social networking | The MarketFarm

Social media marketing: Where to start

Most business owners rightly feel they have better things to do than play around with social media.

At the same time, it’s not an exaggeration to say social media has revolutionized marketing. It allows any business to engage in “content marketing” – essentially developing its own audience at little or no cost, and engaging with them to drive interest in sales. To ignore this is to ignore the behavior of your customers and prospects.

But with so many social media outlets, it’s often hard to know where to get started or what to do next.

Every social media site has its own peculiarities and best practices. Learning the nuances of each, takes a certain amount of time and commitment. So I recommend getting involved in one platform at a time. Start with Facebook, for instance, and work it until you’re comfortable about how it adds value. Only then should you look to add another platform.

At the same time, understand that social media outlets are like ingredients in a sandwich. A piece of ham tastes good, but it’s not lunch until you put it between slices of bread and add tomato, cheese and mustard. With social media, you may need to layer 3 or 4 different sites before you have a program that actually drives revenue to your business.

As an example, most of my social media clients combined Facebook and Twitter – and in some cases a third relevant site – before they gained traction at building audience.

Here is a basic overview of the major social media outlets and what each one brings to your marketing. All are trying to find services you’ll pay for, but they can still be used effectively for free.

Facebook

What it’s for: The foundation of any social media marketing – particularly if your products/services are targeted to a consumer audience. Use it to aggregate an audience of people who are interested in what you sell or do.

Strengths: A billion users. Easy and low-cost advertising. Integrates with many other prominent social media outlets (i.e., when you post on Twitter, for example, it’s easy to have the Tweet automatically post to Facebook as well). Finally, the best adoption in mobile computing – allowing you to easily capitalize on the astoundingly fast migration to mobile devices.

Weaknesses: Constantly changing. Noisy, commercial and often unpleasant to use. Takes commitment to feed it with content.

Nuance: Don’t use your personal page for business. Set up a business page; you’ll look more professional and once you have 30 “likes” it provides you with valuable data to improve your marketing – still for free.

LinkedIn

What it’s for: Social media networking specifically for business. If your products/services are targeted to a business audience, start here instead of Facebook.

Strengths: Many ways to find and engage relevant audience.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with other social media. It’s also become so rich with features that it is becoming difficult to use. Further, some of the best features are now reserved for paid users.

Nuance: Despite the negatives, it’s still the largest and most robust business-to-business networking tool available. You’ll want both a personal page and a business page.

Twitter

What it’s for: Broadcasting headlines. Use it to let people know you have new content to share – whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, your own website or anywhere else.

Strengths: The accepted standard for deploying brief messages. Also strong on mobile platforms.

Weaknesses: Low signal-to-noise ratio. You need a lot of followers here to count on your messages being seen.

Nuance: Because Tweets are so brief, you’ll want to shorten any website links that you broadcast with a free utility like tinyurl.com, bitly.com or goo.gl. Also, the fastest way to gain an audience is to automatically follow anyone who follows you. There are a number of tools that help with this, such as TwitterAutoFollowback (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) or Twollow.

YouTube

What it’s for: Everything video. If you’re going to use video, then you want to use YouTube. Even if a video is posted on your website, you should put a copy of it on YouTube as well for the visibility in search.

Strengths: The accepted standard for all things video.

Weaknesses: It’s not much good for anything else.

Nuance: If you’re going to post multiple videos, create a channel for your business and promote it on your website, other social media sites and in your marketing materials.

Slideshare

What it’s for: Posting presentations of all kinds. It’s owned by LinkedIn and integrates well with it.

Strengths: Easy to use and well-known in business-to-business environmenbts.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with sites other than LinkedIn.

Nuance: Load it up with whatever presentations you have – technical materials, sales presentations, workshops and anything else you do. It’s surprising how much time people spend browsing through presentations once they’ve found the one they’re looking for. Also, upload presentations as PDFs to assure broadest accessibility to your information.

Google+

What it’s for: Even social media experts will tell you that they don’t really know what Google+ is best at. It’s intended as Google’s answer to Facebook. It is often appreciated for being less commercial and crowded than Facebook, but if you’re beginning a social media program, that can be a disadvantage. Facebook may be noisy, but it has tools designed to make marketing easy. Success on Google+ demands more sophistication in social media marketing.

Strengths: Google’s most powerful attribute is search, and the promise is that anything you post using Google+ will be easier to find on the world’s best-used search engine.

Weaknesses: No sense of place. Facebook is a destination. Google+ is a concept.

Pinterest

What it’s for: Creating online bulletin boards filled with images. If your product or service is visually oriented, use Pinterest to create relevant collections of photos and show them to your audience.

Strengths: Easy to use and integrates well with other sites. So you can feed content to Pinterest and have it automatically post to Facebook and Twitter.

Weaknesses: Typically viewed as a site for women, though that reputation is fading.

Nuance: Pinterest is a social platform in itself, and it wants you to gather followers. But you can use it to organize and display photos while focusing your “audience development” efforts on Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram

What it’s for: Very much like Pinterest. But it originated as a photo-enhancement app for smart phones and it maintains that heritage today. While Pinterest is about organizing collections of images, Instagram is more about taking, dressing up and sharing photos (and now, short videos).

Strengths: Integrates with other social media.

Weaknesses: How many different ways do you really need to take a picture or video?

Foursquare

What it’s for: Geographic social media; people check in to places they visit. By encouraging people to check in, you create visibility on the Foursquare network.

Strengths: Creates attention to storefront businesses that rely on heavy traffic.

Weaknesses: Not much buzz about it these days.

There are plenty more social media platforms, but if you’re not already deep into social media, don’t go beyond what’s contained here. Pick an appropriate place to start and then get comfortable using it.

Social media doesn’t have to take over your life, but if you want people to know about your business, it should be at least a regular part of it.

First things first: What game are you playing?

Strategy before execution. This should be simple.

But it’s human nature to jump right into doing stuff before sweating out the big questions.

For example, a couple prospective clients have put off small, closed-ended projects that I proposed to help them align operating strategy and marketing. This in turn would help them answer such daunting digital communications questions as how to deal with social media, and what capabilities does the website need to offer?

It’s my suspicion that what they’ll really learn is the organization doesn’t actually have a unifying operating strategy. But in both cases, the reason given for delaying the little strategy project is that they first have to devote all their attention to the big website project.

I understand that building a new website is daunting. But it’s even harder if you don’t know what purpose the new website is supposed to serve. It’s like getting ready to knock the ball in the hole without knowing whether you’re playing billiards or golf.

That’s why strategy always needs to come before execution. Strategy tells you what you’re trying to do. The website will help you do it. But only if you tackle them in the right order.

Image courtesy of James Barker/Freedigitalphotos.net

Playing the Twitter shellgame

I’m not giving up on Twitter. Yet. There are still a handful of people whose Tweets are interesting and useful to me.

But it’s a stupid game.

It has nothing to do with how much you have to say or how often you say it. It has everything to do with how many people you follow. I recently attended a webcast on how to build a social network on Twitter. The basic advice: follow a lot of people and they’ll follow you back. And if they don’t follow you back, unfollow them.

The rest of the session was inside ball: what rules Twitter uses to prevent such inanity and how to get around them (wait 24 hours before unfollowing anyone); how to identify non-followers quickly using Twitter’s minimalist interface (if you don’t have a direct-message option next to their name, they aren’t following you); and which tools you can use (Hummingbird, $197.00) to automatically follow people and then unfollow them if they fail to reciprocate.

By using this advice (not the software; just the advice) I tripled the number of people following me (from about 100 people after 4 months of thoughtful tweeting to 300 people after another day and just one tweet). Time spent in the effort: 15 minutes.

The etiquette at Twitter is simple: Someone follows you, you follow them back. And vice versa.

How this does anyone any good is beyond me; it assures that you have an audience of people who don’t give a wit about anything you have to say. And vice versa.

To prove the point, I just got a follow from someone whose list of followers and followees at this moment is in the range of 34,000. She has 14 tweets since May (4 months).

Fourteen? Really? That’s 1,960 characters, which isn’t even a respectable dependent clause to William Faulkner. That’s like 17 followers per word. If Jesus had a ratio like that, would Islam even exist?

When in history have so many people lined up to listen to so many people with so little to say?

In a world of SEO, does content matter?

Well, yes. If you have bad content then it doesn’t matter how many people come to see it. Consider this visual from Mark Smiciklas.

Wait, it’s worse than that. If you have bad content, then the more people who see it, the worse off you are. Because now you’re simply broadcasting the fact that you suck.

I would argue you’re better off with great content that only a few people see — because at least those few people will have good things to say about you.

About 10 years ago, I was involved in a magazine that was all about business-to-business commerce. Our readers were intently trying to build e-commerce platforms that would increase the velocity of their business; our advertisers were trying to sell them 7-figure solutions to do so. But the discipline was in its frontier days, and much of what they were doing was first-generation inadequate.

The problem wasn’t that the e-commerce systems failed. It’s that everything else was built for a slower world. Warehouses weren’t organized well enough to handle the high-speed demands of e-commerce. Inventory wasn’t well-enough planned to keep fast-moving items in stock. Shipping contracts didn’t include the kind of pick-up and delivery guarantees that e-commerce requires.

Companies could take the orders with lightning speed, but then the old, slow processes took over.

Which resulted in what became known (at least in my own head) as Rosenbaum’s Law: Enabling e-commerce at a company with bad processes merely makes those bad processes apparent at a much higher speed to a much larger number of people.

The point: Make sure you have something intelligent and/or compelling to say.

Then communicate it.

Then — and only then — promote the heck out of it.

Even low-cost social media campaigns need to be measured

There is an entire industry of consultants that didn’t exist three years ago, telling people how to collect thousands of followers on Twitter; how to gain friends and fans on Facebook; and how to leverage large networks on LinkedIn. These consultants are writing books, conducting web-seminars and selling services.

The thing that gets too little attention is what all this is worth? Sure, you can grab a small nation’s worth of Twitter followers, but will it make you any money if they aren’t paying attention to your Tweets?

So it was refreshing to stumble across a new series or articles in Computerworld on How to measure the ROI of social media.

It would be nice if there were a few key metrics and some nice neat formulas you could follow, but social media is evolving too quickly and the measurements aren’t that simple.

In the end, if you want to know whether your time with social media is well spent, you need to do the following:

Set a meaningful goal. Is the purpose of your social media outreach simply to gain followers? Then you’ll have an easy time measuring, and a hard time proving that the effort was worthwhile. Instead, set a more specific goal, like this: To generate sales of $XXX (or X number of sales transactions) from members of our social media network.

That way, you’ll not only have a pass/fail measurement, you’ll learn something important along the way: i.e., how many new connections it takes to achieve a sale.

Assign specific tasks. If more than one person is going to be involved in the social media effort, make sure that each person knows his or her specific role. For instance, one person might conduct the outbound communications while another works to convert inbound communications into leads, and still another works to close sales.

This way, the entire job will get done — not just the fun part of blogging and tweeting. Further, when things don’t go perfectly (they won’t), you’ll have a team of experts who can figure out what adjustments to make.

Track everything. Time is money. So while social media programs are astonishingly inexpensive in terms of hard cost, you’ll want to know how much of each day your team members are spending on social media vs. their other responsibilities.

If you do these three things, then measuring gets easy. If you have goals, an organized work effort and good data, determining whether your resources are well-spent will be easy. Just like the example of Reality Digital, also from Computerworld.

Is social networking a fad? Figure it out in 4:22

Courtesy of Socionomics.com