by tradesmeninsights | Aug 2, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Social media isn’t just about posting comments on Facebook or Twitter. It’s about not only having a plan of how to execute your message, but how to get the most out of it. Since social media is different from our normal marketing activities, your team needs to be trained with guidelines on the do’s and don’t’s .
The Construction Marketing Association recently posted 5 Social Media Training Tips that would really apply to any industry.
Here are some highlights:
- Create a social media policy – Ensure both brand and corporate objectives are met. Need to define ramifications of negative situations, unprofessional conduct and disciplinary actions.
- Recruit social media editors – Social media opens up who should contribute to the message outside the typical PR and Marketing disciplines. Recruit and leverage thought leaders within your company and take advantage of their expertise.
- Develop a plan – This is not ready, fire, aim. You need to define overall objectives and goals for each social media segment you are planning on participating in.
- Conduct social media training – After you’ve recruited your team, you need to give them some basic training in each social platform. Each are different and they need to understand the best way to use the system.
- Keep everyone in the loop – You need to keep everyone from the team doing the work, to management where you want to build support, updated on the “wins.” Sharing the successes creates enthusiasm.
It’s important not to just jump in but have a plan. What are some things you’re doing to help educate your team?
If you ike this post, you may like:
Have You Got a Social Media Policy?
You Should Know the “Why” Before the “How” if You’re Going to Jump Into Social Media
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 27, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Sure you’ve heard it before that content is king, but what does that really mean? It’s more than a posting on Facebook or your lates blog post. It’s a long-term commitiment to your brand and what it stands for.
Everything you do should reflect your company’s core points of differentiation. I recently read a post by John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, called 5 Types of Content That Every Business Must Employ that I thought made several good points. Among them:
- Build trust – content builds a bridge between awareness and trust.
- Educate – content creates awareness and will make the prospect want to learn more.
- Get customers involved – build loyalty and community and let’s face it, you don’t have all the answers.
- Filtering and aggregating information – you need to be recognized as a go-to source for information; it doesn’t mean it all has to be original.
- Convert prospects into buyers – this is the ultimate goal and great content will help you in this process.
How are you using content to meet your marketing goals?
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 26, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I’m amazed by people who say social media is free! Obviously they haven’t dove into it or they don’t value their time or the time that others invest. While outside costs are minimal usually compared to traditional marketing campaigns, what it lacks in outside costs, it makes up with internal costs.
I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, How to Calculate Social Media Costs, that I thought was worth sharing. Highlights include:
- People – The most obvious and often the most overlooked because they are already in the budget. Your staff monitors, creates, manages and responds to social media.
- Content – This drives everything in social and you need to constantly create new stuff. Who’s doing it and if you’re not doing it in your own department and get sales or engineering involved, how do you calculate their time?
- Support media – What are you doing to promote and drive traffic? E-blast, landing pages, creative and paid advertising.
- Brand monitoring – Software and tracking fees to keep up to speed on what’s being said about you and your competitors.
- Technology – You need support which normally comes from your IT department or creative to support your website, blog and server capacity issues.
What are some other costs that you’ve identified?
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 21, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
If you do a blog and aren’t getting the results you were hoping for, maybe you’re doing something wrong.
A recent article by Cindy King in Social Media Examiner, 21 Dangerous Blogging Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) outlines some items from industry leaders on what they see as the biggest mistakes. It’s a good read and we’re all guilty of some of these. Here are my top 5 favorites:
- Not understanding your audience – What value do you bring to the table? You need to understand the problems of your audience.
- Not having a strong niche – Smaller is better. Develop a niche following that is equally focused, passionate and valuable.
- Not committing to the process – Blogging is a commitment; that means plan on writing 2-3 posts every week using keyword rich posts with persuasive, compelling titles.
- Failing to engage the readers with a compelling headline – You need to get people to open up your post. If it’s not clever or to the point, you could be giving away a million dollars and no one would know.
- Not sharing your expertise – The fastest way to build community is by sharing info. Refer and link to other experts in your industry. Have guest bloggers and be a guest blogger on other sites.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 20, 2011 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Although Google Plus is still in its infancy, the social media world is investigating its uses and benefits. Currently, Google is only allowing personal profiles and it’s an invitation-only party. Right now at least.
I’ve asked Rachel Kerstetter from our PR Department to give our readers a basic review of what Google Plus is and how we can start using it.
Currently, Google is working on not only ironing out the wrinkles for the 10 million users that it attracted in the first two weeks, they are crafting entity profiles that will allow brands, companies, organizations and other non-individual users to jump in and start using Google Plus. The sign up period for business profiles ended on July 15th and a small group of businesses will be using the profiles so that Google can analyze how users interact differently with them than with other individual users.
What it is
For now, individual users are exploring the newest social networking experience. Google Plus features what I call hyper-personalization, allowing you to segment your connections in any way that you choose and sharing with select groups of people.
Benefits to your business
One Google Plus user pointed out that it could become useful as a business collaboration tool because of some of its included features. I’m going to hit a few of the Google Plus features that could benefit business communication. I’m sure that as the network grows, more useful features will be added.
- Circles: Since you can personalize each circle with any way that you choose to label your group, you can share with industry-specific people easily. Imagine having circles called, “Industry Contacts” or “Business Partners” with which you control what you share, keeping personal and professional interest separated but still contained on the same network. And you can add one person to as many circles as you’d like. Once you get started on Google Plus, it is very easy to make new circles.
- Hangouts: Business groups can chat and video chat through Google Plus to keep things all in one place while members are in different physical locations. Multi-user video chat is a pay-for feature on Skype so Google Plus could cut your video conferencing costs. Hangouts allow up to 10 users to video chat. Google Translate can be integrated into the Hangouts which makes international business easier and cheaper.
- +1 Button: People can share items via the +1 button similarly to the various other social media buttons that you see elsewhere online. The Google Plus method of sharing is much more selective. The detailed method of separating people into circles could increase sharability (so to speak) of articles, posts and other information. People are much more likely to share industry-specific information on Google Plus because they can choose who sees it and not clutter their friends’ or family members’ newsfeeds with work-related postings.
- Sparks: The Sparks menu is another hyper-personalized feature that Google Plus offers. This acts as one-stop shopping for topics of interest. You can browse topics (sparks) or add them to your menu for quicker browsing. This option sorts your news for you and allows you to go as specific in your interests as, “saw blades” or specific company names and as broad as “Construction” or “Buildings.” These sparks of information help individuals to keep an eye on what is happening around a certain topic, but it also helps get messages out to those who want to read them.
To select the content that shows up in the sparks feeds, Google Plus uses a combination of +1 sharing, normal Google Plus link sharing and Google’s search engine algorithms. The aim of the sparks material is to get fresh, new things into the feeds. One major parameter of sparks selection is the visual component, leading videos to frequently rank higher. If your business sells a product, consider uploading a video of the product in use to YouTube. There are still bugs in the system, but for companies engaging in SEO, sparks could eventually help increase visibility. Also, if you set your company’s name or your product name as a spark, you can use it to monitor your coverage. It is much like a Google Alert, except it doesn’t send you an email.
Other benefits related to Google Plus are:
– Google Docs is a tool that lets you upload and share documents with anyone, anywhere. This lets you share even out of the office. This is not fully integrated with Google Plus yet, but has the potential.
– Google is overall easy and free to use. One Google Account gives you access to a ton of Google products from Gmail, Google Voice and Google Plus to Google Translate, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Business pages. There are companies that encourage employees to open Gmail accounts so they can use Google chat to make work more efficient.
– Wider professional access. Many workplaces block social networking sites to avoid the inefficient use of time by employees. Facebook may be blocked, but chances are Google is not. This means that your business contacts might have easier access to communication through Google Plus than they would with another social network.
– Potential is the overwhelming benefit that Google Plus holds. The fact that Google Plus is new, added to Google’s financial capability and the existing Google products that are, or can be, integrated into Google Plus, gives this new social network enormous potential for growth and business usability.
Building your Google Plus
Once you’ve got a Google Account and a profile on Google Plus, you can start building your circles right away with your current Google contacts.
Since most businesses use Outlook for email organization, chances are that your business partners are not stored in your Gmail contacts so adding them to your circles would be a cumbersome process of looking for each individual process if you don’t export your contacts. (Google Plus provides a tool for you to import contacts from a Yahoo! or Hotmail.) If you have a Google Account and have set up your Google Plus, transferring your contacts from Outlook is much easier than searching for people or sending a bunch of invitations. Microsoft provides directions on how to transfer contacts here.
If you tend to conduct business communication through LinkedIn, rest assured that you can also import your LinkedIn connections in a similar method as Outlook. You can find out how here.
Once you’ve got all of your business contacts in Gmail, you can simply go to your Google Plus Circles page and click on the “Find and invite” option. From there you can drag each individual contact into your desired circle, or you can select multiple contacts at once by clicking and highlighting over the ones you want to add then drag them into your desired circle.
Prepare now
If you operate the social media for your business, I strongly recommend that you try to snag a personal invitation to join from a friend or colleague so that you can start becoming familiar with Google Plus. (If you don’t know anyone who can invite you to Google Plus, we might be able to help if you let us know in the comments.) Once you’re on, start thinking about how business can use it best when the entity profiles become available.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 19, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Why are you either doing or considering social media as part of your marketing mix? Hopefully the answer is to ultimately get new customers. If that’s the case, you first need to build your followers and start having conversations with them. It’s a process and it doesn’t happen over night. Here are 3 tips on building followers:
- Content – Without it you won’t have anything to bring to the table. Come up with topic categories that would be applicable to your target audience and then put together an editorial calendar to make sure each topic is covered on a regular basis.
- You don’t have to the have all the answers – Rely on others in the field. Comment on what they say and put your take on it. Talk about industry issues and trends.
- Engage – Not everyone who reads your posts will be motivated to either share it or comment on it. But those that do open the door for you to engage them in further conversation. Sometimes your readers see you commenting and jump into the conversation.
Those are some of my tips on getting followers. What are you doing?
