As an insurance agent, it is a constant goal to attract and keep your customers. Having reliable products is one factor in being able to provide great services. However, one crucial component to reaching success may not be as obvious as you think. With social media on the rise, it is important to create quality content that not only engages customers, but encourages them to share.

According to Top Rank, a recent study by Exact Target found that 55% of Facebook users have “liked” a company and then later, decided they no longer wanted to see that company’s post. You don’t want this to happen on your social media outlets. Therefore, you must do everything you can to keep customers reading with relevant posts and provide content that can be easily shared. The following are tips on how to do so:

Tip #1 – Know Who You’re Talking To & Provide Relevant Information

A review of your social media accounts can help determine who your current followers are, what they tend to share information about, and the format in which they use to share socially. Once you see what your audience is sharing and “liking”, you can attract their attention by producing relevant content. In addition, by promoting your agency through contests, giving helpful information, and providing tips on safety, this will help increase your visibility.

Tip #2 – Think Outside The Marketing Box

In order to increase social shares, you need to place focus on your insurance social networking strategy. This can be done by updating your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin around 1-3 times a day, but remembering to keep your content fresh and interesting. In addition, you can search for followers that you believe will be interested in your services. By building up your community, you can watch your agency grow in social success.

Tip #3 – Love Lists

Twitter lists are a great way to segment different types of followers, or recognize them as an expert in a particular field. By making the additional effort to organize your audience, share relevant content, and making information easy for others to share, you can see the benefits of your strategy in the numbers.

Once you develop an engaged audience, this will allow you to become a community leader on your social outlets. Consider social sharing a way to gain additional prospective clients, contributors, or employees that could inspire the growth of your business!

As an insurance agency in a digital world, there has now become an increasing need to understand your customers. However, this applies not only to face to face meetings, but through social media outlets as well. Therefore, in order to relate to your customers, you need to know how to communicate with them on a variety of levels.

According to SocialMediaToday, you should never be too busy to spend time getting to know each of your customers. A couple years ago, socializing with customers was taboo to some. However, now a days, one of the few ways to understand your customers is socializing with them, specifically through social media. A key factor in learning to do this is through having social media literacy.

By interacting with your clients in their own language, this will make them happy and feel like they have a personal relationship to your business. In addition, to continue to strengthen your social networking strategy, the following are 4 steps you can take to boost your social media literacy:

With a new year comes new learning experiences and changes. Therefore, take action with your insurance social networking strategy and build on your social media literacy. Once you grasp this concept, you can leverage that knowledge to build your business to bring it down a successful path!

Having an offsite blog in addition to your insurance website has many advantages. Not only can you increase traffic to your Virtual Insurance Office, but you also have the ability to draw in readers and create conversations through comments. Utilizing this tool will help you learn more about your customers and help them better understand all of the products you have to offer.

According to SocialMediaToday, receiving comments provides insight into the readers’ thought processes, which will help you better understand their needs as well as challenges. This advantage is why it is crucial for you to write value-driven content in order to better relate to your audience. In addition, the more honest and quality content your produce, the more trust and credibility you build with your customers.

Therefore, by increasing the number of comments on your blog, the more viewers will take notice. This is because you will be showing you have the ability to engage and have a conversation with your audience. The following are three tips on how you can increase your comments on your offsite blog:

Tip #1: Make it easy for the reader to comment

People who are new to blogging often forget to turn on their comment feature. Is the comment section large enough for the reader to find it? Do you require only minimum information from the viewer before they can comment, such as their name and e-mail address? If it’s technically difficult to leave a comment, readers will leave the page. Therefore, make it easy for them to start a conversation on your offsite blog!

Tip #2: Ask Questions!

Remind your readers that you want their comments and opinions by asking them a question at the end of the blog post. Ask them directly to share their response in the comment section. You can mention a direct call to action like “Let me hear your thoughts by writing in the comments below”. The more specific the request is, the more likely the reader is to leave a comment. So encourage your reader to take action by leaving a comment and participating in the conversation!

Tip #3: Always respond to people who comment

People don’t want to feel like they’re ignored. This is why taking the time to respond to readers who write a comment shows that you are paying attention to them. This creates an opportunity to further engage with that reader. When other readers see that you are interacting with the people commenting on your blog, they will feel more encouraged to join the conversation!

Once you learn to master the art of writing strong, unique content, you can watch the comments roll in! Always pay attention to how your audience reacts to certain posts or what they seem to enjoy about what you have to offer. By focusing on the audience, you will increase the success of your onsite and offsite blogs!

Have you ever thought about how much the English language has changed over the past decade? Words have shortened in length, while others have become specific to certain regions, and some have even incorporated numbers into them.  This alteration of the spoken and written word is all thanks to the Internet, and specifically, Twitter.

According to the New York Times, many scholars the fields of linguistics, sociology, and psychology are looking at Twitter for real-time language data to analyze. Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its time saving abilities and vastness. In addition to language, moods are also being gauged on a more global level.

Although some say this research can’t prove Twitter to be an accurate emotional barometer, it is proving extremely valuable for understanding how language varies among different demographic groups.

A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University, led by Jacob Eisenstein and Brendan O’Connor, used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. From the data, hidden patterns of informal English were found. For example, New Yorkers preferred the slangy phonetic spelling of suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians wrote koo or coo for cool.

Randal E. Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, saw the real-world applications of Twitter for research: “The key finding was that seemingly meaningless slang and jargon can reveal important properties of the author’s identity, a point of interest for both corporations and the intelligence community,” Mr. Bryant said.

With all of this new research arising, you should make sure the language you are using in a blog post, tweet, or Facebook post is relatable and can be comprehended by your audience. This can be incorporated into your internet social networking strategy through writing about unique and interesting content that your community will enjoy reading. Regardless of how Twitter exchanges may appear on the surface, this social media tool can help uncover truths about our social interactions that are more serious than we think!

Normally, when you think of customer service, you visualize a person talking with someone else in a face to face conversation. However, with so much social media and technology being used in the business, it has become increasingly difficult to recreate an in-person meeting between client and agent. Yet, this doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

In order to keep your customers invested in what you have to offer, you need to utilize different methods to add the human factor back into your services. According to the blog ErnestBarbaric, where marketers often go wrong on their social media sites is they create no conversations, no relationships, and no questions are being asked or answered.

One tactic you can use to make sure you are reaching your audience is by logging out of your account, opening a new window, and reading it the same way a new visitor would.  You don’t want it to lack personality or read as a self promotional site.  Instead, it should be inviting and relatable to your audience.

In addition, each network you have needs to have a clear reason as to what purpose it serves. Clarifying the purpose of any specific channel helps define strategic objectives, measurements, and tactics you may use. You should be educating, reaching out to new audiences, spreading your ideas, and providing customer service.

The most important method you should use to connect with your clients is by putting people first and the brand later. Rather than having your audience talk to an automated entity, put a face to your account and have them speak with a real person so they can identify with your services.

This component of insurance social networking is important to understand. It is hard for someone to have a conversation with your agency as a whole when they find you on the internet. However, having someone running and conversing with the clients one on one will benefit your business greatly and make your audience feel more comfortable. Listen, converse, and be human to create personal relationships with the people you care about most.

There are many facets to a company, and everyone plays an important role in helping build the client base.  However, having each team come together for a common cause, especially through social networking, you can greatly help your internet marketing strategy!

To attract more business and secure greater exposure, you can empower your staff with the inside scoop on what’s happening with the company’s social media, why it’s important, and how it benefits customers.  According to the blog SpinSucks, this can ultimately be a powerful way to engage your employees and elevate them into brand ambassadors for your company.  Some tips to do so include:

It is important to remember that employees who feel valued and appreciated will want to talk about the wonderful place where they work.  By creating a positive culture, workers will become more engaged in the company and its goals.  So improve your internet marketing strategy by paying it forward to your foundation, your employees, and watch the results show in your customer base!

The way we read text on a computer and the way we hear a sentence calculates differently in our brains.  For example if you read a joke, the meaning may go over your head, but if you hear the same joke out loud, it can be tremendously funny based on the tone of the person’s voice.  In this virtual age of internet marketing, as people rely more on technology rather than human interactions, our words may be getting lost in translation due to one key factor: voice.

According to The Angel Voice blog, the concept of voice has gotten lost in recent years with the internet and smart-phones taking us away from actually communicating with each other.  Most of the time, people would prefer sending a text to another person or posting a comment on their Facebook wall instead of having a one on one talk with a person, whether physically or on the phone.

However, although technology has given us the easy way out, what ends up truly disappearing in a conversation are the nuances that come across through the spoken word as opposed to the typed word.  The typed word is open to interpretation, but the nuances of how someone speaks those same words are well defined.

As far as social networks go, they are designed to help us keep in contact with friends, family, and business colleagues.   We “see” their words everyday and interpret them personally in correspondence to how we want to comprehend them, but we don’t get to “hear” their voice to grasp the real meaning.  But now that has all changed.  Two new services from Voice.com allow you to post voice comments to Facebook and Twitter, called Voice for Facebook and Voice for Twitter.

Registering for these applications allows you to call a phone number, record audio, and have that audio posted to your Facebook wall or Twitter feed.  To start using this tool, you must input your cell phone number and sync this number with your Facebook or Twitter account.  You’ll be given a phone number to call.  When you call the number, the application recognizes your caller ID and posts your audio comment to your social media outlets.

With voice enabling social media, you will now be able to hear how your friends feel about a particular topic versus someone trying to get their point across with multiple exclamation points.  However, no matter what means you use to share your messages with the world, it is important to remember that internet marketing is constantly changing.  As rapid as these alterations may seem, you can make the positive evolution necessary to increase your community following by relating to them with your own unique voice!

As social media has expanded over the past couple of years, it is obvious the affect it has had on our society.  We have now become more fast paced and invested in understanding the true definition of communication.  According to the Harvard Business Review, the future of social media stands right in front of us.

From Washington, with Obama utilizing Twitter for his campaign, to millions of Facebook users all around the world, it is clear that social media as something spontaneous reflecting how we behave in the real world is coming to an end.  We are entering an age of social business, bringing about a purposeful, planned, orchestrated, and integrated way of doing business in a social context.  This strategy allows one to complexly make a message feel personal to the outside, while on the inside, the organization is planning and navigating every move.  As further evidence to the shift, one can look to technology.

Over the past several years, innovative companies who have geared their mindset towards the future have begun to understand the value of monitoring conversations.  Therefore, they have purchased software licenses from platforms such as Radian 6.  Additionally, the notion of listening to social conversations is only a small portion of understanding social business.  The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing “social”.  Thus, if the next phase of social media is operating as a scalable social business, then expect to see an increase of activity in the following:

Organizational Design: Social media is focused on parts of an organization or business where communications and marketing encourage social media tactics, while a social business is redesigned to look through a lens that is more holistic for the organization.  For further proof, we can look to Facebook, where business and brand pages deal with both customer “likes” and complaints.  Corporate Facebook pages are great examples of the need for marketing, PR, customer service, and HR to all figure out how to work together.  This is because users on Facebook don’t make the distinction behind which department is running what and to them, a company page represents all departments.

Social Business Intelligence: The rise of social media has led to many technology solutions, allowing organizations to become involved on conversations happening across multiple digital public spaces.  Organizations that have become accustomed to listening in on conversations are now positioned to take the next step and convert listening into organization-wide business intelligence.  Socially intelligent organizations will be able to adapt to conditions in their environment and eventually predict and plan for future scenarios.

Cultures of Collaboration, Co-Creation & Shared Value: The most significant recent business case, which illustrates the business side of social, comes from creating an ecosystem.  This idea operates by having value enter into it and then extracted by multiple stakeholders for mutual gain.  An ecosystem, by definition, is sustainable.

The relationship between social media and social business is complicated.  On one hand, the public desires authentic interactions in social spheres from real people and expect a real-time response.  On the other hand, a business or organization requires a system to be in place that coordinates activities.  Therefore, the oncoming shift is moving from a focus on external media consumption to the internal business integration of what it means to become social and connected. Is social media something you have included in your insurance agency marketing plan? If not you should make sure to include it, social media really is becoming the number one way to communicate with your audience.

It’s natural…everyone encounters writer’s block at some point in their career while composing a blog post.  Although it is frustrating to be in this position, there are ways to conquer this condition.  Although creativity comes and goes, that doesn’t mean it disappears forever.  By continuously feeding your imagination, this will aid in decreasing your writer’s block symptoms.

Some of the most important advice is to not give up when the blank screen is staring back at you, no matter what.  Here are some blogging tips to win the fight over an empty page:

#1: Generate Ideas Separately From Writing

Come up with your ideas before you sit down to write. You can set aside specific times to generate ideas or you can just jot them down in a notebook.  So then when you sit down to write, you will have an idea ready to work on.

#2: Start Off With Someone Else’s Words

Often, it’s hard to put the first words down onto that blank page. So start off with some ready-made words! Take a quote from a blog post that’s inspired you, or from a book that you’re reading. Copy it onto your page, and then start writing down your thoughts about it.

#3: Write an Outline Before You Start

Outlines are great for several reasons:

• They often give you ready-made subheadings or list items for your post
• They let you see how far through the post you are, which is motivating
• They help you to create a structured, coherent post that comes across well to readers

#4: Set a Timer – and Write

Have you noticed that when you sit down to write a blog post, all sort of other activities suddenly look attractive?  Instead of getting distracted, set a 30 minute time block and write without stopping. No checking emails, no Twitter, no Facebook. You’ll be amazed how far you can get.

#5: Start With a Question

The first few lines of a post are often the hardest to write. There are a variety of ways to grab the readers’ attention, but an easy one if you’re stuck is to open your post with a question.

#6: Use a Prompt to Get You Going

Sometimes, you’ll find that none of your previously-thought-up ideas inspire you.  If that happens, a writing prompt is a great way to get going.  A prompt can be anything at all: a line from a song, an image, a question, or even a single word.

So when you find yourself wondering if your next blog post will ever come out, look back at these tips to get yourself started!