Social Media Marketing Made Easy | Facebook & Twitter for Business

[0:00:00]

Hey, Laura Roeder here, and I want to share with you an experience I recently had at CVS that taught me a great lesson about customer service that’s often overlooked. So, you know, the actual details are pretty boring. Basically, I was picking up for prescription at CVS. I thought that I waited in one line and then they call my name, but it turned out that on this particular day at CVS, I was supposed to wait in two lines and they would never call my name, which I finally found out after like an hour and a half of waiting.

So, basically what happened is I waited in line number one, and then when I was done, she said, “Go wait over there for your prescription.” I thought I had played this game before. I thought that meant that they would call my name, but apparently not. And all of this could have been resolved by line number one lady saying, “Go over there and wait in that line to get your prescription.”

It was just a very simple miscommunication, a very simple case of us both making assumptions. The kind of moral of the story is you can never be too specific and too detailed in what your clients and customers need to do next. As consumers, we always appreciate it. And it’s easy to forget as a business owner because we know how our business works. It seems really obvious to us. And this is especially important – you know, I was going to say it’s especially important in digital products, but that’s not really even true. In a [0:01:33] [Inaudible] business, I don’t know about you, I’ve definitely had the experience where I go into a sandwich shop, and I can’t figure out where to wait to order. Like, who are the people that have already ordered, where do I stand. It sounds really simple, but that type of thing can really ruin your experience, because you’re feeling like an idiot and you can’t figure out how to order your sandwich.

So, the kind of equivalent of that in digital products is when somebody buys a product from you and they don’t know how to get it. Like, are they supposed to get an email from you to download or are they going to get a log in, do they need to create a username and password, and then once they do, exactly what page do they click on, and is it something they watch online or is it a video they download. All these things seem really obvious to you because you created the system, like I give them the download link and then they click on it, and then they unzip it. Like you need to tell people, “I’m giving you a link that you’re going to need to unzip. If you don’t know what unzip is, here’s a software where you can do it.”

Here’s an explanation. You really can’t explain too much. Even if people already know, it doesn’t make them feel like an idiot. It really never hurts. It just makes them feel taken care of, and makes them feel like you’ve thought out this whole process. And if they have any question, you’ve answered it for them upfront. So think about what your customers and clients do to receive your product or service, and think about how you can explain it in what to you seems like excruciating detail so that people cannot miss a single step that people can feel like they know what’s going on, they know exactly what to do, and then they don’t get mad at you because they had to wait or run for an hour when they could have just waited in line and gotten their prescription.

[0:03:14] End of Audio

Hi, I’m Laura Roeder. You can find my site at lauraroeder.com, just like it says right here. Today I want to tell you how to create a retweet on Twitter because there are two different ways that you might not know about. A retweet is when you copy someone’s tweet and send it out to your followers giving credit to the original tweeter. So, basically it’s just a way to share a tweet that you’ve read with everyone who follows you.

So, the first way to retweet is to use the built in retweet feature on twitter.com. So, I’m signed in on my account, lkr @ twitter.com, right now and all you do to retweet is click this little retweet button right here. So you can see when you’re just looking through the tweets it won’t show up, but when you hover on the right side this little retweet link will come in. So all you have to do is click this button, it’s going to ask you if you want to retweet to your followers and then you simply click yes. So, once that happens your followers are going to see a message that looks like this. See how there is this little icon right here with these arrows and you see the same icon repeated right here? It says retweets from people you follow appear in your timeline.

So, I actually don’t follow this person, Paidz. This is a retweet from someone else that I follow so it has a little retweet button in front of it so that I can see why this person who doesn’t normally show up in my stream is showing up. So, if you’re seeing people who you don’t follow show up on twitter.com, that’s why. It’s because somebody else has retweeted one of their messages and so you’re seeing it on your homepage. So, again the first way to retweet is just to click this little retweet link by whatever tweet you want to retweet and then click yes.

The second way, kind of the old school way, the way people used to do it on Twitter, is just to copy and paste what someone wrote. So, let’s find a simple one here. So if I want to retweet this tweet from Phil Macnevin, all I do is literally copy what he wrote, paste it into my twitter box here and then I’m going to write rt@philmacnevin and then his tweet comes up. So what this means is ‘rt’ stands for retweet, I need to make sure to put the @ sign in front of his name so that it will show up as a clickable tweeter name just like this one right here and this one right here, and then I paste in his message. So the way – the traditional or old school, it’s kind of funny to say that about Twitter right, the original way to do a retweet is to just simply copy and paste the entire tweet just like this. You want to paste it into your little tweet box and then you want to put an ‘rt’ on the front to show that it’s a retweet and you want to make sure to put the @ sign so that their name comes up as a clickable Twitter link just like these.

You need to make sure that the spacing is correct too. There needs to be a space between ‘rt’ and the name and there cannot be a space between the @ sign and the name. So, to retweet this I just paste it in here and click update. So again that’s one way and the other way is to click this little retweet button. This was Laura Roeder showing you how to retweet.

[0:00:00]

Hey, I’m Laura Roeder, and today, I want to tell you a story. It’s actually kind of a sad story about facing your worst fears in your business and how it can turn out to be a good thing, or how it turned out to be a good thing for me.

So, I’m young, if you can’t tell, younger than most people who start businesses, and I was only 22 when I started my business, very young, even younger than I am now. So, I would always go – I actually built my business, my Web design business when I started off going to networking events, because I didn’t know anyone in Chicago and I needed clients, so I went to networking events, which by the way is actually really great way to build your business.

So, I would go to networking events and I was always, by far, the youngest one there. I mean, I stuck out like a sore thumb. And often these events are predominantly men. So being a woman, being really young, looking even younger than I actually am, I mean, I definitely stuck out. And sometimes people will make comments to me. Sometimes, they were nice, encouraging comments, and sometimes, they were rude comments, to be honest, about my age and about my being so young in being there.

So I was always a little bit self-conscious and I would try to dress and do my make-up and do my hair in a way that made me look older and tried to make people think that I was at least a little bit older than I was. It was always kind of this hang-up that I had. And I went to the eWomenNetwork National Event, and I guess it was in 2008, 2007 – it must have been in 2008. I went to their national event, which was actually a really good event in Dallas. I met a lot of great people. I had a great time, and they had these laser coaching booths set up where they had this professional coaches and you can sign up for which coach you wanted, then you got like a 15-minute session with them for free.

So I was looking through the coaches and I saw the one who’s a sales coach, and I thought, “Okay, well, I need some help with selling. Let’s go and see the sales coach to see what she has to say.” So I went in this little booth with the sales coach, and she immediately just started [0:02:22] [Inaudible] the shots, and it was all about my age and how I looked and my voice.

She told me – and I am not exaggerating, I’m not joking – she told that what I needed to do if I wanted to get better at selling, and if I wanted to grow my business was everyday I needed to practice in front of the mirror speaking in a lower voice, like I was supposed to look at the mirror and speak in a low – I don’t know what she wanted me to do. That’s ridiculous, right? But she told me that my voice sounded too young. No one was ever going to buy anything from me, so I need to change my voice. I need to change everything about my appearance. I need to change my hair. Apparently, I touched my hair when I was talking to her, and she told that my mannerisms made me look too young, so I kept – you know, I kind of tried to steer in the conversation being like, “Okay, but what about selling?” But this was all that she was fixated on.

She told me basically that I looked young, I sounded too young, my appearance was terrible, and everything was wrong with me. So as you can imagine, I was – you know, I’m laughing about it now, but I was holding back tears while I was talking to her. I mean, it was terrible. It was literally – it’s like imagine all your worst fears of what you think everybody is saying about you, and then imagine someone actually saying those things to your face. That’s kind of what happened to me.

So, I – you know, the whole time, I was holding back tears. I, immediately after I was finished, went up to my hotel room and just cried and just kind of, “Oh, my God. Do I have to lower my voice? Everything is wrong with me.” I was really upset. I mean, I could, even at the time, kind of see the ridiculousness, but I was very upset. And I actually remember Christine Kane, who I met at that event, ended up coming up to my room. I don’t remember if I called her or if she just came by, but she came up and I was really upset. And I remember she told me very genuinely, and she’s like, “That really didn’t even …” She was talking about my age. She said, “That really didn’t even cross my mind at all when I met you,” and I believe her, because Christine’s the type of person that kind of doesn’t care about those stuff, a.k.a. the type of person that I like to associate myself with.

So it happened and it was terrible, but I guess the moral of the story is I soon realized that my worst fear had come true and it was okay. You know what I mean?

[0:05:00]
Like all these things that I were afraid, people are thinking or saying about me behind my back, someone had said, someone had – they had said it. It was true. You know what I mean? My worst fears had come true. They were confirmed and I survived, you know, like my life went on. And I soon – and what she was saying was such an outrageous example, especially the stuff about practicing everyday to lowering my voice. Seeing it come true made me realize how silly it was, and of course now, I’ve built my business around doing these videos and doing a lot of webinars where I talk and you hear my silly, high-pitched voice that’s mine and that’s how it is.

So I guess what I want to say is when you think about the very worst thing that could happen to you or your fear of how people are judging you or what they’re saying about you, what if it actually is true? You know, I mean, when your business crash, would you die? What’s kind of the worst thing that can happen? The worst that could happen in my mind happened to me and it was okay. It really was, and so I just want you to think about, is the worst really so bad?

[0:06:27] End of Audio