Read my beginner’s guide to Facebook Graph Search to discover how it could revolutionise the way you search for things online.

What is Facebook Graph Search?

Facebook Graph Search allows you to search photos, places or interests. It uses the data from your Facebook friends to return the most relevant results. It’s currently in invite-only beta testing mode but below I’ll have a look at what you can expect.

How does it work?   

When you type a phrase into the search bar, Facebook Graph Search uses data from your list of friends to deliver its results.

It’s a smart system. For example, the friends you interact most with on Facebook will have their data displayed more prominently in your results.

For example, someone visiting a strange city can find accommodation by searching for “Hotels in Edinburgh visited by my friends”. Graph Search also has Microsoft’s Bing search engine integrated for when it does not have enough information.

Why is it different?

The sheer amount of data Facebook has about its users is what makes Graph Search different from other search engines such as Google.

For example, Facebook probably knows the following and more about you:

• What books you like
• Your favourite films
• Where you’ve been on holiday
• What restaurants you like to eat at
• The music you listen to on Spotify

How businesses could use it

There is great potential for word of mouth recommendations. As a consumer, it’s likely that friends who share your interests would know of other places of products that you’d appreciate. A business on Facebook can also discover more about its customer demographic and gain important research for developing new products.

There are no plans as yet to bring Facebook Graph Search to mobiles, but there is great potential here for marketing to people on the move. For a quick decision on where to eat someone can search “Italian restaurants in London visited by my friends”.  There is automatically a level of trust among personal contacts to rival any amount of third-party reviews. Each ‘like’ gains a new importance as it has greater potential to connect you to a network of friends with Facebook Graph Search.

Want to know more?

For more information and Facebook Graph Search screenshots, head on over to this Social Media Examiner article.

Today I want to talk about the use of negative language on websites.

I’ll explain 5 examples of commonly used words, phrases and techniques you should avoid in your copy.

#1 – Why not?

“Why not give us a call?” – it sounds harmless enough but it doesn’t work too well in reality. This phrase actively encourages people to think of reasons not to call.

A better example would be “Call us now because we’re the only award-winning accountants in your area”.

#2 – Questions that lead to a ‘no’ answer

An example of this could be “Do you lie awake at night worrying about your fuel bills?” Most people would answer no to this question. They might be worried about their fuel bills but in reality it’s unlikely to cause many people sleepless nights.

By getting people to say “no” you’re putting them in a negative frame of mind.

#3 – Don’t delay

Rather than using “don’t delay” it’s better to switch this round into something more positive such as “Call us now”.

Subconsciously “don’t” is associated with negative feelings such as being told not to do things we wanted to as children.

#4 – Beware

“Beware of poor quality window companies in your area”. The word ‘beware’ puts people on their guard right away and won’t put them in the right frame of mind to read the rest of your content.

A better way to put this sentence would be “Give your home a great new look with our high quality windows”.

#5 – Bad-mouthing competitors

Lots of companies think a good way to sell their own products and services is to have a go at the competition. They won’t name them directly, but phrases such as “Other local builders just don’t measure up”.

Just by mentioning “other local builders” you’re making people aware of the fact they have other choices. Again, this is a negative tactic and should be replaced with a more positive statement such as “You’ll benefit from our 40 years’ building experience and 10 year guarantee.”

Follow these five steps and give your website a more positive and upbeat feel. 

It can take a lot of time and effort to build up trusting business relationships with people on Twitter. Unfortunately, it’s all too quick and easy to tarnish or destroy these.

In this article, I’ll look at 5 ways to ruin your Twitter relationships.

#1 – Forgetting your manners

Manners cost nothing. If someone has been kind enough to retweet your latest blog post or video, you can at the very least take the time to say thank you.

If you are ‘too busy’ or can’t be bothered do you think that person will bother to share anything you tweet again? Very unlikely.

#2 – Take, take, take

Even if you do say thanks to those who’ve retweeted or recommended you on Twitter, it’s really just the bare minimum. It’s nice to return the favour without being asked as it shows you care and helps build good feeling.

#3 – Forgetting who follows you

I couldn’t possibly name names here, but I know someone who really upset some of his followers on Twitter by declaring “All **insert profession here** are **insert swear words here**. It turned out about 6 or 7 followers that he knew professionally were in the industry he ranted about and were none too pleased about being tarred with the same brush as others.

#4 – Going AWOL

Relationships take time and consistency to develop. Imagine being on Twitter for 3 months and engaging with people regularly to then take a break for 3 months. If you carry on using Twitter sporadically, your relationships will suffer, just like they would in ‘real life’.

#5 – Not replying to questions

Your Twitter followers will expect you to monitor DMs and mentions of your name. To use a recent example, I asked one of my followers a question about their service (one I was interested in using) and I never heard anything back (I didn’t have a direct email for this person).

I saw them tweet something later that week and called them instead, but it still grated with me a little that they hadn’t bothered checking their DMs, especially as I had to call them in the USA at my expense.

Twitter relationships are every bit as valuable as offline ones, so treat them with care and avoid the 5 things outlined above.

Please tweet this article using the button below, I promise I’ll say thank you! 

Today I want to discuss how costly inaction can be for small businesses. Using some recent examples I’ve come across, I’ll demonstrate how doing nothing is often the worst thing you can do.

Like rabbits caught in the headlights, small business owners can often be paralysed by fear. Without mentioning names, I’ve given some examples below.

The company that didn’t launch their new service

One firm I know had an amazing idea for a new service in their niche. The trouble was they couldn’t decide when would be the right time to launch it.

After 5 months of doing nothing about it, one of their competitors launched a very similar service and gained a huge slice of the market share from them.

New website limbo

I see this mistake all the time. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t apply to websites, no matter what anyone tells you.

A local SME recently launched a fantastic new website – far better than any of their online rivals had in place. The problem was they didn’t tell anyone about it. They had no strategy for Google Adwords, social media or SEO in place for the first few months. The result was a lot of lost sales and brand awareness.

The reluctant bloggers

Content is a great way to drive traffic and enquiries to your website as well as raising brand awareness and establishing yourself as an authority.

Every week I see small business websites with a blog section and no new content. Inbound marketing through things such as blog posts and online video can be very cost-effective compared to outbound sales activities.

The perfectionists

Every small business owner would love their website to be spot on before launch. The truth of the matter is – there is no such thing as the perfect website.

I know of one company that deliberated for over a year on the design of their website and another 6 or 7 months writing their content. If they’d just launched with a good website when they had the chance, they would have made a lot more money and been able to tweak things as they went along.

Don’t get caught in the headlights, as a small business owner you need to take action and be brave. Do something that scares you today.

We all like to get ‘do follow’ backlinks from relevant websites with a high domain authority. However, if you focus solely on this approach you could run into trouble.

Discover why it makes sense to target a wide range of websites to help you build a natural looking backlink profile.

Reason #1  - Google Will get Wise to it

Google is very big on natural links at the moment. The basic premise is that you should get links as a by-product of producing great content (blog articles, videos etc.) rather than purely focusing on just getting links. If you ‘go for glory’ and only approach sites with a high domain authority with a view to getting links, your backlink profile will soon start to look unnatural.

Nobody really knows how Google will deal with this issue, but it’s easy for their algorithm to pick this up, so it could lead to problems for your site if you pursue this approach.

Reason #2 - You May Get Rejected a Lot

If you go after ‘big links’ from your guest blog posts, you may end up getting rejected a lot of the time. For example, if your own website has a low domain authority and you produce average guest blogs, what incentive is there for the authority site to link back to yours?

Going for an even spread of links from low, mid and high authority websites will result in a higher success rate and a more natural looking backlink profile.

Reason #3 – You Could Miss Out on Valuable Traffic 

By going after links purely for the sake of it, you could end up with little or no traffic from them. However, if you take the time to write interesting content for a relevant site regardless of its domain authority, you could end up with a steady stream of traffic from interested readers.

The basic takeaway is don’t try to game the system – aim for a broad range of backlinks and don’t get fixated on the domain authority scores. 

The new series of The Apprentice is upon us. If you tuned into BBC1 last night at 9pm you’d have seen the teams working on a task that involved creating a new flavoured beer and selling it to the trade and public.

In this article I’ll look back on what happened and discuss the lessons I think every small business owner can learn as a result.

Defining Your Target Market

Knowing who you’re selling to is critical before you do anything else. I was surprised to see Tim stating he wanted to target the female beer drinker’s market during the initial discussions. Thankfully the rest of his team quickly shot this idea down in flames and went for a mass market approach.

Not having a clearly defined target or choosing the wrong market can be catastrophic. Using this beer example, the majority of the people at the beer festivals they showed in the show were men. How many pints would Tim’s team have sold to the handful of women who were at the Kent Beer Festival?

It’s all too easy to jump into a new business without doing the necessary research first.

Branding

Whether you’re selling services or products, branding is an important aspect of any business. Of the two beer bottle designs on the show last night, “Rhubarb and Riches” had a much stronger look than “A Bitter This”. If you’re in a crowded marketplace, branding could be the difference between being a ‘run-of-the-mill’ business and one that stands out and thrives.

See my recent article on branding for more information.

Attention to Detail

It’s easy to miss the obvious when you’re caught up in running your own business and juggling lots of different tasks. Examples from The Apprentice last night included not taking a sample of beer for the pub owners to taste and forgetting to print off display labels for the beer pumps.

Even if you’ve been running your own business for many years, it can be beneficial to take a step back and see if there are any small details you’re missing that could make a big difference.

Where to Sell

I don’t want to be too critical of those on the show, but taking beer round to a wine bar doesn’t seem like a good idea. Equally, going to a “beer festival” without doing any research as to its size or location was a costly mistake.

As far as your own business is concerned, do you have a strong presence in the places where people are looking for products and services like yours? For example, I know businesses that don’t have a website and are missing out on 100′s of relevant enquiries every single month.

I won’t be dissecting each and every episode of this year’s Apprentice, but hopefully these points have been useful. If you liked this article please share it on Twitter via the button below.

I was driving to a meeting this morning and heard a radio advert that sparked this blog post. Keep reading to discover what it was and how it stresses the importance of timing in getting your marketing messages across.

The advert was for a well-known takeaway food retailer and started with a question asking if I couldn’t decide what to have for dinner before telling me about their deals.

I understand the importance of brand awareness when it comes to advertising, but it did strike me as odd that I was being asked at 8am what I was thinking of having for dinner. I’d only had my breakfast about 15 minutes earlier!

I’ve had thousands of other thoughts since then and many conversations so even writing this a few hours later I can’t remember the price or the details of any of the offers mentioned in the advert.

Online vs. Offline

• Online Marketing

One of the great things about online marketing such as Google Adwords and SEO is the timing aspect. For example, if I’m looking to go out for a steak in Edinburgh this week, I know I can search on Google and get a list of places.

From the point of view of the restaurants that have invested in organic or paid search, they know they’re visible to people looking for a specific thing at a specific time which greatly increases their chances of a successful outcome.

• Offline Marketing

Using the same example as above, let’s say you owned a steak restaurant in Edinburgh and took out a half page advert in the local newspaper. How many of the people seeing your advert will be thinking of going out for a steak at that moment? Of course, your advert will probably tempt some people to come along, but the vast majority of people who see it won’t act on it at all.

You may also have to advertise in the newspaper every week for a few months to help build up awareness of your restaurant too. However, if you’re on the first page when people search for “steak restaurants Edinburgh”, you will appear every time and to a wide range of people who are actively looking for what you’re selling.

Conclusion

I’m not saying offline marketing doesn’t have its place. For a lot of industry sectors it has always and continues to work very well.

This article is really to emphasise the important of timing – being visible to your potential customers when they’re looking to buy.

How often do you buy something from a person in a shopping mall who stops you and interrupts your day? 

Getting high quality, relevant links to your website is one of the main ways to improve your Google rankings.

As well as creating great content people want to share, interviewing high profile people in your industry is another way to attract lot of incoming links to your site. In this article I’ll explain how to go about it.

Build the Relationship First

If you’re going to approach a high profile figure in your industry for an interview, you’ll need to be on their radar first. You’ve got very little chance of success if you just ask them ‘cold’ if you can ask them some questions for a feature on your website. For example, if you’re selling ladies shoes online, it’s unlikely you’ll get a ‘yes ‘ from a well-known figure in the fashion industry by emailing or calling them as a complete stranger.

There are various ways you can build a relationship which include commenting on their blog posts, retweeting their content and connecting to the people they chat to regularly on social media platforms.

Offer Added Value 

Why would a busy person take time out of their schedule if there was nothing in it for them? One way to tip the balance in your favour is to show them the reach of other interviews or blog articles you’ve written. If your blog gets a handful of weekly visitors, then they’re unlikely to agree to your request.

Think about who you know and how they might be able to help the person you want to interview – think creatively, don’t just ask for the interview without an incentive like 99% of other people will be doing.

Promote, Promote, Promote

There’s no point in interviewing someone and not promoting it. Make sure you have a clear strategy in place before you publish the interview as to where and when you’re going to spread the word.

Assuming the content of the interview is good, you need to get the word out both online and offline in order to get as many links as possible.

If you’ve interviewed someone really well known, don’t be afraid to email all your contacts to let them know in advance when the article will be going live.

When a person has given up their precious time for an interview, the least they’ll expect is for you to work really hard at getting the word out there.

This post was inspired by a small business website I looked at the other day. There was a Twitter feed on the site’s homepage  with a selection of their ‘latest’ tweets.

The problem was that the most recent tweet being displayed was in fact 67 days old, with the rest being even older.

In the rest of this article I’ll look at the pros and cons of having social media updates imported directly onto your website’s homepage.

The Pros

Here are a few advantages of having your latest tweets or Facebook status updates on your website for all to see:

• An extra line of communication with your existing and potential customers.

These updates can help keep visitors to your site up-to-date with your latest news which is especially beneficial if you don’t have a blog.

• Gain more social media followers.

If the content that’s being updated on your site is interesting and relevant, visitors may well turn into followers or people who ‘like’ you on Facebook.

Now I’ll look at a couple of the main disadvantages:

The Cons 

• If you don’t update your social media regularly, it can backfire.

Going back to the example in my introduction, how do you think it looks to potential clients if your most recent update is months old?

It could say one of two things: “your business is no longer trading since it’s not active on social media anymore” or “this business can’t be bothered to communicate with its customers”.

• You can distract people from what you want them to do.

I’ve seen websites that have a Twitter and Facebook feed on the homepage. In my opinion this can make them too cluttered as well as taking people’s attention away from either buying online or making an enquiry.

Summary

I’ve seen a decline in sites using social media feeds over the past few years, but there are still plenty of them out there. In my opinion it’s probably best to avoid these feeds and just have links to your social media accounts via prominently placed logos instead.

There have been a few high profile news stories recently in the UK where people have had their timelines trawled for offensive tweets and been retrospectively punished/held to account.

It got me thinking about how this could affect small business owners on Twitter too. In this article I’ll discuss a few of the issues surrounding this topic.

The Benefit of Hindsight

If you’ve never gone back through your Twitter timeline to remind yourself what you’ve posted in the past, now might be a good time to do so.

Some small business owners tweet multiple times a day, so it’s hardly surprising they can’t recollect everything they’ve ever posted.

Things Can Change Quickly

I was told about a situation recently where someone had moaned about a certain company’s customer service via Twitter. A few months later, they were in the frame to win a contract to provide a service to that particular company.

The HR department found the offensive tweet on the would-be suppliers timeline and the contract discussions were swiftly terminated.

That may sound a bit harsh on the face of it, but would you give business to someone who’d criticised you in public?

Why Worry?

If everyone worried about what they tweeted being misinterpreted by someone else, or found by a potential business contact, then nobody would probably ever tweet.

In ‘real life’ we can’t take back what we’ve said to others, although we can of course apologise after the event. One way of looking at this issue is to just not worry. If you tweeted something with conviction at the time, why should you have to back and delete it?

Providing Ammunition

When personal or business relationships go sour, your past tweets may be used against you. Let’s look at an example – John and Eric used to run a successful accountancy practice until they fell out. Eric decided to start his own business and retweeted old updates of John’s in a bid to show he was providing out of date financial advice to his clients.

Scenarios such as the one above are a very good reason to monitor mentions of your name on Twitter.

Summary

The decision as to whether or not to go back and check your old tweets for anything offensive is an entirely personal one. Even if someone does try to use something against you, Twitter gives you a very good platform to come out and defend yourself on – just make sure you remain dignified and don’t stoop to the level of personal insults as these will only give people further ammunition.