Social Media Marketing is more than just a buzzword or phenomena.
“Social Media Marketing is marketing of the future; where companies, businesses or individuals leverage on available Internet and communication technologies and use these as tools to deliver customer focused messages that encourage participation and dissemination, ultimately achieving branding and marketing communication goals.”
MarketingSherpa has released some research that reveals that more companies are shifting a lot of their marketing efforts from traditional to social media. Why? These companies are seeing higher ROIs from social media efforts, and traditional media not as effective as they used to. You can get the 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report here for $447.
This growing interest in Social Media Marketing has also created opportunities for a position that did not exist a short time ago, the Social Media Manager.
Everyone is going social media; these are not just Fortune 500 companies but any business or person who has a product or service to offer like dentists, mechanics, painters, wedding planners…. people who urgently need but don’t know how to run a social media campaign, and likely do not have the time to spend on Facebook or Twitter looking for new clients.
Forrester has published statistics showing that 99% of retailers are planning on developing an online presence specifically on Facebook by 2011. Now, here lies the the demand for social media marketers… people who are already experts on SMM and will deliver the results faster than a business owner striking out on an SMM (Social Media Marketing) learning curve.
But what do Social Media Managers do? Apart from creating and implementing your social media strategy, they are your brand’s executive assistants and perform tasks like:
1. Cleaning up your Twitter communications and weeding out the spam messages, leaving those messages that are important to you… or as in the case in customer relations / support, routing them to the appropriate individual or department in a company.
2. Blogging and all tasks related to blogging and functions that pertain to the maintenance of a blog such as comment approval and clean up; and in some cases for managers knowledgeable in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blog optimization and content development.
They also help ensure that your blog posts / content, get the most traction by getting them out on other sites at different times of the week, or getting them exposed to your Twitter followers at different times of the day so more people would catch it.
3. In social networking, grow your network or followers. In Facebook these could be your profile friends or fans in the case of fan pages, and on Twitter, these are your followers.
It’s all about numbers, the more people on your network the more people see or read your messages. Social Media Managers will find people who are your target audience, follow or connect with them and then facilitate engagement to develop relationships.
The three keys to success being, network growth, sharing content and engaging your audience.
These tasks can take as little as half an hour to 1 or 2 in a day to do, which is why hiring a regular employee might not be cost effective. Doing this yourself or training someone within the company to do it might not yield immediate or ideal results for a variety of reasons. Which is why it would be best to simply hire an expert to do it for you, get results faster, and you get to focus on more important aspects of your business.
Who says no one can make money from social media? Companies and business are, so do the people that do the social media work for them, of course the latter probably have more fun… making a good living getting paid to play around on Twitter and Facebook all day!
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Image courtesy of http://koifishcommunications.com.
There are people and companies who create multiple fake FB accounts and build up the friend networks on those accounts for the purpose of selling a product or service, promoting something like a website, or simply selling the FB account. That said, always be sure to check who adds you on Facebook unless this is not important to you. If you accept just about any friend request, you run the risk of having your personal information exposed, and can get yourself spammed with ads.
Here are some guidelines below… but a disclaimer, these are my own, and might not work for you..
1. Check Pictures
If a person sending you a friend request does not have his or her own face on it, or might have other people’s pictures like an actress/actor, a dog… think twice before immediately accepting the request, and do a little investigating.
There are some Facebook accounts however, who have a complete set of photos of the same person but are still bogus.. photos are typically ripped from an unsuspecting user of another network like Friendster or Multiply and used on the fake account.
2. Check the friend request sender’s account profile for comments of other people on their pictures, and see if it appears like these comments are genuine interactions between people who actually know each other, that means that person actually exists.
3. Check the person’s wall and see if anyone has tagged them in pictures, notes or status messages .. if that person is tagged on photos of other people that is a good sign that the person is real and that Facebook account is legit. Look for posts on the wall that reveal a person’s personality, likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests. These are easily spotted in the form of photos and videos of that person, notes, and believable status updates.
4. Check the friend request sender’s wall for posted messages from other people and actual interactions.. if all you see are ..”added…”, “liked”, or “is now friends with”.. it is very likely this account is just being used to build up a network of people in order to market something to and is not owned by an actual person
5. Finally, do a search on Google for the person’s name. If they indeed exist there is a chance that their name is mentioned on some web page somewhere that has been indexed on Google.
Again, I believe it is important to check the add requests you get, because you could be allowing access to private information such as an email address, phone numbers and other personal information that might be taken advantage of by shady individuals. You could also be setting yourself up to get annoying advertising messages. Or worse, your identity get’s stolen and your pictures get used to create a fake personality/account on Facebook or another social networking site.
Here’s one more thing to think about. If you need visitors to send to an offer or to a website… or if you have a business that needs customers.. and you have 10 FB accounts each with 1000 people, you have a total network of 10,000 people. If you post a status message with a link to a website you want to promote, even if 10% of people click the link, that there is instantly 1000 visitors. Imagine if you post at least 5 status messages a day with a link. If your click through rate (CTR) is consistently 10%, then you are able to drive 5000 people everyday to any site of your choosing.
We know Facebook is profitable, and that is due to the website’s high traffic and usage by its members. But you probably would have never guessed it was profitable for some in this manner… people and companies whose business is creating and developing social networking accounts, who get paid to build it from the ground up, and even auction accounts with thousands of friends for thousands of dollars.
I put together this short list of Facebook Marketing tips mainly because I was getting a lot of private messages from people whose friend requests I had approved. These private messages were not even, “hello thank you for accepting my friend request”, nor adequate introductions but messages that went like “hello would you like to invest in …..”, “hi, the real estate business is one of the best places to put your money in…”.
Have you ever received any of those messages on Facebook? It can get really annoying. So here are those tips and a few links to good places to read up on Facebook Marketing.
Tip 1 – Do Not Hard Sell
Facebook Marketing is not the process of adding people to your network, then sending them messages about investing or buying something as soon as your friend request gets accepted. Moreover, if they declines, please do not ask them for referrals or names of other people that you can pester. You are annoying people instead of getting them interested in what you are promoting.
Read the line above carefully, and note that the key word there is “interested.”
If people are not interested in what you have, they will not buy. If people do not feel a need for what you have, they will not buy. If people are not interested nor have a need for what you have, neither will they ever want to refer other people to you.
Tip 2 – Content Relevant to Your Audience is Key to Getting Attention
If you are selling a product or service through Facebook, you do not get people’s attention by messaging each and every one of them asking if they want to try your product or service. Instead, create and upload useful and helpful information such as articles, video or links on your profile page that your prospects will find important to them.
The best articles are always informative articles that zero-in on a specific need, problem or situation that they encounter or are in, that needs a solution. By providing valuable content to people on your network, you not only build and sustain a relationship with them but build TRUST.
People buy brands they trust. People buy from people they trust.
Tip 3 – Be Passionate About What You Post
Many times I see Facebook profile pages that look like they were half heartedly done. It gives me the impression that the person who created them did so not because he liked it, but did because his boss told him to do it as a way of getting more leads or potential business for the company. People see through that.
Be genuine, be real. Put your passions on your Facebook profile. I think it goes without saying that, it would be an advantage if you truly love your job and love what you do, because it will show in what you are posting on your profile page. When you write about something you are passionate about you will never run out of things to write, because you will always find something interesting to say… something that other people will also find interesting.
Tip 4 – Treat Your Friends as Friends and Not Leads or Prospects
I have heard many people talk about bumping into their Facebook friends on the street or somewhere but they never say hello. Facebook friends who initiated an a friend request even! What is the point of having someone on your FB friend list if you cannot even say hi or see eye to eye in the real world. People forget that, marketing is about relationships. This often happens when some person trying to sell something simply adds people to his friends list in order to try and pitch a product or service.
Everyone hates a salesman, but everyone likes to have a friend.
Tip 5 – Grow Your Network
For any social marketing effort to work, there is one thing you would need to do consistently… and that is to grow your network continuously. Apart from that, make sure to post useful content that people on your network would enjoy and find useful.. be helpful and make time to interact with people on your network. Again, marketing is about relationships… look at a person as a person and not as a lead.
So here are a few links to pages on Facebook Marketing which I like.
Facebook Marketing by Ron Jones talks about promoting your Facebook profile and fan pages. I especially liked the part about engagement and conversation. After all, social marketing IS about engagement and conversation.
Dosh Dosh Facebook Marketing: Articles and Resources talks about using FaceBook for Brand Exposure, Traffic and Sales and presents a good number of resources as well.
Conversation Marketing might be a new sounding bit of marketing jargon to you but in practice this is one of the oldest methods of getting marketing messages across. It might be touted by many as some new fancy way of marketing but strip away the technology and mediums where it is common today, and you find that it is simply correspondence between two or more people that leads to a purchase decision. It is making waves in marketing circles today mainly because of the internet and Web 2.0.
Think about it… in the old days, if you could get into a conversation with someone who has a problem or needs an answer to a question, and provide them a solution to their predicament; you have just successfully used a conversation marketing technique if that person actually buys the product you were recommending to them. With the Internet and Web 2.0, you can get into as many conversations possible.
A fitting description of Conversation Marketing can be found on www.idiomstrategies.com which says “Conversation marketing utilizes Social Media networks and applications, Web2.0 sites and tools and many traditional marketing tactics to help companies engage in their market conversation, generate awareness and increase sales and customer retention.”
Dynamic Media Corporation CEO and Conversation Marketing advocate Michael Campbell seems to have perfected this system and put it into a course called Goobert Method of Traffic Generation, where you can get a significantly growing amount of traffic to your website by simply jumping into conversations on social sites with other people and providing meaningful and useful to the people involved in the conversation, getting them to click on to your website if links are present, or searching about you on Google. Apart from those actively involved there are the spectators who may not have participated in the discussion but are simply reading the thread and are also potential visitors to your site.
With the recent update in Google’s ranking algorithm (Google Caffeine it is called), there seems to be a better appreciation of traffic and links coming from social websites; not only are there many of them, but these are rich in traffic and authority.
Good webmasters today are no Gooberts. A Goobert is actually someone who does not know what is going on, and in the Social Media Marketing context Campbell refers to his Gooberts as webmasters who are the opposite of its true meaning. Goobert actually is short for Google Blog Alerts, a feature on Google that allows you to receive notices when new blogs on specific topics you indicate to receive alerts about. The moment you get these alerts, check out that new blog and see if the topic discussed is something you can contribute a meaningful discussion to. If you are the first or one of the first to leave a comment there is a higher chance for you to get clicks on your link from the readers of that new blog post. Another way of Googbert-ing around is checking out news stories, again you can set up alerts on Google to receive notices when news stories that have the keywords you request to get alerts on, are published. If there is a comment section or “post your opinion” section at the end of the story, this is an opportunity for you to go Goobert.
To get good traffic, go the Goobert way and go social; interact, be in the thick of as many relevant conversations, and be helpful.
I just opened up my Multiply account to find over two dozen posts in my inbox from the same account/person, in what looked like his or her attempt to promote every single product in their inventory.
Yes it looked like the posts from this account were all about stuff being sold through multiply, fashion accessories and apparel I believe.
Annoyed, maybe because it’s past 5AM and without a wink of sleep yet, I promptly deleted the account from my contact list.
The rise in popularity of social networks has actually made it easy for individuals to connect with other people, joining online communities has made it easy for the non-techie user to create an online presence and network with other potentially like minded individuals. Networking has always been an inalienable human activity, we are a social specie and we like to communicate, to keep in touch, to be a part of a group.. to belong. For this reason communities over the internet are segmented further into smaller groupings maybe according to interests or affiliations, somewhat like marketing psychographics that classify a target market based on lifestyles, behavior or preference. But I digress.
My point being, social networking has also become an advertising medium where one may deliver advertising messages to those who are on their network.
I think people automatically assume that when one accepts an invitation to a network, this is already taken by the inviter as consent from the invited, to allow advertising messages.
While I do believe that social networking is to a certain degree permission marketing, many people abuse this by wanton broadcast of advertising messages that may be received as spamming.
For those who are not familiar, permission marketing is the opposite to traditional, interruption marketing where ad messages are rammed through a recipients throat, permission marketing is the delivery of advertising to a recipient who gives consent for advertising delivery. If done right, permission marketing is actually very effective because your prospects are more targeted and already might have an interest in what you may offer them later on.
Moving on, when you accept an invite from someone to join their network, it is in a way, saying yes, I am willing to receive your posts, bulletins and updates. Which is why I think to a certain degree it is permission marketing, because you allowed it by accepting.
But, permission marketing is more importantly, about building an ongoing relationship of increasing depth with customers. In the words of marketing guru Seth Godin (creator of the popular social site Squidoo), permission marketing is about “turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers.”
So, you have to establish a rapport first, develop the relationship, and then market. Not blast everybody’s Inbox with advertising messages which may not be relevant or of importance to those on your network.
While some people may simply resolve to ignore all that junk in their Multiply Inbox, today was the last straw and for me, hitting delete was a much better solution. One less spammer on my contact list.
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