Companies that were diligent with collecting emails in the early days now have thousands of emails to show for, which is important as it becomes increasingly more difficult for people to fork over their email address.

Those that offered text messaging, or SMS, a year or two ago now have more luxuries because they can more easily reach peoples’ mobile phones and devices and produce higher response rates.

Likewise, those who dove in to blogging and social media a few years ago and kept with it, now have tons of content online and a more established presence, giving them more flexibility and maneuverability than those new to the space. In fact, for those new to any or all of these mediums, building your distribution lists is going to become increasingly more difficult, timely, and expensive.

Chicken and Egg

For celebrities and big name brands with lots of clout, resources and capital this is not an issue, but for everyone else it is potentially one of the biggest stumbling blocks getting in the way of your online success.

Like all new marketing and advertising mediums, there is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, and social media is no different. It’s not worth doing if not enough people are going to see you, but no one can possibly see you if you aren’t doing it. Therefore you have to somehow create the chicken to lay the egg.

Social media has evolved to the point where it has become almost essential to your overall marketing strategy, so how do you as a small business owner already strapped for time and capital, leverage this potentially powerful and hyped up medium?

While there are proven methods and tactics that are known to work, there is no “one way” to do things in social media, let alone any silver bullets. If you study online marketing trends, you are probably inundated with ideas, statistics, do’s, don’ts, and how-to’s.

Unfortunately, most marketers and small business owners have little visibility into their advertising results and are “blindly investing in strategies, unsure of the outcome.” This is what is called “advertising in silos” and Adobe recently published a white paper about the subject. But that information like this is not useful to you if you do not have large enough numbers to work with.

If you have 200 or 300 people on your Facebook page and you run a message on it or a campaign, you would be lucky to get 5 or 8 people interested, which is 2.5% of 200 and 300 respectively. This type of response rate for direct mail would be awesome, but are the expectations of social media any different?

The only way to increase this number (as opposed to the percentage) is to increase the number of people that can see your ad. This might be easier than increasing the percentage.

So what are some ways we can do this? Here are TWO:

Ask People to Connect…BORING

One way is to reach out to your customers and ask them to connect with you. This is always a good first step but you can’t do it very often. Your customers want and need information they can use, not chores to help you out. Therefore, it might be good to find alternative sources, or what I like to call Channel Partners.

Channel Partners

Channel partners are people and businesses with audiences that might like your product or service and who have agreed to work in conjunction with you to exchange audience members. This is a great way to attract more interest in your brand from people not already familiar with you. How you work with these channels is up to you. Here are a few methods you could try:

- Sharing blog posts and information in social media
- Commenting on one another’s material, or
- Doing joint campaigns that are mutually beneficial

These are only a few examples, I would be curious to see what other ideas people have for increasing their distribution so if you have suggestions please share.

Establishing channel partners can take time, and they don’t always work out as expected. What you expect from social media is up to you. But what you get from it is simple math. Get your message in front of more people, get more response. It’s easier said than done, but that shouldn’t keep you from doing it.

Some people struggle with the idea of a single system being utilized for both personal and professional use. Many people do not understand the intricate sharing capabilities of your information on Facebook, that you can post information to be shared with only the people you choose.

For instance, you may want to post commentary on an article that only your Real Estate buddies might enjoy, but your family or bowling league friends might not need to see that. Maybe you want to post pictures of your kid’s birthday party but you don’t want ALL of your Facebook friends seeing it. Only family members and people that were there.

These are common situations we all have and fortunately Facebook is designed for you to share only what you want and with whom.

One way to achieve this is by using the Lists feature in the Friends section. The List feature enables you to create a variety of lists for various purposes. For instance, you could create lists for people you went to school with, people you work with, people you don’t know well, whatever you feel the need for you can create a list for that. You can associate the same person to more than one list and you can create as many layers and combinations you like.

For instance, I have a list called “Pic Friends” which I add friends to when I am comfortable that they would see photos I post, like of my kids especially. I also have a list called “Virtual Buddies” which are people I have never met and do not know much about, but somehow became connected. I don’t need pics of my kids in the browsers of people I do not know well, but I may still want to share harmless fun with them. Lists are perfect for this.

Later this week in our AC List Builder Webinar series we will be exploring the basic use of Lists in Facebook. In this free webinar we will cover…

• How to create a list
• How to add Friends to lists
• How to share Wall Posts with lists
• How to share Photos with lists
• How to send Messages to lists

These core functions in Facebook are highly useful and with a little bit of effort can prove extremely useful, especially when you want to send a message out to more than 20 Friends. By keeping your lists limited to 20 people you can more easily send messages to large groups of the right people.

Join us LIVE this Thursday April 15 at 11:30 am EST by registering for the AC List Builder Series. If you are already registered then you will receive an email reminder from GoToWebinar with your access to the training session. If you are not registered then click here or the button below to receive your private link. By registering you will receive an email for each webinar within the AC List Builder Series which is about every 6 weeks. There is no obligation to attend this or any webinar within the series and you may remove yourself from the series email at any time.

Fortunately there are ways to make your Twitter efforts more efficient. One of these ways is with the use of TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is a browser for select social media networking sites allowing you to manage information on Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. In fact with TweetDeck you can even manage multiplate Twitter accounts, plus any facebook pages to which you are an admin can be managed from TweetDeck too.

For example, we recently launched a new Twitter account for AutoBurst and are using to TweetDeck to manage it along with other Twitter accounts we have in addition to customer Twitter accounts.

This week we are holding a webinar dedicated to the use of TweetDeck and Twitter as part of our AC Social Webinar Series. Our guest presenter will be Ryan Taft from Catalyst Marketers who assists us in managing information on Twitter and facebook for some of our customers. Taft posted to his blog recently offering some extended uses of Twitter and TweetDeck in the post No time for Twitter? Use TweetDeck to save time, but you can benefit from this information first hand by attending this week’s Webinar at 11:30 am EST on Thursday April 1.

In this webinar Taft will be exploring the following topics:

• Quick Twitter for Business Intro
• TweetDeck Overview
• Download for computer & mobile phone
• Add Twitter account
• Add Facebook account
• TweetDeck helps maximize your time on Twitter
• TweetDeck helps show activity at a glance
• TweetDeck recap & summary

As with all our webinars we aim to make them useful and applicable in the real world, this way you can walk away with new skills that can be applied to your endeavours on the web right away.

To attend this webinar you must be registered with the AC Social Webinar series which you can do by clicking here or the button below. By registering you will receive an email notification from GoToWebinar reminding you of each webinar within that series. If you are not able to or are not interested in attending a specific webinar witin that series then there is no obligation to attend. You can disregard the notification.

Likewise if you have an interest in attending webinars from another series we run then you can register with those from the AC Webinar Series page too. Additionally, by becoming a fan of our facebook page or by subscribing to our website then we can notify you of our upcoming events and webinars plus we can share information like this that you can utlize on your own time.

From this conventional marketing approach, the impact of such cross-promotion is recognized by the number of times one of your marketing pieces comes into your place of business as a result of being displayed in a nearby venue. If you are smart you marked or tailored each piece to be associated with each different venue so you can know right away from where it came. If you fail to do this then you may know that your cross-promotional efforts are having an effect, but from which sources and to what extent you may not know.

With the advent of Facebook, the idea of cross-promotion can (and in most cases probably should) be carried into this medium, but with added benefits. Considering the more intricate offerings of Internet technology, local businesses can not only expect to benefit from an increase in patrons coming into their place of business, but also from increased website traffic, more Facebook fans, and more email subscribers. Essentially, by using Facebook, you have more conversion goals and capabilities to consider in your cross-promotion efforts than just phone calls and walk-ins.

The one thing that comes to mind for me when helping local businesses to cross-promote with one another using a site like Facebook is “monetization”. Interestingly, this word does not appear in a dictionary, at least not at dictionary.com. It does however appear on wikipedia.com and is defined as, “the process of converting or establishing something into legal tender.” Monetizing is a common word in the blogosphere that typically equates to the practice of using your blog to generate revenue. I tend to use this term more loosely on the basis that there is a monetary value for every activity you perform and that in most cases you want to associate your efforts online to that monetary value.

For instance, a new email subscriber may be worth $25 to you and a new Facebook fan might be worth $1, so if you launch a marketing initiative that results in 25 new email subscribers and 10 new Facebook fans then you know that the monetary value of that initiative is equivalent to $635. If you spent less than that to launch the initiative then you essentially have made (or saved) money.

All this said, when doing cross-promotions, particularly online with a site like Facebook, the possibilities go farther than just leaving comments on the walls of a venue’s Facebook page. There truly is potential to connect with people one-on-one and in groups. Defining and massaging the monetary value of your activities is key to your success. You want to go beyond just publishing information and going through the motions. You want to make real connections and have real conversations. This is easier said than done, but the rewards are there for the taking.

The exercise for this webinar will be on how to create a custom page on your Facebook Fan Page using the Static FBML application. The Static FBML application enables you to add advanced functionality to your Fan Page using HTML or FBML, like we did this year for our special holiday offer to create our fans and customers a custom page for their Fan Page. The webinar should be short and sweet, probably around 20-30 minutes.

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language which is exactly what it says, a markup language specific to Facebook. We will not be getting into the use of this markup language, only showing how to add it to your Fan Page and then how to insert HTML into it to create your custom page.

To utilize this application, click on the Applications tab that appears at the bottom left corner of your browser when logged in to your Facebook account. You will most likely also have to select to “Browse more Applications”. From there, do a search for ‘fbml’ in the search box above the application category types. Now you should see the static FBML application. Click that and then from there look for a blue box labeled “Go to Application”. Once you click that then you will be propositioned to “allow” this application on your Fan Page. Once that is done then go to your Page admin and “edit” the application by inserting your code and you are done.

You can visit the Static FBML application page on Facebook for more information or to become a Fan. We will be recording this webinar so after it is complete and we polish up the recording we will then notify everyone who was registered when it is available on our Viddler group.

Earlier this week we posted a video about this to our blog which you may want to watch as well. It’s in the post labeled A Big Bang for SEO and Social Media.

For the webinar we will start by going through a slide show that was put together by Peter Caputa over at HubSpot. It’s a short slide show so we will also journey through his commentary of the subject on the HubSpot blog. All-in-all we expect our webinar to last about 20-30 minutes but we may open it up for discussion if there are not too many people attending.

To register for this webinar, click here (or the button below) for the AC List Builder series, fill in the required information and then expect to receive instructions for connecting to the webinar at 11:30 am EST on Thursday November 12. By registering you will automatically be included on all future AC List Builder/Social webinars (once a month) plus you will receive access to our webinars archive where you can watch and listen to past webinars at your leisure.