LEARN HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA. series

Transcription

1 LEARN HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA series

2 FACEBOOK? TWITTER? BLOGS? Will a huge fan base on Facebook enhance your brand image? Will posting videos on YouTube turn leads into sales? Does the potential for negative feedback deter your business from having a public conversation? Social media brings power to the people. It turns marketing on its head. Rather than being a one-to-many broadcast, your interactions with customers can become conversations and your customers can become your best sales tool. The University of Maryland s Smith School of Business looked at the relationship between social media and small businesses and found that the technology adoption rates in the U.S. have doubled in the past year from 12 to 24 percent 1. Nearly one in five small business owners are using social media in their business with the hopes of identifying and attracting new customers, building brand awareness and staying engaged with customers. The small business owners who are using social media are primarily engaging in it through company pages (75 percent) and status updates (69 percent) on Facebook or LinkedIn. Yet only 16 percent are using Twitter as a customer service channel. IT S TIME TO EMBRACE SOCIAL MEDIA There are many reasons to engage in social media. Small business owners, including many of your peers, are relying on it for fostering new relationships with customers and vendors; leveling the competitive playing field; providing direct access to consumers; and managing their reputation. And the potential audience and reach is staggering. Think about this: It wasn t until 1997 that the Internet reached 50 million users in the United States. Facebook gained over 100 million users in the U.S. from January 2009 to January 2010, marking a 145 percent growth rate within one year, according to research by digital marketing agency istrategy Labs 2. But perhaps the most compelling reason is the cost it s free! You can be a significant player online without spending any money except your investment of time. And since it s still so early in working with this new medium, opportunities are wide open to be a leader in your particular market segment. Check it out. Sign up for Twitter or Facebook and see what if anything, your competition is doing. Chances are you have a very good shot at being seen as a real leader or innovator. You have the opportunity to carve out a segment of your market through the creative use of social media. Most common Social Media Platforms 1 Small Business Success Index (SBSI), sponsored by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland s Smith School of Business, February

3 A few of the most common social media platforms to explore and consider are blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. These will surely continue to evolve, but getting started on one or more of these is a safe bet. But, don t think of social media as just another broadcast channel but rather as a way to listen, to talk, and ultimately to sell. It s important to have a clear strategy and to employ the right tools for the right targets. LinkedIn may be a great way to recruit and keep up with professional partners while Twitter may be the best avenue to quickly offer a product discount for an upcoming week. Starting and maintaining a blog can be a great way to build customer loyalty. Your effort should not be all about sales, but rather a way to create real fans that will do word of mouth marketing for you. Harnessing the power of true fans that will defend your reputation and promote your product and will drown out any cranks and naysayers over time. It may seem a bit overwhelming, but the following steps and tools will help you figure it out. SIX STEPS TO SUCCESS Step One Listen...and Respond. One of the first things you should do is listen to what is already being said about you. Are there already Facebook pages set up by others in the company or by your fans? Are people tweeting about your company or your products? Is it positive? It may be difficult to hear if customers have negative things to say, but it s a real opportunity to engage with them, fix the problem and ultimately create an evangelist for your brand. Taking the time to understand their issues will go a long way in providing that authenticity and dialogue that successful social marketers embrace. Free websites with tools that help you navigate the social media landscape If you find blog postings about your industry, take the time to comment. You ll start to build that share of voice that s so important in reaching online audiences. 3

4 There are a variety of free tools to help you monitor the social media landscape. They include: Technorati, Google Blog Search and Twingly for blog specific searches Twitter search and tweetscan for Twitter monitoring Google Insights and Google Trends for all over web searches SocialMention, StepRep and Filtrbox are aggregator tools Test them out and decide which ones are right for you. Step Two Understand your goals. A regional donut and coffee shop decided to put most of their marketing efforts into social media. They knew they couldn t compete with the big guys in a traditional sense, so they spent their energies building word of mouth through Facebook and Twitter. Because of their local community involvement, not to mention great donuts, they realized they had a small but very loyal customer base and wanted to make the most of that. Because of the combination of interesting local tidbits, donut specials, fun contests and other creative posts and tweets, they built a huge following. Knowing what your end goal is whether it s getting those loyal customers to sing your praises or recruiting the right talent will help you focus your efforts on the right platforms for you. Step Three Understand your audience. Once you know what you want to achieve through your efforts, you have to identify the audience you are targeting. What sites are they on? With over 300 million users on Facebook, you ll have to narrow your focus. Once you know their demographic make-up, a little research on the more popular social media services will show you which sites are best to reach that group. If you choose Facebook, you can search groups that are relevant and begin there. Select a few active ones to join. This will get you involved in participating in conversations with people that hopefully care about your product or service. Twitter conversations aren t as easily segmented by topic as they are on Facebook. Choosing who to follow on Twitter will take more research. Services such as twellow.com can help us find people by categories. You should also look into industry-related associations and related groups that may be communicating about a related topic through the use of a Twitter hashtag such as #Trekbike. It s important to remember that people will only follow you back if you have something worthwhile to say, so be sure to some worthwhile tweets keep it Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are great starting points 4

5 human. If you offer interesting insights and links that might intrigue members of your audience and respond to questions within your areas of expertise you ll forge far stronger connections than you would if you treated your Twitter stream as an advertising platform. If you want to reach your existing customers and keep them informed, create a blog. This is a simple way to provide updates, commentary and insights to a ready-made audience. The biggest challenge with blogs is keeping them current. Regular postings are important to build that following. You can even link to your blog through your Facebook and Twitter posts. Step Four Decide on your platform(s) and use them. Unless you have unlimited resources, it s probably best to focus on one or two sites and do those right. The most common, well-known sites are: But this is really just a starting point. Depending on your industry, you may find other sites more suited to your needs. For example, ResearchGATE is a community for researchers in the science and technology fields. Whichever ones you choose, take the time to get familiar with them. It may seem complicated at first, but in no time you ll be an expert user. It just takes practice. Step Five Determine your online personality. Flickr, LinkedIn and Blogger are other good social sites for your business It should reflect your brand and be very true to who your company is. Marketing speak won t work here. It s all about being authentic - being too scrubbed will backfire. Transparency is important and anything that looks too pure will arouse suspicions. Keep the following tips in mind. Make your posts about benefits. Make the customer feel that they need to participate in the promotion. Is the product or feature available for a limited time? Are you offering exclusively to your followers on a particular network? Talk about new or interesting features. Even if you have a relatively popular product, there may be some things consumers don t know about it. What are some new or different ways it can be used? Include some discounts and savings. Offering discounts on products is usually a shoe-in to grab customers attention. 5

6 Step Six Execute! Now is the time to make it happen. Devote a little time every day, maybe the first half hour of your morning, to monitor, respond and post. It may take longer at first, but once you get into a groove, it really shouldn t take you any more time than this. Be sure to multi-purpose the information you are sharing, so that you don t constantly need to create new things to say. If you re a local bike shop, for instance, tweet about the new bike that just came in. Then post a picture of it on Facebook. Then ask fans to post a picture with them riding that bike. Or if you are sponsoring the local charity race, you can post pictures of the event. You get it. There are an incredible amount of resources to get more information from. Here are a few that you may find useful: Mashable: the best guide to the changing world of social media and something you must add to your media diet MuckRack: the best way to find and follow journalists by beat, by news organization LifeHacker: lots of tips on using technology in smarter ways ReadWriteWeb: another good way to keep your pulse on the changing web landscape Valuable resources to help you keep up with new trends and technology The biggest barriers to better social media engagement for companies is the lack of resources (54 percent) and the lack of knowledge or understanding (50 percent) 3. Now you can t let that stop you! 3 Econsultancy s Social Media and Online PR Report, carried out in association with bigmouthmedia, November