook announced via the developer forum that Facebook Pages now need to be authenticated in order to have landing tabs. This means any new visitor to your Facebook Page will not be able to land on a custom tab unless you have greater than 10,000 fans or the Page administrator has worked with an ads account representative. This is a massive blow to smaller companies (or individuals) looking to build their presence through Facebook Pages.

This update came as a massive blow to Page administrators who were looking to build their fan base organically on their own. As we’ve written about in the past, using landing tabs is critical in converting new visitors into fans. Here’s what was posted on the developer forum earlier today:

Hello all,

We apologize for not messaging this earlier. Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the authentication process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.

Also, for advertisers who don’t have a representative or 10k fans, and want to run ads and land users on a specific tab, you can still do so with standard Facebook ads by making their Destination URL as the URL incl. your tab. Unfortunately, this currently will not work with “Fan” ads.

Thanks,
Matt Trainer

As you can imagine, developers (and marketers) are not happy. This means that the odds of building a popular Facebook Page are against the average Joe. Instead, administrators will need to spend money on Facebook Ads or alternatively, have a large traffic base on the company’s existing site in order to build a large following.

We’d assume that this change was made for two reasons: to combat spam and more importantly, to boost revenue. We’ll be sure to post any updates as we learn more about the changes. We’re currently trying to find out what impact this will have on third-party solutions (Involver, Sprout, Wildfire, etc) which enable companies to build custom landing tabs. Thanks to Mari Smith for bringing this to our attention.

This also now affects FBML application feature that allows you to change the landing page to a custom tab.

I do a lot of work for small business owners that it will take them a very long time to be able to get 10,000 people to ‘like’ their page so this new limitation is not good hopefully they will rethink this and change it like they did for the pretty url limitations.

I also looked into the advertiser representative and the lowest amount is $10,000 to contact an ad rep.

Tell me what you think about this by leaving a comment.  Have you found a work around?

To clarify, ALL of your custom tabs still exist. And – this is important – each tab still has its own unique URL.  So my suggestion for the WORK around is to take that unique url and hyperlink it to your Facebook icon on your website to direct them to your CUSTOM tab (Welcome page) on your Facebook page for example.

Twitter launched a fascinating new tool this week – a simple “baking” tool that takes the URL of a tweet and displays it in a convenient HTML output, allowing users to effectively “embed” tweets into their code. The tool, called Blackbird Pie, will let bloggers and other web developers easily insert tweets into their posts and webpages, effectively guaranteeing that those tweets will stay around even if they’re deleted later.

The new feature is very simple to use – there ’s a simple text box on the Twitter Blackbird Pie page, allowing users to type in the URL of the tweet they’d like to “bake” into HTML code. Once users click the “bake” button, their tweet is outputted into formatted HTML, which they can then copy and paste into blog posts, forum posts and articles, and anywhere else that accepts HTML.

The move will make it significantly more likely that bloggers and web designers will begin to use the baked html tweets more often. Until now, most people used images that had been captured of tweets; the downside to this strategy is that the images aren’t crawlable by search engines, making the data contained in the tweets effectively invisible. The new feature will allow for quick and easy insertion of tweets, without requiring a separate step to capture, post and link to screenshots.

Already the new Blackbird Pie feature has taken some criticism from savvy web developers who say that the code it outputs is too bloated. Although the code certainly is significant, one of the upshots of the complex code is that it allows users to effectively format the baked tweets from their own end, using only Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Still, Twitter has listed “shorter code” on its list of To Do’s for the Blackbird Pie formatter.

After the initial launch of Twitter’s Blackbird Pie, the feature was temporarily unavailable to many users due to the flood of people rushing to try out the new feature. By now the Blackbird Pie feature seems to have cooled off somewhat, and generating HTML tweets seems to be functioning fine.

So keep your eyes open – you’ll probably start to see a lot of HTML-based tweets showing up on blogs and on websites around the internet – and how that will change search engine rankings for sites showing a large volume of tweets remains to be seen.

Here is an example of what an embeded ‘tweet’  looks like

My sister Deborah aka @Coachdeb was interviewed on NBC asking “What business need to know about Twitter?”

She mentioned that business need to track what people are saying about your products, services and business as it is happening, so that if they have a need about your service or product you can handle that need immediately which shows for GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE.

One of the tools  that she mentions to accomplish this is http://www.tweetbeep.com

Tweetpbeep keeps track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com)  TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter.

Here are some additional  tools that I use to track what is being said about my business as well as my clients businesses.

Convomonitor is a new web based tool which serves as an extended dashboard for your twitter account and allows you to track what people say about brands on Twitter. You also can track Twitter conversations about any topic, word, phrase, idea, or person.

Doesn’t this do pretty much the same thing as AIR apps like Tweetdeck, etc?

Yes, but you don’t have to download anything or run a separate app to use Convo Monitor. Plus, with AIR apps, you can’t share dashboard with a friend.

Another  simple way is to create an RSS feed based on a keyword search of Twitter. http://search.twitter.com/

TweetDeck – This desktop application  enables you to split all the Tweets you receive into topic or group specific columns. The default columns can contain all tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. You can also make up additional, live-updating columns using the ‘group’ (to create a sub-group of just your favorite Twitterers, for example), ’search’ and ‘replies’ buttons. You can also filter each column to include or exclude items based on keywords or users.

Tweet Grid – This is a browser-based application that allows you to search for up to nine different topics, events, conversations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid. One particularly neat feature is that it can automatically add hashtags if you Tweet directly from their web page.

Monitter – A browser-based application that is very similar to Tweet Grid except it is prettier and you can search for Tweets made within a certain distance of a chosen location. A widget is available for your blog or website but you would need to know a little html to install it.

Tweetchat – A browser-based application that allows you to monitor and chat about one topic. You can tweet directly from the page and it will automatically add the hashtag of whatever ‘room’ you are in. The Twitter stream live updates.

Tweetree – A browser-based application that puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context (but does not properly thread them). It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos etc.

Do you use a Twitter tool to track conversation, share it with us by leaving a comment below.

Learn more about using Twitter for Business by taking Twitter for Business online class in our Online Learning Center.

Facebook has gone back and forth with how many Fans you need for your Business Fan Page to get this “pretty url”.

When pages first came out it was 25 fans, then they jumped to 100 and then 1000.  Many business owners sent in their feedback saying “Hey Facebook for business is also for the small business owner, don’t alienate us by making it 1000 fans.”  So they lowered it to 100.

Currently as I write this they have lowered it to 25 fans.  So if you haven’t ‘prettied’ up your Facebook  Biz URL go and do so today.

Note: Make sure when you  entering the custom business name you are doing it in the right area so that it creates your pretty  BUSINESS page URL.  You can also change your personal profile name in the same area so be CAREFUL.
Once you change it you can’t edit it.

Keep the name you use consistent with what you call your Facebook Business Page or what your domain name is.
Remember this is the url that you can also put at the bottom of your email signature on business cards, on a billboard sign etc.

Facebook at least offers the ability to get a pretty url for both your PERSONAL profile and your BUSINESS page but what if the social media site doesn’t offer that what do you do?

You can use URL shortening services like TinyURL or bit.ly to make short versions of the url link.

You can purchase a domain name set up a 301 redirect to a landing page  “Find Me At”  with ALL of your social media buttons with direct hyperlinks.

You can use http://www.unhub.com for FREE  and set which site it lands on with ALL of your social media buttons and links on top.   Here is my unhub page which lands on my blog site   http://unhub.com/virtualbiz4u

If you need help with figuring out “How To” set up your pretty url on Facebook for personal and business feel free to take the Facebook For Business Online Class which will show you how.

Post what that new ‘pretty url’ is HERE so we can all fan your Facebook page.  If you have a hub account or a custom domain feel free to leave a comment too.  Tell  us a little bit about yourself  and what your favorite social media site you use most often.

I will walking you through STEP by STEP the “How To’s”

Don’t have a “Gift Giveaway or Business Special Offer ” but would like to figure out what you could offer, join the call and I will help you brain storm an offer.

I will show you TOOLS to use to list build as well as show you tools that you can use for FREE on Virtual Meet and Greet that will HELP your business be showcased and FOUND in the search engines.

Feel free to forward this to any business you know that could benefit from getting more customers, you don’t have to be a member of Virtual Meet and Greet to be on this call.

Call WAS recorded if you want to receive an email with recording be sure to sign up below.

BONUS for signing up:

• You will also be automatically entered into the drawing to receive access to the class Facebook For Business.

• Receive COUPON to receive half off Virtual Meet and Greet Networking Membership.
• Once you become a member of Virtual Meet and Greet you can WIN additional Gifts during our “Gift Giveaway”  Event.
  Virtual Meet and Greet members have listed their gifts in the Directory and on their profile wall.  Be sure to visit their profile and listing to enter to WIN.

Virtual Meet and Greet is a Networking Solutions for busy professionals looking to have fun while networking and growing their business.
Allows exposure to a large number of professionals in a variety of fields. You will find many people, like yourself, are busy running their business, which leaves little time for socializing. So we mixed business with pleasure to create a happy hour event where introductions and business exchange is always encouraged.

Our attendees are here to meet other business professionals come and join our  Virtual Meet and Greet

Virtual Meet and Greet features:

• There is a business directory so make sure to list your business there.
• Facebook interface for easy access to your account as well as ability to invite other friends on Facebook to join you here.Join Virtual Meet and Greet Facebook  FanPage and Group
• We will have round table discussions, brainstorm sessions, online classes and much more.
• Industry and Business Specific Groups can be created to network with other
  professional with the same interests and/or industry group.
• Meet and Greet Events for all members to attend as well as “Meet and Tweets”
  using the latest social media tools and Twitter to connect to other businesses.
• Discounts to Virtual Business Solutions Learning Center
  Top experts teaching virtual classes at Virtual Business Solutions’ Online Learning Center will offer discounts to these classes to the
  members of the Virtual Meet and Greet.

  Annual membership cost at $39 per YEAR

  

• Please watch our Video to learn about all the features the site has to offer.
  Watch Video
• Need Help Registering Watch Video
  

‘Tis the Season to Kick Start your 2010 Marketing Plan,

Enter our Holiday Gift Give-Away Today!

Begin your 2010 marketing by getting your product and/or service in the hands of new customers now!
Enter a business gift for our Virtual Meet and Greet members to win while also entering yourself for valuable products and services needed for your business. Promote your company through our Holiday Gift Give-Away…a great way to network with business professionals interested in your business category!

By offering a holiday gift give-away on our site, you will:

• Introduce your business to thousands of potential clients who could benefit from your company
• Gain valuable leads…guaranteed prospects interested in learning more about your business!
• Expand your market by using our site to launch your offer on the internet, social media and email…reaching even more potential clients!
• Promote the value of your company and what makes it different from the competition
• Receive complimentary promotional material that can be emailed or posted on your website and social media sites

Hurry, Gift Offers Must be Submitted by December 1, 2009!

Winners will be announced every Monday from December 7^th

through December 28^th at 12 p.m. EST in our

Live Virtual Meet & Greet Web Room and Tele-Conference line

Gifts can be a product, service or other business offering…anything that will allow a prospect to “sample” your business.  Members can enter to win by signing your Virtual Meet and Greet Profile Wall.  Winners will be chosen at random by each participating member. Members are responsible for contacting the winner(s). The gift offerings will also be posted on VMAG’s Forum Board.

Here’s How to Enter:

• Login to www.VirtualMeetandGreet.com
• List your business gift offer in the Group Virtual Meet and Greet under discussions
  Holiday Gift Give Away
• Please be sure to list the quantity of gifts you are giving away.
• Showcase your business gift on your Profile page and in the Directory
• Prepare a 2-5 minute business gift showcase to be presented in the Web Room and Tele-Conference line using your website or web page.
• Act soon – deadline for entry submissions is Tuesday, December 1^st!

Suggestions for Offers:

• Think about WHO your ideal client is…WHAT service or product do you offer that can benefit them?
• Is your product or service something that you can offer globally or locally?

If you know others who would like to join Virtual Meet and Greet and promote their business in our Holiday Gift Give-Away, please forward this  and tell them to join today!

When users sign into their accounts, they can select to view either the “News feed” tab or the “Live Feed” tab. The news feed will feature items Facebook believes are of most value to you, while the live feed will list everything that is going on with your friends.

When users are on their news feed tab, the live feed tab will keep track of how many new posts have been added. This is similar to Facebook’s recent news feed which notifies users when new posts are added.

Facebook has also added information back to the News Feed, like when friends are tagged in photos, when friends become fans of pages or join a group, when they RSVP to events, and when they add friends

Watch the video and learn how to ‘tame your feeds’ so that you have a better experience with what you see in your feeds.
Many people don’t realize several features that they use to help.

Couple of key features people miss…

• Changing the amount of friends that the default setting is set at.
• Using Friends lists and adjusting where the list folder is placed

This video is part of the Facebook For Business Online Class that can be found in Virtual Business Solutions Learning Center.