Tips for Entrepreneurs: 10 tips about social media

In my soon to be published feature interview in one of Israel’s top Hebrew weeklies, I shared 10 tips on social media. Here they are – expanded and in English for your profitable reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Tip No. 1: Remember that social media is media just like newspapers and ads are media. The major difference is that it’s instant, it’s free, or relatively free – and most of all, you’re in control of what you say. You can cut the time it takes to market your business from taking weeks to seconds or minutes.

Once you think of an idea, you can get it published in social media literally within minutes. It changes the SPEED of business.

Tip No. 2: By using social media, you can market to a very niche group of people – the people most likely to buy your product or service! I once created an ad that targeted a specific person. It was visible ONLY to about 30 people in the world; e.g., like you need to be male, 34, have a degree in journalism from Yale and be married. This means that even if you pay $50 a click, it can be well worthwhile because you can zoom in and target individuals very specifically.

Tip No. 3: Social media is part of a big ladder. If I don’t know you and try to call you by phone, you (or your secretary) will not let me through. If I email you and try to sell you something, you will ignore me. But if I use twitter, I can get a response and begin a relationship with people who would otherwise be far away from reachable. You can, too.

Tip No. 4: You can set up an ad campaign so you only pay for clicks. This means that if you made the ad have a price, such as “NIS 200 for a business lunch,” people not willing to pay that amount will not click, which means you get tons of visibility and exposure for FREE. If someone does click, they are usually someone who can afford to visit you and pay your price.

Tip No. 5: Social media is a great way to build rapport with people you might not otherwise be able to reach. If social media shows me that you like electric cars, or that you have strong political opinions, that can help me develop a stronger relationship with you. And I won’t praise Netanyahu if you are on social media all day long telling people that Barak was a better prime minister.

Tip No. 6: There are tools like twello.com, which is like Daphei Zahav. They enable you to search for people on twitter in specific fields. These powerful tools can help you get seen by the right people and develop a relationship with them that goes up the ladder from totally unknown to Twitter to Face- Book and LinkedIn to email to a personal or business relationship depending on what you want.

Tip No. 7: One of the most powerful tools on social media, and the tool that has most single-handedly built my business, is LinkedIn recommendations. I have 178 recommendations on LinkedIn alone. Each of those recommendations is both seen on my profile when someone hears about “the hassidic rebbe who understands social media.”

Just as important is that people looking at my LinkedIn recommendations also see the profile of the recommendation GIVER. So it’s tremendous visibility in several ways: One, that when anyone out there visits a profile of something or someone THEY know and they see a glowing recommendation about me... I don’t have to expend any effort to close the deal; they are already convinced before they meet me that they need to consult with me. Two, people reading recommendations about me also get to read about the person giving the recommendation. Good for them too! Tip No. 8: Developing an app or plug-in for Wordpress is not only done for money. Many applications are free and are developed simply to introduce you to the company. Seeing the free basic app makes you want to buy a better version, one with no ads or with more features. Other programs are simply for the “noise value” to generate publicity. Other software and Wordpress plug-ins are sometimes created simply so the maker ends up with many links from all over the Web to their site, which then shoots them to page 1 of Google.

Tip No. 9: There are techniques to advertise cheaply when you have a product that fits that category, for 3 agorot a person using Google ads on YouTube. People think that Google ads are a minimum of 25 to 50 agorot each, but there are legal ways to get them for less.

Tip No. 10: Think about your customers’ mind-set. What are they most likely to be thinking about? If someone is on Face- Book, they’re thinking: “What did Sarit make for dinner last night?” or “What are my friends up to? I’m bored.” However, when someone goes to LinkedIn, they are in a much more powerful and business-oriented mind-set. Interacting with them there (through communication, NOT paid ads (which are expensive and DO NOT work well from my experience on LinkedIn) can generate tremendous business.

If you’re not on LinkedIn, you can’t afford not to be. If you’re on LinkedIn and not taking advantage of it, you need to be!

issamar@issamar.com

Issamar Ginzberg is a business adviser, marketer, professional speaker and rabbi who has been published in more than 50 business publications.