If you are in business you can't afford to get it wrong - at best it will be a waste of time, effort and money. It could cost you a LOT of money if you brand takes a mega hit.
Here are some tips to keep you on track:
Social media activity needs a quality website full of fresh shareable content to share and start conversations about. Social media and search engine optimisation has become entwined so what is good for one is going to be good for the other. Without good content and a compelling offer, your tactics could be a waste of time and money.
Even if you don't plan on using it straight away, claim your Twitter account, Facebook business page, YouTube channel. Unlike domain names that are country specific, Facebook, Twitter etc are global and if someone else claims the name first you will have to resort to adding numbers or letters to your account name making it harder for people to find you.
If you know where you are going you are more likely to get there. Before you devote time and effort, work out what you are trying to acheive by having a Facebook page. Is it to gather leads? Respond to complaints? Encourage your user community to support each other?
This will provide you some steer as to which networks to use and what support material and mechanisms you'll need to make it happen.
Even if just for your personal use. Have some experience using the tools even if you don't intend doing it yourself. You will make better decisions about your strategy, use of tools and who you employ to do it if you understand the basics.
You will avoid spreading yourself too thin. Each platform has it's own set of rules - both in the 'terms of use' sense and how it's user base behave. For example, many LinkedIn users don't appreciate a connection request from someone they don't know at all whereas this is not only common on Twitter, but necessary!
This will help you understand the competitive environment you are up against. Follow them and see what they are tweeting about and which ones get re-tweeted. See how they handle complaints and if they don't respond in a timely manner, you could contact the disgruntled party yourself and offer to help!
They can help develop your plan in detail, identify the best tools and platforms, develop policies and help guide you through the early days. These tools change rapidly, so it can be hard to keep up with all the changes if you are not doing it for a job.
Work out how much time and resources you have to allocate and make sure they have the right tools to make the job as efficient as possible. The write a plan of when you will be checking your pages, updating status etc. You may want to do this at a certain time each day.
Make sure you are monitoring your feeds, mentions etc. Measuring activity and results such as retweets, likes etc and can link these results to visitors to your website, leads and ultimately sales
Give people a reason to be a fan/follower – why should they? You can offer valuable tips, funny stories, latest news etc. Would you follow someone just so they can peddle their latest wares? Unlikely, so put yourself in their shoes!
Acknowledge people who contribute to the conversation – eg blog comments and shares. It's easy to say thank you
Remember that it's not all about you. Stay polite and professional when representing your brand, a social media mishap can go viral very very fast
Don't ignore customer complaints or comments, but don't respond to negative comments by being defensive and firing back at them. Use them as an opportunity to demonstrate how much you care about the quality of your products and level of customer service
If you want to learn from other's mistakes, read about these sometimes shocking often funny social media fails:
]]>Not everyone. And the only people you should be worried about is the people who you want to talk to. Ask your current and potential customers what social networks they are on and how they use them and that will give you your answer – where they are there, you should be too.
Google also looks for social signals as part of calculating your search ranking, so that could tip the balance into you taking some action. But being on every social network around isn't going to help, especially if you don't have the resources to do it properly.
Don't make this assumption based on your own experience or prejudice. Often when business say this, they can't back up the statement with research. Find out if your customers are social media, what platform and how they use it.
Don't even think about it.
Firstly, not everyone is on or actively uses one network exclusively. But the main reason you should not put all your online marketing in one basket, let's call it Facebook is that you need to own your own digital property so you can control it. If you use Facebook exclusively, they own you.
A third party set's the rules and can change them overnight. And they can also fail - taking your customers with them.
Some business owners think social media is just for kids or for fun and a sink hole of time and energy from a marketing perspective.
It can be if poorly targeted or used for broadcasting marketing messages. Like anything it has to be done properly.
Outsourcing it to a hip young agency to do it all for you isn't the answer either. Why we won't 'do' your social media.
Social media marketing takes time. It could potentially months or even years before a fan or follower engages you and a business relationship is built.
Don't forget you can use social media for customer service support and complaint/reputation management, not just marketing
Social is something you are, not something you do. Olivier Blanchard
Just having a Twitter feed that automatically spits out inspirational quotes of the day is not being social. Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon are just tools not ends in themselves.
Being truly social means integrating collaboration and connections with your business strategy. It means involving all the stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, industry bodies) in an environment where information is shared and ideas developed together.
A lot of businesses are still trying to integrate 'digital' into their strategy so it's probably going to be a while before we see the majority extend to becoming truly 'social'.
This myth is closely associated with the one above. Numbers can be bought. It doesn't mean they'll buy from you. If you are a local flower shop in Hamilton what's the point in having fans in India or Hong Kong unless they have a connection to Hamilton?
And a Facebook page like or a Twitter follower is NOT the same as someone who has opted into your email list. You can like a page and never interact or even see their content again.
Try and get an audience of interested, motivated people who you can build a rapport with. Having three percent of 500 fans turn into a lead is better than no percent of a five thousand fans.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Signing up for a You Tube Channel might be free, but it takes time, effort and resources to build an effective presence.
This time has a value to your business in real dollar terms.
Usually the people saying this are trying to sell you social media services or they are an evangelist with a lot of time and energy to devote to it.
While it's true it's not going away, there are many digital channels – your website, email and the mobile space. None of which should be completely ignored.
Micro businesses, one man bands and sole traders are still ticking along quite nicely thank you very much without any kind of social media presence at all. I've tried to argue many times that there is sure to be opportunities for better customer communication (and therefore retention) but many of these business owners are happy sticking to what (for the present anyway) works for them.
Yes it can, but you will need to set up effective tracking methods to know where your leads and come from, then translate them through into your sales figures or customer satisfaction indicators.
There are metrics that can be assigned to a campaign or tactic such as growing your follower base, but these should link back to a specific outcome or goal, and will probably involve more than one metric.
Just having more Twitter followers or a high Klout score doesn't in itself translate back to qualified leads and on to more sales, and this is where much of the measurement of social media has fallen down – in the definition of ROI.
It is difficult to measure the monetary value of a fan, but establish a correlation between engagement and sales, or brand preference and the numbers will make more sense.
It's different, but people who working in businesses are people too. Businesses use social media to help make business decisions. It's a matter of finding out which platform is the most suitable. LinkedIn is probably going to be more effective, because people are there for business networking and sharing.
You need to take the time to understand your audience, set some goals and objectives and develop a plan to achieve them.
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