By Jackie Eldridge
Great question! It’s the hottest buzz in business today, changing the way we communicate while enabling us to build and maintain relationships with friends, family, colleagues, existing and potential customers. It’s also the newest trend in business marketing—a proven branding weapon as well as a customer loyalty and traffic builder.
Most businesses realize they need to participate in social media, but don’t quite understand how Twitter, Facebook and the myriad of other platforms can increase their visibility and revenue. Nor do they know how to initiate and maintain a social media marketing effort. Should they outsource the initiative, assign it to a staff member or make a new hire to manage social media efforts?
The free use of the social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to name a few, contributes to the intrigue of social media marketing. If it’s free, then why not give it a try? What’s there to lose? Sounds fairly easy, right? Quite the contrary! Free is a relative term. True, most social networks are free in terms of a platform, but there are costs involved in maintaining them in a manner that ensures your efforts will engage your audience appropriately. Entering the social media realm without a strategy and a talented designated driver could cause more harm than one might fathom. The Reader’s Digest version of why use social media marketing is to establish yourself and/or your company as the expert in your industry or vertical. Launching into social media marketing without a plan could negate this goal and damage your reputation.
There’s more about social marketing to consider than you might imagine! Here are just a few of the questions to consider when creating a social media marketing strategy.
• How do we know what strategy to create? What are the guidelines? • Who will create our social media strategy?
• Will we use it for branding, information sharing, public relations, understanding customers, lead generation, internal communications, sales support or all of the above??? (By the way, branding and public relations are the top two uses, with lead generation nipping at their heels.)
• Who will post strategic messages on each network every day?
• Who will respond to comments made about our posts?
• Who is in charge of information dissemination?
• Who is in charge of creating the messaging from this information?
• Who will monitor site traffic?
• Who will determine and measure goals?
• Who will monitor the competition?
• Who will shoot our videos? Photos?
• Who will maintain our blog?
• How many networks should we have? Which ones should we use?
• Should key employees have their own networks?
• What is our employee posting policy?
• How much time should we devote to social media marketing?
• How do we keep up with trends and technology?
Whew, that is a lot to think about…and it’s just the tip of the iceberg! It can be overwhelming to consider creating your own social media network. Bottom line is that you must have a dedicated person(s) to manage your social media marketing efforts. This person needs to have an excellent grasp of your business and its objectives and goals—inside and out. Must be an excellent writer with a keen understanding of grammar (this person is representing your business and IS the online face of your business). This person must understand social media and how it works. Keep in mind that maintaining a network takes 8 to 10 hours per week, per network.
Make sense? Probably starting to. Now, let’s look at reasons (beyond free platforms) why you want to jump into the social media marketing phenomenon.
• Opportunity to connect with passionate users.
• Build and maintain relationships; establish customer loyalty by offering a personal face to customers.
• Learn what people are saying about you/your company; get feedback.
• Fully measurable metrics.
• Opportunity to experiment with different/new campaigns.
• Generate website traffic.
• Target specific audiences.
• Create niche groups to target and address.
• Ability to interact with the press.
• Save money on other marketing efforts by replacing them with social media.
• Promote products and services organically.
• Monitor trends among customers.
• Research/test new product ideas.
• Provide ways for customers to interact with your company.
• Able to share breaking news.
• Flexibility of message.
• Facebook has more than 200 million active users; more than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day. And that’s only Facebook—add Twitter with 55 million users and LinkedIn with 40 million.
• Dozens of free platforms and tools to expand your exposure and visibility.
• Create a new revenue stream.
Once you decide to take the plunge, understand you are creating new relationships with potentially millions of people, which will take time, and it’s really no different than making new friends. You have to establish your credibility and make friends via common interests. Your goal is to be seen as an expert in your industry while building relationships with existing customers and courting new ones.
If there is one secret to success with social media marketing, it’s honest, transparent communication. It’s all about having thoughtful, integrity-based conversations with others who share an interest or passion in what you have to say. And that’s contagious…pass it on!
Should you manage your social media internally, hire a new employee or outsource it?
They are all viable solutions.
You can try to manage your social media networks in house, if you have someone on your staff who understands how it works and whom you trust to be the face of your company. Some businesses are hiring staff specifically for social media management.
There’s an alternative to hiring an extra employee or stretching an existing employee’s already-compromised schedule. You can outsource your entire social media initiative to a proven and reputable digital marketing company. Typically, you are charged a one-time set-up charge plus a monthly maintenance fee. The great thing about hiring a digital marketing expert is that your social media initiative is in the hands of experts and you can focus on what you do best! It’s like having another employee who you don’t have to pay benefits to!
What should you expect from an outsourced digital marketing company?
Developing a strategy
They should create a social media strategy based upon an extensive review of your company, identifying goals and understanding your business as though they were a stakeholder. You can expect a project manager who is an expert in your vertical to manage your social media as if it were his/her own.
How your new social media network is created
They spend a day at your location to learn your business, meet key contacts, and gather company information including any written information/documents that could be used or reworked for online content.
They research and identify key social networks and online communities that will best align with your core business and social media objectives.
From this information, they create effective strategies for building and optimizing your social network profiles.
Social media networking is measurable?
They set measurable and attainable social media goals (i.e.: increase sales by x amount Q1).
They track and evaluate social media marketing progress on an ongoing basis (i.e.: comparing month by month messaging volume, interaction and sales).
Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn marketing
They employ powerful business uses for the top three social network communities, et al.
They nurture relationships and engage target audiences.
They generate website traffic by using the big three networks.
They build strategic friend networks.
They monitor groups consistently for messaging.
They build powerful profiles and target specific audiences.
Online video marketing
They conduct effective video market research.
They create a video marketing strategy based upon research to build traffic and improve search listings.
They use video sharing tools such as YouTube and other top video sharing sites via TubeMogul.
Preserving and improving your online reputation
They track, report on, engage in, enhance and analyze your online reputation.
They monitor your company, your brand, your products, your services and your key employees.
Messaging
They research key social network sites to understand your competition’s social media posture.
They implement an effective web content strategy–what message do you want to convey and how to convey it for maximum exposure? Where do you post it? And when?
Their professional copywriters represent your business by posting appropriate written conversations online to achieve your marketing objectives.
They use tracking tools for reporting and evaluating social media content distribution.
They engage in SMO (social media optimization) to garner more traffic.
They conduct ongoing research and tracking in your blogs and social networking sites to ensure your messaging is on target and objectives are being met.
They can engage in additional peripheral online opportunities such as forums, wikis, communities, and groups on an ala cart basis to promote your business.
Integrity must be their mantra for all online conversations, as their reputation is only as credible as the online reputation they build for you.
Sold on social media marketing? Final thoughts
Social media for business owners and managers is a little bit like learning a new language. Basically, it’s all about having conversations in dozens of online stops such as blogs, wikis, forums, discussions and news groups, etc. These conversations can be about anything and everything—from your dog’s birthday to where to get the best sushi and everything in between. The availability of these conversations has changed the way consumers think; they’d rather have a conversation than be marketed to. They want to have a voice too. Expressing their thoughts, opinions, recommendations and complaints is very important to them, as well as to you, the marketer. The better you know and understand your market, the better you can market to them.
Engaging in social media is similar to online “word of mouth.” We begin word of mouth communication by joining an existing group or creating our own group, or micro-community, that shares similar beliefs, ideas, practices, values, etc. By building relationships within these communities, we establish ourselves as experts in our industries. This is the ultimate goal for marketers to achieve—to transparently blend in with consumers based upon shared values, creating a positive relationship.
The most important aspect of online communication is simply being authentic. Don’t worry. It will take some time for you to earn credibility with others—just be real in your conversations or you could get the Wal-Mart curse! (Wal-Mart staged a cross-country motor home trip by an older couple who stopped at every Wal-Mart and blogged about each stop. The couple posted fake photos and fabricated stories at each stop to make Wal-Marts across the land seem like the Disneyland of retailers. Wal-Mart employees caught on to the scam and the couple ended their trip. And Wal-Mart ended their credibility.)
Remember the secret to social media success…you can control an online conversation by talking communicating in an honest, transparent, conversational way. For more information on how we can manage your social media initiative, call Holly Sanger at R and R Images Digital Marketing at 602.437.4545.
Posted by R and R Images 
