Is Social Media Just Hype Or a New Marketing Medium?
You’ve heard the term but do you understand what it is? You’ve seen your friends and your kids interacting on Facebook and maybe you even have a Linkedin.com account. But, you aren’t sure what Social Media is and you don’t have the time to delve into it and learn from the ground up.
You are like many other business owners that are too busy running their business to take a side-step into learning about Social Media. My question to you is, “Have you taken the time to learn about television advertising, radio advertising or newspaper advertising?†While these other forms of advertising can be effective in hitting a mass audience, Social Media gets down to a granular, individual level. If you’ve taken the time to learn about traditional media, you also need to take the time to learn about this new phenomenon. Social media can be a very significant component of your advertising and marketing program. As, or more significant that your other traditional forms of advertising because you are having a conversation directly with your customers.
Social Media is about having conversations with your customers. It’s also about listening in on conversations customers are having with your competitors. In its most basic form, social media is about internet networks that allow users to share opinions, rank businesses or services and share ideas all in a very public forum. Your customers are talking about you and your business right now. They’re also talking about your service or lack of it.
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Depending on the kinds and tone of the conversations about your business, social media can either drive more people to your brick and mortar locations or to your online presence or it can quickly shut you down. Once you know what people are saying about your business, you can leverage your response to either multiply the good feedback or to resolve any bad public relations issues.
As with any kind of marketing or advertising, a business owner should have a goal or a well planned strategy in place. The basic goal of a business in a social media strategy is to actually become a part of the conversation. Once you become part of the conversation you can learn from the people that use your products or services. You can also address any problems or concerns your customers have with you. During the conversation, you can promote your brand and positively influence what your customers and potential customers are saying about you.
So where do you start? Like any conversation that you want to join, you need to start by listening. There are a number of free tools you can use to do this. For example:
- Google – use Google alerts to be notified anytime someone uses your brand name or business name in a blog posting or on a news site. Google also returns information about your brand or business from across the web into a daily email.
- Addictomatic – Addictomatic searches the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images for all mentions of your keyword or brand.
- Twitter – If you’re just interested in monitoring Twitter.com you should look at TweetDeck, HootSuite, TweetGrid, or Monitter. These sites will give you tools that track multiple hashtags/keywords being used on Twitter.com
Once you start listening to the conversation, you will find out how customers are using your products, what they thought about the last interaction they had with your employees and they’ll even tell you about how they want to be sold. You’ll find out how they interact with your brand. You’ll find out if your brand concept is actually what is being perceived by your audience.
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You’ll start to see patterns and groups. The groups will fall naturally into advocates and adversaries. You’ll see commonalities in both groups and then you can address them specifically. You can reinforce what the advocates are saying about you and you can address the concerns of the adversaries. If there is a large enough ‘pattern’ in negative feedback, you’ll need to look at your product, customer service or processes to fix what is irritating your customers.
What Social Media tools should I be using?
My suggestion to most businesses is to start with the main social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube.
- Facebook – FB has now surpassed 500 million users. It is ranked as the number 2 website in the U.S. and its fastest growing demo is 35+. You can create a fan page about your business and once you have 50 fans you can claim an exclusive page for your business. For example, one of my fan pages is: http://www.facebook.com/arizonatourism. If you look at the page, you’ll notice it has a branded look and feel. I recommend that you at least create the fan page and your own custom look and feel.
- Twitter – Twitter allows users 140-character posts. These posts can include keyword hash tags (#) which define trending topics and it allows you to respond directly (@) to other tweets. Twitter has over 18 million users in the U.S. You can also snyc your Linkedin and Facebook accounts to feature your latest tweets.
- Linkedin – Think of this as a ‘business’ Facebook. More than 50 million business owners and professionals are members with profiles that include resumes and other business information. Linkedin members network to find job and business leads as well as joint ventures. In addition, users find LinkedIn a good way to connect with past employers/employees and with new contacts in your field. You can also sync your Twitter posts and WordPress blogs to show you on your LinkedIn profile page.
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The best thing you can do with social media is get started. Understand the basics and move forward. There are many workshops and seminars offered…you might want to attend to learn more. Ask your agency or media professionals to walk you through how to set up your accounts the right way. Or, you can give us a call. We’d be happy to help.
Next we look at location based advertising followed by ROI in using Social Media.
