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3 Steps to Getting Started With Social Media

June 21, 2012 / Jim Belosic / No comments

With so many social networks to choose from, how do you decide the best social networks for your company?

Not all networks are created equal; each comes with its own specific benefits, features and uses.

This 3-step guide will help you choose the best social networks based on your business, experience and community.

#1: Find Your Community

If you’re just getting started in social media and are weighing which platform to join first, search for your business on various networks to see if you’ve already got a community there.

Does your product have user videos on YouTube? Did someone create a Yelp profile for your restaurant? Are you mentioned on Twitter? Wherever you find your community is where you should start investing your time and resources.

ShortStack already has a community on Twitter, so it only makes sense that we have a Twitter account and interact with our fans there.

#2: Choose Which Networks Work Best for You

Now that you’ve discovered whether you have a pre-existing community, it’s time to jump in. Remember, choosing networks to integrate isn’t a matter of right or wrong, it’s about how to find the best fit for your company.

Here are suggestions for networks to integrate based on what your business offers.

Do you have a product?

Products need attention and traffic. People need to be able to see the product, check out the specs, read reviews and know that there’s a support community available. That makes Facebook a great place for products—potential customers can see pictures, praise (and complaints) from users and responses from Page admins.

This sampling of product and company information will help customers make an informed purchase. If they like the product, they can share and recommend the product to their friends—in turn giving your product more traffic. Because Facebook is popular worldwide, it exposes your product to eyes from across the globe.

The Facebook Timeline provides a candid, transparent atmosphere for consumers to read real reactions and reviews from other consumers.

It’s also a good idea to build up a bank of videos on YouTube or Vimeo. Show off your product in use, have the CEO give in-depth product introductions, offer official troubleshooting guides and allow users to post response videos.

ShortStack's YouTube channel has how-to videos, new feature introductions and helpful webinars. These resources provide users with an in-depth look at the product.

Videos are a low-maintenance way to make information about your product available. As long as the product stays the same, the video stays relevant.

Twitter can be a great place for products as well. Reward those who follow your product by holding contests and giveaways. You pick and announce the hashtag, and then randomly select a winning tweet. All of the mentions from your followers are certain to get you some extra attention.

Nickelodeon DVD continually offers giveaways to followers and added an extra level of excitement by offering a jumbo package giveaway once their Twitter account reached 9,000 followers.

Do you have a place?

Yelp and Foursquare are essential if you’re operating a local business like a restaurant. You don’t need an international following. Instead, you’re after local customers; people who could actually come through the door.

Create a Yelp profile for your business, complete with the address, hours, business bio and other relevant info like the menu. Yelp gives people the opportunity to review your business, and it also gives the business owner the ability to respond to feedback. You can thank people for positive reviews and run some damage control for negative reviews.

From hours and news to reviews and photos, Yelp is a one-stop-shop for business information.

Foursquare lets business owners reward frequent customers, encouraging them to visit or “check in,” bring their friends with them and keep coming back. Check-ins have a snowball effect, turning your place into a hangout for groups.

In addition to honoring the most frequent customers, Foursquare has features like the loyalty special that gives prizes to people who keep coming back.

You’ll also want a Facebook page for your business. You can add maps, contact info, descriptions and photos—all things to make sure your fans and potential fans can find you easily. It may sound like you’re simply duplicating your Yelp account, but remember that the goal is to get foot traffic, so maintain pages for your business on both sites, making sure the information on both is always up to date.

It’s also important to purchase Facebook ads, which allow you to target specific demographics to make sure the right people see your ads.

The Reno Aces minor league baseball team targeted me with this Facebook ad because I'm male, within their specified age range and live in close proximity to the ballpark.

Own and operate a sports bar in a small town? Show your ads to men 20-40 who live in town.

Do you have a service?

If you’re offering a service, you need to position yourself as an expert by producing lots of free, informative content.

For instance, if you’re an attorney, publish a weekly blog with legal advice and Q&A articles and link to that blog from your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. When people are in the market for an attorney, they’ll be able to see your expertise and accessibility through the articles you’ve written.

As is the case with places, services need to set up pages on Facebook and purchase Facebook ads. A page on Facebook makes the service personable, while Facebook ads give the service a captive, targeted audience.

This Real Deal Carpet Cleaning advertisement appeared on my Facebook page because I live within the company's geographic target.

Angie’s List is an ideal place for every type of service. Its strength is that it aggregates reviews from verified customers. A presence on Angie’s List shows transparency and honesty on your part, which in turn can boost your reputation.

Not every network will be a fit.

You may be a small business owner wearing the hats of accountant, receptionist and janitor, on top of all of the normal responsibilities owning a business carries. This means you probably don’t have time for Twitter.

Twitter is a great tool if you can devote the required time—you’ll see some real benefits. But it’s also very high-maintenance. Twitter moves fast, so tweets need to be frequent and interaction with followers needs to be quick.

This doesn’t mean that a one-person operation absolutely cannot be on Twitter. If you use Twitter personally and are familiar with the platform, then maybe that means you should start with Twitter! But if you don’t already use Twitter, you may want to start on the other end of the spectrum, with YouTube or a business blog.

As long as the content in your videos or blog posts is relevant, the entries will have staying power, unlike tweets that are deprecated in a matter of minutes. Instead of having to update Twitter every couple of hours, you could make one video or blog post per week, and then just worry about responding to comments.

#3: Focus Your Efforts

Remember that more is not always better, especially if you’re just starting out. Small business owners come up to me all the time and say, “Hey, you seem to know a lot about social media and the Internet, want to take a look at my new website?”

And the site is cluttered with a dozen social network icons no-one has heard of. There’s no way to maintain a presence on all of these networks.

The best approach is to pick something, give it all of your attention and focus, do it well and turn it into a habit.

If your starting point is Facebook, then check your Timeline several times a day. Respond to every question or comment from fans. Post new and interesting content. Be habitually social. Once maintaining your presence on that one platform is second nature, then branch out and add another.

But if you’re on six or seven platforms and you only keep up on one or two, that looks bad and can hurt your online presence in the long run. So if you can’t give a platform its required attention, kill it off.

What do you think? How have you approached social network integration? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: get started, How To, jim belosic, social integration, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media tactic, social network /

4 Steps to Selling With Social Media

November 3, 2011 / Rich Brooks / No comments

Are you wondering why your social media efforts aren’t working?

Social media success sometimes appears arbitrary.

Perhaps you’ve wondered, “Why does company X generate leads and business from their social activity while my company wastes resources on blogs that don’t get read and tweets that go unanswered?”

Social media is so new, sometimes the path to success is unclear and it’s easy to lose your way.

If you want to demystify the experience and improve your ROI (return on investment), you need to make sure that your marketing and campaigns include these four essential components:

Attraction: How do you attract qualified leads to your website or business?
Retention: How do you stay in contact with people after they’ve left your website or store?
Conversion: How do you get people to “buy now” or move further down the sales funnel?
Measurement: How do you determine if any of this is working?

By following this model, you’ll be able to ensure that you’ll successfully navigate your way through this untamed wilderness.

What follows is a detailed map you can follow.

Why is accounting software more popular on Facebook than you?

#1: Attraction: How to draw people to you

For most of us, we want to attract qualified traffic to our website. While there are many ways to do this—including search engine optimization, traditional advertising and referrals—I’ll focus here on social media.

To succeed with social media, you’ll need to have a content strategy. This means talking to your ideal customers about what they’re interested in, and having those conversations where they hang out. (For more details, check out How to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy.)

Depending on your audience, you may need to become more active on Facebook or join groups where your customers talk on LinkedIn.

Chances are that LinkedIn has a few groups where your ideal customer hangs out.

If they’re not active on social networking sites—or can’t access them during the working day—you’ll need to create blog posts and videos that help them solve their biggest problems.

Knight Vision helps businesses solve their media coverage problems. Hopefully those businesses read this post before any bad coverage!

While developing your social media profiles, a few things to keep in mind:

Brand your profiles: It’s free or nearly free to set up a blog, create a YouTube channel or build a profile on popular social networking sites.

Because of this, everyone does it. To rise above the pack and establish your credibility, you’ll need to create a branded experience that will immediately help build trust with your audience. This may mean a custom Twitter background, a Facebook landing page or a detailed work history on your LinkedIn profile.

Nike scores with their branded experience on YouTube.

Go deep, not wide: Don’t try to be active on every social network out there. Instead, focus on becoming great at one or two platforms where you’re most likely to engage your prospects. Once you’ve mastered those, you can add more to your plate.
Be consistent: One blog post, one video or one tweet won’t save your business, no matter how clever it is. Success comes from consistency. Your customers don’t want to work with a one-hit wonder; they want to work with someone who has consistently established credibility and expertise over time, which shows that the person should be around for a long time to come.

Emarketingvids build its following through consistently creating content of interest to their audience.

Create paths back to your site: Although being too salesy can turn prospects off, you should always have links to your website so they can learn more if they wish. Ben Pickering has a great article entitled 5 Tips for Driving Facebook Fans to Your Website that gives some suggestions on how to do just that.

Takeaway: Branded, consistent activity on social media sites where your customers already hang out will drive more qualified leads to your site.

#2: Retention: How to keep people coming back

If you’re selling a big-ticket item, chances are your prospect isn’t buying from your site without looking at your competitors’ sites as well. Likewise, if you’re selling a product that needs to be regularly repurchased—like contact lenses or morning coffee—your prospect will continually see competing offers.

How do you stay top of mind and keep the lines of communication open after someone has left your website? This is where retention comes in.

While “traditionally,” email marketing has been the favored tool of the Internet marketer, these days social media plays a critical part.

From the home page, we’re asking people to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our blog posts or YouTube channel… all of which send them offsite.

This goes against everything we used to know: You never send people away after you’ve captured their attention! (It’s like the Vegas casinos: Never show a gambler the exit sign.)

However, getting people to like, follow and subscribe to us gives us the opportunity to continue to engage with them. We can build a relationship by better understanding them through listening and helping them.

Social Media Examiner engages their audience on their website and on Facebook.

To maximize your retention activities, make sure that it’s easy for someone to engage you in your social media activities right from your home page and every other page on your site.

Remember: Always provide value to your ideal customer with your social media activities. You’re only one click away from being unfollowed, unsubscribed from and unliked if you’re not providing value.

Takeaway: For certain sales cycles, you’ll need to engage your prospects with social media even after they’ve left your site… Just make sure you’re providing value wherever you ask your audience to follow.

#3: Conversion: Moving from liker to buyer

Improved conversion rates (whether it’s a “buy now” button or filling out a contact form) are a natural outcome of being active in social media.

The latest HubSpot “State of Inbound Marketing” report showed that companies that blog more have more consistent sales. Companies also report that social media has made the biggest gain in lead generation activities.

Social media continues to grow as a lead generation tool for businesses.

Anecdotally, at my company’s own site, our highest converting traffic comes from blogs and our YouTube channel. In fact, visitors who first watched one of our videos at YouTube are over 700% more likely to fill out a contact form than the average site visitor. Are you ready for your closeup?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=toqC5Ut3GJA

For a more detailed look at conversion rates and the difference between social media leads and other leads, check out Nichole Kelly’s post, 4 Tips for Converting Social Media Leads.

Takeaway: Your social media activity increases your site’s conversion rates because your expertise and credibility have already been established.

#4: Measurement: Making wise decisions

The concern many companies have about social media is that it lacks accountability and tracking, yet this just isn’t true.

Start by installing some robust traffic reporting software on your website, such as Google Analytics. These tools will give you insight into where your traffic is coming from, so you can determine if your Facebook activity is paying off or has been a waste of time.

I was surprised to see this much traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Time to invest more effort there!

You can also see which of your blog posts bring in the most traffic, which gives you insight into what type of content you should create moving forward, and perhaps even what type of services you should be offering.

Further, you can set up Goals in Google Analytics to determine where your best traffic is coming from. For a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up Goals in Google Analytics, you can check out this post, Tracking Conversions: Does Your Website Turn Suspects Into Prospects?

You don’t need to stop with website analytics, however. Facebook Insights gives you great, um, insight into your Facebook activity, and EdgeRank Checker is a freemium tool that provides suggestions for maximizing your Facebook activity.

Accumulating fans is the easy part… Can you engage them?

YouTube also offers analytics, breaking down your audience by gender, age and location, as well as showing you which videos are the most popular and what caused them to attract more visitors.

We appeal to middle-aged men. Maybe it's time to hit the gym.

Takeaway: Measuring the results of your social media activity is easy if you use some free and inexpensive tools to track traffic and conversions at your website.

Conclusion

Social media is still in its infancy, and a lot of the tools and techniques we currently read about will be outdated by next year, if not by next month. (See MySpace, Flock, Google Buzz, and pinging news aggregators with our RSS feeds.)

So rather than focusing myopically on flavor-of-the-month tactics, make sure that all of your social media campaigns include the formula of attraction, retention, conversion and measurement, and you will have a sustainable plan for success.

Your turn!

What do you think? Do your social media campaigns include all of these components? Is there something we didn’t include that you feel is a requirement for success? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: attraction, conversion, How To, measurement, retention, rich brooks, social media attraction, social media branding, social media conversion, social media measurement, social media plan, social media profiles, social media retention, social media roi, social media strategy, social media tactic, View Points, website traffic /

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