Facebook and Twitter — what we are doing on these mediums.

Marketing introduction
The trends in internet marketing change so fast these days its hard to keep up without a good mentor. New avenues for marketing and socializing online keep popping up, and its difficult to know which ones will last, and which ones will work for us. Twelve years ago when I started as a mobile notary, yellow pages were the optimal way to advertise. Then, I learned how to advertise on the internet. That changed my whole life. To market 123notary.com, I then had to study how to effectively use pay-per-click advertising. The next step was to understand optimization. At that point, I spent close to a year investing and participating in reconfiguring our site to be optimized for better placement on google. As time went on, our webmaster recommeneded social media. We started a forum. The forum accumulated a lot of content, much of it very valuable as it included commentary about signing companies — who paid, and who cheated their notaries. This information is shared and is a means for survival for mobile notaries nationwide. Now, the popular forms of socializing online are Facebook and Twitter. Other popular sites are fading out, but these two seem to keep growing.

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/123notary  our experience
Facebook is a wonderful way to intereact with others. You can have discussions, contests, polls, and offer daily tips to your followers. I have learned that it is quite an endeavor to create good material for our Facebook profile on a daily basis. Tens of hours of painstaking work go into it. But, the rewards are that thousands can benefit from our daily tips and discussions, and we get a regular stream of new customers from this medium who are a lively bunch to work with. We know what are doing now with Facebook, but it is such a versatile medium, that in the future, we might innovate some new ways to use facebook. One idea I had is a competition for who can be a guest blogger. This competition could be in September. Whomever writes the best blog article could be selected to win a prize, and have their work published on our blog! That sounds really exciting.

Twitter – http://twitter.com/123notary – what we did, and what we plan on doing.
We used Twitter as a way to send out daily tips to notaries. We have many followers, and they really seem to like certain tips. Twitter is a great way to find out which types of tips notaries like the most, and which are not worth posting. We keep notes and files on which exact tweets and topics attract the most favorable attention. What we are doing in July 2010 is Tweeting only about topics that were found to be the most popular. We are hoping that will help us attract new followers. Additionally, we will be tweeting about our blogs, and hoping that helps drive enthusiasm.

What works and what doesn’t.
We found that social topics relating to the notary business are hits with our customers. They like folksy chatty types of topics the most. But, the notary career is filled with technicalities too? But, not all technical topics worked well. We learned that technical issues that are important on a daily basis were popular, and business issues relating to notaries not getting cheated were equally popular. However, more obscure technical issues that I feel notaries should know about, did not get the positive attention that I felt they should get. So, we will be shying away from oscure topics for the most part and focusing on what people like.

FORUM – http://www.123notary.com/forum
Visit our forum where we have many interesting sections.  We have a tips section where there are over 100 practical notary tips.  Read commentaries about over 400 signing companies.  Also, you can ask the experts your notary questions and get professional answers.  The forum is a great place to exchange ideas with other notaries.

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123notary behind the scenes
http://blog.123notary.com/?p=2499