Chapter 3

Discovering Social Media Engagement Tools

In This Chapter

Evaluating online communications tools

Examining social networks for engagement

Using multimedia tools to engage

Introducing social mobile engagement

Throwing out the old tools you’ve been using and jumping onto the bandwagon to use a new and exciting communications and marketing technology can be tempting. You may feel like you have the capacity for only so many tools, so eliminating the old seems like a way to make room for the new.

This chapter lays the groundwork for our assertion that not all of the older communications tools you are using are broken. Even though it is commonplace to consider social networks as the main tools for social media engagement, understand that many of the tools you’ve been using online are part of the overall landscape of SME.

Considering Traditional Online Communications Tools

Before social networks existed, people communicated online in different ways. Electronic mail (e-mail) was used for sending direct messages to one person or to many people. Messages that could be read by groups of people morphed into forums, known as Usenet newsgroups, and eventually became the current form of online web-based forums.

Throughout these fast technological changes, the way people communicate has changed in major ways. Social networks and other multimedia and social media tools and platforms are incredibly popular, but the use of traditional online communications tools still has a lot of value. E-mail, online forums, and websites can — and should — all be incorporated into your strategy for social media engagement (SME).

SME doesn’t take place on social networks solely on the web. Social engagement aspects in a myriad of online and even mobile apps, tools, and networks should work in concert to help you connect and interact with the target market.

E-mail

You probably use either e-mail software on your computer, such as Microsoft Outlook, or web-based e-mail applications, such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or Gmail. For business communications, you might use a service, such as Google Apps, that includes e-mail.

Though e-mail doesn't seem flashy or modern, it's still the most important engagement tool now in use, and it can tie in with social networks more easily than ever. Figure 3-1 shows an example of an e-mail message with social media links or graphics in the signature file, which were embedded using the WiseStamp app (www.wisestamp.com).

Figure 3-1: Use social media links or graphics in an e-mail signature.

Far more people have e-mail accounts and use e-mail daily to communicate than use social networks. By some counts, more than 3.1 billion people have e-mail accounts (The Radicati Group, Inc., 2011; www.radicati.com). Compare that number to the largest social network, Facebook, and its billion or so users. Social networks are catching up to e-mail but, so far, haven't eliminated the need for more direct correspondence that's separate and apart from social networks.

If SME consists of reactions, interactions, and actions, e-mail clearly fits the bill. When you send out an e-mail, you and others can react, respond, interact, and take actions such as these:

Pass along the e-mail to others.

Download a file attached to an e-mail.

Click a link to visit a website.

Play an embedded audio or video file.

Fill out a form embedded into the body of the e-mail.

Take a poll or survey embedded in the e-mail.

Connect to someone’s social networking accounts.

Click a link to begin an online purchase.

E-mail is more than a message carrier: It’s a conversation starter as well as a multimedia and multifeatured communications tool to engage others beyond simple back-and-forth communications.

Even as you set up your social networking presences, don’t discount e-mail marketing. Any marketer can tell you that a database of fully vetted e-mail addresses is a valuable marketing asset. Many online marketing professionals report that e-mail is still the most effective way to connect and engage with others because of the contained nature of e-mail messages in an inbox and people’s habitual use of e-mail.

Do not force people to opt out of (or have to take a specific action to remove themselves from) your e-mails because you’ve subscribed them without their knowledge or permission, which can lead to negative feelings about your brand. The well-established e-mail marketing best practice of allowing people to opt in by giving express permission is still alive and well.

E-mail marketing tools of the past were intended to broadcast (in one direction only) messages to many recipients. E-mail marketing platforms now integrate social media features to let recipients easily connect with you on social networks and not simply read your e-mail, delete it, and then forget about you. E-mail marketing tools also let you announce when you’ve sent a marketing e-mail or an electronic newsletter by autopublishing an update to your friends, fans, and followers on social networks.

You may already have an e-mail sign-up form on your website or blog. Add ways for people to provide you with their e-mail addresses in your social networks. For example, integrate an e-mail sign-up app into your Facebook Page using any of the popular e-mail marketing tools, such as Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) or MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com). Figure 3-2 shows you how MailChimp does it.

Figure 3-2: Using MailChimp to allow fans to sign up to receive your e-mails.

Online forums (groups)

When you have people gathering online to discuss common topics, you have the seeds for building online community. Where you have online community, you have the potential for actions, reactions, and interactions. None of these activities is exclusively an aspect of SME, but they’re common to all online communities where people gather, including web-based online forums or groups.

Though people still congregate and interact within web-based forums, they now have these community-building options that are powered by social media:

Facebook Groups, shown in Figure 3-3: Focus on discussions among members (despite their similar appearance to Facebook Pages and Timelines) and can feature members at the top of the page.

LinkedIn Groups, shown in Figure 3-4: Facilitate information exchange, and networking among LinkedIn members — usually, professionals.

Google+ Communities, shown in Figure 3-5: Build your audience on G+ through their Communities feature similar to LinkedIn Groups.

Most social networks provide you with the tools to create more contained, or even private, members-only forums for ongoing discussions. Facebook Groups offers two privacy levels: Private (others can see your group listing but you must approve requests to join) and Secret (your group isn’t listed publicly so you must invite others). LinkedIn has a single private level; you approve requests to join. In early 2013, Google+ introduced Communities that offer a privacy level for member approval. See Chapter 13 for more information on Google+ Communities. Twitter lets you make your Twitter account private but does not offer a group feature.

Figure 3-3: Facebook Groups focus on discussion among members.

Figure 3-4: LinkedIn Groups enable networking and exchanging information.

Figure 3-5: Google+ Communities bring together like-minded individuals.

Whether public or private, online forums and groups work well when several factors are present:

A focused topic area or theme: Conversations in the best forums remain on topic.

Like-minded or interested people: People join groups voluntarily based on their interests and needs.

Strong community leadership: A good moderator keeps the discussion going with a light touch so that everyone feels welcome to the conversation.

Clear community rules: Every group needs publicly posted guidelines that define proper behavior and spell out bad behavior.

Fair policing: Many online communities police themselves, admonishing or removing individuals who post inappropriately, and others let moderators ban people.

See Online Community Management For Dummies by Deborah Ng (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) to get the nitty-gritty on managing an online community, whether it’s based within a social network or not.

A benefit of setting up a group in a social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn is that you can build an online space for people to gather that feels like a cohesive community. Building a community on a Facebook Page, for example, is challenging because of the way Facebook limits people from seeing your messages and from seeing other people’s posts on your Page. The limitations of Facebook Pages hinder group-wide discussions. On a Page, most community conversations take place in a disjointed manner within the comments of various Page updates.

People tend to Like a Facebook Page to show their affinity for a brand, though they may also want to interact. They join a Facebook Group specifically for the interaction among members. People connect with you on LinkedIn to add you to their contacts and likely don’t interact with you regularly. They join your LinkedIn Group to engage in dialogue — with you and with other members of the group. People are more likely to look forward to the conversations and respond in more depth when they join groups with the intention of participation.

Websites and blogs

You may not think of websites in relation to online community and social media engagement, because websites are often considered static destinations and repositories of information rather than engagement tools.

Engagement isn’t only a means of attracting someone’s interest and attention, though a website can be attractive and attracting. To make a website more interactive, you have to add features to it beyond static HTML pages in order to turn a site visitor or reader into an active community member or customer.

To understand what drives people to interact and to know how the tools you have at your disposal provide for engagement, you should understand a little of the history of the tools we now use for SME. In the early days of the web, “interacting” on a website was limited to clicking an e-mail link.

Then came the guest book, a web-based submission form that posted a message publicly on a web page under the guise of signing a guest book for the website owner. In some cases, people realized that others were signing the same website’s guest book at nearly the same time.

Even in those primitive days, people wanted to make contact and communicate with one another, so they began talking to each other by leaving comments to each other on web-based guest books and refreshing the pages until they saw responses.

Early on, people could share an article from a website with a friend via e-mail. Soon they could leave comments on articles. Then came blogs, and with built-in features such as comments. People commented on not only a blogger’s content but also on one another’s comments. Blog comments weren’t feature-rich, but they turned websites into online communities.

Now you can build your website on a blog platform and instantly have an easier way to manage content and updates as well as embed more social features into your site.

Comments on blogs are no longer confined to websites. Social commenting tools, such as Facebook Connect comments, and third-party software add-ons, such as Disqus (www.disqus.com) and Livefyre (www.livefyre.com), let people log in to your website to comment using their social media accounts or identities. Add social networking triggers to your site to increase the likelihood of people engaging with you — and with each other — when they visit.

Table 3-1 breaks down various ways to engage through websites and blogs.

Table 3-1 Basic Engagement on Websites

One Way	Two Ways	Multiple Ways
Signing up for an offer	N/A	N/A
Filling out a feedback form	Finding live help	Supporting the community
Sharing with a friend	N/A	Clicking a Like or Favorite widget
Answering polls (private results)	Answering polls (public results)	Answering polls with sharing
E-mailing site owner	Adding comments to site	Adding social comments

No matter how many interactive tools and features you place on your website or blog, people are increasingly inclined to move the conversation to their favorite social networks. That’s why we encourage you to embrace social networking for stronger and more consistent engagement than your website can provide and to integrate your social networks into your site to make the transition to those networks easy and seamless. We talk more about how to make e-mail, forums, websites, and blogs even more engaging in Chapter 8.

Your website content may be interesting, and people might return to read it, but if you cannot engage site visitors in dialogue, they’re less likely to convert to prospects — they’ll be avid but inactive readers.

Engaging with Social Networks

Technology developments over the past decade have played a significant role in moving websites from static pages to basic online community hosts to full-blown, interactive, and interconnected social networks. A social network is a website with technology on the back end and features on the front end that give people ways to connect to one another by acting, interacting, and reacting.

Investing a lot of time, attention, effort, and money into building presences and communities on social networks has glaring downsides. You’re competing for the time and attention of individuals whose attention is already fractured. Today’s consumers, customers, and prospects can publish and build an audience and online community as easily as you can. All this publishing adds to the glut of information and messages that are already out there, often translating into noise. You’re trying to get the attention of individuals who may also be publishers, broadcasters, and leaders of their own communities. You’re also competing against all the other businesses clamoring to reach those same individuals. Worst of all, individual tech companies — with their own agendas, business models, and goals — own the social networks.

Every social network has different rules or terms of service dictating which behaviors the company behind the network allows. Pay attention to the rules as you plan how to use each network to achieve your own business goals.

The upside of participating in social networks is that a lot of people use them, so you have the potential to reach a great many customers and prospects — and the general public at large. If you use social networks well, you have an inside track to people’s interests and affinities. You have the chance to reach them and communicate with them on mutual ground and in the environment where they’re most comfortable. You can build and strengthen your brand and your relationships with the very people who can keep your company in business. You can also reach even more people — exponentially more people — when your own connections share your information with their connections.

Facebook

Facebook claims to have a billion monthly active users (as of October 2012), and it has become one of the largest social networks in the world. Facebook offers several layers of public and private information depending on which features members use and on how members configure their privacy settings.

Interactions and conversations happen on Facebook in a number of ways:

Status update: Post to the Wall of a Page, the personal Timeline, or a Group using text, photos, videos, or links.

Comment, Likes, and Shares: React to posts by clicking Like, posting a comment, or sharing the post.

E-mail: Private message one individual or many Facebook friends. Pages and Groups are limited in terms of how they can message individuals to prevent spamming.

Checkins: Use a smartphone to check into a Place on Facebook if a Page has been set up with an actual location, or to a Facebook public event within three hours of the event’s start time.

Facebook chat: Instant message one individual or groups of people.

If you’re using your personal Timeline on Facebook to market your business, you may be blurring the lines between your personal communications and business marketing. Facebook states in its Terms of Service that you cannot create a personal Timeline for a business and cannot use your personal Timeline for commercial purposes.

We recommend that you create a Facebook Page for your professional presence on the network, and keep your personal Timeline, well, personal. We each have a personal Timeline and a Facebook Page, and we use them in different ways. Danielle is comfortable using her personal Facebook Timeline to share images and news from her personal life with her Facebook friends. As a media personality, she is in the public eye, and a portion of her brand is about family. Still, she doesn’t accept friend requests from everyone who asks. Figure 3-6 shows Danielle’s Facebook Timeline, where she shares with a wide audience (several times a day) a blend of family-related posts and work-related posts.

Danielle maintains two separate Pages for both her main sites but dedicates the bulk of her attention to her personal Timeline because it integrates both sides of her brand. Danielle’s Page for her website, Extraordinary Mommy, centers on the content from her blog at ExtraordinaryMommy.com. (See the leftmost image in Figure 3-7.) Danielle’s company page, Danielle Smith Media, focuses on industry-related news — social media, media training, and video tips. (See the rightmost image in Figure 3-7.)

Figure 3-6: Danielle posts several times a day to her Facebook Timeline.

Figure 3-7: You can maintain separate Facebook Pages for your blog and your company.

Aliza joined Facebook before Pages were available, so she initially used her personal account as her professional Facebook presence. As more of her friends and family joined the network, she soon realized the value of using it to share more personal information; by that time, however, her Facebook friends consisted of many people she did not know personally. When Facebook introduced Pages, Aliza set one up to post her business news and technical tips. She finds it challenging to maintain both presences. Over time, she has tried to make her Timeline more personal and is now careful about accepting friend requests.

How you use Facebook should be a combination of your personal preferences and best practices and an understanding of how others use Facebook and Facebook’s Terms of Service. You also have to consider the tools that Facebook provides for you to use, and how you use the components for engagement. See Chapter 9 for details on how Facebook features work to help you better engage with others.

Read and understand the Facebook Terms of Service (www.facebook.com/legal/terms). The site prohibits using a personal account or personal Timeline for commercial gain. The company created Facebook Pages to give businesspeople another option. Though many people violate these rules and haven't gotten caught — yet — we recommend not taking chances.

Facebook has been known to close down personal accounts that violate its rules. Per Facebook: “You will not use your personal timeline for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).” Neither are you allowed to hold contests that require participants to use Facebook features as part of the contest.

Twitter

With more than 140 million users, Twitter is smaller than Facebook but has fundamentally changed how people communicate with one another. Twitter has impacted not only how individuals and companies communicate but also how people consume and report news. Nobody ever imagined that a service that limits messages to 140 characters could cause such enormous changes around the world.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter conversations are predominantly open to the public, unless you choose to make your Twitter account private. Most people go with the default public setting to share their updates — or tweets — with the world. Although private Twitter accounts are available, in order to engage easily and widely with others, your account must be public.

Twitter has its own way of organizing conversations and interactions on its network that can be confusing to new users. You can communicate on Twitter by posting one of these elements:

Tweet: A publicly posted message to your Twitter stream that also appears in the streams of your followers.

Retweet: A publicly posted message that repeats or restates an existing tweet from someone else that credits the originator and can be seen by your followers.

@mention: A tweet directed to someone specifically that appears in their stream.

Direct message (DM): A message sent to someone else privately if you follow them and they follow you back.

We both love Twitter and use it often. The shorter tweet lengths may not appeal to you, but they force you to be more concise and specific in your messaging. In this day and age of text messaging and smartphone use, being able to adapt your communications style to accommodate the smaller screens of mobile devices is a good skill to have.

From its early days, Twitter has allowed programmers to use its application programming interface (API), the behind-the-scenes code that makes up the network. This openness allows applications to integrate easily with Twitter, including tools to monitor it, manage it, measure activity on it, and post creatively to it. The same cannot be said about all social networks.

We both connect some of our other favorite social networks to Twitter, including Instagram and Foursquare. The image on the left in Figure 3-8 shows a tweet from Danielle using Instagram; her Instagram account connects to Twitter, so she has the option to tweet to her Instagram account the photos she posts via her smartphone. The rightmost image in the figure shows a tweet from Aliza using Foursquare; Aliza tweets her Foursquare check-ins sparingly, and she carefully provides context so that her Twitter followers have more to read than simply a place name with a link. (You can read more about Instagram, Foursquare, and other location-based services later in this chapter, in the “Location-based services” section, and also in Chapter 14.) We talk more about enhancing Twitter in Chapter 10.

Pinterest

Pinterest was touted as the fastest-growing social network of all time when it surpassed 10 million monthly unique visitors in January 2012. (ComScore, Feb. 2012) By October 2012, Pinterest was receiving nearly 25 million monthly unique visitors (Compete, Oct. 2012), surpassing the popular microblogging site Tumblr. Pinterest is hot!

Figure 3-8: Tweets from an Instagram account and a Foursquare account.

Like Twitter, Pinterest is also changing the way we communicate, focusing far more on images than on text. Though Twitter challenges you to publish messages in 140 characters or fewer, Pinterest pushes you to find more visual ways to convey your messages and position your brand. There’s no denying that Pinterest is all about the visuals.

If you prefer to publish text content, Pinterest can work as a gateway to content residing on your website or blog or other sites. If you prefer to communicate with your audience using only text, Pinterest may hold you back based on how most people prefer to use the network — looking at and sharing visuals.

Even though Pinterest users can comment on pins in a similar way to commenting on updates and photos on Facebook, fewer than 1 percent of Pinterest users (according to Repinly, a Pinterest directory) choose to comment. Knowing the limitations of certain social networks, and how people prefer to use them, are important factors in choosing which networks are right for you.

You can communicate and interact on Pinterest using these actions:

Pin: A post of an image and video to the Pinterest stream and to your topic-specific boards with descriptions.

Like: A favorable reaction to other people’s pins.

Repin: Sharing other people’s pins to your followers.

Comment: A response to pins, but used less often than Likes and Repins.

Collaborate: Pinning with others using Pinterest’s group boards or secret boards.

Pinterest introduced business accounts in late 2012 for brands. The implied intention of these accounts was to eventually provide companies with metrics, advertising, and monetization options. In early 2013, Pinterest introduced metrics strictly for business accounts.

We both enjoy pinning, and we appreciate the power of Pinterest. We tend to focus most of our online marketing time and energy, however, on networks where we can engage more conversationally. Regardless, Danielle has many videos that are ready-made for pinning. Aliza likes to use Pinterest to publish bite-size pieces of advice culled from her many articles and blog posts that lead to the content source.

We’re both firm believers that pictures speak louder than words — but we would add that great-looking pictures speak louder than words. A poor image or video is a hindrance, and not at all helpful when it comes to Pinterest.

Figure 3-9 shows how Aliza uses a Pinterest board as a résumé specifically to highlight her work and related articles. Figure 3-10 shows a board of inspirational quotes that perfectly complement Danielle’s overall mission and message.

Figure 3-9: Compiling a board to serve as a résumé.

Figure 3-10: Pinning images with inspirational quotes.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been around since 2003 — several years before Twitter was launched, and available to the public several years before Facebook. In August 2012, LinkedIn reached 175 million users. A laser focus on professionals and businesspeople sets LinkedIn apart from all other major social networks.

If you’re looking to reach a more business-minded audience — particularly for B2B marketing — LinkedIn is a useful tool. We go into a lot more depth in Chapter 12 about engaging via LinkedIn.

As with many social networks, LinkedIn has a number of basic ways to engage with others with a slant toward professional networking. You interact on LinkedIn using these methods:

News feed: Post information in your own feed with text, images, and attached files.

Like, comment, share: Respond to posts from your connections, and they can do the same on your posts.

Company Page: Publish and share corporate news to your Page followers.

LinkedIn e-mail: Send a message between connections.

LinkedIn inMail: Reach non-connections by sending messages using this paid membership feature.

LinkedIn Groups: Public or private discussion forums for like-minded individuals or organization members.

LinkedIn Polls: Publish or respond to quick polls that can be shared on through your news feed.

We authors have LinkedIn profiles, and we recommend that every professional person should set one up. LinkedIn is excellent for personal brand building and business networking. Figure 3-11 shows Danielle’s LinkedIn profile and Aliza’s company page on LinkedIn. LinkedIn also offers company pages to build a presence for your business as well as LinkedIn groups to help you build an online community.

Figure 3-11: Danielle’s LinkedIn profile and Aliza’s company page on LinkedIn.

Google+

Google+ (often abbreviated as G+) hit 400 million users in September 2012, according to Vic Gundrota at Google. Even though Wikipedia reports that only 100 million Google+ users are active, that’s still a lot of users.

Despite its large user base, Google+ can feel much more intimate than other major social networks. Google+ has a fast-moving stream, similar to Twitter, and it offers many of the same multimedia and interactive features as Facebook Pages. Yet Google+ conversations somehow manage to feel more interconnected than on Twitter and more cohesive than on Facebook.

Members of Google+ can communicate in a number of ways:

Post to their G+ streams, whether the posts consist of text, photos, videos, or links.

Add a +1 rating (similar to a Facebook Like) to posts or photos.

Share a post from someone else in your stream.

Comment on posts.

Text-chat within Circles.

Video-chat in Google Hangouts.

Live-stream video by chatting in Google Hangouts on Air.

You can also target messages to specific groups by using Google+ Circles or groupings of connections and create as many circles as you want. Figure 3-12 shows a circle consisting of writers and reporters using G+.

Figure 3-12: An example of a G+ Circle.

To become familiar with the features, try out Google+, and start with a personal account before expanding to a Google+ Business Page. Definitely reserve your G+ Page name now even if you don’t start updating it. In Figure 3-13, you can see that Red Bull posts photos and videos of extreme sports to its Google+ Business Page. See Chapter 13 for different ways to engage using Google+ including G+ Communities.

Figure 3-13: A brand’s G+ Business Page.

Incorporating Audio and Video Platforms

When you evaluate tools for social media engagement, you might not immediately consider audio or video. Listening to audio or watching video may seem at first glance to be passive activities. Granted, listening or watching doesn’t involve the typical two-way or multiple-way conversations of SME. Still, audio and video can play an important role in stimulating engagement.

As we’ve stated elsewhere in this book, actions, reactions, and interactions make up engagement. Both audio and video involve publishing content — in this case, multimedia files uploaded to or embedded into websites, blogs, or social networks. Most places where you can post or view digital audio or video online usually include ways for people to Like, Favorite, comment on, or share what they listen to or watch. These interactions happen either in a multimedia player or on the site where the content is uploaded.

Where you have content and where you have tools in place for responding to that content, you have the potential for engagement. Audio or video can attract attention and provide content to start a conversation — so audio and video cannot be left out of the SME equation.

Audiocasting or podcasting

Audiocasts are digital audio broadcasts on the Internet. You may also hear them referred to as podcasts because they’re often played on iPods. In 2012, 29 percent of Americans had listened to a podcast (Edison Research).

Podcasts can refer to video in addition to audio. In this book, podcast refers to digital audio online, and video podcast refers to, well, digital video online.

Most podcasts are available for listening or for download entirely for free. Radio stations and radio production companies can produce podcasts in professional studios with professional audio editors. Just as often, independent producers, marketers, and audio enthusiasts can produce podcasts too with varying degrees of production quality.

Some popular podcasts on the Apple iTunes store are This American Life and Freakonomics Radio and a number of NPR shows.

A podcast can be delivered on G+ by using these methods:

Live streaming: Usually recorded

Recording: Generally followed by broadcasting

Embedding on a site, blog, or social network: For instant or on-demand play

Archived on a network: For individual download or subscription

Podcasts are recorded in many lengths and styles. Some podcasts are produced similarly to radio shows with recorded intros and outros edited in after the content is recorded and even with music added. Sometimes, podcasts contain commercials. Podcasts can also be streamed or recorded live, even from a mobile device, and uploaded on the fly with no editing.

Aliza is a big fan of podcasting. Several years ago, she recorded nearly 100 episodes of Digital Marketer for the Quick and Dirty Tips Network. Since then, she has self-produced various podcasts including Zen of Being Digital. Danielle, with her strong background in television news, gravitates toward video. A large portion of her brand revolves around self-produced videos hosted on her sites and her YouTube channel and around professionally produced pieces when she is hired as an on-site correspondent. That video, too, ends up on all her channels.

Don’t underestimate the power and portability of audio to connect with your audience. You can also engage your audience in audio conversations online, as we explain in Chapter 15.

Videocasting or video podcasts

A mere handful of years ago, we couldn’t confidently recommend using online video for digital marketing and SME. Bandwidth was still an issue for many people, and even with the fast-growing popularity of YouTube, consumers were unable to easily watch video on their Internet connections. Oh, how things have changed in the past few years!

Millions of people now watch videos online daily. By the end of 2011, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content and viewed 43.5 billion videos. Google sites — YouTube in particular — was the number-one video site at that time, followed by Vevo and Yahoo! Sites (comScore). That’s a lot of video being watched and a lot of video being uploaded.

This list describes a few ways in which digital video that’s hosted online can benefit your engagement. You can use a well-produced video to

Grab the attention of your audience: Video attracts attention. The Play button graphic on an image immediately compels action. (Click!)

Enhance content: Video adds a dynamic dimension and an enhanced visual appeal to the content you publish.

Embed content in other formats: Video can be easily embedded into websites, blogs, and social networks, providing richer content to consume.

Inspire audience reaction: Most online video players incorporate social features, including the ability to Like or Favorite and comment.

Share: Digital video is easy to share, especially when someone shares a link to the video online or within social networks. Gone are the days of e-mailing large video files to share with connections.

Also gone are the days of having to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce highly polished, professional videos. These days, a minimally produced video can be as popular as (or even more popular than) videos with expensive video production.

Don’t set out to produce a viral video (a video that is shared organically by thousands or millions of people). Too many factors are at work when a video goes viral to be able to plan an entire marketing strategy around producing one. Using video for SME is one tactic in a more complex online communications plan.

YouTube

The Grand Poobah of online video is undoubtedly YouTube. The latest statistics on its website state that more than 800 million unique users visit YouTube every month and watch more than 4 billion hours of video. Users upload 72 hours of video to YouTube every minute. In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, or around 140 views for every person on Earth. And on and on it goes.

This list describes several winning features that make YouTube useful for SME:

It’s free. You can’t beat free for hosting video files online, especially when files can be large and cumbersome.

It attracts numbers. The sheer volume of members and viewers makes YouTube a natural choice for video hosting and engagement.

It benefits from search engine optimization (SEO). The added benefit of how YouTube videos show up in Google searches makes your videos hosted there potentially much more accessible.

It has tools that are easy to use. Editing and embedding video can seem complicated until you use basic tools such as the ones offered on YouTube.

It has a number of community features. YouTube incorporates engagement features into its site and video player, including the ability for anyone to Like, comment on, embed, e-mail, and share videos (as long as they’re signed into their Google account). The site also offers a video commenting option.

It offers advertising options. YouTube offers a number of paid advertising options to give your videos a boost and exposure to more people for potential engagement.

YouTube isn’t the only free video-hosting site on the block. Vimeo, for example, offers a free membership level and provides good-quality video playback and an elegant video player. If you’re looking for the highest number of eyeballs on your video message — and potentially the highest number of interactions and shares for your video — YouTube is undeniably the right tool.

YouTube is considered the second-largest search engine in the world. (Google is first.) It doesn’t hurt that Google owns YouTube. Your videos on YouTube may therefore have a better chance of visibility than if they’re hosted on other video sites.

Aliza is just getting started with online video as a tool for social media engagement, but several of her clients use it regularly. Danielle has been using video successfully for a number of years in her own business. She has a large enough viewership that she can monetize her videos. Because her entire business revolves around content production — particularly video — and engagement with her audience via her multimedia content, making money from her videos on YouTube makes sense. You may not make money directly from your videos on YouTube; you can, however, achieve tangible business goals and boost SME by incorporating YouTube-hosted videos into your online marketing mix. See Chapter 16 for different ways to effectively leverage YouTube.

Recognizing Other Social Engagement Tools

Let’s face it: The world has gone mobile. Statistics from ComScore indicate that 234 million U.S. residents now use mobile devices. Smartphone use has increased 4 percent to 110 million (more than 1 billion worldwide, believe it or not). That means 47 percent of Americans are using smartphones.

Tablet computers are also becoming more commonplace. According to Pew Research Center, as of early 2012, 58 percent of American adults have desktop computers, 61 percent have laptops, 18 percent own e-book readers, and 18 percent have tablet computers. Tablet computer ownership has increased more than 16 percent in less than two years.

The increase in mobile device use for accessing the Internet also changes the way people access websites. Check your website stats, and you’ll see an uptick in visits to your site from mobile devices and mobile versions of social networks such as Facebook.

The way people communicate changes continually with the rapid rise in smartphone use and the increasing popularity of tablet computers. Communications tools are more portable than ever, and social networks are all going mobile. People now have unprecedented access to the tools and platforms to reach out to, and engage with, their audiences, customers, and prospects — which means that they can be reached anywhere and at any time.

Mobile applications

A mobile application, or app, is a compact piece of software that runs on a mobile device — a table computer, a smartphone, or even a gaming device. The app can be a mobile version of a website or another online content or be a self-contained application with content that resides entirely on a mobile device. Mobile apps pack features and functionality into relatively small files with interfaces that fit the smaller screens of tablet computers, smartphones, and the like.

All the most popular web-based social networks have mobile versions that appear legible and clear on the smaller mobile screen. Many social networks offer their own mobile apps so that you can easily access their networks from your Android or iOS mobile device. Some web-based social networks with apps include Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube.

Some of these popular social networks can also be accessed from third-party mobile apps such as HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) that let you post to many of your networks from a single mobile device. All these dashboard tools for managing your social media also have web-based versions, and some even have desktop versions to make access to your social networks conveniently cross-platform. Without the mobile aspect, however, they would be missing a large and growing share of users as more people turn to their mobile devices to access and communicate online.

Mobile continues to grow at an astronomical pace. According to YouTube, its traffic from mobile alone tripled in 2011. More than 3 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube from mobile devices every minute. That’s powerful.

Location-based services

A subset of mobile applications are location-based services (LBSs). LBSs are social networks that are focused around places — actual physical locations — and they tap into the GPS in a smartphone or mobile device to offer features and functionality. Mobile is the operative word in LBSs — they offer ways to turn social media engagement on the web into social mobile engagement.

Though many LBSs are available, we mostly focus on Foursquare and Instagram because they have options and features either geared toward or useful for companies and brands. We both use Foursquare and Instagram practically daily in our own SME efforts. Danielle is especially adept at connecting with her community via Instagram. Aliza has helped numerous clients incorporate these and other LBSs into their day-to-day engagement activities and to enhance offline events with online conversations. We go into more detail about LBS engagement in Chapter 14.