Merchants, Customers have Difference of Opinion on Social Media Use

Small business owners are always quick to see an opportunity. So the fact that millions of potential customers are using social media has not gone unnoticed by them. According to a Zoomerang survey of 1000 small business owners, the number one reason they have established a social media presence is to connect with customers.

However, the survey also presents some pretty interesting numbers when it comes to gauging how small businesses are using social media to attract customers, as opposed to what is actually effective. One thing that really jumped out to mobile wallet experts at MobiSquad was the difference in opinion between small business owners and customers on the most effective way to reach customers on social media powerhouse Facebook.

What’s the Most Effective Facebook Tactic to Reach Customers?

According to Small Business Owners

Wall Posts               ———————————————————–51%
Direct                           —————————–20%
Special Offers and Discounts ————–10%
Testimonials                                        ———7%
Likes                                                    ——-6%
Surveys or Polls                                  —2%
Advertisements                                   —2%
Other                                                   —2%

According to Customers

Special Offers and Discounts ———————————————37%
Direct Messages                                 ———————–18%
Wall Posts                                           ———————–18%
Likes                                                    ———–9%
Advertisements                                   ——-6%
Testimonials                                        ——5%
Surveys or Polls                                  —–4%
Other                                                   —-3%
None                                                   —-3%

MobiSquad believes these results reinforce the importance of the mobile wallet as a tool for distributing special offers and discounts to customers. It creates an immediate conduit to get them in the door. Bringing awareness of mobile’s potential to local merchants is why MobiSquad launched its “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd.

If you would like to see Intuit’s full info graphic and more interesting numbers, click here.

http://www.intuit.com/websites/small-business-social-media-infographic/

The 15 Twitter Marketing Tips MobiSquad Gives Its Clients

There’s no arguing Twitter is one of the most ubiquitous forms of social media. Lots of people use it. But even more people, especially those running businesses, have a real problem using it effectively.

MobiSquad’s “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd, is designed to bring awareness of mobile technology to local merchants. As part of this campaign, here’s a list of hot tips gleaned from the Social Media Examiner to help improve your Twitter marketing.

Make Your Tweets Better.

1. Share valuable content in your own voice. It’s the best way to match your personality or brand

2. Use keywords in your tweets. Industry buzz words work best.
 

3. Share links to useful content. Don’t send jokes or defamatory material. Share things people can use.
 

4. Use search features such as HootSuite to discover what your clients want.  
Improve How You Network.

5. Connect with the right people. Tweet with them. Try to collect followers who want to know what you have to say.

6.”Break the ice” by retweeting other people’s relevant tweets.

7. Cultivate relationships with people in the industry on Twitter.

8. Engage your audience. Share articles. Lead discussions. Don’t sell.

9. Be helpful by providing helpful info.

10. Be transparent. Add to your credibility by owning up to mistakes you say or write.

Bring Twitter Followers Back to Your Website

11. Use hash tags to create conversations around your brand.

12. Share links back to your website for list-building. Offer something of value in exchange for email addresses form your followers.

13. Tweet more links to your blog more often. Don’t spam, but let people know more than once about your post.

Make Twitter a Regular Part of Your Social Media Marketing

14. Connect your LinkedIn account with your Twitter account. Let your customers know you tweet and connect on different sites.

Make Twitter Tools Work for You

15. Take advantage of tools that help you to share relevant content. They can greatly improve the effectiveness of your social marketing by filtering out the noise.

Use Social Media to Attract More Business | MobiSquad

How to Generate More Local Business through Social Media

Do you own a local business that’s requires local customers to succeed? Most do. And if you’re such a business owner, it is hoped that you are already using social media tools to your advantage

This is pretty much a no-brainer, Think about it. Your customers are all pretty much connected to the internet in every way you can imagine. The more your name and brand appear online, the better chance you have of finding your customers online. That means repeat business in a big-time way.

However, there are plenty of free ways to increase your social presence even more without spending a dime. MobiSquad offers the following tips to generate local business through social media.

Create a Group
Mutual interest groups are still quite popular on the internet. They just have a new skin than they did just a few years ago when they were called “newsgroups” and were all print. Create a local group on a social network like Facebook or Pinterest around a topic related to your business. For example, let’s say you own a bookstore. These days you need all the exposure you can get. So create a local book discussion hobby group. You will attract people with a common interest that provides a public service without blatantly trying to sell something. (Which is not to say your business doesn’t need its own Facebook page? Read on.)

Community Blog
Start a blog and invite local businesses to contribute useful content around a broad topic. Let’s say you’re in, such as home maintenance. Invite various suppliers to provide informative articles on the site. Save on particular specialty for yourself, such as plumbing. Make sure all participating businesses also link to the blog by providing links in their marketing and social media efforts. Just like that, you have a local search engine magnet for all of the participants.

Location-based services
People love location-based services such as Foursquare and Yelp. These sites have created a check-in behavior among mobile consumers, as if anybody cares where you’re eating lunch. Nevertheless, people do it, so take advantage of this social behavior by putting your business location on this service. You don’t even have to be a restaurant. Lots of people think they have to tell everybody where they are all the time. Once you’re signed up, take advantage of ways to make offers through various built-in features.

Social Landing
Create landing pages specific to a social media network. In other words, create a Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Google+ page and Twitter page   and link to your primary website from your profile on the respective network.

This is a basic Search Engine Optimization trick to get you more visitors and hopefully more customers (not to mention a higher search ranking). Here’s how it works: someone visits your Facebook page, and then clicks on your website link. They are first taken to your Facebook landing page, where you might have a teaser offer or special news. From there, they can click into your website.   This does several things. First, it helps personalize your site. It also creates an engagement opportunity. You can create content on your website that’s both local and social. This gives you a better chance of getting picked up in search engines. That in turn helps you build a stronger presence in all of your social networks.

Social Media — Marketing Your Business Effectively | MobiSquad

The social media and mobile marketing experts at MobiSquad are frequently asked to define the usefulness of these two factors. This is the primary reason for the recent launch of its new “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd.

So what is social media and mobile marketing and why are they important to local business?

Social media is a way to build your brand without having to tell consumers what your product or service is all about. Instead, you rely on customers telling each other about your product or service through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp! among others. Word of mouth is also extremely important.

Social media marketing promotes your business and establishes your online identity. It is a powerful tool that lets you engage with your targeted audience to drive traffic to your webpage and ultimately through your front door. Moreover, in comparison with online advertising through a service such as Google, social marketing is much more cost-effective.

Mobile marketing goes a step further by bringing social media marketing to mobile devices. It provides your customers with time and location-sensitive, personalized information that promotes your goods, services and ideas. It helps your business increase its presence in the local community and allows you to stay connected constantly to your customers. This helps to establish your brand.

Here are some recent social media marketing statistics:

• 53% of Twitter users recommend companies and products in their tweets
• 74% of B2B companies aggressively using Facebook in social media marketing
• 57% of companies have acquired customers through LinkedIn

 

• 75% of small businesses in the U.S. engage in social media marketing
• $3.1 billion will be spent on social media marketing in 2014
• B2B spending on social media marketing will rise 67% over the next 3 years

 

• 20% of all website visitors to company sites come from social media
• 2 out 3 people that follow a brand on Twitter will purchase from that brand
• 66% of marketers saw a rise in search engine rankings due to social media marketing

 

• 91% of experienced social marketers see improved website traffic due to social media
• Social media commerce sales are expected to climb to $30 billion in 2015

So if you have been putting off using social media marketing up to this point, the time is now to start using it to your advantage.

Leave the Social Media for Your Business to Experts at MobiSquad

As far as local businesses go, social media used to be an option. Many businesses got along fine without it. However, this is no longer the case. There’s an unwritten rule in small business: if you’re not connecting with your customers online, you’re doomed.  So what happens? Merchants rush out to set up a Facebook page and think that’s all they have to do. Or they might open a Twitter account then sit back and wait for customers to clog their entry way.

Of course, you know that’s not how it works. It takes a lot of effort to connect with your customers. A web page alone is not enough. How are you sending people to your site? It doesn’t do you any good to have a page that no one ever visits except for your immediate family members. In order to grow your business successfully with social media, you have to integrate your efforts. You must actively manage your page or accounts. You must consistently drive new traffic to it and diligently interact with your social connections. It’s also important to respond to customer comments. Complaints and poor reviews must be promptly addressed.

According to research by UM Wave 6, merchants are notorious for forgetting that they still need to interact with customers.

So how does a local merchant harness all the social media platforms and make them work to their advantage? That’s where MobiSquad comes in. As the premier advocate for small businesses we realize that local merchants simply don’t have the time and expertise to fully exploit mobile marketing. That’s our job anyway. And since everyone should do the job they can do better than anybody else, we provide a dedicated workforce skilled in helping you turn your social media into an effective marketing tool.

How dedicated is MobiSquad to making social marketing a must in every local business? Check out their new “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd. For more information on mobile technology and effectively managing your social media, look to the e-wallet experts at MobiSquad.

http://www.mobisquad.com/brandonlloyd

Loyalty Cards Making Way for Mobile Swiping, MobiSquad says

For many years the loyalty card has been a major customer-getter for all kinds of local merchants. From frozen yogurt to fashion stores, businesses have passed out literally billions of the plastic and cardboard cards, hoping to entice customers who frequent their establishments. Whenever a customer spends money at the business they are rewarded with a stamp or digital scan of a bar code on the card. Collect enough stamps or swipes and get a nice discount or something free.
Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Many businesses complain that not enough people use loyalty cards because they forget them at home, accidentally throw them away or don’t think they’re worth anything.

Fortunately, there is a better way. As usual, modern technology is behind it. Research shows that customers are more likely to use a product if it’s easy to use and has a visible, tangible benefit. This can be a hit or miss proposition when it comes to loyalty cards. What the public needs to make loyalty really work is an electronic loyalty program.

That’s where e-wallet expert MobiSquad comes in. They offer all the tools and expertise needed to help local merchants run a loyalty campaign using mobile technology. With a Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled terminal serviced by MobiSquad, local merchants can now accept mobile tap-and-go payments from customer smart phones. They can also manage an integrated loyalty program at the same time.

Just think — no more stamping cards! The customer’s Smartphone becomes both a method for payment and a virtual loyalty card! Everything a customer does with you is automatically tracked. Rewards are more easily tabulated and sent out. You can even keep track of who is redeeming their awards much easier.
This innovation is just one of the things that MobiSquad’s new “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign is designed to cover.  Featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd, the campaign is designed to encourage smaller local merchants to get into the mobile payment game now, before larger companies do it.  For more information on mobile technology and customer loyalty programs, check out MobiSquad.com.

http://www.mobisquad.com/brandonlloyd

Local Merchants Need MobiSquad Now

If you’re a smaller merchant and you aren’t accepting mobile payments yet, what’s keeping you?

Don’t wait for big companies to come asking you to sign up. They’re still fighting with each other over who’s going to be the big dog when merchants show up en masse.

The trick is to strike now. Studies show that by 2017, at least $1 trillion will change hands worldwide using mobile, or “tap-and-go,” payments.

Fortunately, you can get in on the trend now. MobiSquad is hitting the streets with its “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign featuring NFL star Brandon Lloyd. The campaign is designed to bring awareness to local merchants on how they can capitalize on the mobile payments to increase their sales now.

Watch Brandon Lloyd’s MobiSquad videos:

http://www.mobisquad.com/brandonlloyd

True, mobile payment is still in its early stages. But merchants are slowly catching on to the idea. Every day a merchant doesn’t offer the service, chances are they’re missing out on sales because their competitors do offer the service.  Taking a wait-and-see approach, could be a very costly mistake.

Mobile payments, or m-payments as they’re sometimes called, have been growing exponentially each year. Studies show that in 2012, worldwide mobile payment transaction values were more than $171.5 billion. That’s a 61.9 percent increase from $105.9 billion in 2011. The total number of mobile payment users hit 212.2 million in 2012, up from 160.5 million in 2011.

www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2028315

So it’s no surprise that more than a trillion dollars will be spent worldwide using mobile devices by 2017. That estimate could be very low. As “tap-and-go” payments catch on, more people will want smart phones. So the potential is astronomical. Some experts say a trillion bucks could be a mere 2.5% of the estimated worldwide commerce that mobile payments could, in theory, tap into in 2017.

Currently, e-commerce is the primary way people spend money on mobile phones, but swipe payments are slated will gain steady ground quickly.

If you’re a local merchant, don’t wait for large companies to position themselves to be players in the mobile payments market. You can get started now by talking to a MobiSquad rep. There are more than a trillion reasons to do so.

Source

http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats

MobiSquad Ready To Safely Lead Merchants into Mobile Payments

A recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve revealed the number one reason respondents are not using mobile payments to make purchases is  the fear that it is not a secure way to pay. People worry that their credit card numbers and other sensitive information will be plucked out of the air by internet thieves.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/mobile-device-report-201203.pdf

MobiSquad, the e-wallet expert, would like to spread the word to everyone that this belief is nothing even close to being true. Mobile payments are in fact, extremely safe. That’s the message behind the company’s recently-launched “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” campaign.  It features NFL star Brandon Lloyd performing an amazing feat of incredible trust: Jumping over a moving car, driven by MobiSquad president Nathan Reis.

The object of the campaign is to bring awareness of mobile payment safety to local merchants and consumers.

“Naturally, people have questions about the security of mobile technology,” Reis says. “When it comes to using a “mobile wallet,” the public wants to know: How safe is it from would-be data thieves? It’s very safe. We wouldn’t be offering mobile payment technology to merchants if it wasn’t.”
http://www.mobisquad.com/brandonlloyd

So what’s the key to keeping things safe? MobiSquad safeguards your credit and debit information from potential data poachers by installing a state-of-the-art system employing Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. NFC keeps virtual pickpockets frustrated by transmitting data via short range radio waves at distances of 4 cm (1.6 inches) or less.  NFC-ready phones protect your credit card information by using a special chip known as the secure element. It encrypts the card information until it arrives safely at an NFC-enabled terminal on the merchant’s end. Even if a hacker were able to get close enough to intercept the information, it wouldn’t be readable. The secure element also isolates your credit and debit card information and stores it so that only the mobile wallet can access it.

So if you have been putting off adopting mobile payment technology until “everybody else” tries it, MobiSquad would like to have a talk with you.

The Secret to Keeping Customers is Offered By MobiSquad

At MobiSquad and elsewhere, much talk has arisen to the creation of the eWallet. Also called the mobile wallet, it is the ability for today’s smart phones to hold and protect all of the financial information a person needs to make purchases at local and national businesses.

Like any new technology, people are excited about tap-and-go marketing. As businesses, they are afraid of it. Right now, larger chains won’t touch it until they see if it works. Which means it’s up to the small and local businesses in your town to grasp this technology and get the leading edge.

If you own a small business, you should be chomping at the bit to take mobile payments. Not only is the technology proven and safe, it also provides you with other amazing benefits. The true power of the mobile wallet for local merchants is that it isa conduit to the mobile customer. Brands can be built by marketing directly to the customer base through special sales and offers. This in turn enhances the overall shopping experience.

Making shopping personal is an edge that a local business will always have to set it apart from the competition. But you need more than that. The experience has to extend past the friendly face at the door and the helpful advice you give and the quality products you offer. Even the checkout experience must be advantageous. This brings us back to the mobile payment offerings available through MobiSquad.

Those commercials you see with companies offering tap-and-go payments aren’t science fiction. That technology is here now. It’s marketed to small business retailers because large companies never want to change anything. They’re the last to come around, Which offers a great advantage to small business owners who adopt swipe payments now.

Bringing awareness of mobile’s potential to local merchants is MobiSquad’s bread and butter. The company recently launched its “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” Campaign. It features NFL star and emerging rapper Brandon Lloyd, jumping over a car to symbolize how MobiSquad helps companies jump all the hurdles of offering mobile payments.

When a local merchant is able to combine a unique experience with the power of mobile marketing to make target special offers, that’s where the true power of the mobile wallet truly becomes unlocked. They can then fully cultivate brand awareness and turn random customers into repeat business. MobiSquad is ready to help.

What’s in Your Wallet Could Be in Your Cell Phone Soon

What’s your wallet made from? It’s a valid question, because tap-and-go mobile payments will most likely be the popular payment method of the future. Right, now the phenomenon is still in the novelty phase. That’s why MobiSquad, with the help of New England Patriots star Brandon Lloyd, released its “Buy Local. Pay Mobile.” Campaign. It’s a major push to bring mobile technology to the forefront of mainstream consciousness. At MobiSquad, we believe doing that starts at the grassroots level with local merchants.

Mobile technology is turning smartphones into digital wallets. So is it time for consumers to start thinking of their leather wallet as a relic of the 20th century?

Not completely, but we’re getting there.

You may be asking: why replace your cash or plastic with a phone? Is it any more convenient to pay with a phone than by pulling out a credit card? Actually there are loads of reasons to do so. In addition to convenient payments, the digital wallet adds other benefits for both the consumer and the merchant. A mobile payment system with an integrated loyalty programallows local merchants to track purchases and fine tune special offers. These benefits are then sent directly to the customer’s phone. When a customer makes a purchase with their mobile wallet, any special offers are automatically accounted for at the register when they tap-and-go. Receipts are sent by email.

Digital wallets are also safer. Lose your leather wallet and you can lose a lot of time reporting lost cards, lost money and more.  However, if you phone is lost or stolen, one call to your wireless carrier or a visit to their website puts a freeze your mobile wallet and everything else.

So are leather wallets dinosaurs? Not quite yet. However the day of digital driver’s licenses, medical and drugs cards etc. is on the way. When that happens, you’ll have to get a leather case for your smart phone if you want to reminisce.