Technology continues to provide many new tools for brand building. Over the next few months I'm going to talk about different apps and sites that we're using for our clients and our own online marketing. I think you'll find these recommendations eye-opening and very useful.
If you've been reading this blog for a while now or if you've been paying attention to what's going on in the world, you know how important it is to build your social media presence. But just like planting the oak tree we talked about a while back, the best time to have started building critical mass on social media was months or even years ago. Or today.
Here's a great — and free — new way to start building your social media following on Facebook or Twitter. Direct your browser to Blitzster.com and let their service help you build your fan base. Blitzster is a new online service and mobile app that incentivizes your customers and clients to like or follow you online.
Blitzster lets you create an offer – a percentage-off discount perhaps, or a free sample – that your customers and fans will receive after they “like” you online. That way you're not only incentivizing your customers to post positive things about your company or products but you're also establishing a relationship with a value-for-value exchange.
To make it as easy as possible for you, the Blitzster app lets you set up your campaign and even print posters for your location and HTML codes for your website that include QR codes and URLs for your customers to access. Blitzster also tracks your users and provides you with up-to-the-minute metrics that you can use to test concepts, establish the effectiveness of your offers, and watch your social media following grow.
If you're an entrepreneur, retailer, speaker or consultant, you'll be able to use Blitzster to both engage and entertain your customers and build your social media roster. If you're a CMO or social media manager or other marketing professional, you'll be able to use Blitzster to strengthen your company's social media efforts. And if you work in advertising, PR, social media or web design, you'll not only be able to use Blitzster to increase your clients' social media census but you'll also have another service in your quiver that you can sell to your customers and further demonstrate your value.
Here's how I'm going to use Blitzster, by the way. Each week more and more people sign up to be on my blog distribution list without Blitzster, but wouldn't it be great if they also followed me on Twitter or liked me on Facebook in exchange for the post? I've used Blitzster to build a campaign that offers free registration to this blog in exchange for new users following me on Twitter. When they do I'll have more ways to reach out to them and many more people to communicate with when my next book comes out – all of which will help me build and monetize my own brand. After all, I'm already writing and distributing these blog posts for free – why not use them to help build my online census at no additional expense?
That capability – plus the fact that Blitzster is absolutely free – is the good news. The bad news is that Blitzster is a beautiful concept wrapped in a still evolving interface and should be a bit more intuitive. But as Peter Diamandis wrote in his book BOLD – “If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” Surely the Blitzster guys aren't guilty of waiting too long – instead they've put their product out there for us to use right now.
So go online and use Blitzster to build your business. It's the easiest and most effective way I've found to grow your followers and fans. And it's free. With Blitzster you'll be able to incentivize your customers to engage with your social media sites across all of your various marketing efforts, both on- and offline.
Once you've experienced Blitzster, do me a favor. Write back and let me know how your experience went and what you discovered along the way. I'm curious to see how easy you found the site to navigate and also what you were able to do with Blitzster's technology. And if you have ideas about how to make it better I'd love to hear them too. I want to do a follow-up blog on how my readers are using Blitzster so I'm very interested to hear what you discover.
Whether or not you send me your opinion, you'll still be able to use Blitzster to build your social media following and build your business. And that's certainly worth a little of your time and initiative.