Now that your business has developed an identity on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you and your employees have probably created personal accounts in addition to your agency’s fan page. It’s good practice for you and your agents to have pages so you can connect with clients if necessary and it also shows that insurance agents, despite public perception, are down to earth and regular people just like the rest of us. However, having employees on social media platforms like Facebook can come with a risk. Like your agency’s fan page, employee pages should always adhere to a certain level of integrity and respect. Also, you should be able to balance on the threshold between professional and personal. What do we mean by this? Well, would you want one of your agents to have picture of him or her partying or making an irresponsible gesture? The list goes on and on about what is and what is not acceptable for professional accounts. Let’s take a look at what you should preach to your employees about social media etiquette:

1. Appearance: We recommend that your default photo be a picture of you. Having the company logo or something other than yourself will make the page initially appear robotic. Nothing is wrong with having the logo in the photos section, but the default photo should be one that has you in it. Also, any other additional photos of yourself should always be appropriate and not include anything like partying or obscene gestures or poses.

2. Be careful with words: Anytime one of your agent’s post either a link or comments on a post, it should always be kept on the lighter side and should avoid contentious issues as well as libel. Additionally, keep your language clean! Never, under any circumstances, use any curse or swear words. Remember: you’re a professional!

3. Don’t Spam! Similar to your brand page, one thing to always consider is not post too often. If you post too much in a given day it’s considered “spamming” and existing and potential customers are not going to want to see you come up in their feed too much. When posting, keep it at a minimum and try to stay positive and informative so your friends are getting useful information.

Apart from your brand page, it’s important that you and your employees’ personal pages reflect not only who you are as people, but who you are as a company. Remember to keep it simple, tight, and appropriate, and you should be able to bring traffic to your insurance agency website.

In the old days, small business owners had limited avenues in which to spread awareness for their companies. Whether it was radio or print advertising, the platforms available for getting a message across were few and far between. Needless to say, advertising has come a long way for local businesses. Before, only the big boys could afford mega advertising campaigns in national magazines, newspapers, and television. But now, with the internet leaving everything else in its wake, anyone can bring attention to their business for relatively little money. Currently, if you don’t have a website you’re considered to be behind. If you’re not taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter, you’re deemed old fashioned. Additionally, if your business isn’t putting its name up on Google Places or Yahoo! Local, you need to begin to soon! Local listings pages are an easy and inexpensive way to bring customers to your website. So what are local listings pages, anyway?

Local listings, or “local search,” are pages created on specialized search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a database of local business listings. A local listings search will normally include the “what,” such as restaurant, hotel, etc., but also the “where,” such as city name, address, or postal code. For instance, if someone is looking for insurance in Warwick, R.I., they’d search terms like “insurance in Warwick” or “cheap insurance Warwick.” Your goal as an agency is to optimize your page so it shows up in search results for users in your region.

A standard local listings page will include three important components: location, business description, and customer reviews. The two most popular platforms, Google places and Yahoo! Local, provide a map in addition to your business address. It goes without saying, but it’s important to have your address exactly as you need it to appear. If you ever change locations, always remember to update your address and any other information such as phone and fax numbers.

Your business description can be as standard or creative as you want. A good rule of thumb is to always include your agency name as well as a few examples of services you provide. Keep it short, but always make sure it is longer than one sentence and at least two.

The customer reviews section can make or break a page. A listing with customer reviews will make your page look more legitimate because users will see that customers have come to you for help and have been influenced enough by your business to share their thoughts on the web. Also, the more reviews you have, the better traction you will receive.

Additional information you can include, depending on the platform, can be business hours, payment methods, keywords, and even a photo.

Remember, the days of print, radio, and local TV advertising are long gone. While you can still use these to advertise your agency, the internet, especially local search, is a platform you need to take advantage of.

Aside from Yahoo! And Google, feel free to check out these platforms as well:

Merchant Circle

City Search

Insider Pages

Yelp

After months of anticipation and speculation, Google+ has finally unveiled its pages for brands. Ever since its launch in June, Google+ has been open only to individual users, but this all changed when Google announced the release of “Google+ Pages” on November 7. Now that Google+ is open to the public and to brands, more and more people are continuing to register with the social media platform. While the buzz surrounding Google+ has subsided in recent months, the advent of brand pages and making the platform open to everyone makes it an avenue that should be and will be enticing to businesses. However, the question remains: should your independent insurance agency begin taking advantage of Google’s brand pages? Let’s take a look.

With already tens of millions of users, it’s no secret that Google+ is certainly making its presence known on the web. Frankly, you may be wondering why not to put your agency on Google+. On the week ending November 12, 2011, Google+ received more than 6.8 million total US visits, a 5% increase compared to the week before. Despite the social media platform’s seemingly burgeoning popularity, a look at some statistics show that it still isn’t really close to competing with Facebook. According to BrightEdge, 61% of the top 100 brands in the US have Google+ pages, compared to 93% with Facebook pages. Ford Motor Company, one of the first brands to use Google+, only has a little over 27,000 fans, compared to having over 5 million on Facebook.

As a small agency, it may be best to keep concentrating your efforts on building communities within the two biggest social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, first. While the brand pages are available, many believe that they are not as optimized as they could be, and interaction on Google+ is still significantly lower than that of Twitter and Facebook. Right now, making these two profiles the best they can be should be your number one priority for social media. Facebook and Twitter stretch further than any platform and this is a case of quality over quantity. \

Beware of watering down your social media efforts, and concentrate in areas where you know you can succeed in building a community.

It’s no secret that it’s becoming increasingly important for small businesses to take advantage of the benefits of social media. Because social media platforms are constantly updating and innovating their software, it’s necessary for small businesses to keep up to date with the changes and happenings in the world of social media. Thankfully, you have this excellent blog as a resource when it comes to receiving advice! To kick off the week, here are some additional ways for small businesses to get ahead with social media.

A Plan and Strategy Are Key

Many small businesses often create social media accounts without any clear plan intact. They simply see that the major corporations are doing it and haphazardly sign up but don’t utilize it to their advantage. While you may not have as many resources as larger companies, social media is still an inexpensive way to spread your band. Whether the goal is to increase web traffic, sales or online presence, having a specific goal and strategy in mind is essential. Otherwise, your Twitter and Facebook will look like chickens running around without heads!

Interact!

It’s easy to simply post photos, links and quotes from your social media accounts. The key, however, is to reach an interaction level with your audience that will cause them to spread the word of your social presence. Promotional components such as contests, trivia, and virtual gifts will help engage your friends and followers to a much higher degree and keep them wanting to get your status updates and tweets. Remember, if you’re not supplying quality online content users will not hesitate to either unlike your Facebook page or stop following you on Twitter.

Make Yourself Available

One of the underrated aspects of having social media accounts is actually checking them on a consistent basis. There are too many brand pages out there that look more barren than Antarctica that can and will lower the reputation of a business. Large companies have the luxury of employing community and social media managers whose main job is to run the social accounts. However, since you’re a small, independent insurance agency your only option is to have someone add these tasks to their additional workload. Whether it’s you or another employee, it’s imperative that posting is relevant and done on a daily basis, and we recommend at least one Facebook post a day and at least three tweets per day. You never know, your availability online may be what prompts a potential customer into contacting you for business!

Aside from these three tips listed above, there are countless ways to better manage your social media presence. Use these to your advantage, and always come back to our blog for more social media information that will improve your insurance agency website!

In every case, posting the content online you write for your agency is never enough. Just because you make a blog post or a press release available on the internet doesn’t mean that everyone will access it. Let’s be honest, these posts are often tucked away on websites and in order to get the word out you need to do things like post them on your Facebook and Twitter accounts in the hope that your friends and followers will relay the message. However, sometimes even that isn’t enough so it becomes necessary to consult alternative methods to link sharing, one of these methods being social bookmarking. Bookmarking websites have been around for a while, but only recently have they begun gaining steam in the business community. While most people use these for news and finding unique articles, your company should be implementing them to grow traffic to your insurance agency website. But how is this done? How should your agency go about sharing content on social bookmarking sites? It’s easy!

Your best bet is start off with three of the most common bookmarking sites—Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. These sites—especially Stumbleupon and Reddit—are commonly used for internet users to share links of news articles or anything interesting they find on the web. Websites are separated and shared via categories, so for instance topics such as “news,” “entertainment,” and “lifestyle” are commonly browsed tabs. What sets apart social bookmarking from social media is that social bookmarking allows you to reach an audience outside of your community on Facebook and Twitter. If done correctly, your links will hopefully show up in lists under whatever category you choose.

In order to bookmark a link, you’ll need to create a login for every site you want to bookmark with. For now, we’re going to use Reddit as an example because not only is it one of the most visited bookmarking sites, it’s the 45th most visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa.  After registering and creating a username and password, you’re ready to begin bookmarking! To start, jump to Reddit’s homepage where you will see medium-sized text reading “Submit a link” in the upper right hand corner. You’ll be brought to a page where the next step is to fill out information regarding the link you’re posting. Whether it’s a blog post, press release, or any other form of content, it’s important to make sure your title is creative and eye-popping while also including your keyword. If you’re having trouble coming up with a catchy title that includes the keyword, don’t worry; making the title stand out is the most important thing and in some cases it’s okay to omit the keyword. Once you come up with a title, all you need to do is copy and paste the link from your post and you’re site is bookmarked!

Once you start bookmarking your pages, make sure to keep posting them on your social media sites as well: the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once you start bookmarking every piece of content you post online, you should start seeing better results and more hits to your website.

In addition to Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon, here are additional bookmarking sites to consider: Delicious, Jumptags, and, of course, Google.

The internet started as a revolutionary platform for information and communication, and guess what? It’s still revolutionizing the way we inherit and consume information, albeit much differently than how it was ten years ago.

Ten years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter and communication between friends was based on instant messaging and phone calls; even texting hadn’t become as widespread as it is today.

Now?

Facebook seems like it has become the norm for communication among younger generations. Email has been replaced by Facebook messaging, while phone calls have been replaced by texts and wall posts. Instead of calling friends to see what everyone’s plan is for the night, it’s now acceptable to post a status update reading, “what’s the plan tonight?” with links to various profiles of friends.

Facebook and Twitter have undergone significant changes since their debuts in 2004 and 2006, respectively. Remember the old Facebook layout? If you don’t, then we’re not surprised, because that was the layout all the way back in 2005. In order to keep up with the changing uses for the internet, social media accounts have to change, too.

So what changes have social media platforms made, and how does your insurance agency adjust and adapt?

Social media platforms change based on what they think people are currently using the internet for. For instance, Facebook was one of the first websites to really understand that users wanted to share photos as much as possible. On their initial run, photo space was limited, and now? Unlimited. Foursquare started up because the developers realized that people wanted to know where their friends were and what they were doing. And now recently, they have altered their website to allow users to not only check into places, but check into events as well. Although social media platforms all have different services and philosophies, they do have one thing in common: acceptance to change.

Social media platforms are always changing, so it’s necessary for us to change with them. If we don’t, then we’ll fall behind and we won’t be able to successfully implement them back into our lives and business strategies. It’s always funny when a website like Facebook drastically changes their layout: there is always a public backlash, but users will begrudgingly continue to log in because they can never get enough of Facebook.

So how should your insurance agency be adapting to changes in social media? Simple: as much as you can. As social media platforms change, your agency must change with it in order to better acclimate itself for future success. The old saying is, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” which directly applies to this situation. If Facebook or Twitter makes an adjustment, you should make sure you and your social media team are aware of the changes.

Perhaps the biggest change within the last year is social media’s adaption to mobile phones. Mobile is primed to become a large part of social media in the near future, with LinkedIn announcing that they are revamping their mobile application in an effort to streamline the way users interact on the actual website and the application. Also, the new Apple mobile operating system, iOS5, is going to have innovative Twitter integration. It also does not hurt to mention that Facebook is the most downloaded free mobile application ever.

As an agency, it’s crucial to step up your game when it comes to the internet. The internet is where many current and potential customers spend a lot of their time whether it’s for work or for personal use. Keeping your agency up to date on the internet—especially social media—will allow your company to remain competitive in the online field and add traction to your insurance agency website.

Don’t be afraid of change!

It’s no secret the influence social media has had on Americans especially those in younger generations. What once started out as an application for people to meet and interact online has now become a super highway of sharing personal and public information. With this data, businesses and search engines are able to follow trends and tendencies among users and see what types of topics and products are popular and, more importantly, unpopular.

In recent years social media use has exploded at exponential and alarming rates. Now, not only do younger people use these platforms, but adults do as well. While Facebook and Twitter have over 700 and 200 million users respectively, it’s impossible to deny the influence they have had on society and culture. It’s especially been helpful for businesses. When information about the product is supplied and repeated, more traffic is brought to the company. With Google’s new social media platform Google Plus gaining in popularity, businesses are obviously at a disadvantage if they are not spreading their brand via social media.

Although most users access their social media accounts on computers, a new trend is beginning to emerge in how consumers gather and spread information: Smartphones. Ever since the release of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, mobile companies have been churning out phones with World Wide Web capabilities at rates that seemed impossible five years ago. Smartphones are so popular that, according to a recent study, of the people that own cell phones, 42% have a Smartphone. That’s closing in on 50%, and it’s only going to increase. Eventually, the inevitability of technology will cause every phone to be a smartphone.

So what does this mean for social media marketing? How does the increasing usage of Smartphones affect your agency and the way we use social media?

Because so many Americans have smart phones, information is being gathered and shared at the highest rate the world has seen. Social media marketing, and marketing in general, is in over its head with the ability consumers now have to see everything that is going on in the world wherever they may be. Consumers use Smartphones for surfing the internet as well as accessing their social media accounts. Individuals are notified of any happenings and updates on social networking sites through their cell phones in real-time. The consistent connection to social sites means agencies can remind and update followers about their capabilities, offerings, importance and much more. Additionally, advertisements are always in view of the user as well. Simply put, your agency has the opportunity to be sending messages and information to your followers wherever they are at all times, so why not take advantage?

Smartphones are overwhelmingly changing the landscape of business and marketing. Because information is now available anywhere, it’s up to you and your agency to implement a social media strategy that will provide constant updates for your followers with smartphone access.

With social networking applications teaming with Smartphones, spreading your brand has never been easier.