How Social Media Marketing Can Win Customers
Overview: NAWBO-NW presents the Entrepreneurial Program Series during their monthly chapter meetings. In February, the Entrepreneurial Program featured Heather Pieczonka of Funsational, Inc. (formerly Creative Spark Media, Inc) speaking about social media marketing, including the strengths and potential of social media, the range of social media tools, how to decide which ones are most effective in reaching your customers.
How Social Media Marketing Can Win Customers
Social media is simply anything you do online that allows others to converse, contribute, add to, or give feedback to.
Why Social Media Is Important
1. It's less about "Selling" and more about "Engaging".
2. We've gone from "Large Campaigns" to "Small Acts".
3. We're changing from "Controlling Our Image" to "Being Ourselves".
4. We're changing from "Hard to Reach" to "Available Everywhere".
The key to developing a successful Social Media campaign is in setting yourself up as a solution to your customers. Not to sell so much as to solve.
Where Do I Start?
Start by developing a strategy; by deciding what your goals are; then choosing the Social Media platform - or tools- that will take you there.
In the words of Seth Godin: "'’Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time'’ is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics.”
The strategy is all about the goal. Social media tools are our tactics.
Social Media Strategy
Social Media strategies can be simple or complicated. It all depends on the goals you
have and the level of involvement you feel comfortable with.
The beauty of social media is that you can see reaction in real time. So if you're not
getting the information and feedback you're looking for, try something new. If you find
one tool is outperforming others by a large margin, put your attention there.
Blogs
Blogs are a way to express your opinion, or establish your expertise on a subject. It's like a news column, a collection of articles, ideas, and random thoughts.
Blogging puts a face to the person behind the website, or people behind the business - which is paramount in our new age of transparency.
For example, mommy bloggers are average everyday moms who have carved a niche and have a huge influence on people and corporate America. These women reach thousands of readers. They started out by expressing their opinion, and gained large readership. We call that followers.
Online Reviews & Opinions
Think about the last time you researched a purchase online - at Amazon, say, or Cabelas, or some other big player. Did you check out the customer reviews? Did they influence you? It's not a passing fad; it's the wave of the future.
Online reviews are powerful because they foster community and they foster trust. It's not the same to post some customer comments on your site. Anyone can do that. What customers want to see are ratings and honest reviews, audio reviews, video reviews...and they want to see that they have the ability to review as well. That means you're actually using customer feedback and not making it up.
Social Networking
Social networking creates connections that you can see. You see your friends, and you see your friend's friends. This is important because your network has hidden opportunities... and social networking makes these connections between people visible.
Digg & StumbleUpon
Digg & Stumbled Upon are social bookmarking sites.
Here’s how they work. You read an interesting article - if you like it, you "Digg" it - and it increases the articles popularity (and the corresponding site.)
Of course then you can go to Digg, and see what other people think is popular or what they've said it about it, too. The same for StumbleUpon.
YouTube
The demand for video is already proven: U.S. audiences viewed nearly 28 billion online videos in November 2009 alone.
Flip Cameras are also rapidly increasing in popularity, and at their low price of $149, it doesn’t take a large investment anymore to start making videos and sharing them with your online communities.
Three ways you can use online videos:
1. Post videos to your Facebook profile.
2. Be active on YouTube. Go there, generate excitement for you.
3. Shoot your own video blog.
Facebook & MySpace
Both of these sites primarily serve as a group of friends and associates who want to socialize. The profiles are usually personable and inviting.
The companies that are most successful at converting followers into dollars are those who interact most with the users - and frequently post content related to their brand.
MySpace has gained popularity in the teenage and early 20's demographics, while Facebook is most popular among those over 25. I'll be addressing Facebook specifically, but you will want to choose your platform based on your customer demographics.
As users become “fans” of your page, all of your activity appears in their News Feed each time they log on.
Facebook’s Fan Page is probably the best example of how you should be marketing your company through social networking sites.
Fan features your company should be using:
1. Comment on other users' content or profile posts.
2. Ask questions on your wall.
3. Posting links or threads.
4. Posting relevant events.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is powerful from establishing professional contacts. I stress professional, because Facebook, Twitter and MySpace were created to casually interact with friends. LinkedIn was created specifically as a professional networking site.
Beyond building professional contacts, you can also use LinkedIn to generate leads.
Start by creating a polished and personally branded profile on LinkedIn. Start connecting to your current and past contacts - and focus on connecting with contacts where trust already exists.
Then you can:
- Join LinkedIn groups where your clients/customers gather and participate.
- Post relevant content on groups and start building your credibility.
- Answer questions posted on LinkedIn.
- Create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content there.
According to Wikipedia, Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.
Originally Twitter was designed as an instant messaging tool - SMS to be more accurate - to instant message friends with short notes like, "I'm heading out to lunch at Carusos" or "Having a great time downtown, want to join us?". It was designed by techies and was soon adopted.
The best description I can give you is that it's like being on a bus. You can hear many conversations going on, but you choose which one you want to join.
If this doesn't sound useful to your business, I don't blame you. But, (pause) the power behind twitter isn't having a thousand different friends telling you what they're doing at 3 am. It's much more.
Twitter:
- Helps businesses listen to customer feedback
- Creates a real-time news source
- Makes trending topics visible through hashtags
In addition to monitoring what's being said about you, you can also create your own private lists of Twitter users, to help you manage more effectively.
A few quick and easy ways to use Twitter Lists:
- Create a private list of your competitors, so you can keep tabs on what they’re writing about
- Create industry-specific lists of experts to brainstorm with, or draw new information from
- Create a list of your clients who actively use Twitter
- Create a list of media organizations, to keep tabs on current events or stories
- Create a private list of journalists you want to follow or target with story ideas
Social Search
Social search is how social media is influencing online searching.
And it isn't so much of a tool, as in something you control or use, it's already out there and you should be aware of it.
Search engines like Yahoo and Google have very complex ways of ranking websites. Ever wonder why someone else is number 2 and you're number 200? That's where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Experts come in. They know ways to help you get to the top.
They know to get your site to the top of the search engine; you need links from highly regarded sites back to yours.
Sites like Facebook and Twitter are highly regarded. They get indexed more frequently that an average company's site.
What does this mean to you?
It means if you put your article on Facebook, which is linked to Twitter, and to your blog...now instead of one place, it's in 3 places, it increases your visibility - and - it will get picked up by Google or Yahoo search faster than if you simply put it on your company's media page.
About Heather Pieczonka
Heather Pieczonka, President & Chief Strategist of Funsational, Inc (formerly Creative Spark Media, Inc), the world’s most prolific printable game developer dedicated to holidays and party themes. Pieczonka has nearly 10 years of e-commerce marketing and sales experience and is an entrepreneur at heart. Armed with a Bachelors in Computer Science from Arizona State University, she carved a niche in the online world by designing, creating and selling printable games for parties and occasions. Using traditional online strategies like Search Engine Optimization and Google AdWords, Pieczonka leveraged the power of the internet to sell over 10 million games in 103 different countries. Now her focus is on using the power of social media to expand her company's reach to millions more.
copyright 2010 Heather Pieczonka, Funsational, Inc.