Social media has been around since the beginning of time. Whether its two people talking about where the biggest bears are, where the best dresses can be bought on Bond Street, or chatting around the water cooler about the best tablet computer, word of mouth has always been one of the best ways to sell things.
It turns out your customers know one another and talk all the time. If they find out about a great product or service they tend to share it with one another. Social media marketing is the art of getting people to talk about you, your business and what you sell.
User driven websites can be massively effective marketing tools from a variety of perspectives:
- If you understand the kind of customers your products and services serve, you can find them online. If you truly have the right offering for that set of people, your messages will be welcomed. For example, veterinarians who post on sites where the owners of aging dogs talk about their pets are rarely, if ever, accused of “Spam”. When each post can contain a link back to a website or a domain name, social media sites are one of the best, cheapest and most targeted marketing solutions ever.
- Most social media sites have very high PageRank on Google. Several hundred social media posts pointing to your website can quickly push it to the top of Google for one or more related search terms. Since 40% of all Google users click the first link on Google, and more than 90% of all searchers click a link on the first page of a Google search, getting listed on the first page for your search terms is important to your business.
- Unlike marketing products and services through ads which require payment per ad, and sometimes even payment per click, social media marketing can become self propagating. Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore didn’t have to market his product through social media sites. His fans, and those who intensely disliked his film, did it for him.
If you understand the kind of customers your products and services serve, you can find them online. If you truly have the right offering for that set of people, your messages will be welcomed. For example, veterinarians who post on sites where the owners of aging dogs talk about their pets are rarely, if ever, accused of “Spam”. When each post can contain a link back to a website or a domain name, social media sites are one of the best, cheapest and most targeted marketing solutions ever.Most social media sites have very high PageRank on Google. Several hundred social media posts pointing to your website can quickly push it to the top of Google for one or more related search terms. Since 40% of all Google users click the first link on Google, and more than 90% of all searchers click a link on the first page of a Google search, getting listed on the first page for your search terms is important to your business.Unlike marketing products and services through ads which require payment per ad, and sometimes even payment per click, social media marketing can become self propagating. Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore didn’t have to market his product through social media sites. His die-hard fans, and those who intensely disliked his film, did it for him.
Now that you understand why social media marketing is important to your business, you can begin to master the skills required to use it effectively.
Using Several Types of Social Media to Promote Your Enterprise
If you ask people to describe social media, they mention websites like Facebook or Linked in. While you can use these sites to great effect, they are not the only way to market your business. They represent just one type of social media. Social networks, which are groups of friends or business associates that join a website in order to converse with one another online, may not even be the best way for you to reach out to potential customers.
Here’s a quick review of seven types of social media with some relevant links.
- Social Networks are groups of friends or business associates that have created a community online. LinkedIn and Facebook are good examples of social networks. What matters to people on these sites is the contacts they have and those they make. Individuals using these sites talk about posts, and they can become quite offended when exposed to content they do not find personally interesting, even if it may be of interest to someone else in the group. Furthermore, social networking sites, in order to protect the network, often ban specific types of speech they consider to be “spam”. For example, Linkedin is quite restrictive about the text you can put under your name on your profile, and about pitching your products and services in their Answer section.
- Content Communities are groups of people who don’t know one another but who share an interest in a given kind of content online. Youtube, Flickr, Slideshare and Podomatic are examples of content communities. Unlike social networks, people on these sites care about media. They do not hang around on the site chatting, though they may well share what they find with friends and associates on other sites. Content posted on content communities is rarely flagged as spam.
- Wikis are group documents. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written by the world at large. Anyone can add to it and it represents the collective wisdom, or ignorance, of its writers. Wikipedia pages appear at the top of most Google searches. Creating Wikipedia pages for your products, services, and important people is a great way to create high value links to your website. Many businesses create product and service pages on the Wikipedia site, and occasionally it is reasonable to create links on pages for the products and services you sell. For example, if you sell a 3D camera, a link to your website on the Wikipedia stereo camera page.
- Social Bookmarking Sites are places where people with common interests share links. Reddit, Digg and Fark are examples. Because these websites are designed to point people to other websites, videos, images or other resources, they can be a great way to share information of interest to many people. The key is finding a bookmarking site, or portion thereof, where what you want to talk about will be of interest.
- Blogging Sites, like HuffingtonPost are news and editorial publications created by communities. If you are a recognized expert or celebrity in your field, blogging for one of these sites can become effective marketing. “Thought Leadership” is a recognized method for generating leads and closing customers.
- Micro-Blogging is news and commentary in the form of very short bursts of text. Twitter is an example of an extremely successful micro-blogging website. It is by far the largest site of its kind, though it has many websites now duplicating its “short message” posts, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Buzz to name a few. Twitter is an exceptional tool for marketing because someone who follows your business on Twitter may well have a number of Twitter followers of his own. This means that they can, and often do, automatically re-tweet messages they find interesting.
- Location Based Networks are real world communities that find one another online. Rumble, Foursquare and Meetup are examples of this unique kind of social media. Those who start Meetup groups usually meet first online, then meet from time to time in the real world. Marketing through these groups lets you present information first online, then face-to-face to an interested group of people.
As you can see, Social Media is about far more than just posting on social networks. If you know the characteristics that define your best customers, you should be able to find out where they spend time online and you should be able to determine what data they will find interesting and useful over time. This kind of relationship building increases both leads and sales for savvy businesses.
Social media is not just a way to broadcast your message, it is a way to listen to your market and respond to it. When EA released a golf game with a glitch that showed Tiger Woods walking on water to hit a golf ball, there was a social media frenzy about the quality of the game. EA immediately released a viral video that showed Tiger Woods walking out onto the water to strike a ball, and indicated “It’s not a mistake. He’s really that good.”
In Social Media, Content is King & Marketing is Queen
Content, wherever you put it, is what connects your customers to you. Videos, podcasts, photos, status updates, blog posts, music, applications, plugins, and content comes in a million forms. Almost anything of value to your customers can be considered useful content from a social media marketing perspective.
But Marketing is key. Everything you release must be guided by and presented in terms of your unique “promise” to your customers.
You also have to be smart about how you use content. Maximize the value of each piece of content you create. Turn a blog into a podcast, have a video transcribed to create text. Release slide shows on Slideshare, and incorporate their images into blogs and videos. Figure out how to save time and money when it comes to releasing your content. Tools like Ping.fm and Tubemogul let you deploy video content across social media sites quickly.
Make sure that the content you post is consistent across social media sites. This is critical to your branding and identity over time.
Your Networth Equals Your Network
Social media can be a very effective way to find customers and build market share quickly if you have the right product or service and the right strategy. You must find your customers online, and you must connect to them emotionally and socially in order to succeed. You must deliver the promise they want to hear across media.
You have a fantastic opportunity compete with large brands if you make a plan based upon tightly targeting your market and delivering exactly the right content. Be lazy and do what works. Stick to the basics and you will succeed in creating an effective social media solution.
Q & A
Question: How does social media really contribute to sales? The mechanism seems so diffused that it’s hardly worth the effort.
Answer: One of the reasons that we review all the social media options available is that we want you to understand that you don’t have to engage in social media that involves long discussions. By using a solution like Tubemogul you can pump content out to several video sites at one time. Using Podomatic you can publish podcasts for thousands to download over the course of a year. Creating a Wikipedia page for your product or micro-blogging items of interest to your target market through Twitter takes just a few minutes per day. Learning where to find your customers and what information they will find the most useful and easy to send to others is a very cost effective use of your time. If you can get your customers to create new leads for your business for merely an investment of a few hours per week, it will be time very well spent.
Question: Whenever I try to do anything business related online, I get accused of spam.
Answer: Social media websites like Facebook and Linkedin are friend loyal, not brand loyal. This means people are loyal to their network, not to the social media sites they network through.
This has a couple of interesting ramifications. Firstly, what’s hot today may not be hot tomorrow. Making your company entirely dependent on your Facebook fan page for sale means that if Facebook fumbles, you’ll be hit extremely hard. Second, these sites are network based. Since people who are socially interested in one another are rarely interested in all the same products and services, commercial posts can alienate members of the network. Since people come to the site for the network, obviously commercial posts from your company about your products and services can draw quite a lot of negative attention.
This is why people who are fans of a given product, service, celebrity or cause will frequently start or join Facebook fan pages where they can post at will about the topic they have in common. Linkedin, within the broad parameters of standard business communication, is much more “business friendly”. If you have B2B products and services to talk about, you may find participating in Linkedin groups and discussions fruitful.
IMPORTANT: Display networks like Youtube or Flickr are not based on pre-existing social networks. This means that a video or image posted on one of these sites will not draw the kind of negative attention it might get on a social media site based on discussion, yet videos posted here can be cross posted to sites like Facebook by fans and happy customers and they won’t be labelled “SPAM”.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?