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YouTube might seem a purely personal social media format at first but it’s easy to see why it’s been adopted by many businesses – especially those that provide products or services to people rather than other businesses.

Believe it or not, approximately 20% of all web searches are now done on YouTube. OK, many of those will be for Gemma Arterton or Rhianna but a lot are for business products and services.

It’s possible to create a channel f0r your business and style it with your logo, colours etc. so that visitors recognise your branding. Adding videos is really easy and the YouTube player can be embedded into your web site to play them from inside the web page, not the YouTube web site.

With YouTube having been bought by Google, you can be sure that it’ll be made even easier for businesses to advertise and be found here.

http://www.youtube.com

Facebook is the last, and the least in my book from a business perpective, main social media platform.

As a business, if you sell products or services directly to real people then it’s probably worth your time and effort. If not, leave it for connecting with friends and family.

It’s possible to create a company page if you’re a business – but the whole ethos and aim of Facebook, to my mind, doesn’t fit with this unless you’re Business to Consumer.

For me, Facebook is a bit like LinkedIn for personal use. You can add all sorts of information on your background, what you’re doing currently, your photos and much more. It has a messaging system so it’s possible to communicate with contacts inside the Facebook environment. There’s a chat facility too for real-time communication.

Facebook can be branded and extended with add-in applications so it can be customised and enhanced to provide a powerful interactive social platform.

You can find more information here: http://www.facebook.com/help/

The newsletter has been lovingly crafted and sent to all the people who agreed to receive it (even if only by implication – see Newsletters – building the address list) so you could just sit by at your desk and wait for the congratulatory e-mails to flood in and the phone to ring with enquiries.

Preferable is to have some idea of how it has been received.

The bigger and better e-mailing companies provide tracking tools for e-mails. It’s usually possible to see how many newsletters were delivered and how many were rejected (undeliverable, invalid address, suspected spam etc). This tells you who COULD read the newsletter and who would never see it. It allows you to correct any address mistakes, remove out of date addresses and to contact people for whom it was classed as spam. They can usually configure their PC to allow mail from specific addresses (i.e. yours) to be delivered.

You will usually be able to see who has opened a newsletter and who has deleted it without reading it.

More importantly, it’s usually possible to see what people found interesting in it – but only if it was set up correctly. Links in an e-mail newsletter can usually be tagged. When a reader clicks on one of these links it gets registered. If your newsletter has been constructed correctly you’ll be able to see what people have clicked on and therefore what interested them. For example, this Blog article was linked from one of our newsletters. Anyone clicking on the link in the newsletter and reading it (perhaps you?) will have registered with our e-mailing system.

The aim of tracking is to see what’s of interest to readers and what works when included. It can be taken further. Suppose you put an article or advert for a particular service or product in your newsletter with a link to the relevant page on your web site. When someone has clicked on it and visited the web site you could e-mail them or, better still, extract their phone number from your database (assuming you had it of course) and call them to see if they need any further information.

Of course you can make the newsletter more interactive for your readers by including papers and articles they can download or polls they can take part in. You could have sign-up facilities for other newsletters you issue or mailing lists for people who want to be kept informed of special offers and so on.

If you’ve read through the series of articles here on newsletters and would like to know more, please call us on 01579-342360 or e-mail us via enquiry@clarihon.co.uk

So, your lovely shiny new newsletter is ready to go. Who are you going to send it to?

1) An e-mail address list that you’ve purchased?

2) A list you’ve built from visiting websites of people you want to target?

3) The list of people from the local Chamber of Commerce that someone quietly slipped you?

4) The list you’ve built up from business cards you’ve collected at meetings and seminars etc

5) The people you’ve called/written or e-mailed asking if they’d like to be added to your mailing list?

6) The names and e-mail addresses you’ve captured via the sign-up form on your web site?

It might surprise you to learn that only options 5 and 6 are totally kosher. Option 4 is considered acceptable by implication – after all, if people have willingly given you their contact details, shouldn’t you be able to contact them at least once?

The guideline is that you should only send a mass e-mail (and that’s what an electronic newsletter is) to people who have signed up to receive it or given you permission to send such communications to them. You can also send it to people in category 4 – but in ALL cases you must always give people an easy and obvious way of removing themselves from your mailing list. You are then not allowed to e-mail them again (with mass e-mails) unless they restore that permission or sign up again.

When you have that valid list of people who have agreed to receive your newsletter (even if only by implication) you need to load it into the e-mailing system. Most will allow you to import from a text list or an Excel spreadsheet. Some can import directly from an Outlook address book. If none of these work for you then you might need to type each one in individually. Most of the big e-mail system companies provide code for you to post into your web site. This allows people to sign up directly into your newsletter mailing list.

When you’re ready to go the e-mailing system will take the template and add the details of the first person in your mailing list. It then e-mails it to that person’s e-mail address. If you’ve set it up correctly it’ll start ‘Dear Brian/Davina/Moshe’ or whatever their first name is. This happens individually for each member of your mailing list.

All of the reputable (and certainly bigger) e-mailing companies have strict policies against spamming. You’ll need to have agreed to terms and conditions when you created your account (or had your Web guy set it up for you). If you breach this, and there are more than a tiny number of complaints, your e-mailing facilities will be removed or shut down.

Now the fun starts. Who opened the e-mails and what did they do then? Answers in the next article….

So, you’ve decided to create and send out an electronic newsletter. Where do you start?

The first place to start is with someone who can send out multiple newsletters for you – not by using Outlook, Gmail or any other PC or web-based e-mail client. If you’re sending to more than about 10-15 people in one go there’s a good chance that one of the major e-mail account suppliers (like Google, Microsoft, AOL and so on) will think you’re a spammer. In addition, what about the ‘Dear Nigel’ bit at the top of the newsletter that personalises it a bit. Are you going to send all 150 e-mails out individually?

No, you’re not – and that’s why you need a professional e-mail distributer.

If you don’t want to take care of the design & creation of the newsletter ‘template’ and the creation of the account and other facilities you’ll need yourself, your Web Designer/Internet Marketing company may be able to help (we can!). If you are happy to take care of all the setup, organisation and management aspects yourself, there are plenty of reputable e-mailing companies around. Drop us a note if you’d like some pointers.

Once the facilities are in place you’ll need a newsletter ‘template’. This is the skeleton of the newsletters you’ll be sending out with your branding and layout framework. The best newsletters are striking, well laid out and reflect the branding of the company sending them out. They’re almost certainly designed by a professional Graphic Designer. This needn’t be expensive and will greatly increase your chances of you making a favourable impression. If you can’t afford a custom design then you can always tweak the many templates usually provided by the e-mail companies themselves.

All you then have to do is add articles and images. With most of the facilities provided this is quite easy and you’ll soon find that you can knock up a newsletter in no time. When I say ‘all you have to do is add articles and images’, I’m being overly simple here. This is in fact the most crucial part of the activity.

Selecting what to communicate to your audience and the style will determine largely how it is received. If it is useful, informative or amusing (and appropriate!) then it will probably get a good reception. If not, and you fill it with selling messages, it’ll go straight in the bin and you’ll quickly get requests to be taken off your mailing list. That doesn’t mean you can’t promote yourself in it though. Far from it, it’s a great chance to remind people what you do and why you’re better then your competitors. You just need to be subtle and provide useful content too.

When the content is there and you’ve tested the newsletter to see how it looks and reads – from a human perspective and in the wide range of e-mail clients available – you’re ready to send. More of that in the next article.