How and Why to Use Social Media
Whether you want to grow your business or your career, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to build awareness, expand your influence, and strengthen your existing connections. It’s a competitive advantage. A strategic approach will help you build your personal brand most effectively whether you’re just getting started or not.
Getting Started
Why Social Media Matters
There’s no shortage of information available online. Employers can review job applicants’ online presence before contacting them. Customers can research products and services before suppliers are even aware of their interest. Today’s web-savvy consumers may know exactly what they want prior to their initial contact with you. They may even become subject matter experts with in-depth knowledge. By far, the majority of their researchis conducted online. So, the greater your presence in this digital realm, the greater your potential influence, and the earlier in the decision process your name can rise above the competition.
According to a CEB 2013 survey with small business owners on the impact of social media, 58% took one or more actions online to gain more information when they read a message on their supplier’s social media page. Additionally, useful content raises the overall perceived value of a supplier by up to 39%.
Emerging Technology
Social media is still evolving. Updates and new features are developed frequently for established platforms, and new platforms appear continuously. Don’t worry about being an early adopter. Establish your presence on the platform(s) where your customers, prospects and network are already engaged. Keep listening and learning, this new medium still has many new opportunities ahead.
Leverage Your Advantage
Large organizations drive growth through price, reach, and delivery. Their size is a key competitive advantage. Small and medium-sized businesses, and individuals, compete with more personalized service, subject matter expertise, and the ability to create strong customer
relationships through face-to-facemeetings. Social media is a natural extension of those strengths. Use it to leverage your local advantage.
Social Listening
Define your Audience
Start with what you already understand about your customers and prospects. What are the key challenges that you or your company helps them address? Use social listening to expandyour customer insights and to learn which social media platforms they prefer.
Social Listening
Social search or listening is an excellent way to learn what customers and prospects are saying about you. Set up automated search on keywords relevant to your business: Company name, your name, product names, competitors, industry terms, etc. You can practice testing keywords with a search engine to fine-tune the results. Search your own name to review the results.
Build your expertise using social search tools such as:
• Google Alerts – email digest of results from all over the Internet.
• Addictomatic – results from up to 25 social channels.
• Meltwater Icerocket– results from blogs, Twitter and Facebook.
• Topsy – results from Twitter photos, videos and influencers.
• WhosTalkin – results from blogs, news, networks, videos, images, forum and tags.
• SocialMention – real-time results from blogs, bookmark sites like Delicious and Reedit, images, videos and microblogging services.
You can also use these social search tools to help locate content you want to post/link to for your
followers.
Learn from Your Customers
Today’s marketing no longer centers on what you want to say. It’s about what your customers want to hear. They listen to what’s relevant to them, and tune out the rest. For you, this requires better understanding. Start with the customers you know the best. Ask them which social media platforms they use most often and why—or simply find them online. Learn which platforms they use regularly, what kinds of content they respond to, and what kind of information is important to them.
Content Planning
Your Social Media Plan
Make social media part of your overall marketing mix. It’s okay to start small, but as you begin to see results, revisit your plan to ensure the best overall ROI across all of your marketing activities. Define the objectives you want social media to achieve, whether for your company or for yourself. Your objectives will influence the type of content you create and provide.
Here are a few common objectives:
• Expand awareness
• Increase/improve relationships
• Gain insights into network’s preferences
• Gather recommendations/testimonials
• Improve customer service/support
• Drive traffic to your website and business location(s)
• Attract prospective customers
• Increase sales
• Career opportunities
Which Platform(s)?
Start with one or two social media platforms, based on their active use with your existing customers or network–or your personal preferences. Make your content valuable and frequent enough to be noticed. If your resources are limited, plan to do one thing well, rather than two or more things not so well.
The most commonly used platforms for businesses are:
• Company Blog (Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad)
• Linkedin (online resume company and/or showcase pages)
• Google+
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Google Places for Business, Yelp and Foursquare (retail, restaurants, travel industry)
Communications Plan
Start with a brainstorming session to begin developing your communications plan. What subjects will you cover? Where will your content come from? How often will you post—and when? You can monitor activity on your initial posts to fine-tune your timing to maximize engagement.
A calendar is integral to the planning process. What content aligns with the calendar? Check daysoftheyear.com for a comprehensive list of daily celebrations and themes. Start blocking in potential content on your planning calendar. Consider your company’s events and milestones; local events; etc. Once your content awareness is engaged, the potential is nearly endless. Build up your pipeline of content ideas throughoutthe year. As the current date approaches, the more topics and options you’ll have to work with.
Promotion
Your first communication should be internal. Advise your colleagues and coworkers of your social media plans, who will be posting, who will handle follow-up, and which platforms you will engage, and when. Next, begin external promotion by highlighting your social media venues via signage, flyers, email, business cards, etc.
Content Guidelines
Remember, the best social media always puts the consumer first. As you evaluate and develop content, keep your audience in mind along the way. What will they find useful or entertaining? The 80/20 rule applies. Invest the majority of your social media effort on things that benefit customers and the minority on self- promotion. Think of social media as an opportunity to create or reinforce positive impressions, not necessarily to close a sale.
Use direct feedback and social listening to continually refine the value of the content you create. Tap the knowledge of business leaders, coworkers, associates, and key customers to help you develop original content. The Internet is a wealth of information. Simply consolidating content from numerous sources is a time- saving service for your audience.
Content Creator
Who will create your content and post it, depends entirely on the scale of your investment. It can range from a few hours a week
to a full time position, or more. It can be assigned to an intern, an employee, or outsourced. Aim for someone already active in social media, who understands your brand and tone of voice, and someone who communicates well in writing.
Monitor Comments
You can monitor comments and replies made on various social media platforms via automated emails. Just review the settings to fine-tune your options and frequency. It’s a great method to stay current without having to stop by the website continuously throughout the day. In most cases, you can read the comment directly from your email, and even reply.
Handling Complaints
A coordinated response is always a good idea, but it’s especially important online. Don’t add confusion with one response from sales and another from customer service. Assign one person to flag negative feedback or complaints so they’re escalated offline quickly and cleanly. Then, designate one person to respond and follow-up.
Online, people expect response quickly. Follow the “triple A” rule of response: acknowledge, apologize (or empathize) and take action. Try to reply within an hour. Not necessarily with resolution, but to acknowledge the issue and its inconvenience, and note it’s being escalated
within your organization promptly.
FUD Factor
The number one reason businesses are reluctant to engage with social media is fear, uncertainty and doubt—the dreaded FUD factor. Fear of negative feedback or complaints that anyone online can read. In reality, it happens less often than you may think. And when it does, simply use the same strategy you use to handle issues in person.
Integrated Marketing
The more marketing activities you’re managing, the more opportunities you have to integrate your messaging. When you update your blog, you can reference it on Linkedin and Twitter and drive more readers to your most recent post. Services like Grosocial and Buffer provide tools to manage messaging acrossmultiple social media platforms.
Set Targets
What does success in social media look like? Standard metrics include the number of followers, click throughs, downloads, sale leads, information requests, phone calls (be sure to ask what initiated the call) and customer satisfaction (number of positive and negative comments from social listening). Tracking all of this data can take time. You can extract some of it from the individual platform sites. If you’re managing multiple platforms services like HootSuite and Sprout Social consolidate data fro multiple sources for centralized reporting. TweetDeck provides some great management tools for Twitter. Agorapulse provides a complete toolkit for managing your Facebook Page.
From Job to Skill
Social media is here to stay. Its importance grows every year, and will eventually move from being
an area of specialization to a skill, simply a part of the job for anyone who works at a keyboard.
Don’t be left behind. Start building your skills and expertise—and your network, now.
Visit us on the web or ask your local Xerox provider about our comprehensive line of printers and multifunction printers. xerox.com/office
You are not authorised to post comments.