Social Media
Virtually everyone knows what the top social media/networking sites are, how to setup a profile/page and basic functions. But not everyone knows how to effectively utilize these sites/tools in a marketing/outreach campaign. I’ll highlight a few of the more popular social sites/tools and share a few ideas/tactics marketers can use to increase traffic to a site, build a brand, promote a product, service or event or otherwise reach more people vs. traditional email marketing.
Suggestion: If you setup new accounts for a company/organization, I recommend you setup generic accounts for your individual groups/teams. This is important, especially for professions with a high turn-over and even for positions where people might tend to stay longer, etc. — people tend to move on to other opportunities after a few years and if a personal-branded username is setup for an account (which generally you can’t change) and start to spend time/resources building a network on this… or worst yet, when someone leaves, they carry that account with them (or have otherwise been using an existing personal account to build their network), all the energy used to build relationships/networks on company time would be lost. So if your company is Company X, you might want to create a CompanyXCEO account for the company CEO to share insight/news with shareholders, etc… a separate marketing account everyone can share and build, a sales account, etc. Just be sure to create regular exports of your contacts in case a team member mistakenly (or worst case intentionally) abuses a social network’s policy (i.e. sending too many emails to LinkedIn 1st connections, etc.) Aside from this concern, it is always a good idea to build regular backups anyway, as from my experience, permanent and temporary data loss from cloud-based services is not all that uncommon and lists are also prone to human error. You may want to make a few exceptions for more personal impact when you are building your network so an invitation to join your network/group doesn’t come across as spammy… and some groups/networks specifically require people who join them to be an individual vs. a company/organization-branded account.
Great for B2C campaigns but whether it is a truly effective tool for B2B campaigns at the moment is up for debate. On one hand, one can say B2B Facebook marketing reaches more people that might be in the industry but as Facebook is more for keeping in touch with one’s personal friends, marketing on this platform may not be as effective and depending on marketing frequency, could potentially hurt a promoter’s brand. Marketers can setup a Facebook page (which they can setup a vanity URL i.e. facebook.com/vanityurl after 25 Facebook users “Like” their page) which can get great SEO. Another tactic marketers can use is to setup a Facebook group and invite their contacts to join (and promote signing up to join the group on their web site/email newsletters). Facebook allows users to email group members which can have higher open/delivery rates over traditional email marketing, effective so long as a plain text email message works… always good to mix HTML and text emails anyway however.
If you use Firefox and install the Greasemonkey add-on, you can install a number of Facebook enhancements, one being “Facebook Friends Checker”… if you post too many marketing-oriented posts which might be deemed an annoyance to your Facebook Friends, this is a good indicator of that and you can see who removes you as a Facebook Friend to optionally rebuild a relationship with a client.
Integrating Facebook with your web site: Read http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/ – definitely consider Facebook comments integration for nice viral marketing on a blog/magazine site. Also a “Like” button, “Join our Facebook Page” or “Join our Facebook Group” works well, as does a Facebook badge illustrating number of likes a post/page has received. For a nice social effect/greater sense of community, you can add a social widget that shows X number of random people who have liked your page (with their photos, if they enabled public display of them) and number of people that have “Liked” the page overall. A Facebook icon promoting your company’s page is helpful as well (standard).
Great for B2C and B2B. Twitter posts have been gaining great organic SEO results lately. The site is experiencing some growing pains with frequent outages noted in the past but is getting better. With Twitter, one can leave hash tags to help posts get found in search results, and if they gain enough traction, can be listed as a trending topic at twitter.com. A user can invite their existing contacts to follow them (either via interfacing with Twitter’s contact import tool which works with LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) or creating a comma-separated list of email addresses. The trick here is to get as many of your contacts following you on Twitter as this is another channel you can use to promote your product/service. Some marketers look down on Twitter as not being truly effective but I’d disagree as the tools Twitter offers can boost a marketing campaign considerably if utilized correctly. Like traditional ‘offline’ marketing, a good marketer considers (where possible/practical) marketing in print, radio, TV (‘marketing everywhere’) to carry their brand/message forward as much as possible. A mobile phone app allows you and others at your organization to Tweet messages anytime, particularly useful if you are at an industry event and want to post updates while in attendance. The ability exists through 3rd party tools/services to setup automatic scheduled Tweets for peak times (when you may otherwise not be able to manually send, which is also more efficient) and send automatic follow-ups every time someone follows you. You can also manage multiple Twitter accounts through these tools. Some of the more popular ones are HootSuite (web-based program) and TweetDeck (downloadable program), each essentially offering the same features but you might want to try both out to see which one you might like best. These tools also help you determine who unfollows you, among other features which helps you determine who among your audience might not be interested in your posts and cater your messages accordingly, while also reconnecting with those who unfollow you to rebuild connections, etc.
Using the @ symbol before someone’s username (i.e. @username) is used to reply to a tweet… if you want to “retweet” (copy someone else’s tweet and give credit), you can do this manually by typing “RT”, space and then @username. There is also a new automatic way to retweet on Twitter — see: http://mashable.com/2009/11/21/retweets-how-to/. This segment of my Twitter highlight helps you understand to also start a so-called ‘Twitter conversation’ between one or more people on Twitter.
Considered a courtesy if someone follows you that you follow them back but not required. If you follow someone and they follow you back (or vice versa), this allows you to Direct Message them (a personal email/message on Twitter).
A particularly useful/interesting way to connect with others is the LinkedIn integration with Twitter… if you want to see who you are connected with on LinkedIn (1st connections) with a Twitter account, you can go to http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow/import (“Who to Follow” > “Find Friends” tab) and click on the LinkedIn button. This will transfer you to LinkedIn where you can click on “Follow” buttons and also opt to “Unfollow” people if you wish. Being connected with someone on both Twitter and LinkedIn benefits you because it increases exposure to your posts/marketing — what might be missed/overlooked on 1 site might be seen on the other. Note: Depending on the size of your LinkedIn 1st-degree network and the number of those that have publicized their Twitter account handle with LinkedIn, you may need to manually go through and Follow people over the course of a few days, possibly weeks as Twitter (to deter spammers), sets a daily limit/cap on the number of people you can follow per 24-hour period.
Twitter is a great tool for PR organizations/groups to monitor your reputation and listen to your customers/client base. It also gives sales/marketing an opportunity to see with greater clarity who is interested in/looking for a specific product/service and can follow-up with them… also useful for research and development efforts. The possibilities/implications are virtually endless — some have even successfully used Twitter to land a new job… even working the other way around (a company rescinding a job offer to someone based on a negative Twitter post, as with the famous Cisco dialog):
theconnor: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”
To which an Agent of Cisco replied: “@theconnor Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”
Integrating your site with Twitter: many different ways from a Twitter badge showing # of Tweets a page/post has to an AJAX widget that, in real-time displays latest Tweets from your account or multiple accounts/hash tags. If your blog/site is setup to automatically Tweet from a new post you created, I recommend you disable this and setup a field in post/page edit optimized for Twitter (allowing you to manually enter a Tweet)… otherwise your post will be cut-off and won’t reflect all keywords/phrases/hash tags and you won’t be using Twitter to its full advantage. See http://mashable.com/2009/03/30/twitter-badges/ for some options. Twitter also has a new content “Follow” button you can place on your site – http://mashable.com/2011/05/31/twitter-follow-button/. As with Facebook, standard practice is to include a Twitter icon on a site to promote your account.
Primarily useful for B2B. Not just a ‘job search’ or professional networking/contact management tool. Sales/marketing can use LinkedIn as an effective lead generation tool via miscellaneous filters having the ability to target people in geographic areas and by title/rank at a company, while also keeping in touch with contacts. A marketer can send a message to all of their 1st contacts, cycling through 50 people at a time (not recommended, but possible) or alternatively, post a status update (recommended over regularly emailing a marketing message to your 1st contacts). The 1st connection messages you have the ability to send, along with the paid InMail messages you can send all have the ability to reach someone’s inbox with a much higher delivery rate/open rate over traditional email marketing (again, if you’re OK with sending out a plain text message). Marketers also take advantage of LinkedIn’s groups — if you can build a group up to a nice number of group members, you can normally email a good portion of this list once a week (not everyone will elect to receive group messages but most do and by default the option to receive group mail is generally auto-checked). This is another great way to marketing your product/service. Sending email out more than once a week to the sale list can cause higher than normal levels of list fatigue so the 1 week limit shouldn’t impact one’s marketing objectives. One can build their network by joining up to 50 groups you notice many of the people you want to network with belong to and then inviting them to join your network on the basis of group membership while (recommended) leaving a brief personal message introducing yourself to them. You may have better success networking with people who have the word “LION” next to their name or tagline (means LinkedIn Open Networker) or another group such as TopLinked, Open Networkers, etc. as too many “IDK” (I Don’t Know) queries can potentially terminate your account as technically, its against LinkedIn’s policy to invite people to join your network if you don’t personally know them. Another way to grow your network is if you can generate a list of contacts exported from Outlook or elsewhere that you personally emailed/otherwise communicated with, you can import these in LinkedIn, determine which ones have a LinkedIn account (or invite them to create one) and invite them to join your network that way as well. If someone is not a group member and you really would like to network with them, you can always remove yourself from a group temporarily (recommend you only do this for the groups that you can join automatically vs. any long-term approval process involved with them) so you can quickly re-join an existing group if you wish. If you run out of invites, you can always request more and LinkedIn will generally provide you with 500 more invitations to use every 30 day period, eventually increasing the amount to 3,000+ provided most people you invite to join your network accepts the invitations (an algorithm LinkedIn uses to determine the likeliness of you actually knowing the people you invite to join your network).
Suggest you enter your Twitter handle with your LinkedIn profile so those on Twitter can find you / potentially follow you.
Integrating LinkedIn with your site – not too many integration options with LinkedIn right now, outside the API but you can add a content “Share” button to the site. The most shared content on the web (shared through this feature) is displayed at the top of the LinkedIn site after one logs in so this gives publishers/developers a nice incentive to implementing this. Might also want to consider advertising a LinkedIn icon that links to your profile and a link that invites people to join your LinkedIn group. (On the later, I recommend a LinkedIn group be set as open in most cases for SEO benefit but if you are currently in closed membership status and get a high volume of spam messages, may want to weigh the pro’s and con’s of open vs. closed groups).
YouTube
A video sharing site useful for B2C and B2B. Some might be surprised with the B2B aspect, but the truth is YouTube is the world’s 3rd largest search engine. You can get excellent rankings on some videos submitted to YouTube, depending on various factors (from your username, video title and description, video tags, views, etc.). The SEO benefit applies primarily to YouTube search results and also Google… you may have noticed some videos being displayed at the top of organic search engines and these are from YouTube. YouTube also provides another means for people to find more information about your brand and it never hurts to submit videos there, whether you are a Yoga studio/fitness club, government/military organization, educational facility/organization, etc. — there is always a creative way to submit a video (training video, outreach campaign, preview/sample of a class or program, etc.)
Integrating YouTube with your site: you have the option to embed videos from YouTube to your site using the embed feature. You have the ability to show similar videos or disable this feature and also have control over the size/colors of the player. Certain web site platforms/modules allow you to automatically feed videos to your site based on parameters you specify which works great for video blogs or if you want to automatically feed a “TV” or video section of your site. Recommend also displaying a YouTube icon to promote your channel.
Flickr
Another great way for B2C and B2B companies/organizations to market themselves or products/services. Following the idea behind what I mentioned for YouTube above, this provides another channel and allows you to reach more people. At times, since Flickr is primarily recognized for photos, you may need to get a bit creative with regards to what you want to post with your account but this could be anything from a career/Human Resources outreach program, posting team outing photos on the site, hand off of a large ceremonial check for a charity, a photo to illustrate small classroom sizes, hands-on training, instructors providing one on one training to students, etc.
Integrating your site with Flickr: May be best to utilize Flickr’s API using a 3rd party/community module/plugin for this. You can also add a Flickr button/icon to your site to promote your Flickr handle.
Many other social media tools/sites to consider (Digg, Delicious, popular niche/industry-specific social media sites, etc.) that should also not get over-looked, but this should provide a good overview of what is possible with some of the more popular ones. You may have noticed these sites/tools are great for client/employee relationship management as well.
Somewhat of a blurry line between social media and SEO, but Google’s latest “+1″ feature lets users click on a +1 button placed on sites to help identify credible/relevant/quality content. The results of this button reportedly help a site’s SEO/influence ranking in Google based on a social ‘QC’ (quality-check) principle.
Another social media/content sharing integration item you might like to consider would be www.AddThis.com or www.AddToAny.com which allows you to share content to hundreds of sites/services very easily. Adding a “lifestream” to your site (a collective static or live stream of items pulled from social networking sites) is a creative way to tie your social network updates/content in one place and can also help SEO.
If you’re looking to build your own social network using GPL-licensed open source software (PHP/MySQL), I highly recommend Elgg (www.elgg.org). They have a hosted/service option for those that are not techies at www.elgg.com. WordPress’ BuddyPress plugin and related components might also be a good alternative. But if you need to create a highly-customized social network, I might suggest creating it from scratch using Drupal (version 6 vs v7 at the moment as many plugins you may need might be more mature/secure at the v6 level). Drupal has a high learning curve but is very secure and reliable with a large (and growing) user base with many developers migrating to this CMS from WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke and others.
They key to differentiating yourself from others in social media and to create a really effective social/viral marketing campaign: be creative and have lots of great quality content! Create content/posts that have good ‘viral’ qualities and value… I’m being intentionally broad so as to not give away all my ideas ;) and to open the door for your own truly creative thoughts/ideas. A post of course does not need to be controversial in nature to gain instant media attention (as you might see with many celebrity news channels/sources attempt) — it can be anything.
Some more great info on the web:
- 30 Social Media Marketing Tips and Tactics – http://oneforty.com/blog/social-media-marketing-tips/