Social media is no different from any other marketing tool. In order for it to be successful, you need to have a specific plan with action items that can not only be attained but measured. Once you have a plan, get the C suite to buy into your goals and objectives and keep them in the loop as things move forward.
Once you get approval, make sure you integrate social media programs into your other marketing plans. It can’t and shouldn’t stand alone.
I recently read a good article by Heidi Cohen that outlines seven social media goals. Here are some highlights:
Build brand awareness – a great way to engage directly with prospects.
Protect your reputation – you need to know what folks are saying about your brand.
Learn more about your customers – use social as a kind of market research.
Increase customers or prospects – based on your content you can engage new potentials.
What are you doing to ensure your social media program is a success?
It still boggles my mind that companies who rush into social media ignore feedback once they do get it. I wonder if they do that with traditional feedback? Why get into it if you aren’t going to participate? What I don’t get is why many companies are ignoring social media on a day-to-day basis. The object of the medium is to engage with like-minded people who are looking for information or products.
I recently read a post by Jeffrey Cohen from socialmediaB2, 69% of B2B Companies Ignore Social Media Feedback. He cites a recent study by Satmetrix that shines some light on worldwide social media practices. They interviewed almost 1200 companies from around the world.
“Businesses recognize the need for a social media strategy, however many are challenged in putting an effective strategy in place,” said Richard Owen, chief executive officer, Satmetrix. “While 77 percent of consumers post about products, 67 percent of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said, and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity. Not only are companies running the risk of losing customers by not addressing their issues shared online, but they are also walking past the opportunity to capitalize on positive comments made on the social web.”
Highlights of the study include:
Businesses are blind to the threats and opportunities of social media:
Thirty nine percent have no social media tracking in place at all.
Fifty one percent of B2B have no tracking compared to 22 percent of B2C companies surveyed.
Fifty five percent of companies ignore customers who provide feedback via social media – by having no process in place to respond:
This increases to 69 percent for B2B companies compared to 42 percent for B2C.
Sixty seven percent of companies do not measure or quantify social media – increasing to 75 percent for B2B companies:
For those that do have some form of quantification, 56 percent just count the comments and followers.
Only 4 percent have any form of sentiment analysis.
Sixty percent of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy (either do nothing, track or follow-up only).
North America leads the way with 43 percent of North American companies having a follow-up process compared to about 25 percent in other regions.
So where does your company’s social media program stack up? Do you have a strategy in place?
B-to-B marketers are responsible for generating leads from various sources, among them today are social media. I read a report a few months ago by Pardot, a B-to-B cloud marketing automation software provider that said 42% of B-to-B marketers report zero social media leads.
I can’t believe that that high a percentage of users of social media aren’t getting any types of leads. I know some folks use social primarily for brand awareness, but for most of us, the end game (strategy) is to generate leads and eventually a sale. We target a very small market niche, and our blog alone gets 40-50,000 hits a year, many of which turn into opportunities for us.
I’d like you to take a quick poll to see if you’re getting any leads, and if so, do you know where from? Thanks, and you’ll be able to see responses from the other participants.
For those of you who read me on a regular basis, you know I’m high on LinkedIn and what it can do to help you grow your business contact list. With over 161 million business members, there are certainly opportunities there if you know where and how to look.
That’s why I’m always trying to improve how I use this important business tool. As Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn says, “It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected.”
Jeff Korhan wrote a great post recently in social media examiner that outlines and shows examples of 10 LinkedIn Tips for Building Your Business. All the tips are free to use. Here are some highlights:
Use appropriate key words and phrases in your heading and title – they are different and your heading gives you an opportunity to elaborate on your skills and areas of expertise.
Make sure your online and offline business network are housed within LinkedIn – By linking in other business contacts you ensure its completeness of your entire network.
Tag your skills and expertise – this helps reinforce your capabilities for those who come across your profile and you can use up to 50 tags.
Personally welcome those new connections – It only takes a minute and it’s the first step in starting a relationship.
Hopefully you are using and benefiting from using LinkedIn.
For those of us who write blogs, we do it with the sole purpose of sharing insights and tips that hopefully make your job easier. Our biggest challenge once the killer content is written is to make sure as many eyes as possible see it. Professional tradesmen are always on the go, and I want to make sure they get what they want in short concise bits of information.
It’s true optimization is usually associated with search, but you can insure that your content performs well on social media platforms. I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, 11 Tactics to Optimize Your Blog that I found very interesting and wanted to share some of the points she makes:
Focus on just a few keyword phrases – prioritize them by the words you want to cover.
Create great headlines – you need to catch their attention so they stop and smell the roses.
Use good photos/graphics – It’s true a picture is worth a thousand words and it attracts readers.
Make your posts easy to read – use headings and bullet points. It also helps search engines.
Make content spreadable – RSS feeds, emails or social media.
I bet for most of you it’s that you’re afraid you won’t be able to publish relevant content on a regular basis. I’m the first to admit starting a blog is a commitment, but one that’s well worth it.
Your blog can be the center of your social media plan where you can repurpose posts to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. We have found that consistent posts have helped us become the thought leader in marketing to the professional tradesman and have generated new clients from it.
Since content is usually the stumbling block to starting a blog, here are some suggestions on where and how you can get good content. You need to realize you don’t have to write everything. You need to be the “go-to” resource for your niche, so utilize other experts.
Try to do one original post a week.
Supplement other posts by sharing industry/association news with your insights.
Set up a Google Reader account where you can send RSS feeds of people you want to read on a regular basis and repost their articles with commentary and insights from your point of view.
Case studies and testimonials – Get your sales staff involved. These are great stories and it’s great when customers tell, in their own words, how you helped them solve a problem.
Stats/surveys – folks love to get industry info or trends. Start your own survey and share the results. It’s a great way of getting a conversation going.
Look internally – some of your best resources might just be down the hall. Talk with sales, customer service and engineering. They probably can give you more topics and issues to talk about than anyone else, and it’s relevant to your industry.
Those are some suggestions for getting great content, and don’t think you need to be the sole source of content. Make it a team effort.
