Rodney Wayne Franchisee – Swan Management Limited (Rodney Wayne) engaged CampaignHub’s* social media marketing solution to build up their email database quickly and ethically.

For many business owners Twitter is often placed in the “too hard” box, which is understandable, as 75% of all Twitter accounts used for business have been abandoned.

After finding out the ideal number of tweets per day is a lot higher than I would have guessed (more about that in a moment), I was curious to find out the ideal times to tweet.

Many, especially in the business realm, are still struggling to come to terms with Twitter so Foursquare may still be that leap too far, having said that a number of enterprising NZ businesses are already taking advantage of it.

It’s often the little things that we say that mean the most. Words can be extremely motivational and incredibly destructive. Ironically the less words we use the greater the impact and resonance.

If the term ‘Social Media’ is relatively new to you, then you may have not yet pondered the benefits of promoting your business by using this media.

Usually I spend ages writing a catchy introduction to my blog articles, but this time the first point is so immensely powerful and persuasive I don’t need to…

The statistics say it all; Social Media is here to stay… But hang on, what about New Zealand agricultural businesses?

Only when you get suspended or banned from a social network will it finally dawn on you how much of your own life you put into these networks. As of 48 hours ago one of our business Twitter profiles with over 5,000 followers was suspended.

It’s pretty well known in Social circles that your follower numbers, or subscribers, in no way relates to the number of people actually engaged with your content.

I’m not at all opposed to online networking – I use it all the time to build relationships, but no matter what medium you use to connect with people, it’s not about CONTACTS, but meaningful and lasting CONNECTIONS.

Property Tutors engaged CampaignHub to market their recent 4 Hour Event via social networks including Twitter and Facebook.

You know how valuable a blog can be to your business. You know how every article you add gets you more love from Google. More traffic. More leads. More sales. You started off great, but now you’re getting busier and you just can’t find the time or inspiration for creating regular new content for your blog.

The debate of how much effort and resource a business should invest within social media for engagement continues but we at BusinessBlogs.co.nz have found that social networks are increasingly making up 30-40% of our inbound traffic.

This post is for all the businesses out there that have heard of “Social Media” but have no understanding of what it is, how to use it and most importantly how much it is going to cost.

I have just come back from a few days in Auckland presenting to business owners the results of our 12 month project using social media as a business marketing channel and networking “tool”.

As Craig Harrell of Rainmaker Marketing says, “A rubber-banded stack of business cards is not a sales strategy.” We have transferred the impulse to gather stacks of business cards from local networking events, to gathering stacks of “followers” on the internet.

A while back Levi’s sent out hand selected people in their signature jeans across Australia and New Zealand while clues were released through twitter as to their whereabouts …

Before you actually start to engage in using Social Media some serious consideration should be made to who within your organisation or company has the mandate to manage the portfolio.

Few would claim last year was an easy one for business. Taking an optimistic point of view, it has forced us to look long and hard at our business models and come up with ways to improve on the bottom line.