COGO Interactive

Archive for the ‘Using Social Media for Business’ Category

For most of us, social media benefits our businesses for two reasons. One, it gives us a way to engage and interact with both customers and potential customers on a personal level. Two, it gives us a platform from which we can market our products and services in a way that will help us connect with the largest audience possible.

Often these two aspects of social media for business overlap quite a bit, and that’s where it’s important to be careful with just how much self-promotion you’re doing in the scope of your everyday social media efforts. While self-promotion is certainly a big part of having a social media presence, being social is the key factor in making your marketing efforts work in your favor.

We’ve all run across that person on Twitter or Facebook, the one who never shuts up about how great their product is, or how their service can help you. How long did it take you to unfollow them? No one wants to listen to a stream of repetitive marketing speak 24/7, so it’s important not to be that person if you want to build a responsive social media following.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with talking about your product on your business social media accounts – that’s what you’re there for, after all. But you have to know where to draw the line between tasteful marketing and obnoxious marketing. If someone on a social network asks you a business-related question and there’s an opportunity to get your marketing message out there, go for it. But if someone asks you how your weekend went, chances are they just want to know how your weekend went.

For some of us, the concept of choosing when not to market is quite foreign. Marketing used to be a one-way conversation – you sent the message, and your target market either got it or they didn’t. These days, marketing is much more give-and-take – your customers ask what they want to know, and you can respond in the context of an actual, one-on-one conversation. Keeping that conversation flowing naturally is essential to keeping their attention.

Today’s social media users are intelligent people. They can smell over-marketing a mile away. If you put the emphasis on being approachable and informative instead, people will want to talk to you more often, which puts you in a great position in terms of building up an audience of potential customers.

2010 was a big year in terms of businesses starting to establish a social media presence, and 2011 expanded on that with an explosion in the number of businesses that started taking social media seriously as a marketing tool. Now that we’ve done an adequate amount of setting things up, it’s time to start thinking of 2012 as the year when we really push forward and begin to innovate in terms of using social media in the best possible way, and customizing the experience so that each business is serving its own customers in a manner that suits their particular situation.

With the unveiling of Google+, and more recently the public debut of Facebook’s new Timeline format, it’s clear that social media channels are evolving to meed the needs of a community that perpetually demands more from its online networking. Whereas before we might simply have been looking to stake a real estate claim on the social media landscape, now we want to decorate our spaces to more accurately reflect our businesses.

As SEO strategies evolve to give greater weight to businesses who provide engaging and relevant content to their customers, social media networks will become the place where much of that engagement happens. If, up until now, you’ve been treating your business’ Facebook or Twitter account like a blog, with mostly one-way communication, 2012 will be the time to start opening up more of a dialogue. You’ll want to encourage your customers to talk to you, and to talk about you in their own social media circles.

Google is already starting to reward business that are more frequently discussed on Google+, by giving those businesses higher rankings in search results. Effective SEO is no longer about static links and self-created keyword density, but about real interactions with real people, and the amount of buzz you can create in your target market. The buzz, of course, is the reward for providing your potential customers with quality products, great customer service, and an online conversation that goes both ways.

2012 will be a stellar year for those who can see where this new customer engagement model is going, and can find ways to provide even better communication than is expected. Both search engines and customers have learned to see through the SEO strategies of the past, so this year the focus should be on moving forward with finding new methods to engage with your audience in ways your competitors haven’t thought of.

I frequently give talks to various business groups on the best way to use social media to build awareness around your business and drive targeted leads to your website. When I begin, I see a few (okay, many!) skeptical faces in the audience and most of that skepticism is because of the technical overwhelm many feel when starting out in this new digital frontier. Many just don’t know where to begin and get stuck in analysis paralysis and then end up not doing anything.

It really isn’t that hard and here a few tips to keeping it simple:

• You don’t have to be everywhere to make it work!
• Each network is different
• Start with small steps
• Adapt & adopt
• Begin where you are

You don’t have to do it all now.

My suggestion: follow the above guidelines and start with one social network to get your feet wet. If you are primarily cater to business-to-business clients, create a LinkedIn profile and attach a company page. If you target business-to-consumer, create a Facebook Fan page. These are fairly simple and both provide an excellent way to get started in social media.

It’s time…take the first step!

How have you been using social media and what works?

A great article from Marketing Profs on how marketers are using web data to make their marketing campaign decisions…

Metrics & ROI – 2011 Trends: Turning Data Into Action; Mobile; Social Marketing : MarketingProfs Article.

I often look to other seasoned marketers for guidance and insights and one of those mavens is Marcia Yudkin. See below for what she had to say about building trust with customers:

Around the world, 83 percent of well-informed, well-heeled,
college-educated people rate a company’s trustworthiness as
extremely important.

So say the remarkable 2010 results of a survey conducted by
Edelman, a PR company with 52 offices worldwide.

Trustworthiness ranked higher in importance than having
high-quality products or services, offering fair prices and
being a good corporate citizen.

A hefty 75 percent of these respondents said frequent
communications from a company contribute to its reputation.

Whereas the 2005 and 2006 versions of this survey noted a
trend of trust shifting from authorities to peers, in 2010
experts and academics were rated as extremely credible by
64 percent, versus 44 percent for “someone like me.”

My comments on what you should do in the light of the data:

* Enhance your expert status through publishing and
publicity.

* Make sure reality matches your claims and promises.

* Seek endorsements from trusted experts.

* Communicate often with customers and be talked about by
credible sources.  Respondents in the 2009 Edelman survey
said they needed to hear something about a company three to
five times before they believed it.

You can subscribe to Marcia’s insights here:

The Marketing Minute
by Marcia Yudkin, Marketing Expert and Mentor

http://www.yudkin.com/markmin.htm

Building trust is another reason why a solid social media plan and policy is critically important to a company’s growth. What are you doing to reach out to your customers on a consistent basis?

Today’s CEO is not social. So says Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony. Very few of the CEOs at top companies in the U.S. and the rest of the world have any material presence on the popular social media sites.

Read more

6.) Business Exchange – Network with Industry Leaders and Become the Thought Leader

Business Exchange is literally the Business Week of Social Networking. What I like about it is that it is similar to LinkedIn in terms of demographic but it gives you the ability to network with and share/learn information with/from other professionals in pre-defined categories and industries. For instance, for the topic of social media alone there are actually categories covering analytics, branding, business failures and successes, design, social media in the workplace, social media innovation, job hunting, marketing, operations, privacy, training, and social media vs. old media. Find your industry’s category(s), start sharing information that would interest decision makers in your industry, and build out relationships as you would on LinkedIn. on Business Exchange for the latest in social media strategy. B2B social media marketing is like anything else social media-related: new tools, old rules. Business has always been social. You just need to find where your audience is and get used to a new paradigm where you professionally network with others and try to gain mindshare in a virtual, online world. That is, in a nutshell, B2B social media marketing.

(Source: Neal Schaffer, Windmills Marketing)