• Individual Deals for a one-time check in
• Loyalty Deals for those who check in multiple times
• Friend Deals for those who check in with a group
• Charity Deals for those who check in and you or the businesses donates a specified amount to a certain charity

Individual Deals are the most popular with consumers, and Loyalty and Friend Deals are a great way for businesses to encourage people to keep coming back.  But what if you don’t want to only be known as a discounter, or discounts for your business just don’t make sense?  That’s when you turn to Charity Deals.

Associate your business with a good cause -

Most everyone has a heart for giving endeavors, so involving your business in activities that help others is always a good move.  You’ll social raise awareness among Facebook users not only for the non-profit, but also your own business reach by encouraging check-ins. You think your corner deli has got the best sandwich in town, and your sales have proven you right. But you’d like to bring greater awareness to your deli with providing discounts.  Try connecting with a local homeless shelter.  A Facebook Charity Deal would put $1 in the shelter’s coffer with every check-in.   A success Charity Deal like this could help dozens of need individuals each week! Partnerships like this one can be invaluable to both the business and the charity. Brand expansion aside, linking up with one or two charities through Facebook gets you and your consumer involved in the philanthropic world. A simple check in with a charity deal means that one more persons knows about a charity they may not have known about before. Charity Deals not only build your business, but your community.

An organization can take all the benefits of blogging a step further when they contribute a guest post for another blog.

1. Increase credibility

Readers read blogs because they entertain, inform or both – and they won’t read one if they don’t have some respect or interest in their opinion.  When a favorite blogger recommends a product or service, readers give it a chance because someone they trust said it was worthwhile.

The same thinking goes for guest blogging. You writing a guest post, relevant to your business, on their site means that the blog owner trusts your opinion and thoughts enough to publish your content on their site.  And if they trust you, their readers are likely to do the same. 

2. Socially network, literally

Having exchanges with followers on Twitter is great, so is “liking” a business on Facebook.  But the ultimate social media compliment is being asked to contribute a guest post on a partner’s, vendor’s, or related business’ site.

Guest blogging doesn’t only increases your credibility with their audience – it exposes your business to potential new customers, and maybe even other blogs.  This exposure can lead to more guest posts, potential business leads and speaking engagements.

3. Extend search engine reach

With a credibility increase, and a broader professional network, comes a larger online reach – all from one simple guest post!  Linking into new sites, drawing new traffic makes your current business site more relevant to search engines.

4. Extending your business reach

We get pretty comfortable with what we’re good at, and that may lead to not opening ourselves up to opportunities such as new partners, customers, and vendors.  Writing a guest post for a site that doesn’t run in parallel with yours, requires critical thinking, creativity, and maybe even a little courage.

5. Inexpensive marketing

Approach contributing a guest post with this mindset: Someone is giving you permission to hang a marketing poster for your business in their shop for their customers and clients to see.  And they aren’t charging you a single penny – only asking that you provide a thoughtful and relevant sign for them to display.  How great is that?

Blogging

The majority of businesses can benefit from a company blog.  No two companies blog for the exact same reason. But for the most part, businesses use blogs as a way to further connect with their consumer. For social media non-friendly companies, a blog can be the best way to engage their target audience virtually.

Let’s say that a family therapy practice is struggling in the search results, and they’re looking for an inexpensive way to rank higher in search engine results. By simply adding a blog and updating it regularly – once or twice a week – they would  be consistently adding new content to their website. This gives them a boost in the rankings and it opens up the door to other business opportunities, like speaking engagements and guest blogging from referral generating organizations.

Guest blogging

Blogging on your own site is incredibly beneficial. But blogging on another company’s site provides instant credibility. Guest blogging is a 100% free way to not only connect with other companies and individuals, but also to get more eyes on your website instantly. Successful blogs have a subscribing audience that respects their opinion and trusts their judgment. So when your name and company is on a post, the readers will automatically view you as someone credible.

A final note on blogging: A problem we run into with businesses and their blogs is coming up with ideas for new posts. Yes, it’s a challenge. But consider this: you started a business because you saw void in your market. Your blog gives you another outlet to share your ideas in your own voice with consumers and other businesses alike. So play around with different styles and ideas until you find something that just clicks with your business and your personality. If you have great content, people will come.

Twitter

We’ve hammered home how important it is to blog, which is exactly why you need Twitter. Twitter is a microblog, and it only takes 140 characters to connect with consumers, fans and potential business partners. Remember how we said a blog starts a conversation? Twitter does it faster.

What makes Twitter special is that the people who follow you could have major influence on a target audience parallel to yours. Maybe you’re a cosmetic surgeon/basketball fan tweeting about the NBA playoffs. Some likes your tweet, responds, and you get into a conversation that starts with basketball but quickly turns into business. That simple tweet could lead to a speaking engagement or even a jump in followers.

LinkedIn

Maybe a blog on your site isn’t exactly for your company and Twitter is a little too casual for your target audience. Enter LinkedIn: the Facebook for businesses and networking. The great thing about LinkedIn is that it provides the connectivity of Twitter and the content capability of a blog.

You’re a divorce attorney looking for a few new associates for your firm, but you don’t trust Facebook to be your main avenue for finding quality candidates. Investing in a LinkedIn company profile is your best bet. You’re a click away from full resumes, contact information and references/recommendations of hundreds of local potential candidates. You can also connect with other businesses that are looking for partnerships.

If you need proof of just how powerful of a tool LinkedIn can be for a traditionally non-social business, check out Dell’s company profile. It proves that you can be involved in social media without turning your back on who you are. So get social; you never know what avenues are available until you put your company out there.

Enter StumbleUpon: In our opinion, the most effective blog marketing tool to date.

What’s a “stumble”?

The great thing about the internet is that it’s full of resources…lots and lots of resources. The bad thing? You have to deal with a lot of duds before finding gems. With one simple “stumble”, you can eliminate the long sift through bad content and go straight to the relevant and interesting.

StumbleUpon takes casual searching to a much more efficient level. If you have a new blog (or an old one in need of a traffic boost) use StumbleUpon to get people to discover it.  Every time a person hits “stumble” in their toolbar, their system searches for a new site based that individual’s chosen interests.

Paid discovery

StumbleUpon offers something different than search engine ads or Facebook PPC: paid discovery. The keyword here is “discovery.”  Their inexpensive, pay-per-stumble program allows a blog (or any other web content) to be efficiently discovered by specific targeted audiences.  Once a StumbleUpon user discovers new content they can give it a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” review.

Getting a thumbs up

If you can’t tell, we’re believers in what StumbleUpon offers. But with all of its perks and simplicity, there is a catch to StumbleUpon: you need good content.  It’s pretty easy to spot a poser on the web which is why you need quality content. StumbleUpon presents your blog exactly as it is, allowing it to either shine or fall flat.

To get a thumbs up from “stumblers”, you have to provide valuable content. The best way to do that is to deliver good information in your own voice. If the reader likes it, you’ll get rewarded; every time another person stumbles on your site, they’ll see that you got a thumbs up. Maybe even two or three. With fresh content and a passionate delivery, you can use StumbleUpon to drive visitors to your site with a simple click.

Keep it short

Think about what you do when you look at your cell phone. Are you leisurely, taking your time to read each word and go through every email? Or do you get the gist of what’s in front of you, respond quickly and move on to the next item? You work though things at a quick pace, only stopping to further investigate if it’s really important.

Grab their attention…

And you know why this is important: the scroll though. Touch-screen phones make it very easy to just glide past anything that we deem boring or unimportant. So when you’re doing Facebook updates or tweets, consider how it will appear on a smaller device.

Your 400-character explanation of the image you just posted may look short and sweet on your 17″ Probook, but on a Blackberry it’s a novel. Keep it brief but interesting; you want to get to the point without overdoing it. But you also don’t want to go at it half-heatedly. Remember, the goal in social media is two-pronged: grab their attention and hold it. And that’s where authenticity comes in.

Be honest

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to be authentic. No other business out there is like yours. So show your personality, especially when putting together mobile marketing campaigns. The most important thing to walk away with here is to be yourself.

Make it your own

This all sounds good, but how can this really help your business? The answer is to make it your own. Maybe Facebook is your main channel (your 80%), but you still love to use Twitter to connect with new consumers.  Once a month, make a campaign that is specifically designed for Twitter users on their cell phones.

Say you’re a bar looking to get more people in the door for your weekly beer tasting. Try a Twitter scavenger hunt; send out a series of charging people to find and Twitpic certain items with your bar’s name as the hashtag. Whoever finds the most items gets free admission for two to the tasting.

Whatever your desired platform, there are ways to make it more mobile-friendly for your targeted audience. Facebook, Twitter and other social sites aren’t just for laptops anymore; tablets, netbooks and the ever-evolving smart phones need to get an equal amount of love – if not more – in your marketing plans. So be sure to create campaigns that can easily translate to both stationary devices as well as hand-held ones.

Use the 80/20 principle

Now that you know your way around the social web world, we want you to divide your focus unevenly. You read that right; we want you to invest the majority of your time on the one site that really works for you – so, 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent should be devoted to some interaction on the other sites, but the main purpose is to funnel them to your main social channel and/or website. So, 80 percent of your time goes to 20 percent of your channels and 20 percent of your time goes to the other 80 percent of your sites.

If you’re not convinced this will be successful for your business, keep reading to hear us out on why the 80/20 rule is the way to go.

Time

Business can be tricky roller coaster; deadlines get lost, conference calls run long and emergencies happen. It doesn’t take anyone long to learn that the most pressing things need to get done first, and every free moment needs to be devoted to a valuable – yet lesser important – task. Why not take that same attitude towards social media?

Instead of spending time on the sites that aren’t really working for you, focus the majority of your efforts on the one site that brings in the most scalable value. Let’s say you have two hours off-and-on throughout your day for social media, and Facebook is your most valuable site. If you’re working in 30 minute chunks, spend 20-25 on Facebook and the remaining time checking your other sites.

Improved engagement and conversation

When we’re talking social media and business, the emphasis should be “social” before “media.” And to be truly social, you need to be an active participant in the conversation. How social can you be if you’ve spread your targeted audience out equally across multiple mediums?

In terms of conversation, the best way to interact with your customer is by knowing exactly where they are. And using your sub-channels to funnel your consumers to the main channel is the only way to know exactly where they’re at.

Authenticity

This one is a biggie. We want you to spend time on the social channels that will help you achieve your goals; we’re not interested in building your platform on a site just because it’s “in” right now.

How many restaurants looking to promote weekly specials and big events are going to really succeed on LinkedIn? Not many. They should focus the majority of their efforts on Facebook while using Twitter and Foursquare to enhance their Facebook platform.

But an engineering firm focused on recruiting fresh talent and connecting with clients isn’t going to take that same approach with their social media. LinkedIn is a better fit for them, while they can still use Facebook and Twitter as added ways to share their blog posts or general information.

Including yours. Here’s why you want to position your business as a thought leader, making it one of the most respected in its segment with informative, sometimes opinionated, and always engaging content.

Good content sparks a conversation -

No longer just Facebook and Twitter, social media extends to everywhere on the web where people can engage with one another. And communicating with interesting and original content is really the only way to spark a conversation with your target audience.

How can you do this? Update your company’s blog once or twice a week with thoughtful content about what’s going on in your industry. Ask questions not only in your blog posts, but also on your Facebook page.  Distribute your posts and content through channels such as FOCUS and LinkedIn.  Basically encourage your readers to talk to you the best way they know how – through social media.

Good content garners respect -

There was a time when no one took blogs and sites like Facebook seriously. Now, every company that’s any company is logged on (hey, even MySpace is on Facebook).

What happened between now and then? Businesses realized that since people were spending time on blogs and social networking sites, they needed to be there as well to grab their target audiences’ attention. Once the businesses got involved, they saw first-hand how fickle the public can be. They knew they had to keep creating good content to keep their audience engaged.

Good content for your business helps establish your organization’s strengths and expertise.  It also helps position your product or service among competitors.  Does this happen overnight?  Sadly, no.  But with a regular production of quality content these qualities will all take shape for your organization.

Good content ranks higher in search engines -

That’s right; search engine optimization isn’t just loading your page with keyword phrases. The engines give greater relevancy to content that engages readers.  The more comments, links, and references there are to your content the greater the SEO result.  In addition, updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site.

You see it all the time: “Find us on Facebook!” or “Follow us on Twitter!” Social media is, in some circles, the preferred method of marketing and advertising.  But there is still so much value in using traditional media; after all, billboards are still abound and print publications haven’t died yet.

At Local Social Solutions we stress to our clients that social media is not a marketing silo, and the best social marketing efforts integrate with ALL marketing efforts regardless of the medium.  We know that this is best means to maximize both web and print’s overall performance.

So here are five ways you can integrate social media into traditional media.

Press releases -

Traditional media’s influence is waning, especially print and television news. So instead of investing the resources contacting newspapers and dealing with reporting staff, post your press release as a note on Facebook.  You can also pull quotes and important information from the press release and put them on Twitter with links to the full release on Facebook. This way, you can get the information out to your target audience and it will be in your voice.

Advertising -

Though the traditional advertising industry is going the way of traditional media, there are still ways to utilize social media in ads. And it’s a quite simple solution: the call to action. When you advertise in a radio spot or place an ad in a magazine, your call to action could be “Like us on Facebook” or “Be sure to retweet us on Twitter.” These simple phrases can go on anything: window clings, yellow pages, billboards, kiosks, brochures, fliers, etc.

Website -

Your website is where you tell potential consumers who you are and what you product or service you provide.  Using social media in conjunction with your website takes this information a step further by enticing them to learn more and take action.  A simple Facebook or Twitter link on your website can get potential customers to your social media channels to learn about promotions and how your current customers feel about your offering.

E-mail marketing -

You know how tricky email marketing is; composing it, sending it and hoping people open and read it is a bit of an art and a science.  So, when they do open your email and actually take in information, why not throw in a reference to your social media channels, and what the reader will gain by visiting.  In face, not directing them to Facebook or Twitter profile at this point is just a wasted opportunity. And think about it like this; if they’re reading your email, they’re already online.

QR Codes -

Quick Response (QR) Codes are wonderful information portals. With one simple click of the cell phone, you can share valuable information with your consumers. And QR codes can literally go anywhere: business cards, yellow pages, magazines, newspapers, postcards, brochures, etc. Using QR codes is an excellent – and not to mention free – way to connect with and offer-up more information for your targeted audience.

But what about your company on LinkedIn?

Of course it’s another channel to promote your company virtually. And it’s turned into a great way to recruit new employees and connect with other businesses. But there are a lot of other benefits – especially for smaller companies – that can help immensely in brand engagement and growth.

Telling your story -

For a business, it’s practically necessary to have a website these days. And if you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing out the best form of web engagement with your consumers. But LinkedIn provides something that the others platforms don’t; it allows you to tell your story on a scale that other platforms do not. You can upload product and service information in your exact words; and that information extends to logos and other images that will increase brand recognition.  Take a look at what Dell (products) and Deloitte (business services) doing and see how can apply to your business.

The biggest benefit of a LinkedIn may be help in expanding your brand, but the heart of that is putting names and faces to your employees. And for small businesses, your employees profile pages (which are attached to your company page) aide in telling your business’ story.

Company promotion and business development

When your team is attached to your story, as it is on LinkedIn, more doors open for company promotion and business development. Every Group any one of your team member’s joins is an opportunity for brand development and engagement. And anytime you work with another company and they recommend you, that is almost equivalent to a referral.

Another great component of the LinkedIn Company profile is your ability to create educational content. You want to put pertinent information about what you do on LinkedIn, but you can use it as a way to delve deeper into your ideas. This is where LinkedIn trumps Facebook. The ability to spotlight one product or service and discuss it from a business perspective exclusively works wonder for both promotion and development.

There are many advantages of setting up a LinkedIn company profile. It improves search engine optimization and it’s another portal for basic company information to be on the web. But it is an excellent tool for promotion and business development, as well as putting a face (literally!) to your company.  With a little bit of work and some upkeep, your LinkedIn company page can expand your brand recognition in ways that other sites just can’t touch.

And it’s more than just a new look; these enhancements give your business improved social marketing abilities, more networking opportunities, and easier usability for both users and page administrators.

Ability to share and filter more.

First off, businesses can now add more detail to their Facebook profiles. The new design provides multiple sections telling visitors and prospects more about what you do.  New sections include a company overview, mission, awards, and product detail. Not only can you share more information, but you can also filter out posts.  Page admins can select between an “Everyone” and a “page posts only” default link for the wall.  And the “Everyone” link automatically filters the comments to show the most relevant information instead of posting chronologically.  Posts by friends, local users, and ones that received a lot of “Likes” and comments will bubble to the top.

In addition, Facebook introduced profanity and moderation tools that will help page admins achieve better control of negative content.

Improved layout provides new opportunities to engage.

Page tabs have been replaced with a vertical panel of links on the left side, below the profile picture. This panel gives a little more space for longer, more descriptive titles than were available with the tabs.

The new layout also has an area that will show users which of their friends also “Like” your page as well as any mutual “Likes” they have with your business such as “Favorite Pages.”  This is your new strategic referral section.

Easier networking and leveraging strategic partnerships.

One of the coolest features is the new “Use Facebook as Page” option. This allows page admins to make comments on other pages as your business’ page (instead of from a personal profile). Let’s say your company really likes what Nike Women is doing with their “Make Yourself” campaign. This new feature gives your business the ability to let them know from your page.  So you’re not only talking directly to Nike Women from your business’ page, you’re also talking to everyone who looks at their page as well.  This opens the door for new business, and it’s a great tool to leverage strategic partnerships.

Some will refer to this new look as a redesign, but we prefer it to call it a smiles all-around upgrade.  Facebook has always been a great way to connect with consumers.  And with this new layout, it’s now easier to connect with other businesses as well.  If you’re still skeptical, head over to our page to see what it’s all about.  It may take some getting used to, but you’ll love the improvements.