Lawrence Web Design | Dark Horse Communications

Posts Tagged ‘Lawrence Web Design’

Small Business Social Media Tactic: Using Twitter for Appointments

Ok, so I was thinking about small businesses using social media tools to help increase sales like I do, and I came up with a great reason for using Twitter.

For some back ground research, one of my projects is working with the great ladies at Salon Blush. I was thinking about how sometimes you have dropped appointments or last minute cancellations. It’s going to happen sometimes in any business, and the key to not letting this affect you is quickly letting people know you have free time and can accept a new appointment. Enter Twitter.

If a business has a developed Twitter following, they can simply tweet out that they have free time, and that anyone responding to the Tweet will get a 5% discount for filling the time slot. This provides incentives for your customers for following you on Twitter while allowing your business flexibility in communicating. It also has the added benefit of marketing your business to the general public if done correctly using hashtags.

When you are logged into Twitter, there is a list of trending topics of the day. A great way to start getting your name out there is to make a humorous play on one of the hash tags and include your business’s link. For example, one trending topic in Chicago today is #worstfeeling. An example for a Salon’s tweet could be:

#worstfeeling … Going out on a first date without getting your hair done. http://salonblush.net.

This can help get followers, expose the brand, and help fill in appointment times. Not bad for a free service that you can spend 10 minutes a day on and have a positive impact.

Posted in Twitter | Tags: Glenview Social Media, Glenview Web Design, Lawrence Web Design | Comments Closed

Lawrence Kansas Web Design: Resource Page

I am putting together a resources page for my use as well as for other small businesses. This page will include links to tools I use, books I think are useful, and other stuff that I think someone looking to run a better web site should look at.

The page is at http://www.darkhorsecomms.com/resources and I recommend you check it out on a continuing basis as I want to add to it as I move along.

**UPDATE**

I have been working on the video part of a campaign lately, and have figured out what I think is the best strategy for video SEO. Provided you don’t get hit by YouTube for using “spammy” words in your campaign (Make and Money are to never be used. At all.), it is the best service to start off with.

I am still testing on this with some other services, and the biggest thing I can tell you is that unless you have a campaign with less than 50 videos, posting times need to be dragged out as long as possible. Uploading massive amounts at once will get noticed at MetaCafe and banned very quickly. Daily Motion does allow for some big uploads, and besides YouTube they are good at dealing with a large amount of content.

The more I look at the video space though the more I realize that YouTube should really be your first and only stop for now. Every company should have 5 videos about themselves online at the least, and then targeted term videos can fill in after that. Chances are that is all you need to do (If you don’t believe me, YouTube your biggest competitor … told you.), but if they are active with video that’s when you start utilizing multiple sites.

On a related note, I was at Netroots Nation during the Update, and most of the panels I was in on suggested that while online video is a great tool, it is not ready to be a stand alone content type. They suggested using video as either a primary reference source or as a supplement to content.

Posted in Practices | Tags: Kansas City Online Marketing, Kansas City Web Design, Lawrence Kansas Web Design, Lawrence KS Web Design, Lawrence Online Marketing, Lawrence Web Design, Small business marketing, web design, youtube marketing | Comments Closed