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Social Networking and Media Marketing for Business
Diane SchubachKeller Williams Realty
There are several different types of online media: Websites
Business Websites Real Estate Search Sites Job Search Sites
Visitors Are Passive/Not Interactive
Blogs/Microblogs/Forums Blogs like www.PortWashingtonLife.com Online diaries like Live Journal Microblogs like Twitter.com and FourSquare.com Forums like CityData.com Blog Networks like ActiveRain.com
Has the ability to allow visitors to comment and add some content/more interactive
Social Bookmarking Digg Del.icio.us Stumble upon
Share/recommend online content/ commenting on content
Social Networks/Multimedia Sharing
Facebook Myspace Linkedin Flickr YouTube Slideshare
Interactive/allows adding content
Go Where the Customers Are Facebook has 400 million users, and 175
million people log in to Facebook every day.
There are 97 million online video viewers on YouTube.
Twitter has 75 million users, and 39 million “tweets” per day.
Linkedin has 65 million users.
MySpace has 200 million users.
Join the Conversation
Businesses can now communicate with their markets directly.
Businesses can belong to a community. Start a conversation; establish relationships. Add non-marketing messages to your voice. Leverage the “long-tail” (local and specific).
Getting Started
Google yourself and see what’s out there about you.
Create profiles on two or three sites (Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook are good places to start). Get familiar with how those sites work before adding more.
Find relevant blogs and comment on them. Contribute every day. Be honest and willing to share.
Social networking takes consistency. The advantage is that it costs nothing, but it takes an investment in time.
Reach out to people you’ve met online. Social networking works better when you put the “social” back in.
Reply to all who reach out to you. Comment on other people’s updates. Your non-marketing updates can be fun, but
should always be appropriate. Experiment with the ratio of your
marketing/non-marketing updates. Engage users with questions or polls.
Make It Work
Start a Facebook Fan Page
Create a Linkedin Profile
Create a Twitter Profile
10 + 1 Myths About Social Media
Social media is really easy. Because social media is fundamentally about conversations, the individual(s) behind your social media activities is often perceived as the public face of your company. Be careful about who gets this responsibility.
Social media is really hard. True, there are techniques that work better than others, guidelines that are good to know, rules of etiquette to follow and common mistakes to avoid, but the general skills called for aren’t all that uncommon, and the specifics are teachable. Not just anyone can do it, but it’s not rocket science either.
Social media is only for the young. On the consumer side, the largest cohort of Facebook’s user base is the 35-54 age group, and the fastest growing is the 55+ cohort. Age is irrelevant in social media usage, and life experience is a plus for social media marketers.
Social media is free. While recent studies show that about half of marketers say that social media reduces their overall marketing costs, it is by no means without a price. The tools of social media are (mostly) free, but the time, effort, and expertise required to make social media marketing effective has real costs.
Because social media is labor-intensive, we should offshore it. While off-shoring works well for tasks like IT consulting services and software application development, it tends to be less efficacious for market-facing activities.
Social media success is all about rules. There are guidelines as to what
works well (being sincere, helpful, and knowledgeable) and what doesn’t (trying to use social media sites as one-way broadcasts of your marketing brochures), but the field is new enough that many of the “rules” are still being written. While there are some techniques that seem to work well and are worth replicating, and others that should clearly be avoided, there’s also a great deal of space for creativity in this rapidly expanding and evolving area.
Social media has no rules. Just because there isn’t an established cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing success doesn’t mean there are no rules. Don’t be excessively self-promotional, don’t try to automate everything, be sincere, add value—there aren’t a lot of rules, but these are a few very important ones.
Social media gets immediate results. Almost never. Sure, you may run across an example somewhere of this happening, just as you may hear about a couple who got married three weeks after they met. It can happen, but isn’t common and shouldn’t be expected. Social media is about building relationships and influence. It takes time, but the payback can be much more lasting than a typical “marketing campaign” as well.
Social media is too risky. This fear is most common in the medical, financial services, and other regulated industries. And it’s certainly true that there are situations where a company has to be somewhat cautious about its social media participation and content. By all means, be aware of your specific industry and regulatory environment and put necessary safeguards in place.
Social media is new. Certainly the tools are new, but social media marketing is fundamentally about participating in and influencing the direction of conversations about your industry and brand. Those practices are timeless, but social media has increased the velocity and magnitude of such conversations.
Social media marketing doesn’t apply to my business. There are isolated niches where this is true. But for virtually every other type of business however, someone, somewhere is discussing your brand, your industry, or your competitors in social media.
You’re missing out if you’re not listening and participating!
