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The best story of social marketing delivering revenue to a business is the story of a cupcake business in Washington DC. Two former executives who escaped the pressures of corporate life run this cupcake company. They transformed their love of cupcakes into a thriving business that pays them both in excess of $100,000 a year. This success would not be possible without the use of social media.

One of the most important developments with social media is the advent of location check ins. This lets friends and family know that a person is visiting a certain shop or vendor and that the shop or vendor can be trusted. In the cupcake makers' situation, this helped to get them a following of cupcake lovers. People would check into the business using their favorite social platforms and their friends and followers would see the check in. This social proof helped the business grow quickly and proved that they were a high quality vendor.

Another important factor has been the addition of GPS into some of the social networks. This has allowed service businesses that travel around and deliver products or services to be relevant on the internet. These services can be such things such as locksmiths, food carts, and painters. Usually, these services are highly mobile and do not have an address associated with them. This means that they cannot readily use the local maps for business advertising. These businesses need something else and that's location based check ins based on GPS locations. In fact, before the advent of this technology businesses that traveled have been known to share their location via the social networks. In this case, that is exactly what the cupcake cake van did. They shared their location with their audience and the people would coordinate their breaks so that they could go get the cupcakes. This practice leads to a greater amount of sales. They also generated buzz because many departments would be emptied due to their arrival on a certain street corner or block.

Social media can be highly effective for businesses without locations as evidenced with the above paragraphs. In certain situations, social media may be the best type of advertising that any business can generate as long as the hype is not mechanically generated. Such is the case of the cupcake makers, their ability to make delicious cupcakes, in addition to the lack of supply (since they are a mobile business) lended to their business success.

What success on social media networks takes is the willingness to put a company on the networks and find out what markets exist for their content. A business can also manage their fans through the social media networks and allow them to be where ever they are by telling the audience how and when to meet them. Social media is also effective for contests where the business can leverage the lists of their "friends" or "followers." If a business can do that, then they may experience the level of success that this little cupcake van in Washington D.C. has experienced.

Scott Buendia consults for Bizbuilt.com. All the views and tactics in this article are tactics and ideas of the author; they do not necessarily represent the ideals, beliefs, or trademarks of Bizbuilt.com. Visit his card on Bizbuilt here, https://www.bizbuilt.com/socialmediaprivacy.

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Small business-to-business (B2B) businesses that focus on LinkedIn as one of their main social media channels have been and are continuing to be successful at getting more leads that eventually lead to increased business. It is a worthwhile tool.

Many business people seem to be having a difficult time using social media channels for business. If you are one of those people who is not so well acquainted with LinkedIn, the following information should help you to understand why it is so important for your business. Leveraging LinkedIn will help you to achieve positive results for your business and before long, you will not understand how you managed to leave it out of your online marketing strategy.

Generating leads for your business

Undeniably, LinkedIn is widely used among professionals. The reason that it is so popular is that it is an extremely effective social media channel that is easy to use and extremely user-friendly. When it comes to lead generation, you need to identify what works for you and your business and what doesn't work. If you find that something is working for you, use it as much as you can. Of course, if you have tried something that doesn't seem to be working, don't waste your time and effort on that because your time will be much better spent on things that cause positive results. In order to successfully generate business leads, the first thing that you must do is to complete your LinkedIn profile. Completing your profile doesn't mean simply putting your name and a few details about who you are and what you represent professionally. You need to fill in as many details as you can so that you allow other people the opportunity to get to know you. After all, you need to build relationships with people so that they will eventually buy whatever you are selling. Building a relationship means that you are going to build trust and credibility as well as your positioning yourself as a subject matter expert. Your goal in that regard is for the other person to think of you first when they have needs that you can fulfill.

Realizing the fullest potential from you social network

LinkedIn is a much more powerful tool than a great deal of people realize and it can help you to achieve your business goals in an extremely effective manner. It won't cost you much money, if any. the only things that you will have to invest are time and effort. Those are investments that you would make for your business no matter what tools you used to achieve success.

Handling customer service properly

It is very important for you to examine precisely how your business is handling customer service and how it is tending to the needs of your clients. You can tie in LinkedIn with this as well. The discussions through LinkedIn are critical to your success and all sorts of interesting and stimulating pieces of information can be discovered through that particular form of communication. If you want to achieve greater success with your business, you need to pay a great deal of attention to the timing. You must always respond in a very timely manner and your clients must always feel that they are your first priority.

Engage with people on a very regular basis

You should regard LinkedIn just as you would any other social media channel except for the fact that it is one of the top social media channels for business and should be respected for that. Engaging frequently can take on many different forms. You should synchronize your blog posts to LinkedIn as well as other social media channels with which you engage so that you increase your reputation and exposure.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is an amazing social media channel that will enable you to engage at the next level with your valuable professional online connections. More and more people are starting to understand what an important social media tool LinkedIn is and they are learning how to use it to its fullest potential so that they can achieve greater and greater business success.

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Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company's Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.

His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.

Mr. Cohn earned a Master's degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master's degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

Mr. Cohn is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

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