Social Media
Introduction to Social Media Marketing
Social media is about developing personal, intimate relationships online. It is about having and maintaining regular dialogue, sharing useful information. If you share enough relevant, interesting information you will be seen as a trusted adviser. As in all walks of life, when a person needs a service – they tend to think of a trusted adviser for advice. Social media is no different – many businesses have achieved significant growth due to adopting a social media presence.
Current business relationships have been formed over many years of traditional networking. Social media may not necessarily replace traditional networking, but can be used in parallel. However, as social media takes time to build a following, it is important to start sooner rather than later. It is estimated that only 6% of the business population are using social media and this is expected to grow at a significant rate over the coming years.
A social media marketing campaign is different to a search engine optimisation campaign. The latter is about broadcasting, gaining links, developing key words for your site. Social media marketing is about engaging with people and by doing so will help the optimization of your web site.
Why build a social media following?
Social media marketing allows organisations to create:
- Trust
- Contacts
- Brand awareness
- Feedback
- Leads/enquiries for your business
Why develop a social media marketing strategy?
Prior to implementing any social media marketing strategy, it is important to understand what it is you are trying to achieve.
Objectives are likely to include:
- Increase visitors to the website
- Increase general brand awareness of your organsiation
- Increase third party credibility
- Sustain relationships and increase the levels of engagement with our audience
- Listen to what is being said
- Analyse and become more informed of your market
- Develop new ‘fans’ or advocates of your company
- Join communities that advocate your products (and those of your competitors)
- Help you develop additional key words and tags for your website
Digital Marketing Audit
Conduct an audit to understand and evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing including:
- Websites
- Social media activity
- E – shots/ e – newsletters
Issues which should be evaluated include:
- Key words
- Messages
- Call to action
- Rankings
- Database
- Frequency of activity
This will provide valuable information to help determine your social media strategy.
A strategy should seek to provide answers to the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- Accountants, FSA professionals, Influencers
- Business owners
- People who have come into wealth
- What information should you share?
- Promote something Free for visitors/readers
- How can you allow people to engage with you?
- Why will people trust you?
- What will be the content to demonstrate you are the expert?
Branding
- How will the branding work online?
- What content would be relevant and useful to the different target audiences?
Information similar to traditional media approaches:
- Content that is relevant and newsworthy, interesting and informative
- Content needs to be engaging, issues around why you do what you do – not what it is you do.
-Why your organisation exists – rather than we do this. We believe . . . - This portrays something personal
- It also demonstrates your actual belief and is therefore more believable – rather than a traditional press release or sales brochure
- It demonstrates genuine support – being there for people
-We have a passion for . . . - This demonstrates you are passionate about your business and your customers service
-Your opinion - This will develop trust – it is important to become the trusted adviser
- People will be happy to spread your word
-Use the traditional advertising acronym of AIDA
A – attention
How do you grab attention, e.g, something may be free
I – Interest
How will you stimulate interest after gaining attention?
D – Desire
How will you stimulate desire – getting a person to want to use you or know more
A – Action
What is the required action for the recipient?
- Who will spread your word?
- Who will support/follow you?
- How could this be encouraged
- Social media allows your organsiation to become the media
- The question is “how social will you be?”
- People will share what you say only when they know and like you . . .
Where should we share the information?
What are the tools to deliver/implement the strategy?
There are a number of online tools that companies can use the popular ones include:
Twitter - allows you to enter/start conversations
Facebook - rapport building site, useful traditionally for audiences under 35 year of age (but this is changing), more of a consumer based site – although this is changing rapidly as more corporate brands use the facility
Ecademy - one of many business networking sites, useful as positioning yourself as a business specialist
LinkedIn - contact building site – allows others to recommend you and links people to other people through common ground.
YouTube - audio/visual facility to communicate messages and information
Posterous/Word Press/Blogger - blogging tools that can be linked to your website
Gowalla - useful if you are running conferences as you can “check in” at a location and demonstrate where you are
StumpbleUpon - latest news and articles that a reader can search on specific topics of interest
Article directories - there are a number of different directories (hundreds) that all can have articles posted to them
How should the information be shared?
Tools can include:
- Written word
- Audio – podcasts
- Video – video blogging, conference presentations
- Tag keywords from your videos to help get you noticed
- Videos have been proven as personal
- People like to hear what people have to say
Once a company has developed followers, then other forms of digital marketing can be adopted:
- E – shots can be mailed regularly with links to You Tube videos, online press releases and your website
- Tweets and Facebook can be used to post links to the newsletter as well.
Social Media Monitoring
How will we monitor the effectiveness of our social media?
There are a number of software packages available that can determine what online “conversations” are taking place around particular topics. This can help in assessing where to add comments into existing conversations/topics, e.g., Twitter trending, Alterian, etc.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to:
- engage with clients
- compare with competitors as you will have a greater insight into them
- get a full demographic of the information of the person making the conversation
- translate foreign languages/Analyse what is being shared
- White papers, articles, presentations
Many companies and organizations have started building a social media presence, but how many have been monitoring its effectiveness? If there is no monitoring of effectiveness done, how do they know if they are achieving the best return on investment of the marketing budget?
Proposal
Win Marketing can provide the following services:
- Conduct a social media and digital marketing audit
- Develop a social media marketing strategy with timescales for short and medium term objectives, with monitoring and control mechanisms agreed to allow for ongoing evaluation.
Implementation services as follows:
- Setting up the key social networking sites with your brand, ensuring profiles have your corporate image and are relevant to your target audience
- Integrate these social networking sites with your existing website, e.g., a links to your news pages
- Provide support to help develop a blog on your website to be more engaging with visitors
- Interview key people for content which we can write up as suitable for social media
- These can be turned into articles, blog postings, tweets, etc
- Regular (monthly) analysis of web statistics with recommendations to develop the ongoing social media marketing activity
There are a number of “one-off” services we could provide once the strategy has been agreed and this could include:
- Training
- How to update profiles, articles, etcHow to analyse the data and how to improve your online presence from the findings
