Thursday 25 October 2012

Business Consort brings you 6 steps nearer to social media success


Social Media marketing brings with it greater engagement but many businesses make the classic mistake of selling not telling!
Social media engagement will reap the rewards.
For example, don’t send these awful welcome emails listing in great detail the vast array of services and products that the business provides.
Establish the need first and build the relationship!
1.) Engage at the point of connection
Try sending a welcome message to thank someone for joining the network and ask a question – Get them to engage back because as soon as interaction is gained the stronger your relationship is.
Segment social networks based on your sales cycle – Send a Welcome email – Fact find – Is there a need? – Send more information – Set up a meeting? – Add them to email newsletter - Send out polls or surveys.
Offering downloadable guides adds value and sending links to video tutorials are good way of engaging and getting a network to interact with a brand.
2.) Attracting new people to grow social networks
A common stumbling block is growing a social network and how to get new people involved.
Start with the people the business knows - that is the easy bit!
The key to social media is to draw target markets in by engaging through discussion – Ask questions and initiate participation – Fact find and establish a need.
Asking something like - How do businesses use social media? start the conversation and bring people to discuss a topic. Don't just promote.
3.) Remember it's 2 way - It's called social networking after all!
Often businesses are so hung up on getting their content out and getting their own network to comment, like or share they forget to engage with others conversations and content.
4.) Content is key and appeal to your networks egos
Networkers are visual creatures and as there is more and more content to compete with such as 100,000 tweets a minute means you have to stand out from the crowd.
With social networks such as Facebook whereby people spend over 1.3 million years of eye time this offers a great platform for increased visibility.
Use bite size videos to get your message across instead of just using text as content.
Remember the objective is engagement - If a business wants to achieve this then it's got to be worth commenting, liking or sharing.
Engaging isn't just about spreading a message but can be as simple as strategies that appeal to the people in a networks egos - Halls of fame, get them to compete for the most active networker and reward with discounts and offers.
Perhaps get networks to help reach a goal - "Help company X get 10k Facebook fans and all fans will be rewarded with a free XYZ"
When a networker uses a social network they don't trawl endless amounts of posts but search for their topic of interest - Include keywords in content to make sure you are seen and don't forget to hashtag!
5.) it's all about reach and viral fame
A good site to see you social engagement (how many comment, likes and shares) as well as monitoring calls to actions such as URL clicks is http://www.sproutsocial.com.
This tool is free to try for 30 days and also offers great tools to discover new people to follow and connect with as well as monitoring reach - How far did your content go!
Reach is used to determine your viral fame - So if 10 people share your post and they each have networks a million strong then you reached 10 million plus whoever is in the businesses own network. 
Lastly but just as important see top posts by influence (reach) and engagement and build on them for your next high impact post!
6.) Know what works and don't plan too far ahead - Trending is not next week it's now!
Remember to do some social listening about your area of expertise and also your own company name and brand.
Google alerts are easy to use and take seconds to setup.
Benchmark where you are now and set clear Key Performance indicators (KPI's) - Know your goal.
Use a metrics tool such as Google analytics to see which network is sending you the most web traffic - Simply set up 'social settings' in the 'Admin' section.
List all your social URL's and blogs etc.
See where your website sits among all 645 million live websites in the world - http://www.alexa.com will help you see your global and UK ranking as well as audience demographics, time spent on site, per page and bounces.
For more social and digital media tips check out Dawn McGruer FRSA's video filmed at The Telegraph.




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