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Knowing which social media channels to use to build your brand and engage your audience is crucial. Study your market and your social media platforms to create social media solutions unique to your company.... In an increasingly “social” world, having the right communication channel for your company is more important than ever, and the list of social media platforms grows longer. The choices seem endless: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube. These are just some of the channels dominating social media marketing services. But which ones should you choose? While any social media channel will be an extremely useful tool in your company’s inbound marketing strategy, there are a few broad trends you should be aware of. The type of social media solutions your company will want to use depends on the depth of your brand messaging and the demographics of the group being targeted. The latter can be a bit tricky, so analyzing the age, interests, and other characteristics of a company’s target market is an important first step in determining which social media channel to use. A young, hip student is likely to spend more time checking out new content on Tumblr or Pinterest, and exploring predetermined pages on YouTube or Facebook. A more mature audience, however, is likely to be found on LinkedIn Groups and Google+ Communities....
Yowza! Take a look this huge list from Beth Kanter. Includes social media monitoring and a long list of tools for every social media need. Fill your hat... and your toolbox.
While social media appears to be ideally made for budget conscious marketing small business, the reality is that social media can be a resource hog. During 2012, small businesses stepped up their social media activity across a variety of social media platforms. With the exception of Facebook, where small businesses, like their larger counterparts, had followed the masses, these firms had limited participation on social media. More than four out of five small businesses had staked out their turf on Facebook as of December 2012, up seven percentage points from May 2012. While Facebook can be effective for consumer-oriented businesses and not-for-profits seeking to engage a mass audience, it’s not ideal for every business. Without time to examine the options available, many small businesses aren’t necessarily selecting the optimal social media platforms for their firm. While about 30% use LinkedIn, the top professional social platform, it’s mainly for their ability to reduce hiring costs, not marketing. The omission of blogs is surprising and may be attributable to the fact that many companies consider it content marketing, not social media. Blogs should be at the center of your social media strategy since they provide information that answers customers questions and shows them how to use their products. Further, beyond creating the posts and distributing them, blogs don’t require constant engagement like other social media venues. As a bonus, they support search optimization!...
Many marketers today are looking to increase their Facebook fans, LinkedIn memberships and/or Twitter followers. Social media marketing is a new buzz-word in both b2b and b2c domains. But, when it comes to engagement, how easy is it to measure the engagement-level of your Facebook fans or LinkedIn Group Members? How easy is it to interact with them and nurture them? How easy is it to get usage and engagement metrics out of Facebook, LinkedIn et al? Is it even possible? Can you act on the metrics? External social sites are good for brand-building (or reach) but not for interaction or engagement. A recent Gartner report cited that a mere six percent of marketers claim that marketing on social networking sites is their top priority. What is even more powerful is that 45 percent of those surveyed said corporate websites were key contributors to marketing success. And from the customer perspective, four out of five customers claim to visit a website for product information and only a mere 19 percent would visit a Facebook page, according to Incyte Group....
There are several people asking the same question: “How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work?” In today’s video, Arnie Kuenn answers the question in several ways... ...What’s it really going to take to get that payoff? Well, this slide here shows you that both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies with 100 to 200 pages will generate 2.5 times as many leads compared to those who have 50 pages or fewer. It gives you an idea of where you are with your website. If you’re far exceeding that, you have thousands of pages, well then you’re in a different league. But basically for small businesses, this is the target you want to have. Companies that blog more than 15 times per month, we used to tell our clients that they really need to be looking at trying to blog or post new content on their website 3 to 4 times a week. This pretty much right there, 15 times a month for some new content. If you do that, you’re looking at generating five times as much traffic to your website compared to people who aren’t blogging or aren’t generating any kind of new content at all. That’s significant. That’s five times as much traffic....
... To become an empowered social business is to inject the advantages of social media directly into the heart of your corporate DNA. That means recognizing it’s not only about having a fantastic Facebook page or a high profile Twitter account (though that might be part of the plan!). It’s about implementing the benefits social technology offers through the fabric of your business- not just the consumer facing ones. What social networking tools provide is a way to break the divides that separate your employees and their expertise from customers and one another, fostering a climate of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Instead of isolated knowledge hives, you build engaged communities who relate and share with one another naturally. It’s about building a social corporate culture where innovative solutions naturally arise by a foundation built on trust and a love of sharing, a business of conversation and mass participation....
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It is very easy to confuse social media and social business. The graphic in this post, created by my colleague David Armano, is a great illustration of the differences between a social brand (for the purposes of this post, this is synonymous with social media) and social business. At a very high level, a social brand is what we all do from a communications perspective to include marketing, public relations, customer support and so on. So what is a social business strategy? It helps evolve the thinking and preparedness of an organization by bridging internal and external social initiatives, which results in a more collaborative company and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, employees). If you study the above graphic, a social business is very much focused on the internal dynamics of a company, from training and governance to knowledge sharing and culture. Social media policies and employee engagement also play a pivotal role in shaping a social business. A social business strategy can almost be considered an enabler, because if you have your internal process and structures sorted out, it is much easier to scale your social media initiatives externally. Whether it is launching a global Facebook page or empowering employees to engage in social media, having a solid social business plan will help minimize mistakes. As a marketing guy by trade, I will try to communicate the value of how a better social business strategy enables a better social brand....
A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
Unfortunately, like other marketing channels out there, social media, is still not without its own set of growing pains. Most businesses today commit critical and costly mistakes when setting up their social media marketing campaign. So to help you, I’d like to discuss the top 3 mistakes in social media marketing and ways you can avoid them so you can get the biggest return for your marketing investment....
Social media is a great way for businesses to market their products and services and to increase awareness of their brand. However, social media marketing is often a long-term play that does not generate an immediate increase in sales. In fact, it may not be obvious that social media is helping you at all for quite some time, and you may be wondering why you should even bother continuing to implement your social media marketing strategy. Before you give up on social media altogether, consider these measures for evaluating the impact that your social media campaign is having on your business — or the potential impact it will have on your business...
Friday fun. This app can get you free bacon..? Rashers, "North America's Only Bacon Sandwich Shop," is a small business based in Toronto, with one location and a no-frills, bacon-only menu. Founders John Clark and Richard Mulleny have adopted all the usual social media gimmicks: daily Twitter and Facebook updates from the store advertise promotions in which customers can answer trivia questions for in-store discounts. And they have a knowing logo (that's the helvetica typeface, much favored by hipsters, in case you didn't know). It's Rashers' mobile strategy, however, that really brings home the bacon....
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Social marketing is most effective when you keep it simple: the right channel, directed to the right people, at the right time, for the right ROI. See, I said it was simple! ;-)