Last updated 2 years ago
Achieving the Social Media Balance
From non-profits to large Fortune 500 companies, everyone seems to be hiring social media gurus. Organizations are realizing they need a person with the responsibility of directing social media efforts. Among open job listings this year, Indeed.com, a leading international job site that charts job trends, lists Social Media professionals in their top 10. In fact, Indeed.com has ranked the Social Media position as experiencing almost a 2000% trend in growth over the past five years.*
As useful as it might be to have an in-house person perform this role, smaller businesses simply may not have the resources to hire someone to oversee their social media efforts. But are daily updates to Facebook, Twitter, and your blog the only way to achieve social media marketing (SMM) success?
The Age Old Debate: Quality vs. Quantity
How do you plan the overall volume and frequency of your social media activities? The key really lies in examining your own behavior.
- What companies are you a fan of?
- What blogs do you read? How often?
- What RSS feeds do you subscribe to?
- What newsletters do you keep in your inbox and not flag as spam?
Just like you are always looking for content that is relevant, fresh, and informational, your social network is too.
When thinking about frequency of updates: it boils down to quality vs. quantity. Facebook fans will remain avid fans if you provide them with useful information, strategically invite them to events that they would be likely to attend, and periodically entice them with incentives such as coupons or discounts. Find ways to achieve this balance for all your social media efforts. No one wants to hear from a company every day, even if they spend hours browsing social media sites. Minimize the “fatigue” your readers may experience from your social “chatter”.
Social Media expert Scott Straten, author of Unmarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, gives sage advice when it comes to the quality vs. quantity debate: “…Use Facebook to engage, and to comment on people's posts and status updates and to share links with them that they may like; not ones you have written to promote yourself but ones you have found that may help them.”
*http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Social+Media&relative=1
Last updated 2 years ago
An organization’s social media strategy should focus on customer and employee engagement. Leveraging platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs can help you optimize your engagement strategy.
Engaging Audiences with Social Media
Having a tough time engaging customers, employees and other stakeholders? Companies ranging from Coca-Cola to your local small business know that the key to successful engagement strategies lies in getting social.
The way people are using the Internet has evolved: they are no longer going online simply to look up information; they want it to be a place where they can go and interact—queue in Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social network platforms. Some digital technology experts have called this phenomenon a migration out of the Information Age to the Relationship Age.
If you haven’t aligned your social media strategy with your engagement strategy, here are five tips on how to get a good start.
1. Updates. Keeping your content fresh should be your number one priority. Make sure that whether you are maintaining a blog or a Facebook page, you post new content at least once a week. Statistics show that organizations that invest time in updating content have more followers, leading to optimized engagement.
2. Be an expert. No one wants to read content that is blatant advertising. Whether you’re doing an e-newsletter or writing a blog post, make sure your content is filled with tips, industry-related news, and thought-leadership that will appeal to your audience—they’ll be more likely to listen to what you have to say.
3. Don’t be afraid of the camera. Flip cameras and point-and-shoot cameras have become highly affordable. For under $200, you can invest in one to help you achieve the perfect balance of content. Videos are now among the highest-ranked content on Google searches, and being so, the companies that have a good mix of informational text, videos, and photographs in their social media strategy are likely to be the most successful.
4. Instill a sense of community. Converting the occasional viewer to a fan involves investing time in an interactive social media program. Organizations attracting and retaining the highest number of fans have created channels that provide their audiences with that unequivocal sense of community. Encouraging fan-to-fan interaction, replying to as many individuals as you can within a timely period, and sharing or retweeting a fan’s content are all great strategies to encourage that communal vibe.
5. Cross-pollination. Don’t forget to merge all of your social media platforms. Make some of your posts point back to your corporate website to increase traffic. Make sure to post your YouTube videos to your Facebook page, blog, or your Twitter feed.
Last updated 2 years ago
– Develop Your Organizational and Social Media Brand
What does it mean to have a “social media organizational voice”? More importantly, why is it important? In basic terms your overall organizational voice is one of your main brand identity components. Essentially, your voice encompasses the overall corporate message typically communicated through a myriad of vehicles including traditional means:
• News releases
• Brochures
• FAQ website and brochure sections
• Web content• Customer service delivery
• Email messages and blasts
This voice disseminated through traditional means can be fed into the realm of social media outlets – from blogging to viral video – as a way to expand your market footprint and customer base.
Old Spice is a great model of a brand with an effective social media organizational voice. After updating and repositioning its brand to attract a new generation of men, the company leveraged clever traditional means and social media to communicate its message. As a result, the company experienced unprecedented success. YouTube Old Spice viral video views hit the 5.9 million mark, along with 22,500 comments…in only a few days. In fact the Old Spice ads received more views than President Obama’s historic victory speech.
How Can You Find Your Social Media Organizational Voice? Your social media voice is crucial to compete in a rapidly evolving market where customers are fickle and stay tuned to up-to-the-minute news. A solid social media voice requires a deep understanding of your mission, goals and audience in order to effectively communicate your intent. Before you can create your social media organizational voice strategy, you should determine:
• Why are you speaking and who is your company? Your social media voice must reflect your mission and goals.
• Who is your audience, what are your audience’s priorities and what are their expectations?
• How do you currently communicate and how will it be intertwined with your social media strategy?
• What type of language will be most compelling? Does your audience respond positively to slang or jargon or is a professional, polished approach better?
• What will you discuss on the social media platform and why?
• How often will you leverage social media channels?
Once you’ve identified your direction and goals, here’s how you can put your social media organizational voice to work for you:
• Be true to your message and audience by being authentic
• Be current with your message and relevant
• Take a conversational approach to communication
• Offer a solution to your audience’s problem or hurdle
• Foster loyal followers by being consistent
Want to learn how you can find and embellish your social media organizational voice? Keen to know how you can use tools such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogging and Twitter to your benefit? Talk to us…we can help. Reach out by calling 702-270-8772.
Last updated 2 years ago
– Build A House on Rock, Not Sand!
Social media has certainly come a long way. New technologies are emerging daily and it is easy for users to feel overwhelmed with the range of choices available. “Social technologies” is the latest buzz word that further befuddles novices.
As Digital Marketing Consultants and Social Media Optimization (SMO) experts, we are often asked by clients to help them determine the best social technologies suited to their business. Our response is to recommend a 3-step process to embark on social media optimization:
- Let’s identify the goals that you seek to achieve with SMO.
- Next, let us align your business objectives with your social media goals, so you can adopt the best approach that will deliver the right results.
- Finally, let’s create a shortlist of the ideal social technologies and tools that will help accomplish the 2 steps mentioned above.
By following this logical process, we help business owners build a strong social media foundation. With the ever-changing social cyberscape, staying up to speed with trends and best practices is critical to remaining in the know of what works, what doesn’t. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work in the digital marketing world. Yes, every business forum online has certain commonalities but customization is the key to engagement. If you build your social media profile leveraging the right technologies and focus on monitoring / measuring results, you can’t go wrong. It’s akin to building a house on rock rather than sand. The winds of change won’t wash it away.
Recognizing common platforms and cherry-picking custom social technologies
In the most rudimentary software terms, social technologies are those that bring value to users by engaging others. Social software apps fall into different categories depending on the objectives that they are used to attain. Think about what purpose your business needs to use social technologies for – to distribute useful / valuable content (not about your company, but about your industry), networking with your target audience (customers, suppliers, channel partners, vendors); expressing your thoughts / opinions / ideologies on a subject of relevance in your field; interactive games, quizzes, gift-giving; charitable work and / or fund raising activities, and so on.
Not sure what social technologies are available to you? Want to be sure you are choosing the appropriate social tools to engage qualified leads and bring quantifiable results to your Vegas-based business? Let’s connect. Give us a call at 702-270-8772.
Last updated 2 years ago
Social Media Strategy – Where Do You Begin?
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Right? Everybody knows that. And here we are, an Internet marketing global leader based out of Las Vegas, helping businesses and organizations every day to get the word out! All over Las Vegas and across America and around the world! Every client we work with wants to communicate with their target audience, build brand awareness, fuel engagement and drive conversion.
So what’s the #1 tool for better quality engagement with qualified prospects and customers? Social media. No surprises here. What is surprising is that many companies are involved with social media activities with no strategy or direction. More than once, when we have broached the subject about a social media strategy, we get responses like:
- “Oh, we have a Facebook Fan Page.” (Great, how often do you update it? How many fans do you have and do they matter; i.e. are they true leads or referrals?)
- “We ask our website visitors to follow us on Twitter.” (Terrific. Now when did you send the last Twitter update? What was your latest Tweet about? Did anyone ReTweet it?)
- “Our YouTube videos are really cool!” (Really? How many views do they get? Who shares them? Do they boost your demand generation efforts?)
The point we’re trying to make is that you can’t hope to leverage social networks without a well-defined social media strategy. Social Media Optimization (SMO) or Social Media Marketing (SMM) is all about engagement.
Planning a social media strategy is critical to an organization’s success with social media. A well-oiled SMO machine delivers greater engagement.
So we tell our clients, it’s time to turn that old saying on its head...what happens in Vegas should not stay in Vegas. It should travel far and wide with your social media conversations and fans!
We advise businesses of all sizes and types to ensure their social media optimization strategy starts with 3 critical components:
- A social media conversation calendar. Try to align this with your organization’s overall business calendar. For example, if your business has seasonal peaks and dips for certain products and services, your social conversations can follow these patterns to step up lead generation and maximise sales.
- Keep the content buckets full. Make sure you have these content buckets first! Very simply, this means having specific categories / themes under which your social media activities are conducted. Whether it is your Facebook updates, Tweets, blog posts or LinkedIn pages, you can divvy up all the things you want to communicate into distinct idea buckets.
- Have an identifiable voice. So often we find that in trying to remain neutral or third party, businesses end up having no distinguishable voice. Or their social media image is a blur. The result is a lack of engagement a.k.a. poor or no conversion.
It doesn’t matter whether your business is small, medium or large; whether your brand is well-known or unheard of, having a social media strategy will help you stay competitive.
Stay tuned for more on GivemeSMO!
Contact us: Call Mike Watkins at 702-270-8772.
