Infographic: Generational Media Usage by Time of Day

A new study by Magid Generational Strategies breaks down who's using what media at what time of day. Check out the media usage by generation and day-part:


Created by: MBA Online

11 Freelancer and Virtual Assistant Outsourcing Sites

Ever since Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Workweek, the small business owner market has been aware of outsourcing and its benefits. Find a virtual assistant or contractor of just about any flavor and your work life will be easier.

That’s the promise. The reality is a little different. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right person (as in regular employment), and it often takes more management than you expect, especially when the person is working from a remote location. However, I have used several of these services as a business owner and can attest to their value.

If you know you need help in marketing, in technology (think programming) or with administrative issues, but really don’t know how to get help, this review is for you. It is for small business owners that want to find contractors, not employees, who can work locally or remotely to get the job done.

For many jobs, you need a full-time employee, but for some projects and tasks you can get work done faster and more cost-effectively with an independent contractor. Each of these services offers a way to get a job done through a contract, and they often offer 1099 tax services, too. Unless otherwise noted, none of these sites charge a fee to list a job or project opportunity or to look for a freelancer.
Read More By TJ McCue : 11 Freelancer and Virtual Assistant Outsourcing Sites

17 Things Marketers Should Delete From Their Facebook Strategy NOW

Now with over 750 million members, there's no doubt that Facebook should be a part of your business' social media marketing strategy. At this point, it's almost insane to think that your own prospects and customers aren't on Facebook, which is why many businesses are realizing they need to create an engaging and valuable Facebook presence for their fans that also serves as a viable channel for generating traffic and leads for their business.

But for every business that understands it needs a Facebook strategy, there are just as many businesses that are executing their strategy incorrectly. To make sure you're not falling into bad Facebook marketing practices, below is our definitive list of things businesses should delete from their Facebook strategy...immediately.

What to Axe From Your Facebook Marketing Strategy: 17 Things Marketers Should Delete From Their Facebook Strategy NOW

Posted by Pamela Vaughan

Fri, Aug 26, 2011 @ 10:59 AM

Managing an Online Reputation

Your customers are talking about you — and the whole world is listening.Local review sites are reshaping the world of small business by becoming the new Yellow Pages, one-stop platforms where customers can find a business — and also see independent critiques of its performance.
How do you manage your reputation when everybody is a critic?

For some business owners, this is a terrifying prospect that seems more like mob rule than the wisdom of crowds. Negative reviews can hang an albatross around your neck if they appear prominently in search results. Happily, there is a big upside: referrals from happy clients are traditionally the best source of new business — and online forums are powerful word-of-mouth. The review process has been democratized.

But managing your online reputation requires a whole new skill set, including monitoring the online conversation and engaging with customers and the tech-savvy to promote yourself in the best channels. These skills are becoming essential for mainstream businesses. According to a survey by the Opinion Research Corporation, 84 percent of Americans say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

Read more By KERMIT PATTISON, New York Times

Quick Tips:

• Set up automatic alerts to notify you when your business is mentioned in a review or blog.
• Local search sites are the new Yellow Pages -- make sure your business is listed. The more complete your listing, the more likely you are to get good search results.
• Respond to reviews to show readers that you are listening and that you care about customer service.
• Online reviews are a gold mine of business intelligence. Analyze metrics to get a better sense of your customer demographics.
• Don’t write false reviews to puff your business or trash a competitor. You can severely damage your reputation...and look really silly.

Suggested Reading:

• Tips from Yelp on responding to positive or negative reviews.
• A guide to Web tools to track your online reputation.

Most Facebook Fan Pages are Underperforming

SHOCKER: 3% To 7.5% Of Fans See Your Page’s Posts

Posted by Brian Carter

The chart above shows that fan page owners are grossly overestimating how many people they’re reaching through posts.
(Note: That chart based on pages that together represent more than 400 million fans; it was complied by PageLever, which is in beta and growing its data set. The PageLever charts rock (they’re much cooler than my lame MS Powerpoint table above), and if you want better Facebook Page insights, you should sign up for their beta. The “approximate % of fans seeing posts daily” and “total daily impressions per fan” columns are daily, so these numbers are affected by pages that are not posting daily.)
It’s more of a shocker than you thought, isn’t it? Among Facebook pages with a million likers or more, less than three percent of their fans are seeing their posts daily.

Most Fan Pages Are Under-Performing

I’ve been told that HubSpot recommends a 0.5 percent feedback rate as a goal. But I have seen pages up to several hundred thousand fans achieve feedback rates above one percent regularly when they post purposely to get likes and comments. It may be possible for multi-million fan pages as well.
If you aren’t thinking about how to get more likes and comments, you probably don’t understand how EdgeRank is reducing your visibility to your fans.
Keeping your fans engaged daily and arousing their desire for your offering must be part of your fan page strategy, or you’re wasting the opportunity to stay visible and get sales.
There may be cases where a one percent feedback rate is not possible, especially if your fans don’t have much in common that they’re passionate about. This is more likely the case for fan pages that prioritize high fan counts ahead of targeting good potential customers. But you can see from the numbers above that high fan counts are deceiving.

Many Are Under-Posting

A lot of experts recommend posting to your Facebook fan page daily. But many are not achieving that. This is a missed opportunity. It’s similar to how so many companies have email lists but no email marketing strategy beyond a monthly newsletter than no one cares about. You need a fan page posting plan.
Afraid to post daily? To give you a contrary example, one e-commerce website I know of has found their 90,000 fan Facebook page to be quite profitable, and they post five times per day and have done so for more than six months.
Four daily posts are engagement-oriented and one is sales-oriented. Not all the Facebook e-commerce efforts I’m aware of are making profits, so it’s interesting that this profitable one is posting so often. Perhaps by being so aggressive, they cultivate the most passionate fans and weed out the ones who are never going to buy.
Facebook fan quantity is overrated. You do need a lot of fans, but you need a lot of quality fans, and you need to keep them engaged. The best Facebook marketers are engaging their fans with a purpose while growing their fan base.

But Can Big Pages Stop Growing Fans?

An underestimated factor in EdgeRank is time decay. One of the reasons so many fans of the biggest pages are not engaged is because they became fans so long ago. Some huge fan pages were not started by the company, and the early fans may never have been engaged. If a fan hasn’t clicked on one of your posts for a year, there may be almost no chance they’ll ever see your posts again.
And if you continue to do a poor job with your post feedback rate, over time, your fans will continue decay. You’ll have to keep getting new fans, as they get more and more expensive (because of ad burnout, they always become more expensive).
Once the cost is prohibitive, you’ll have no choice but to pay for sponsored post story ads to your existing fan base to try to re-awaken them. If you have more than 100,000 fans, you should already be running sponsored post stories and other ads to your existing fan base to keep them engaged, especially if your feedback rate is below 0.5 percent.

Solutions: Here’s The Good News

I was very reluctant to put this post out — it’s cool that it has an attention-grabbing title and it’s based on real data, but it could be discouraging to many involved in Facebook marketing. There are many naysayers about this business, so why add fuel to the fire?
In my experience, the people who say Facebook doesn’t work for business have little experience and no training. I agree with them that not enough businesses are succeeding, but I see it as a function of companies not doing it well, not as a function of the social network itself.
Consider this a tough-love post. I want you to face the facts and change your tactics so you can get better results.
Here’s what you need to change:

• Have a plan for engaging your fans: Who’s going to do the posting? Do they have any experience in this? How often will they post?  Have you planned out 30 to 90 daily posts yet?
• Go for likes and comments: Without them, you don’t get visibility. If you’re not getting a one percent feedback rate, have you been trained how to get more likes and comments from posts?
• Grow targeted fans that are realistically good potential buyers for your company: Don’t just go for numbers. The businesses I’ve seen make money from Facebook grew all or most of their fans from Facebook advertising, which gives you powerful targeting options.

Brian Carter is the chief executive officer of the FanReach Facebook marketing training company, a social media trainer, and a Facebook and AdWords consultant.

Google+: The Complete Guide

Google+: It’s the hot social network on the block. In just three weeks, Google’s competitor to Facebook and Twitter has amassed more than 10 million users, and its users are sharing more than 1 billion pieces of content daily. It’s become a hotbed for early adopters, tech luminaries, marketers and businesses around the world.

Google+ isn’t the easiest thing to understand, though. It has a lot of features that can confuse beginners. Even advanced users can miss a lot of the little gems and nuances that define Google+.

Read more from Mashable: Google+: The Complete Guide:

5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Expert Online and Off

There’s a lot of talk in the marketing blogosphere about the importance of setting yourself apart from your competition–about how to be taken seriously, you must establish yourself as an expert in your field. And while that’s all well and good, no one ever really tells you how you’re supposed to establish yourself as an expert. What goes into becoming an “expert” and how do you know if you’re doing it right or you’re just spinning your wheels and getting no brand karma?

What should small business owners do to help brand themselves as authorities that users will trust? Below are five tips:

1. Start Small: I’m sure there are a number of things you want to brand yourself and your company as being an expert on. However, start by picking one and building your empire from there. What is the one thing that your company does better than anyone else? Or what would you like to be known for doing better than anyone else even if you don’t right now? Become the go-to person for that. Once you get that under your belt, you can expand upon it and add a lot of related services.

2. Learn Everything You Can: Once you know what your area of expertise is, dedicate yourself to becoming the master of it. Read blogs and forums to stay up to date on the latest news, read discussions to understand the different pain points, read print magazines and offline materials to hear from even more sources. In order to be an expert on something, you need to be able to speak intelligently on it, and that means understanding it as thoroughly as you can.

3. Create a Plan for Sharing Your Knowledge: Through blogs and social media, small business owners are able to easily share their knowledge with others and display their expertise for everyone to see. But have a plan for how you’ll do that and use multiple formats. Maybe you’ll blog, offer webinars or speak at local events. Or perhaps you’ll host a meet up in your area and write articles for popular industry sites. Ideally, you should be doing a number of these things and sharing information in all the satellite communities where your audience hangs out. It’s not enough to simply share the content; you have to share it where people are going to notice and consume it.

4. Share Opinions, Even Difficult Ones: To really develop your standing as an industry expert, you need to be comfortable sharing your opinion on what’s going on in your niche. Use your unique point of view and your way of seeing things to share your passion with the people you’re trying to reach. It can be hard to put yourself out there and show your vulnerabilities, but you need to if you want people to able to relate to what you’re telling them. Share opinions on your blog, through social media, at local networking events, and anywhere else you can!

5. Live What You Preach: People want to see that you’re not only preaching best practices, that you’re also living them. Make sure you’re implementing the same things you’re telling everyone else to implement and that you’re not doing what you’ve told them not to do. If you’re trying to sell yourself as an authentic social media marketer, people are going to get upset pretty quick if you start sending out automated DMs or spamming them on Facebook.

Above are five tips I’d recommend to put yourself on the path to becoming an expert in your field. What did I miss? What traits or actions make someone stand out as an expert in your eyes?

Read More By Lisa Barone : 5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Expert Online and Off: