Are you thinking of creative ways to boost your insurance agencies internet marketing strategy? One word to live by- Twitter! Twitter is a popular social media site that allows you to build a community and is one of the best ways to get your brain stirring with creative blog topic ideas.

Twitter isn’t going to write a blog for you, but it will give you relevant and interesting ideas to start the brainstorming process.

The top 5 ways to get creative with Twitter:

When engaging your reader things you will want to remember when writing is, keep the information informative yet interesting and make sure your information is relevant for the times. Twitter keeps these things always in mind as is updated with information every second.

Along with these ways to gain ideas you will be able to pull relevant and credible links from twitter. People usually post information and then add a link. This is a great way to add informative outside sources to your blog post! Remember as an insurance agency you want to intrigue your audience so get creative! Reading your Twitter will keep you in the know while positively affect your blogging process.

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!

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.

Mention YouTube, and some people picture cats playing the piano, or FedEx drivers throwing fragile electronics over fences. But YouTube is a gem for marketers in virtually all industries. The video sharing site turned six last year, and on its birthday we learned that YouTube is now the second most popular search engine behind Google. It’s larger than Facebook and Twitter, and averages three billion views per day.

These statistics prove that YouTube is overflowing with opportunity for insurance agency marketing. But how do you start? Here are some tips for turning your YouTube presence into dollars:

• Build your profile. Just like on other social networking sites, YouTube encourages you to fill out a profile. Make sure you include links to your website, Facebook, and Twitter, and write a search-engine friendly description of your agency.
• Post videos! This is the most obvious way to utilize YouTube, but be careful. People don’t want to watch commercials for your products. Instead, record videos that answer questions your viewers may have. For example, you could record a series of videos that explain different types of business insurance. Keep them short and sweet – try not to run longer than two or three minutes!
• Use it as a community. YouTube allows you to like, favorite, share, and comment on videos easily. Network with people on YouTube just as you would on Facebook or Twitter! Comment on relevant videos and share videos that you find interesting.
• Cross-promote. Don’t expect people to find your video just because it’s on your YouTube channel. When you record something, share it on your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, and everywhere else you can think of. Include the link to your YouTube channel on your business cards, website, and in your email signature. As long as you provide quality, informative content that isn’t overly promotional, people will watch!
• Interact regularly. Yes, your video is there to stay once it’s uploaded; unlike on Facebook or Twitter, it won’t get “pushed down” the News Feed. But as we’ve said, YouTube isn’t just about uploading and watching videos. Remember to log on regularly to comment, like, and share!

YouTube is an excellent resource for insurance marketing. With the right mix of relevant uploads and interactions, you’ll be well on your way to building a great YouTube presence!

Happy New Year to all! Have you been keeping up with your New Year resolutions? While some of you are planning to lose weight and be more active, others have vowed to work on their insurance marketing efforts. In order to step up your game, you must continue to blog on your site, bookmark your posts, and keep up with your social media strategy. We understand that it may be hard to keep up with these efforts, but trust us- the end result is worth it!

In order to keep up with these efforts, I have put together a list of strategies and tips in order to make the most of your efforts.

Blogging:

-If possible, make sure you have a blog post up every single week. If you can get two or three up, even better!

-Make sure you include keywords in your content with the correct link attached. Choose keywords with high search volume and low competition.

-For the New Year, test out a few different blogging strategies. Try posting in a list form one day and then paragraph form the next- see which blog receives better feedback and has more shares! Pinpoint the best strategy for 2012.

-Do not be afraid to add some humor or pop culture references to your posts. The more interesting, the more shareable, the more memorable!

-In order to have your blog be seen by others, bookmark! Choose bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit in order to share your posts with the public. It doesn’t hurt to share on your social media accounts, too!

Social Media:

-Set aside 10 minutes every day to look through local business pages on Facebook and accounts on Twitter. Follow those who you hope to connect with!

-Be a real person. It is important that you do not only spit out links all day. Throw up a few personal tweets and status updates to engage your followers

-Tweet and post at least 3-5 times a day. One post will not cut it- you will be lost in your followers’ twitterfeeds/newsfeeds!

-Motivational quotes, fun facts, and other random posts are always appreciated by your followers and tend to be the most retweeted/liked!

-Have you been shy on your social account? Reach out to your fans and followers this year!

Start 2012 off the right way! By sticking to your resolution, you will not only feel accomplished, but are sure to see results. Good luck!

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!

If your company is active on social media as a part of your insurance agency marketing, you know probably know that many of your employees are also active online. They probably have Facebook and Twitter pages, and maybe even LinkedIn profiles. As a business owner, you have to consider what might happen if someone says or does something inappropriate on the Internet.

Consider this: An employee has a problem with a client, and complains about that client on Facebook. The client sees that your employee is talking badly about them publicly, and drops you as their insurance agency! Nightmare, right?

The sad part is that situations like this happen every day. Social media should serve as an extension of customer service, and that’s why it is so important for you, as an employer, to create a social media policy for your employees. Your team should be made aware that policies on harassment, ethics, and company loyalty extend to all forms of communication, both inside and outside the workplace. But how do you go about creating this policy? Here are some tips:

A great social media policy can prevent online mishaps while at the same time encouraging employees to utilize social media in a productive way. By creating and asking employees to sign your policy, you’ll be sure everyone understands the role of social media in your company!

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.

Social Media isn’t just for Twitter and Facebook anymore.  More people are utilizing Foursquare to let their friends and family know what they’re up to.  This application is a location-based check-in system allows customers to boost your business’s status in the community.

“Foursquare unlocks your city and makes your world a more interesting place,” writes Carmine Gallo, author of ‘The Power of Foursquare’.  He continues, “It informs, illuminates, and inspires.  For small businesses, it can help attract, reward and engage customers in ways that were never possible.”  Gallo’s book give seven tips that educate business owners how the application can help them.

• Connect your brand
• Harness new fans
• Engage your followers
• Create rewards
• Knock out the competition
• Incentivize your customers
• Never stop entertaining

With the November 15, 2011 revamp of Foursquare.com, your business has the opportunity to get noticed without a customer “check in”.  Users who sign onto Foursquare via the web at certain times the website will suggest places they should visit.  For instance, sign in at 11:30am and they will suggest great lunch spots near their office.  The same will occur later in the day around dinnertime.   Foursquare is committed to helping your business connect with your customers.

Compatible with other Social Media tools, when your customers “check-in” they are able to notify not only their friends who utilize Foursquare, but Facebook and Twitter.  For every check-in, Foursquare users have the ability to “unlock” different achievements:

• Mayorships
• Reward points
• BadgesDeals

Foursquare helps your business connect with your customers in a new way.  It also brings attention to your business and community.  “Unlock” the possibilities.

Businesses of all sizes have embraced social media as a way to build communities, market their services, and form relationships with customers. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google+ are popular. However, one platform that is often misunderstood is LinkedIn.

Officially, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. The site allows users to input their work history in a resume-like format and form connections with others, much like the Facebook friend system. However, that’s usually as far as most people take it. But if you’re a business owner, you should know that LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for generating business.

If your LinkedIn profile is sub-par, you may be damaging your credibility. By maintaining your profile and remaining active on the site, you will show potential customers that you are a credible expert in your industry. This way, they’ll remember you next time they need someone in your field. Here are some tips:

If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry! LinkedIn is actually extremely user-friendly and will guide you along the way. The most important thing is to keep up with it. Sign in a few times each week, participate in discussions, and you’ll be on your way to building your business in no time!