Things are slow right now. You’re spending less time on sales, less time on support. How can you best spend the free time you have now to create value in your business?
One idea is to build a video portfolio on YouTube demonstrating the use of your products. Take a look at my client CropStop.com on YouTube, showing how to use QuicKutz, Boss Kut and Cuttlebug scrapbooking dies, embossing folders and storage sleeves.
OK, here you go: @thatsoftwareguy‘s top ten list of people you must follow:
@TheGrok, @dmscott, @roxyyo, @penelopetrunk, @chrisbrogan, @andybeal, @problogger, @doshdosh, @nametagscott, @copyblogger.
Extra bonus name: @JOHNABYRNE.
Want more names? Check out Linda Bustos’ awesome list. Or check out all the people @thatsoftwareguy is following.
Here’s a great article from TwiTip about building a community using Twitter.
If business is slow and you have extra time on your hands, one option is to learn more about social networking and build your business profile this way.
I have long admired people who create informative Twitter backgrounds, but I’ve never been good with graphics work. I noticed that the folks at TwitArt.com had a very impressive portfolio, so I hired them – I think they did a good job with my Twitter background. What do you think?
I have said before that I think the Q&A facility of LinkedIn is one of its greatest strengths. Here’s a recent question asking how to build a better e-zine that is an example of what I mean.
Linda from GetElastic talks about how to build a Twitter search and get the results by RSS. Now that Twitter Search is working reliably, this is exactly how I do it.
Facebook Pages, unlike Facebook Profiles, allow you to message all the people who are connected to you at once. This is done via an “Send an Update to Fans” link on your Facebook Page. In the past, these updates were somewhat obscure; you really had to look to see if you had any. A recent change to Facebook has increased the visibility of these updates. Now, any fan of your page will see a notification of your update at the top right hand side of their profile:
When someone follows the “1 new update” link, they will be taken to the “Updates” section of their Inbox, and your message will appear.
As with all communication, use this in moderation and be sure to add value by offering coupons, advice, tips and so forth – not just straight selling pitches and marketing. The last thing you want is for your fans to press the “Opt Out” link (or worse, the “Report Spam” link).
Creating a badge for your Facebook Profile is simple – click on the Profile menu at the top of the page, scroll to the bottom of your profile and click the “Create a Profile Badge” link.
However, Facebook Pages don’t automatically come with a badge creation link. Hopefully soon, the Facebook Pagebadge application will be fixed to make this easier, but for now, you have to do it indirectly like this:
- Log into Facebook.
- Add your corporate logo as a photo.
- Click on this photo, and scroll down until you see on the lower right part of the screen that says, “Make Profile Picture.”
- Click on the Profile menu at the top of the page, scroll to the bottom of your profile and click the “Create a Profile Badge” link.
- The badge will now have your corporate logo. You may or may not want your name or other fields on the badge; adjust to taste.
- Save the badge.
- Right click on the badge and save it as an image. Use this image anywhere you want a badge for your page.
- Go back to Profile/Photos/Profile Pictures and restore your original profile picture (if desired).
Here are a couple of examples of what I did; the first is with my name and the second is without. I’m using the second one as my Page badge.
Unfortunately, the URL to your page on Facebook is an impossible-to-remember huge string of numbers and letters. Vanity URLs which are shorter and easier to remember are only available to businesses which spend a significant amount of money on Facebook advertising (for instance, The Gap has http://www.facebook.com/gap).
But using your own website and hosting company’s “subdomain” creation facility, you can create something like http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/facebook or http://facebook.thatsoftwareguy.com and have them point to http://www.facebook.com/pages/That-Software-Guy/29706430641. URLs like these are much easier to remember and pass around.
One of the challenges of adding a Facebook Page to your already overflowing list of things-to-do is figuring out how you’re going to add fresh content on an ongoing basis.
One way that Facebook makes it easy to do this is using the Facebook Notes facility. Click the Edit button at the top right hand side of the title bar of Notes, and Import an External Blog. For That Software Guy’s page on Facebook, I use only the “That Software Guy” related posts from my blog, which are identified by the following URL:
http://thecartblog.com/category/that-software-guy/feed
Of course, you may choose to import your entire feed or just a portion of it.
