Beatrice Whelan

When Beatrice Whelan took on the role as Social Media & Content Specialist with Sage Ireland just over a year ago her biggest challenge was how to do B2B and accounts software in an interesting way on Facebook and other social media channels. I talked to Beatrice about the challenges she has faced, what works for her, the monitoring tools she is using and what her goals have been.

Here's some of her key points:

• Be where your customer is. Sage is on Facebook because small business owners have pages on Facebook, if the customer is there they should be too.

• Sage Ireland's strategy has been to give their Facebook followers genuinely useful content that they can use in their businesses.

• On Facebook they used live chats to engage with business owners. They invited business owners to ask questions on a particular subject such as business planning and social media  to experts in the field.

• They use Sysomos to monitor social media mentions and return on investment. They chose it as it's good value for money and does everything they needed it to do.  It alerts the team whenever Sage or it's products are mentioned online allowing them to respond when necessary. Also allows them to measure share of voice.

• Smaller businesses can utilize tools such as Google Alerts, Twilert and Sprout Social to monitor their online mentions.

• It's easy to measure ROI if at the beginning you set goals and decide what they want to achieve. Sage is very web focused with it's social media so they use Google Analytics to measure web traffic to landing pages and resulting sales.  They use their social media monitoring to measure share of voice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Beatrice's top tip: Before thinking about what your social media strategy is think about what your content strategy is. How will you, as a business, add value to your customers?  By sharing genuinely useful content with them. If you were them what would you like to see shared on Facebook and Twitter?

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The post Tweak Your Biz TV Talks With Beatrice Whelan, Social Media & Content Specialist At Sage Ireland appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

Blogging is a great tool for business as it keeps you connected with your customers. Grafton media are a digital agency based in Dublin, Manchester and London Soho. They work with businesses of all sizes and are hugely active in the SME community in Ireland.

Dave Antrobus

Dave shared his advice for small businesses and de-mystified some of that jargon that can confuse those new to the digital world.

The post TweakYourBiz TV Talks Digital With Dave Antrobus From Grafton Media appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

Conor Keppel and Ethan Cleary from the Irish Farmers Association have just launched a new app onto the market for Farmers, iFarm takes all the core information that a farmer needs and puts it onto their phone.

The iFarm App is available for Android, iPhone and other Smartphones and Tablets. It allows farmers to get farming news, dynamic weather information, directory listings, European and Irish market information and commentary, all together in one comprehensive app. To download (in Ireland) simply text 'ifarm' followed by your name to 51000. Ordinary text message rates apply.

Related: Nine Tips To Prevent Your App Becoming A Needle In The 600,000+ Apps Haystack

I talked to them about how they devised the product and why they felt it was relevant to the farming community.

• Research found that Farmers didn't like using traditional computers but they used touch screens on their farming equipment all the time.  This meant touch screen smart phones were a technology they would feel familiar with.
• Cross platform application was important as many farmers wouldn't subscribe to an appstore as they require a credit card and many don't own one.
• They used text messaging to send a link to the application and added bookmark buttons within the application prompting farmers to save the app to the home page of their phone.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related: Building An App Into A Business: An Interview With Lisa Domican Of The Grace App

Thanks to Connor and Ethan for telling us about the iFarm app, which I'm sure with be a great resource for busy Irish farmers, please share any thoughts you have about the app in the comments below.

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The post TweakYourBiz TV Talks To The Brains Behind The iFarm App appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.