The MerchantCircle Blog
The MerchantCircle blog lets local and small business owners know what's going on in their marketing world. Whether it's online marketing solutions, yellow page directory statistics, business video solutions, or general merchant musings, we make sure you're informed.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
If you're a Facebook fanatic, a Tweet-a-holic and a MerchantCircle member then you’ve been leveraging the most popular social media platforms to promote your business. Until now, any content you’ve built on MerchantCircle you’ve had to manually repost to both Facebook and Twitter. We know your time is precious, so we’ve streamlined the process to save you time.
We're excited to announce the integration of MerchantCircle with Twitter and Facebook enabling members to easily update all social media networks with one click directly from their MerchantCircle account.
Next time you post a blog, create a coupon, upload photos or send out a newsletter, we'll publish that information to your Twitter and Facebook accounts for all your followers and fans. It will also show up on our own MerchantCircle Facebook and Twitter feeds as well for added exposure. When you put in the work, we'll make sure that content lives on other popular social media channels where your customers and potential customers are listening.
MerchantCircle members can simply go to the "My account," "settings," "Twitter and Facebook" and easily link your accounts with one click.
Visit our YouTube channel to learn how you can leverage this new platform: http://www.youtube.com/user/MerchantCircle#p/c/0A2A5D8D0CCD83AB/0/dCgFXnSwANY
Labels: Facebook, MerchantCircle, Social Media, Twitter
Thursday, October 15, 2009
An online survey, recently conducted by Internet2Go, through MerchantCircle's most engaged merchants (having created blogs, uploaded pictures, built coupons, newsletters, etc.) - using a sample size of less than 5% - showed some very interesting results on how quickly small businesses are adapting social media.
Granted, the merchants surveyed are already predisposed to our network, we believe the survey shows that merchants are rapidly beginning to understand and embrace social media like MerchantCircle, Facebook, and Twitter.
"We believe the behavior exhibited by these small business owners is a pre-cursor of things to come – that small business owners will increasingly forgo expensive advertising options and embrace publishing their unique content across various social media outlets," said Darren Waddell vice president and MerchantCircle. "While MerchantCircle typically focuses on helping businesses get online for the first time, we are excited to be an important part of the social media strategies employed by this new segment of merchants."
Other survey findings include the following:
- 79% of respondents report annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000 per year with the 44% spending "less than $1,000" annually on advertising and marketing
- 80% of respondents have four or fewer employees
- Asked about their "biggest complaint" regarding online marketing the top two were "too costly" (26%) and "there's not enough time to do it well and still run a business" (15.9%)
- 75% said they monitor online reviews of their business. The most common method was by visiting specific review websites (47%) and by searching on their business name (44%)
- Despite its enormous popularity social media showed the biggest gap between SMB adoption and perceived effectiveness as a marketing platform.
You can read the entire press release here.
Sincerely,
Community Relations
Labels: Facebook, Merchant Circle, MerchantCircle, MerchantCircle.com, Small Business, Social Media, Twitter
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Josh Catone from Mashable, "the social media guide" website, wrote a nice piece today titled: "Smarter Food: How Social Media is Making Our Cities Tastier".
The article highlights how merchants use social mediums to market and how consumers are using the technology available to them to access this information.
Promotion, of course, is one of the main reasons food merchants are using social media. In addition to helping restaurants connect with current customers in new and more personal ways, social media also allows restaurants to better connect with new customers. By making their establishments more easily discovered, food vendors can use the web to grow their business. Local guides like MerchantCircle.com, Judy’s Book, and even Google Maps make restaurants easier to find and allow business owners to advertise directly to their most likely customers: hungry people searching the web for food.
From directories, to social networks, to phone apps, you can find a lot of good information in the article. Here at MerchantCircle, we have products that will get you onto all of the networks.
Click here to find out more.
Get listed on all the sites below!
Sincerely,
Community Relations
Labels: business, Josh Catone, Mashable, Merchant Circle, MerchantCircle, MerchantCircle.com, Social Media, social networks
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The website, American Drycleaner, recently released a survey of social media usage among drycleaners. They found that 52% of their respondents used social media, while 48% did not. Of those who responded:
- 76.9% used Facebook on behalf of their businesses
- 46.2% used LinkedIn
- 46.2% used Twitter
- 7.7% used MerchantCircle
There are also some other interesting stats in the article, but the Editor of American Drycleaner writes: the "survey presents a snapshot of readers' viewpoints at a particular moment, it should not be considered scientific."
Still, the results show there is a lot of growth for social media usage amongst our nation's local drycleaners and the local business owners that they represent. Click here to see the study results.
Sincerely,
Community Relations
Labels: American Drycleaner, Merchant Circle, MerchantCircle, MerchantCircle.com, Social Media, Survey
