What you need to know about Social Media
How does social media marketing work?
I am hearing loads about marketing via Twitter and Facebook… because that’s where real people hang out! So do you have any tips or guidelines on Social Media Marketing?
7 Ways to Make Your Social Media Marketing More Effective
Since integrating social media into your marketing mix helps expand your reach, increase sales, and build your fan base, it’s important to maximize your social media marketing’s efficiency. Here are seven tactics to help achieve this:
Include a call to action. Once you have your prospect’s attention, what do you want them to do next? While every marketer will say buy, consider where you are in building your relationship and where the potential customer is in terms of her purchase process. Traditionally, direct marketers focus on purchase-related calls to action; with social media, calls to action can comprise a broader array of options such as likes, social sharing, comments, reviews, and RSS feeds. To improve tracking, especially for price deals, include a promotional code that’s associated with the original media source. Even though today’s consumers are more likely to share offers with broader audiences, you can still determine which source initiated the sale.
Provide at least one response channel for participants. This channel should encourage participants to take an action that leads toward greater engagement with your firm. Think broadly in terms of likes, follows, check-ins, and RSS feeds. Also provide an alternative where they can reach a form of customer service such as old-fashioned phone calls, e-mail, and chat. (Here are more options for customer service via social media.) It’s critical to make sure that you’re staffed to respond to these inquiries, since they come from interested prospects.
Include post-interaction marketing. Because the purchase process may take time, it’s important to stay top of mind with prospects. This is especially true in the current environment where the purchase process takes longer and is more social. You need to have on-going communications and interactions to convert prospects into customers. Ideally, this should continue beyond the actual purchase.
Audience. Are you reaching your target audience in terms of prospects, customers, influencers, and the general public? In terms of earned media, how has your reach been extended through the use of social media marketing?
Interactions. Track these in terms of views, shares across social networks, likes, and comments. Have they increased with the use of the calls to action and promotional codes?
Brand perception. How has sentiment towards your brand changed as a result of your social media marketing? How does this relate to intent to purchase? If it isn’t positive, what can you do to improve it?
Expenses. Calculate expenses in terms of marketing executions, creative, technology, and head count. Remember, social media costs more than you think, so include the hidden cost factors as well.
Sales. Track sales related to specific calls to action and promotional codes as well as social media’s contribution to brand favorability, prospect acquisition, and post-sale retention.
While it’s important to be where your target audience is, social media platforms can be a double-edged sword. You and your fans can promote your offering while new options are introduced that may sway consumers towards other options. Therefore, you must incorporate social media marketing into your overall marketing plan, include ways to make it more effective, and track results.
How can I incorporate social media into my small business marketing effort?
What are some ways to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to spread the word about my business?
Great question! Social Media falls into a larger umbrella called “Inbound Marketing.” Traditionally marketing would be 1) cold calls/ telemarketing 2) print marketing such as magazines or newspapers 3) radio advertising 4) TV advertising 5) outdoor advertising. The before mentioned techniques would be labelled as “Outbound Marketing.”
50 years ago companies like P&G, McDonald’s, and Pfizer built their brand with these techniques. The problem with outbound marketing today is: consumers have DVRs so they do not watch TV commercials; consumers have iPods so I don’t listen to the radio; consumers subscriptions rates to magazines and newspapers are near extinction; and consumers have learned to ignore “interruption marketing” such as telemarketing through services like caller ID.
Newer companies within the last 10 years such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have used Inbound Marketing. Using social media will give you leverage to compete with bigger brands and with bigger budgets. Here is how:
Create Profiles on Social Media Sites: Although there are many social network sites it is best to get your feet wet on 1) Facebook 2) Twitter and 3) LinkedIn.
Facebook:
Create a Fan Page for your business. Click on this link http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the setup instructions.
Twitter:
Create an account by navigating to https://twitter.com/signup. Follow the instructions to setup your account.
LinkedIn:
Create a personal account and a company page. To create a personal account go to https://www.linkedin.com/secure/register?trk=hb_join and enter in the appropriate fields. To create a company page make sure you have your personal account created and verified and then click on this link http://www.linkedin.com/companies?didentcompy=.
What’s Next
In general listen. See what your target audience is talking about, and then after you understand add value by sharing your thoughts. Below are a few specific examples:
Twitter:
You have 140 characters. Be short and link back to more information on your website or blog. By linking back to your website you create traffic and allow your site to be indexed by search engines. Both are good.
Facebook:
Pose questions. Share resources that your target audience would find of value. Think of your Facebook Fan Page like a forum.
LinkedIn:
Answer questions posted by your target audience. This will give you “expertise” which is rewarded with green stars in the category your answer was selected as the best answer. Link your blog to your company page. By adding your blog to your company page your LinkedIn page will share your latest blog post with the professional community.
How to manage multiple social media accounts?
Are there any useful tools/programs/websites for managing and streamlining all social media accounts (like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, etc.) in ONE place? For instance, I can’t imagine a company or business logs into each individual account in order to manage them .
http://swimwire.com/
Your single Swimwire page can list and link all your online profiles, making it easier to stay connected. Your free profile can automatically connect with sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to bringing all your social networks together to one place. Help people find you, anytime, anywhere, online. Connect with your friends and make new ones in a vibrant community.
http://frid.ge/
Fridge enables anyone to instantly create simple and private social networks to share photos, messages, and events with friends and groups.
http://ping.fm/
Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.
Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.
http://www.trigga.me/
Organize all your social networks in groups
Keep track of your friends updates and replies from different sources
Safe storage of your passwords
http://www.familytic.com/
Familytic is a social family data aggregator that helps you to gather all your family’s photos, videos, status updates and more from social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and streams them to your own family social network.
http://www.socioclean.com/
Take Control: Help manage online profile with advanced monitoring.
Maintain Social Reputation: Drive self-governance with growing social networks.
Expand User Experience: Single portal management for various social networks.
http://www.yiid.com/
Build a profile of all your communities: Connect all your networks to one single super-profile
Discover networks of your friends: Share your networks with your friends and see what networks they use
Manage your online identity: Keep an eye on all your data in your networks and use yiid to log in everywhere
http://www.meevr.com/
Meevr is a social networking aggregator allowing you to pull your favorite social profiles into one place. Users can interact with each other via the Meevr answers platform.
http://www.whoopaa.com/
A new open and social platform to connect, integrate and manage your social networks, friends and business relationships.
www.vinehub.com/
Vinehub is a new application being developed to connect all of your accounts on major social network including Facebook, Google Buzz and Twitter.
www.kazle.com/
Kazle is a social multi-tasking. to update, view, edit and aggregate all your social networks, blogs and gaming platforms from one place.
http://yoono.com/
STAY CONNECTED: Connect to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, AIM and more… in one place.
STATUS SYNC: Update your status across all your services at once.
EASY SHARING: Share links, images & videos across all your networks.
REAL-TIME UPDATES: Get all your friend updates wherever you are on the web.
www.myweboo.com/
Manage your files located on web services, social networks, and computer systems in one place. Works with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, GoogleDoc, and many other places.
www.webwalks.com/
Now enjoy all social network and mails in one place/interface. It support Facebook, yahoo, orkut, gmail, myspace, hotmail, rediffmail, aol, linkedin, twitter and many more to go on our list
www.fav20.com/
Fav 2.0 is a modern way to use your most visited websites. Set it as homepage and add your most visited sites.
Source – Yahoo answers
