Neal McTighe needed help analyzing and building his budding business, Nello’s Sauce. As an adjunct professor of Italian at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., he called on a colleague to provide him with a valuable resource: MBA students.
social media marketing for small business I was happy to send him willing volunteers enrolled in my summer business-consulting elective course. McTighe described the various challenges and opportunities he faced and members of my class split themselves into teams based on their background and interest. Over six weeks, these teams analyzed his sales and distribution data, researched the pasta sauce industry, looked for prospective distributors and collaborators and developed recommendations to help him move his company forward. In an ideal world, your employees would gladly share all of your company’s social media posts, right when you want them to. But it’s often hard for them to keep up with the tide of individual emails badgering them to share this or that. The result: Social burnout. They don’t care to share and your social footprint suffers. In this video, social media expert Brian Honigman suggests Circulate.it as a convenient quick-fix, yet effective solution to this common problem. Circulate.it is a web-based app that neatly bundles everything you want your employees, co-workers and colleagues to socialize into a single simple daily email newsletter. The tool lets you quickly share all of the company news, articles and blog posts you'd like your team to boost across their social media networks -- in one click, directly from your email. The easier you make it for them to socially share your content (on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), the more likely they’ll be in the mood to. At least that’s the idea.
social media marketing b2b If social media marketing is part of your business, you should definitely develop a strategy to capture information through this tool. You only need an active account on Twitter to follow-up with the leads more easily but, even if marketing on Twitter is not very high on your priority list right now, you can gain interesting information about your niche.
Varied backgrounds and experiences to help a company with its challenges
The MBA students in my class had backgrounds in marketing, social media, QuickBooks and global trade all areas that McTighe needed help with. The students ended up doing projects that will be immediately beneficial to Nello's sauce.
social media marketing courses McTighe knows sauce, but now he has acquired other assets important to grow a business. Twitter has gained currency across demographics, everyone’s on it. Everyone has an opinion and everybody loves to use hashtags. A creative person can do a lot with the resources available on the advanced search page. Advanced Search on Twitter is easy to use. Combining it with knowledge of search operators makes it twice as powerful. There are a lot of permutations and combinations possible. The fields are straightforward and easy to understand but the implications are immense. Search usernames and tweets by usernames. References to usernames indicate the general mood and public perceptions about a username. Track conversations between two usernames. For example, this feature allows you to track conversations between your competitor and their main evangelists on Twitter. Narrow down the geographical field of the tweets. Find out what people in a given area are searching for. Restaurants near a specific location used with the relevant phrase or hashtag can throw up powerful clues about local markets. For example, “Restaurants” near: Dallas within: 5 miles.Search for tweets that ask questions containing your chosen keyword or phrase.In any search string, you can filter out unwanted words with the “none of these keywords” field:. This means the search will come up with only those tweets that are without the filtered term(s).
how to use social media for marketing Follow trends and search by hashtags to get real-time intelligence about your niche. The MBA students developed a marketing and social media plan for Nello's Sauce, helping McTighe prioritize how and where to spend his time. The team convinced him to use the treasure trove of photos stored on his phone through Instagram, so that prospective customers could almost taste the sauce after seeing it.
Research assistance to help an entrepreneur dig into areas not yet probed
When a person is running a small company, his or her focus is often on immediate sales, not the long-term research and networking that could net insights or resources to help the company grow. After all, it's hard to focus on the big picture,
social media marketing software while making and delivering the sauce.Even in a short six-week summer elective, these MBAs researched other companies and industry reports and found resources that McTighe, a solo entrepreneur, had not yet unearthed. Use the Twitter advanced search feature in conjunction with Twitter tools such as TweetBeep and Twilert in order to track conversations that mention your chosen search terms. This will allow you to pick up information that can be used for reputation management, increasing follower count and tracking responses to tweets. Sometimes, a fresh objective perspective can be an immense help. The MBA students pushed McTighe to find new ways to partner with other businesses to showcase his sauce and experiment with new recipes.My MBA students took my class to learn about consulting as a prospective career. They interviewed other consultants and read books and articles. But the best way to learn about consulting is simply to do it.These students got a taste of consulting with the Nello’s Sauce project. They learned that consulting is not limited to developing a great idea but might involve setting up accounting systems using QuickBook to ensure that employees are paid and customers are invoiced properly.
marketing with social media By hearing directly from McTighe and working with him over a six-week period, my MBA students had a firsthand look at what it takes to start a business. They now have a new appreciation for how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and all the issues a business owner must juggle.McTighe had experimented with marketing and social media but wasn't sure how much time to spend on it for a return on his investment.
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