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A Final Word on Social Media
Tools for Attracting Even More Business
“You are in the findability department. The marketing department is dead.”
BEFORE WE FINISH UP, I want to give you a few more tools for making the most of social media marketing.
Integrating Your Social Media Efforts
One of the biggest struggles people face in marketing with social media is figuring out how it all ties together. How does social media fit in with online marketing? What does the big picture look like? You want to integrate your social media efforts not only to save time but to reach even more people than you thought possible. Let’s take a look at some ways you can tie in your social media efforts.
Revolve Your Efforts Around Your Website
This is your home base—where all the action should occur. As I’ve mentioned, you should do everything you can to organize your social media marketing efforts around directing traffic to your website.
However, you can also use your website to let visitors know about what social media sites you’re involved with, giving them the chance to keep in touch with you in other ways. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all provide badges or buttons you can place on your website, which allow visitors to connect with you on these other sites. If you have a graphic designer or are one yourself, you can create your own.
Make It Easy to Share Your Content
If you have a blog or post articles on your website, find a way to enable one-click sharing. The easier it is to share your content, the more likely it is people will share. You will reach so many more people in this manner just by leveraging your current visitors. Give your visitors an easy way for people to tell their friends. This is why I really like the functionality Word-Press provides. It is a blogging platform that you can build your entire website on. If you use WordPress, you can also download the ShareThis plug-in, which allows visitors to easily share your content on their social media sites. It can be found at www.ShareThis.com.
Social bookmarking is another way to facilitate sharing. Social bookmarking, in a nutshell, allows visitors to share their bookmarks with each other. Websites dedicated to facilitating the collection and sharing of bookmarks are a great way to attract new visitors to your website. Although there are many such sites out there, here I will focus on the three that I believe have the most potential to drive traffic to your website.
•StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon (www.StumbleUpon.com) is a great tool for driving long-term traffic to your website. It is my favorite social bookmarking site, because it drives quality traffic and it helps you discover quality websites. It also tends to bring a good mix of visitors.
•Digg: Digg (Digg.com) is a rather famous social bookmarking website, but the traffic you get from it tends to be short-lived. Think sharp spikes of quick traffic. The audience on Digg is also partial to technology pieces.
•Delicious: Delicious (Delicious.com) is simple to use and has a broad audience. If you aren’t familiar with social bookmarking sites and need a simple way to get started, this is a great site to get started with.
Synchronize Your Status Updates with Ping.fm or Postling.com
Status updates, across all social media sites, are crucial to presenting and sculpting your brand. However, updating all of them can be time-consuming. The best tools I have found so far for updating all your status updates at once are Ping.fm and Postling. com. Postling even provides a robust dashboard that allows you to view Facebook and Twitter comments, along with your updates, all in one place.
Initially, you have to input your login information from each of your social media sites. This takes a few minutes. Ping.fm or Postling.com then saves all the login information, and the next time you have an important message to send out, you can do so with just one click. You log in and post a single update in Ping.fm or Postling.com. Then, that update is automatically sent across the board to all the sites you gave Ping.fm or Postling.com the login information for.
There may also be search engine-related benefits to setting up Ping.fm or Postling.com that have yet to be fully unearthed. Ruth Perryman of the QB Specialists (www.TheQBSpecialists.com) sent me an email describing the way her business’s Google rank shot up after she signed up for Ping.fm. I was definitely intrigued, so I interviewed Ruth.
How did you use Ping.fm to get ranked in Google for your search term?
Nobody really knows what Google uses to rank pages, and, worse, it’s thought that their algorithm changes often. But my key search term “QuickBooks enterprise” shot from higher than 20 pages (I gave up looking after that) to page three within about a week of me signing up for Ping.fm and joining all the network sites they link to. I believe the links to my website from those social networking sites is the reason for the huge increase, because I didn’t make any other changes during that period. We’re also on the second page of Yahoo!, and on the fifth page of MSN/Live now, but I can’t honestly say I knew what the ranking was before because I never checked. But I believe it’s very likely they were also 20 or more pages in. We’re tinkering with the website more now to see if we can replicate it. For instance, my staff is also signing up for Ping.fm. If we continue to climb up the page ranks, it’ll be almost certain that this is the cause.
What is your Ping.fm strategy?
One of my friends told me about Ping.fm a few weeks back, and it sounded like a great way to manage Twitter-type messages and status updates. But I’m the anal sort (good to be when you’re an accountant), so one rainy Sunday I went in and added all their networking sites that I didn’t belong to. I posted my picture, added my website, and entered little bios. It never entered my mind that it might increase my ranking. But for the last six months, I’ve been just checking Google to see if I was in the top 20 yet, only to be denied week after week, and then, lo and behold, less than a week after I joined all those networking sites, I was suddenly on the third page. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather! In fact, when I saw I was also on the third page for Yahoo!, I couldn’t help but yell—wait for it—“Yahoo!” Great name, by the way; very appropriate.
If you could share one tip or strategy with others looking to do the same, what would it be?
Carve out a day—a cold, rainy day over a weekend is perfect; after all, what else are you going to do?—and just start at the top of Ping.fm’s list of networking sites. Join them, and complete your profiles. At the very least, put in your business name and website. It’s actually a nifty little tool—you enter one 140-character post, and it’ll send your post to all the microblogging and status update sites automatically (you can change your defaults so it only goes to the ones you choose). That’s actually what I originally meant to use it for; the surge in page ranking was an unexpected yet delightful surprise.
Given that my company, The Marketing Zen Group, already ranks high for many of our top keywords, I have not yet tested this strategy. However, just claiming your personal name and your business name on various social media sites is a good strategy in itself. And if it does result in extra benefits, as in Ruth’s case, even better!
The easiest part of social media measurement is simply counting the numbers. Website visitors, blog links, Twitter mentions, and Facebook fans are all numbers worth measuring.
Unfortunately, the numbers only tell us half of the story. Next you need to measure the sentiment of each of these social media channels. What percentage is positive versus negative? Are your efforts pushing that sentiment needle in a positive direction?
Lastly, you need to connect this all to your bottom line. You know you increased the number of mentions on Twitter, and you know that the majority of tweets were positive, but do you know how many new sales were generated as a result?
Understand this trifecta of social media measurement and you’ll see success.
Andy Beal,
founder of Trackur (www.Trackur.com) and coauthor of Radically Transparent
How to Measure Your Efforts
Social media metrics is the technical term for measuring your social media marketing efforts. And, yes, this could also be a book in itself. Albert Einstein once said, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” So much of social media is about building relationships and leveraging word of mouth. How do you measure goodwill? Sometimes a consumer has to hear about you 10 times before he or she will buy. You engage consumers using multiple channels, so how you do know which straw broke the camel’s back?
There are some things you can measure—and you should! Here are some straightforward metrics that you can use to start measuring right away:
•Your bottom line: I am always surprised by how many people don’t at least measure their bottom line. By “bottom line, ” I mean how much money you’re making. How much revenue is coming in compared to how much was coming in before you started using social media?
Social media marketing is complex, and it is sometimes almost impossible to track exactly how and why someone came to buy from you. This is because, if done correctly, social media marketing is like filling a piggy bank, each coin bringing you a bit closer to your goal. Eventually, one last coin will fill the jar; however, each coin got you a little bit closer.
When we ask how new clients heard of us, we often get answers like, “I saw you speak once and subscribed to your newsletter. Then I befriended you on Facebook. However, I had to unsubscribe for a while, because I was busy with other things. Then I saw a status update you made on Facebook to a post you wrote, and it was exactly the help I needed.” Do you get the picture? Many coins, one piggy bank. Measure your bottom line!
•Number of leads: This is another very straightforward metric. How many leads did you get before you implemented social media marketing, and how many leads do you get afterward?
•Website visits: Currently, Twitter is responsible for 20 percent of our company’s website traffic. We use Google Analytics (a free tool provided by Google) to measure how many people visited our website and where they came from.
•Sales cycle: Measure how long it takes to make a sale to a new client. If your best friend was selling you a car that you needed, how long would you hesitate before buying? Given that you had the money and trusted your friend, not long! Compare that to buying a car from a dealer. How many dealers would you visit? How much research would you do? Social media marketing allows you to be that friend—the person or company that people trust.
For instance, when prospective clients come to our company, they are often already ready to buy. And these aren’t small purchases. Our services start at $2,000 a month. They just have a few questions. We don’t submit long drawn-out proposals or go back and forth proving that we can do the job. They already know we can, because they have seen us online. They have visited our website, read our articles, seen us on Twitter, and perhaps even seen some of my videos on Shama.TV. If you can establish your expertise online, you will find that people are more than eager to do business with you.
•Conversion rate: Let’s say that before doing any social media marketing, one out of ten people who came to your website bought something. After you follow all the directions in this book, two out of ten people are buying. Your conversion rate just went up! Why might this be? People are more comfortable buying from brands they trust. Although you may not be Coca-Cola, you can certainly establish trust through open communication and transparency. I am more willing to buy from someone I know I can get in touch with easily than from a no-name company online. What about you?
For Executives Only! Seventeen Best Practices for Adopting Digital Marketing
Many executives between the ages of 45 and 65 are digital aliens. They were not brought up in the digital age and feel overwhelmed and sometimes fearful of the new technologies. Many struggle with the changes necessitated by engaging in digital marketing. The result is a new digital divide between companies that are fully immersed in digital applications and others that are still trying to decide if Facebook is even a good investment!
The following is a road map of 17 practices that, for the latter companies, will facilitate the adoption and successful implementation of a digital marketing program.
1. Assess current market practices. Determine the gaps and opportunities to position your organization in the digital world.
2. Adopt a digital mind-set. Gain executive understanding and buy in to the changes required to adopt a digital marketing program.
3. Dedicate resources. Commit staff, provide training, and allocate budget.
4. Strategize. Design a digital marketing strategy that incorporates your assessment, clarifies goals and brand, integrates all media, and tracks and evaluates. More than 60 percent of social media programs fail because they don’t have a blueprint.
5. Build on what you do best. Incorporate digital media to leverage and augment successful marketing efforts already in progress.
6. Listen, research, refine. Monitor digital buzz and real-time customer feedback via forums, tweets, surveys, online reviews; refine your product.
7. Give value. Focus on giving value before expecting anything in return.
8. Be consistent, not overpowering. Maintain your brand; increase your digital presence through regular conversations, but don’t push, overexpose, or irritate.
9. Develop sustainable relationships. Create conversations and take the time to interact; this is a social environment. Conversations build relationships and encourage participation. Touch your current and potential customers with regular alerts on new services, advice, and deals.
10. Provide social sharing. Include easy-to-access social amplification tools (social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and email) to spread the message.
11. Cultivate satisified, loyal customers. Focus on caring for, thanking, satisfying, and providing value for your customers. This will engender trust and encourage your customers to do your marketing for you by sharing your product with their networks.
12. Leverage social communities. Access related social communities that have a potential interest in or would benefit from your product. These groups can boost exposure and penetration with little additional expense.
13. Develop an online environment as your hub. Drive traffic to an integrated online environment, including a website, Facebook site, landing pages, and a blog.
14. Integrate media. Augment your traditional advertising (TV, radio, outdoor, direct mail, print) and PR with social media, mobile, and online efforts.
15. Monitor and measure. Track your company’s digital footprint (the size and composition of your online presence), company chatter, and social mentions.
16. Evaluate your Social Return on Investment (SROI). Evaluate SROI as a tool for measuring a much broader concept of value. SROI incorporates social, environmental, and economic costs and benefits into decision making and helps you readjust your strategy and tactics to meet your goals.
17. Keep current and generate a competitive edge. Keep your “fingers on the pulse” of your business ecosystem and the changing digital environment. This responsiveness will drive innovation and competitive positioning.
Dr. Ira Kaufman,
Entwineinc.com
Wrap-Up
To wrap up, I want to leave you with three main points to take away:
1. Strategize first. Before you create a single profile or partake in a single online conversation, map out your overall online strategy. What will you use to attract? What will you use to convert? What will you use to transform? The tools you use to do these things will be your tactics.
2. Be human. Remember that behind every Twitter name or Facebook profile is a real live human being. The ultimate goal is always to connect with that person. Even if you’re talking to a group, that group comprises individuals who crave personal connection and attention.
3. Have patience. Measure your social media efforts, but also have patience. Social media marketing is a long-term strategy; pay attention to the results you’re getting as you go, but always keep your eye on the horizon.
By now, I hope you have a much better grasp of social media marketing and what it entails. I further hope you have realized that leveraging social media isn’t hard; you just have to know how to use it, and it can be an incredibly powerful tool. It is truly the Zen way of achieving success!