When Suzy Q makes an appointment for a haircut, it’s easy to jump online and see what she’s been doing on Twitter. Has she been following your business online? Has she contacted you on Twitter, created conversations about your business, or talked about hairstyles online? These are things that you can talk about when she comes in. Perhaps she tweeted on Monday that she was thinking about changing her hairstyle, and on Wednesday when she came in she didn’t mention it right away. What a great opportunity to bring up some new styling ideas!

Maybe you happened to be on Twitter when Suzy Q was talking about her hairstyle preferences, so you were able to jump in on her conversation and provide some ideas and pictures before she even came in! I guarantee you that Suzy Q will tell her friends about your salon, as well as become an incredibly loyal customer because of your online suggestions and proactive approach.

“But it’s too time consuming” – True, it can be a bit time consuming, but there are tricks to the trade. As with every trade, there are secrets and programs that you can use to be more productive in less time.

“I don’t understand. Who sits online all day” – While this may seem like what people are doing, in reality so many people don’t even go to Twitter.com, or Facebook.com. Mobile applications are making it easier than ever for people to be on these networks all day, every day, without even going to the websites. And, as mentioned above, there are programs that are available that monitor Facebook and Twitter for you, so that you never even have to go to the actual sites.

When a complete stranger updates their status with; “Just got the best haircut ever! Luv this place!”  Every single friend of theirs is going to see that and wonder where Suzy Q just got her haircut. If you offer an incentive for her to say something on Twitter, she’ll do your advertising for you at NO COST!! How can you lose when customers do your advertising?!

“I don’t want customers and clients to have control over the message. What if they say something bad” – It’s going to happen. When you put the message out there, open your business to the masses, you are going to lose certain controls. There are those that won’t take any steps forward for fear that a step forward could mean two steps backwards. And yes, it could mean that, but it won’t. Small business owners need to be in control of their products, the way their message is portrayed so that they can stay in business. As a small business owner myself, I completely understand that. However, you have got to let it go a bit in order to grow.

When a former customer or client decides to say something about your business, you have to respond. In reality, the only person that is getting hurt when bad things are said is the person who is saying them. No one likes negativity, even on the social networks. Respond with a “how can I fix this” or “what can we do to repair this relationship.” In the end, your business is not the one who looks bad. You take the criticism, soak it in, and offer solutions. If your nemesis does not take to your responses, you are the one who looks like the bigger person for stepping up and trying to alleviate the problem and everyone will see that.

Don’t be afraid of criticism; use it to your advantage. In the end, it gets your business name out there even more. What’s the old saying? No press is bad press.  In many cases, negative opinions or status updates regarding your business can turn into positive exposure and profits.

So the question appears to be not why use social media, but how to get your current customers to talk about you them? How do you get Suzy Q to do your free advertising? You have got to think outside of the box and ‘get with it,’ so-to-speak. Perhaps you want to offer a free haircut for every Social Media referral they send your way. Perhaps you want to do a punch card and for every tweet they post about your business, or every potential referral they give you , could be a punch and ten punches is a free haircut.

Giving your customers incentive to talk about you on the social networks can be as easy as offering Twitter Only or Facebook Only specials. Perhaps you offer a Twitter special that requires a retweet to get a 10% discount. Or perhaps you offer a Facebook special that requires you bring in 10 Facebook friends for that 10% discount.

The possibilities are truly endless, and that’s what’s so amazing about social media. With the millions upon millions of people on Twitter, and with Facebook beating out Google for the most visited website, your local following could be massive. Use your imagination, experiment, and don’t be afraid of the outcome. As long as you always take the high road, you will be seen as the bigger person and a better company for it.

Every time I drive down Warner, past Recker on the way to my lil sis’ house, I remember the small town that Gilbert used to be. I remember learning how to drive a stick-shift out by William’s Air Force Base, and racing down the back-roads with a car full of basketball players. This is my small-town-USA, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about it. I left a few times, once after high school graduation and again a few months ago, but I’ve always come back realizing that there really is no place like home.

Web design for Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Queen Creek and Apache Junction offers the opportunity for small businesses to add an extra layer of advertising to their marketing scheme. A small businesses web page has the potential to bring in not only local Arizona traffic, but national traffic as well. There are hundreds of ways to target your audience, whether you are looking only to bring in residents from your small-town-Arizona, or whether you want to play with the big boys and take on the national crowd. It’s all possible.

Breaking it down to its simplest form, this is what you can expect from Linwright Design. Below is an example of a search for flowers in Gilbert, Arizona. (flowers Gilbert Arizona). As you can see, Google provides a map of the area within the SERP (search engine results page), and there are 150,000 results. This means that if you want to rank without paying for it, you have to compete with 150,000 other websites for this search. The mapped area would be how you would target the local crowd, and the easiest way to do that is to simply register your website with Google local. See the diagram below for an overview of the SERP.

What I would suggest doing to target the local Gilbert, Chandler, Mesa, Queen Creek or Apache Junction area is to register with the local advertising sites. With Google it’s free to register your site. They will give you a call to verify your address and your business, and the rest is up to you. In order to rank well for Google local, it’s all about organic SEO (which basically means anything and everything that you do to get to the top without paying for it. AKA; link building campaign, content, blogging, social marketing).

If you have ever searched for batting cages in Gilbert, Arizona, you probably have come across Rip City Batting Cages, which is located at Freestone park. If you are considering doing a local marketing campaign for your small-town-Arizona area, take a look at these batting cages. They have completely saturated the SERPS. They almost have the entire first page of Google for this search term! Granted, there are only 43,000 competitors for batting cages in Gilbert, Arizona, which is a small number, but they have registered their site with every possible local firm.

It’s as simple as registering with City Search, User Instinct, Yelp, Yellowbot, Merchant Circle, Local Yahoo, Local Google, Insider Pages, and Yellow USA, among many other local platforms. Some of them are paid-per-advertising, some of them are completely free. But if you are considering building a website and marketing it towards local traffic, this would be the route to go.

On top of local SEO, Linwright Design would also integrate Facebook and Twitter into your website. In my personal opinion, it is almost pointless these days to build a website and not integrate social media into the mix somehow. Twitter and Facebook also allows you to engage your customers at a local level as well.

By using Twitter and Facebook you can target users who are from your local area. In every case, a person building a profile on these social networks will have to enter their home-town. If their hometown happens to be Gilbert, Chandler, Mesa, Queen Creek, or Apache Junction, then you add them to your list of followers and friends. It’s that simple, and that easy to let them know about upcoming promotions, specials, and local appreciation days.

Now, the actual web design is the best part. Designing a website for a small business involves taking inspiration from the business itself, the customers’ needs, and, of course, the area. In my opinion, how can you build a website about small-town-Arizona if you haven’t lived there for all of your life?

I won’t lie, I had to build a corporate website recently targeted to residents of Indiana. Now, I’ve never been to Indiana. I’m sure they’re proud of their Colts, but what else are they proud of? What would catch their attention? So, I did some research, found some pictures of Indiana, and tried to make it work. It’s difficult when you have to make a local website about a place that you’ve never been, but, of course, I made it work.

Building a website for a small business that targets the local traffic is one of my favorite things to do, especially for small-town-Arizona. Nearly everything about this state is beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoy creating a website to promote that as well as the small businesses and business-people behind the scenes.

Don’t forget to contact me for a free custom quote!

Getting accurate and conclusive statistics regarding Facebook pageviews, Twitter clickthroughs, or simple blog visits is tougher than you might think. Sure, you can enlist Google Analytics, try bit.ly or su.pr, attempt PostRank, or jump on TweetStats, but if you were to compare all of those numbers to each other, they will never add up.

If your Twitter shortener (the platform that you use to shorten your links for Twitter’s 140 characters) says that you received 115 clicks from a certain link, your Google Analytics will no-doubt show far less than that for the amount of people that actually viewed the page. Sounds confusing, right? Here’s the visual.

See what I mean. I used to use bit.ly for my Twitter shortener, until the numbers really went haywire and didn’t match in the slightest to what the other analytics stats were saying. So, I did some research and decided to give su.pr a try. Su.pr is owned and operated by StumbleUpon, which gives your blog post an added boost. When you shorten the link, su.pr will automatically post it to StumbleUpon. I also heard that su.pr is more accurate than bit.ly because it weeds out the bots. But, as you can see from the visual above, it’s still hard to tell exactly which numbers are correct.

So, in some more research for accurate social media statistics I heard about PostRank, a brand new analytics program that combines Google Analytics with social tools like Twitter. It takes the numbers from Google Analytics, and from my  understanding, compares those numbers with the amount of interaction that happened on Twitter concurrent to a specific blog post. Than it takes the blog visits, combined with the Twitter conversations, and creates a interaction score.

Pretty sweet sounding, right? Well, after getting truly excited about something that might actually be accurate, I decided to give it a few weeks. As you can see below, it’s still not entirely accurate. Not only are the followers numbers off, the numbers pulled over from Google Analytics don’t always match up, nor does the amount of Twitter conversations or the social bookmarking stats.

I give PostRank a lot of credit, however, for attempting such a feat. Being able to accurately track social media numbers is incredibly crucial in this field, and finding a system that works will probably make millions for the creator. I’m still waiting for that day.

Until then, I simply use a variety of analytics including Google and su.pr. I continue to switch it up every couple of months to try and find the most accurate program, every time wishing that the perfect social analytics tool is out there. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

Update: As I was going through my feeds this morning, I came across an article from Social Media Today regarding this exact subject. This is the section that I found most interesting:

Unlike traditional forms of gathering consumer insight, online tools are often cheaper, based on much larger sample sizes, and are quicker to deliver results.  For the past few years the value of search engine marketing (SEM) are measured largely by ad impressions, page views and click through rates.  However, as internet users are more willing to input additional data online, companies are now looking to measure key metrics of engagement on a person-level.

According to a recent comScore and Starcom USA’s study on how U.S. Internet users click on display ads, “Only 8% of internet users now account for 85% of all clicks… The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact.”

That’s just one of the examples that web analytics can be misleading.  It will continue to be challenging for marketers to abstract reliable data as social media adds another pile of data to the media measurement mix.  The future trend to measure more accurately will be to combine technical web analytics (server logs) with a sampling of user surveys (opt-in by visitors) that visits the site.  Although there will be sampling errors, it certainly beats making assumptions that doesn’t reflect real user behaviors.