Chapter 4
IN THIS CHAPTER
Integrating social media with e-newsletters
Incorporating social media into press releases and public relations
Leveraging social media with website features
A volatile debate rages in marketing circles: Has social media become so prohibitively popular — and social media companies so desperate to monetize their sites and satisfy their investors — that it’s no longer possible to be successful with only free posts and content?
Statistical analysis by Wordstream.com shows a steady decline in organic reach for brands. Instead, promoted posts, ads, and posts from friends squeeze out your attempts to communicate for free.
You can address this problem in two ways: Beat ’em or join ’em. In this chapter, we talk first about beating ’em by combining social media with email, press releases, or websites to increase reach.
If those methods don’t work, you can always join ’em by paying to promote your posts, tweets, and pins to reach the audience you want. We discuss a range of advertising possibilities on four primary social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
For many businesses, social media marketing adds to the richness of the company’s marketing mix with a purpose of its own. Others see it as a low-cost boost to standard press-release distribution, email newsletter subscribers, loyalty programs, or other forms of marketing.
These more traditional marketing efforts can go viral when you take advantage of social media integration to do the following:
In Book 2, Chapter 4, we discuss simple integration techniques, such as displaying chiclets to invite people to follow your company on social media outlets and implementing share buttons to encourage viewers to share your pages with others.
Whatever you’re planning, take advantage of the measurement tools we discuss in Book 9 to establish baselines for traffic, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI) for existing marketing methods so that you can detect any lift (or drop) that integration brings.
In its “2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” Social Media Examiner asked businesses whether they integrated their social media with other marketing techniques. An amazing 81 percent of respondents replied affirmatively. Consider their experiences while you move forward with your own plans for social media integration.
Marketers spend a good portion of their time on different social networking platforms to best reach their customers. However, there are still good reasons for maintaining and cross-posting between social media and your e-newsletter campaigns.
With so many people using social media to consume content, why are marketers even using newsletters? Many marketers have found targeted email campaigns to be more effective than social media when it comes to sales and messaging. Popular newsletter services include Mailchimp (see Figure 4-1), Constant Contact, AWeber, and Sendinblu.
What follows is a look at some of the reasons to take advantage of email newsletter campaigns:
With numbers like these, you have every reason to integrate social media with email to attract new subscribers, promote your newsletter, obtain content ideas, and identify issues to address in your email newsletters, not to mention increasing the reach for your social media posts.
Wherever and whenever prospects discover your presence on social media, try to provide them with other opportunities to find out how you might be able to solve their problems. Your online newsletter is certainly one of those opportunities. Follow these guidelines to gain more newsletter subscribers:
https://marketplace.constantcontact.com/Listing/applications/constant-contact-labs-facebook/PML-0239
) and Mailchimp (https://us6.admin.mailchimp.com/facebook
), among others, have apps you can add to your Facebook page to allow individuals to sign up for your newsletter. You never know — you might reach dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of new prospects.Email integration with social media works both ways: You can drive people from your newsletter to social media services or use social media services to gain subscribers. Here are some guidelines for finding more followers and connections:
Writing content continuously for newsletters and social media is always a challenge. However, you can exploit the easy interaction between the two to lighten your writing burden:
https://us6.admin.mailchimp.com/facebook
).The reasons for dealing with public relations and press-release distribution haven’t changed since the explosion of social media — just the methodology and relative prominence. Where once you worried only about the care and feeding of a small covey of journalists, now you must nourish a veritable horde of bloggers, individual influencers, authors of e-zine articles, editors of online publications, and individuals who will recommend your article on a social news service.
All these venues, not just standard media, open a door to public attention. Take advantage of them all as a cost-effective way to achieve these goals:
If you haven’t already done so, set up an online newsroom (media page) for the press on your primary website. Use this newsroom to present any press releases you create, provide writers with downloadable logos and images, link to articles and posts written about your company, and let writers sign up for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for future release.
Also consider setting up this newsroom as a separate section in blog format (another way to integrate social media!) to aggregate queries, moderated posts, and trackbacks from individual releases. Give each release a unique URL, and place your headline on the page title.
Identifying influencers is one key way to get into a conversation. Influencers are people whose blogs, tweets, or Facebook pages drive much of the conversation in a particular topic area. They often have a loyal following of readers who engage in dialog, and repeat and amplify discussions the influencer began. In the olden days, press folks would cultivate public relations and press contacts the same way you now cultivate influencers.
Here’s a quick checklist for finding these key figures to approach with a request for coverage:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/free-keyword-research-tools
.Frankly, the more sites, the merrier. Although you’ll pay a penalty for duplicate website content in search engines, press releases don’t seem to suffer.
Table 4-1 shows a partial list of press and PR online resources.
TABLE 4-1 Publicity and PR Resources
Name |
URL |
Description |
---|---|---|
24-7 Press Release |
Disseminates news to online media, print media, journalists, bloggers, and search engines. |
|
Business Wire |
|
“A Guide to Press Release Optimization.” |
BuzzStream |
Fee-based outreach list builder. |
|
ClickPress |
Free and premium press-release posting on-site. |
|
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) |
Matching reporters to sources. |
|
iNewsWire |
Submits press releases and other content to news, social media, and media outlets. Prices start at $200 for one press release. |
|
Pitchengine |
Social PR platform, social media release creation and distribution; paid versions starting at $15/month. |
|
Press About |
Paid press-release distribution in the form of a blog. |
|
PRLog |
Free basic distribution for press releases; paid versions with wider distribution. Prices start at $29 and go up to $359 per release. |
|
Social news site that accepts links to releases. |
||
The Open Press |
Paid on-site press-release posting. |
|
Tiny Pitch |
Free service for the first two pitches, then $5/month; turns a press release into a web app that can be shared on social networks and with your contacts. |
Post your release, at minimum, on your own website and blog. You can, however, easily add releases to your other social networking profiles, if it’s appropriate. For example, an author might post a release for each book she writes but wouldn’t necessarily post a press release for everyone hired at her company.
Many paid online press-release distribution sources exist. Among the most well-known are Business Wire, Cision, PR Newswire, PRWeb, and GlobeNewswire. Sometimes, distribution services offer levels of service at different prices depending on the quantity and type of distribution, geographical distribution, and whether distribution includes social media, multimedia, offline publications, or other criteria.
Table 4-1, presented in the preceding section, includes several options for free distribution. Many free services don’t distribute your releases — except perhaps to search engines — but, rather, simply post them on their sites for finite periods. Whether they’re free or paid, be sure to read carefully what you’re getting. Perhaps the most straightforward example of integrating press releases with social media is the distribution of a release announcing your social media activities.
You’ve laid the groundwork by identifying appropriate bloggers and other influencers and participated on their publications. The next step is to get them to post your news. The most discrete way is to email it (or a link to it) with a cover note to see whether the recipient wants to share the article with readers or comment on its content.
Because you’re pitching the bloggers, include in your cover note why you think readers of the blog would be interested and also a descriptive paragraph about your company. It’s considered bad form to submit your press release as a post on most blogs — bad enough that a moderator probably would exclude it.
You can send similar emails to individuals and influencers you have identified as participating in key discussions about related products or issues, including a short notice about a press release on Twitter and a mention to groups and professionals on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
You can submit your release to the few social news services that permit you to submit your own link to your press release, such as Reddit. In other cases, you may need to submit to social news and bookmark services from another identity, or wait until the story appears on a blog and submit the blog post instead.
As always, content, tone, and interest level are the keys to catching people’s attention. Keep your release to about 400 words or fewer if you’re including multimedia, but don’t go below 100 words lest your release is viewed by search engines as spam.
Combine anchor text (see Book 2, Chapter 2) with the URL in parentheses right next to it (to cover all bases), but don’t use the same anchor text twice. On some press distribution services — and, of course, on social media — you have a chance to submit keywords or tags, which is an essential process for leveraging your press release for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
Be sure that some or all the keywords or tags that you identified are also included in the headline or first paragraph of the release. Try to use at least some of your primary set of search terms, as described in Book 2, Chapter 2. For example, good keywords or tags appearing in a headline, subhead, or lead paragraph might be food technology, social media week, cooking app, or sidechef.
One possible way around the mash-up between social media and publicity is to create a socially friendly press announcement that you can post easily on multiple social media and encourage engagement. PitchEngine has a free app called Tiny Pitch that will convert content you create on any device into just such a format, complete with a logo, images, likes, a message feature, and a share button.
The same social-monitoring tools that you use to find influencers can be applied to track key performance indicators for your press efforts, such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Twitter Search. Assessing results from your publicity is a good place to use all that qualitative data, as well as advertising measurements, for online brand awareness and equity.
Any website can incorporate a myriad of features that integrate with social media, going well beyond the obvious and oft-repeated reminders to include Follow Us On and share buttons everywhere, including product pages in stores. You can get clever: Include links to your help forum or YouTube video tutorials as part of the automated purchase confirmation email you send to buyers.
And, of course, this integration can work the other way: integrating your social media with your website.
In some cases, old-fashioned versions of social media — on-site forums, chat rooms, product reviews, and wikis — effectively draw repeat visitors to the hub site, avoiding any integration with third-party social media sites.
More advanced sites have already implemented social media techniques on-site, including blogs, communities, and calls for user-generated content — photos and videos of people using your product or suggesting creative new designs and applications, as well as ratings.
Several strategic factors may affect your decision whether to implement such techniques on-site or off:
A few on-site techniques, such as loyalty programs, work just as well on social media (for example, special offers for those who like you on Facebook). Three other popular methods practically cry out for integration: coupons, discounts, and freebies; games and contests; and microsites (more about these methods in the following sections).
It doesn’t take much monitoring of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as social news, bookmarking, and shopping streams, to see how frequently they’re used to offer time-limited deals, coupons, special promotions, discounts, and free samples.
The sense of urgency in certain social media environments catches viewers’ interest. Just like the competitive energy of an auction may cause bidders to offer more than they intend, the ephemeral nature of real-time offers may inspire viewers to grab for a coupon they might otherwise have passed up.
The upside and downside of real-time social media is precisely the immediacy of these offers and how quickly a chain of other posts extinguishes them from awareness. You have a chance to move overstock quickly, bring in business on a slow day, or gain new prospects from a group you might not otherwise reach without making a long-term, and perhaps too-expensive, commitment.
Here are some points to keep in mind when offering coupons, discounts, and freebies:
Most of the hundreds of online coupon sites already have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. You can use their services or simply create a coupon of your own.
In Chapter 2 of this minibook we discuss the group-purchasing model for coupons, which is dependent on volume use reaching a critical mass.
Your imagination is the only limit to contests and games that you can post on your site and cross-promote via social media. As usual, make sure that viewers link back and forth among your sites, ensuring that an inbound link to your primary web presence exists. The goals of your contest may vary:
You can find ideas for creating more effective contests and games at www.socialmediaexaminer.com/six-ways-supercharge-contests-social-media
.
Microsites are branded environments specific to a particular product, line, or brand. Created like any other free-standing websites with their own domain names and only a few pages, microsites are usually dedicated to a specific product or service. Often used with a new product introduction or special promotion, microsites may facilitate social media–style activities specific to that project. Often, user conversations or user-generated content contributions are incorporated into the site.
Many microsites incorporate highly focused presentations to launch a new product, turn a sale into an event, provide how-to instruction, or target specific demographic groups.
A microsite is an excellent way to branch out from the design of your main site and show off your style and skills. It might portray your brand in a new light — one that connects more closely to users and makes a creative impact on them. And beyond the aesthetic design, an easy and engaging interaction will make the experience more enjoyable and beneficial for your users.
Private membership sites are subscription-based sites whose content is visible only to subscribers. Private membership sites can be free or paid, but they’re a way to offer something of value to your online community. Private membership sites can be forums where online communities interact and share ideas, places to receive exclusive content, or opportunities for learning and teaching experiences such as online courses.
Because people sign up to join private membership sites (especially if they’re paying for the experience), they’re more invested in the content and in participation.
All throughout the book we talk about how social media is all about community. Having an online community to consume your content and support your brand is why you’re on social media in the first place, right?
Community forums, also known as Customer Communities, are sites where customers and brand advocates can gather to bond and build relationships with both you and other customers. It gives customers a place to hang out and to talk about their experiences with your product and other interests. If nurtured, the community will grow organically over time, and your customers will feel valued and heard. People keep coming back and make purchases from brands that pay attention and work to build relationships with their customers.
Another benefit of building a community forum is crowd-sourced support and Q&A. As you already know, social media takes time, and cultivating a strong online community is probably one of the more time-consuming parts of social media marketing (albeit, one of the most rewarding). If you’re not able to provide 24/7 support in the forum, chances are, other forum members will chime in with answers to questions being asked. If you see this happening, always confirm or correct the answer that was given and thank the person who answered for helping out. People like to be recognized for their good deeds!
There’s also the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefit. Because search engines crawl community forums, whatever conversations are taking place will be scanned and depending on the appearance of your keywords, the community content can help with your search engine rankings.
For more information on how to build your community forum, Wix has a blog post that takes you through the different technological aspects of setting one up at www.wix.com/blog/2020/05/best-forum-software
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