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Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

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Interview with Sarah Worsham on BSC Designer

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1. Industry Publications – Since you probably already read industry publications to keep up with news and events, why not see if there are hot topics that you can cover on your blog or other social media platforms?
2. Influencer Blogs – Most industries have acknowledged and respected experts. What topics are they covered and how can you add your opinion or take?
3. Competitors – If your competitors are producing or curating content, what are they covering? Are there topics where you can add your own spin or additional insight or expertise?
4. Sales & Marketing Training Materials – What sales and marketing materials have you prepared for your own employees? Are there topics that could be of interest to customers (removing confidential information, of course)?
5. Case Studies – Have you had a situation where you learned something that might be useful to your customers? Write up a case study on the situation, what happened, and how it was resolved (bonus for providing data and insights with a good story).
6. Customer Service – What questions and concerns are customers bringing to the company? Can you help ease frustration by providing additional content or information?
7. Social Media – What topics are being discussed already on social media for your industry? Look at the conversations that competitors, industry publications, and customers are having and see how you can help.
8. Conferences & Events – Take a look at the topics that conferences and events are covering (for your industry and for your target customers). Covering an event or conference you attend is another great source of content.
9. Related Topics – Instead of only producing content about your products and services, think about related topics.  If you sell water bottles, think about the activities your customers like to do with the water bottle — exercising, hiking, playing sports, gardening, etc. Figure out what topics your customers are excited about and provide content about those topics.
10. Q & A – Solicit questions from your customers and audience — what questions do they have on the topics you are covering (or on your products)? Answer the questions as content for everyone.
11. Guest Authors – Instead of trying to come up with all the content yourself, see if there are guests who would like the opportunity to write for you (or produce a podcast or video) — it’s a win-win for everyone: you get content without having to produce it yourself, they get in front of your audience (guest authors often help promote their content too).
12. Curation – Another content source is to curate content from other sources. It can take a bit of effort to keep up with everything going on, so people often appreciate when someone else does the hard work of putting links to what’s important in one place.
13. Ask – Stuck trying to figure out what content to produce next? Ask your audience what topics they’d like covered.  If you don’t get a response online, ask people in person. Ask co-workers and colleagues as well.
14. Reviews – When people go to buy a product or service, they often like to do some research first.  Are there products or services within your industry (or within the topics your audience is interested in) that you can review as posts or videos? Similarly, how about asking others to review your products? They can serve as content and as testimonials. (Make sure to disclose any relationships you have with reviewers or organizations, as well as if you received anything for free — or were paid to do the review. Disclosure is required by the FTC).
15. Crowd Sourcing – Ask your audience to contribute content — photos, videos, stories, etc. You can even feature the best every week as a round-up post or create a contest.

What other sources of content do you use in your social media strategy?

(photo by Friar’s Balsam, on Flickr)

Broadcast vs. Participation

Radio, TV, and print (traditional media) are all broadcast mediums — one publisher distributes content out to an audience with very little interaction. Social media is a many to many medium where anyone can be a publisher and where the audience can interact with publishers. Broadcast mediums like print, tv and radio are fine for marketing via advertising because the audience puts up with ads in return for free content (tv shows, music, news, etc.). However, on social media, the audience has a voice in what is published — either by whether or not they even bother looking at it, or by voicing their opinion on the content (or organization). The social aspect means that it’s much more important to take into account your audience’s needs.

Audience Needs vs. Your Needs

Since audiences online have a voice in what is published (and whether they look at it), it becomes vitally important to understand their needs so that you can provide content that fulfills those needs.  If all you do is post promotional messages about how great your organization is, that probably doesn’t fulfill anyone’s needs except your own. People are very selfish. If your content doesn’t fulfill a need, they’ll quickly go somewhere else and never come back (which makes it impossible to market to those people).

Immediacy vs. Long Term Effects

Advertising on traditional media usually provides immediate effects (hopefully, or else you’re not likely to do it again). Participating on social media has less of a monetary investment, but a much larger time investment. If you want people to listen to you and have conversations with you on social media, then you need to be consistent about posting and engaging. The upside is that social media can help you build relationships which have much longer effects than a one-time up-surge in sales.

How does your content make your social media strategy?

(photo by Niko Herlin, on Flickr)

1. Increase Awareness – If you rely entirely on word of mouth referrals, then the only new business you get will be through your current customers. While there’s nothing wrong with growing slowly, and referrals are the best kind of business lead, social media can help make more people aware of your services. If more people are aware of your existence, they’ll be more likely to ask their network about you for recommendations (and may even refer you even if they haven’t used your services).
2. Be More Top-of-Mind – The more often you interact with someone, the more likely it is that you will be considered if someone is in need of your products or services. Likewise, the more interactions someone has had with you, the more likely they will be to consider referring you to their network.  Social media can help you increase interactions with your referral network by connecting with them more often than is possible in person.
3. Increase Reputation – People may not realize just how much you know about your industry or niche if they only have a chance to have one interaction or conversation with you.  Social media gives you the opportunity to consistently help people by answering questions, providing support and creating helpful content which can help improve your reputation as an expert.
4. Improve Customer Service – Every business has customers who have a problem or a question. The more available you are to address problems or questions, the more satisfied people are (even if they initially had a negative experience). People are talking about your business, whether or not you have a social media presence.  Being active on social media gives customers another opportunity to resolve a problem or have a question answered before voice their issues to their network. Even if a problem is posted on a review site or a blog, monitoring for your brand names can help you be aware of these posts so you can reach out to the customer who had a problem and help solve it — people realize that problems arise, but they want to see that a company cares about the customer.
5. Improve Loyalty – The best way to increase referrals from your current customers is to have happy customers who are loyal to your organization. Social media can give you an opportunity to reward loyal customers, while at the same time making that reward obvious to non-customers. Social media can also help you track (and give back) for referrals. For example, Foursquare allows businesses to post offers or specials to customers after so many check-ins (or visits) and it also allows businesses to see who their loyal customers are. Most small businesses know who a lot of their customers are, but it may not always be obvious who they are or how loyal they are.
6. Build Relationships – People buy from people. People are more likely to buy from a company if they know someone there. Social media helps humanize an organization by providing an opportunity for customers to connect one-to-one with an employee. Social media also provides opportunities to continue to build relationships that have been formed in person and/or the opportunity to meet people online that you may later meet in person.

How do you use social media to increase word of mouth referrals for your business?

(photo by coolio-claire, on Flickr)

One of my clients has an eCommerce site, but also has a retail location.  He felt like his efforts to post on social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) weren’t really worth it. He wasn’t seeing an increasing trend in online sales, so to him, social media wasn’t working. However, his use of social media has not been constant (and he’s still learning about engagement versus information vs. promotion). Intuitively, it may seem like lack of consistency and posting on social media may be affecting sales, but it makes more impact to prove it visually.

I plotted the number of posts on social media versus the visits that the ecommerce website was getting from social media and the affect on the number of sales (numbers have been removed, but the scale is 1 to 1):

When you see the numbers plotted visually, there certainly looks to be a pattern. When there is an increase in social media activity (measured just in number of posts by the client), there tends to also be an increase in traffic to the site from social media.  There are also lifts in the number of sales (although they sometimes lag by a month). There may be other marketing efforts affecting sales (including efforts for the retail location), but doing a visual analysis can be helpful in spotting overall trends. (Doing a direct correlation analysis may also be helpful.)

Having dedicated landing pages for specific social media promotions would help to figure out the impact of specific social media tactics. However, there still will be some traffic and sales from people who have interacted with you via social media, but didn’t make an immediate purchase (they come back later).

Marketing isn’t always an exact science, but measurement and trending information can help give insights into the effects of various tactics. Having information about how tactics are performing makes it easier to make good business decisions on how to move forward.

How do you measure how social media activity affects sales?

(photo by borman818, on Flickr)

The Trends Dashboard allows you to view and compare the most viewed (in past 24 hours) and most shared (on Twitter and Facebook in the last 24 hours) videos by location, gender and age group. It’s also possible to highlight unique (videos unique to one upload list) and common videos (exist on more than one list).

YouTube is also curating content in daily blog posts, divided into categories. I’d love to see this expanded so that there are daily posts for each category (or some way to sort by topic or category in the dashboard). Unfortunately the last post in advertising was way back in February. To be fair, YouTube’s efforts are mostly directed at news outlets.

Have you used either YouTube Trends or the Dashboard? How?

Satisfy a Need

The only reason people buy from you is because your products or services satisfy a need (even if the need is to feel more important or happy). In order for it to be effective, it’s important for social media marketing to fulfill the needs of your customers. Needs fulfilled through social networking may not be entirely the same as needs satisfied by buying your products (but probably are related). Understanding the needs of your customers so that you can satisfy them will make any marketing tactic more successful.

Deliver Value

A product or service also needs to provide good value in return for satisfying a need.  If the price is too high for the perceived value, then an individual will not buy the product. Perceived value is what’s important — not how much profit margin you’re making. Products that are priced to low can also suffer because the low price gives them a low perceived value.

Most of the value you’re providing in social media marketing is in content and communication (which is largely free to the customer). However, if you’re providing valuable information through social channels, people will attribute that value to your brand and to other things you sell. Delivering valuable content also allows you to build your reputation as an expert in your field which makes your products and services more valuable.

Proof

Whatever claims you make, be sure to back them up (either through social channels or other marketing channels). If you claim your engine has the lowest maintenance costs, prove it. If you think you’re an expert in your field, prove it. Think about what types of information have to prove your claims.  Think about how you can get people who have experienced your claim to testify to it’s accuracy (testimonials, ratings, word of mouth). Social media can be a powerful promotional tactic provided that you prove any claims you’ve made (or think about how others can help you prove them).

Frequency, Reach & Yield (FRY)

To increase revenue, you either need to increase the frequency that your customers are purchasing from you (frequncy), increase the number of customers (reach) or increase the amount that’s purchased each time (yield). Having conversations and providing valuable content are good tactics for social media, but it also helps to think about how you’re going to use social media to increase your revenue. Are you going to use social media to try to reach out to new potential customers (reach)? Are you going to provide great support for current customers so they’ll purchase more often (frequency)? Are you going to inform your customers so that they’ll be more likely to buy your upsells (yield)? Thinking about these tactics will help make social media a valuable tool in your marketing strategy, but will also help you understand how to measure what you’re doing on social media.

How do you apply basic marketing principles to social media?

(photo by lobo235, on Flickr)

Build It & Go to Them

Instead of building a Twitter profile and a custom Facebook page and spending time trying to attract people to like and fan you, use those profiles as a way to find your customers and listen to what they’re saying. When you take the time to listen to the concerns and questions people have, and answer them, people will be more open to connecting with you. Instead of a self-centered, promotional bastard, you’ll become a sympathetic ear.

What They Want

It’s really nothing new: business is about giving customers something they want. The same is true of social media or any marketing tool. When you give customers the information or support they want, they will be more willing to purchase from you. Do the work of figuring out what your customers need and why, and address those needs directly in your content.

How do you use social media to do the work for your customers?

(photo by koalazymonkey, on Flickr)

How do you think Google+ will be useful for Marketing?

Summary of Facebook’s Rules for Promotions & Contests

The full Promotions Guidelines can be found here, but to summarize the main points:

• Promotions on Facebook have to be done through a Facebook application, either a Canvas Page or an app on a Page Tab.
• You have to make sure it’s clear that the promotion is not connected to Facebook either way.
• You have to fully disclose who is collecting information, what information you’re collecting and how it’s going to be used.
• You cannot use any Facebook features or functionality as part of the promotion’s registration or entry processes.  For example, you can’t have people like a Page or check into a Place to have them automatically enter a promotion.
• You also can’t use liking as a voting mechanism (or checking in).
• You can’t force people to do anything on Facebook to enter your contest, so liking your Page or a post, or commenting or uploading a photo cannot be requirements of the promotion.
• You have to notify winners outside of Facebook (via email, snail mail, phone, etc.).

These are just a summary of Facebook’s promotional guidelines.  You’ll want to check out their page before every promotion you run, since you’re also responsible for keeping up with any changes they make.

(image by birgerking, on Flickr)