Chapter 6
Social Marketing: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
IN THIS CHAPTER
Developing a Facebook marketing strategy
Using Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
Marketing with digital channels today is somewhat like trying to hit a moving target as the tools, tactics, and trends change more quickly than most can imagine. And because nearly all marketing today is connected to a digital channel, platform, analytics tool, or device, the term digital marketing is somewhat of an oxymoron.
No matter what business you’re in, the role you play, or the size and scope of your market, you need to understand and stay on top of digital marketing tools to succeed on any level.
Although digital technology introduces exciting opportunities to open new markets and engage with customers like never before, it also comes with the following challenges:
- Digital tools are constantly changing. As soon as marketers master one, another comes up.
- Because of the ability that digital technology offers for highly personalized communications, customers have grown to expect it, making traditional marketing methods less effective and putting more pressure on marketers to keep up with rapidly changing technological developments that enhance customers’ overall experience.
- Being able to manage the breadth and depth that digital channels offer marketers for communicating to customers any time and any place is another challenge. In the old days of marketing, brand managers just had to worry about developing a clever campaign with a good offer and getting a good media buyer to negotiate ad buys with magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations, and outdoor companies. Now, you have to identify the best opportunities within numerous channel categories for several customer segments and then customize versions of all elements of each campaign to be personalized for every customer segment or persona, adapt the format for every channel you plan to use, and then deploy quickly and frequently. Oh, and then you have to monitor social media dialogue and online review sites and respond quickly to avoid losing consumer interest, your reputation, or sales.
Mind-boggling! But thankfully, manageable. The trick is to map out a detailed plan based on how your customers use and respond to digital channels to guide how you spend your time and resources communicating, placing ads, and creating meaningful experiences online. Otherwise, you can keep yourself busy and not really go anywhere.
After you have a plan in place as to which channels you need to use and how you need to use them, you then need to have a plan for which technology investments make the most sense for your desired reach, outcomes, and budget.
This chapter provides some insights on several digital channels that drive customer engagement and sales and some tips for how you can integrate these into your marketing plan.
If you want more in-depth information on the channels discussed here, check out Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Jan Zimmerman and Deborah Ng (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
Using Facebook for Engagement That Builds Sales
Facebook is an incredibly important marketing tool. To effectively use Facebook for customer conversations, promotions, and relationship building, you need to build a content marketing plan specific to this channel and an advertising plan. Don’t post anything just because you can. Posting without a messaging plan may actually do more harm than good because if it’s not meaningful, you’ll lose likes, follows, and readership, and each of these is hard to build back.
Following are some guidelines for putting together a content and advertising plan for Facebook; however, this planning guide applies to all other social media channels mentioned in this chapter. Instead of repeating these tips for each channel, use the following as your guide for building a presence and dialogues with your customers on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other sites.
Developing a successful Facebook plan
Facebook is where many people document their life story and share their greatest moments. It’s also a great place for brands to tell their stories and do so in ways that support the values of their core customers. As you build a plan to tell your story and engage in dialogue with core customers, keep in mind that Facebook is for stories, not sales pitches. Using this channel the way consumers use it will help you achieve greater success and return on the time you spend posting, sharing, liking, and more.
Here are some key elements you need to establish as you work on your Facebook marketing plan:
- Define your purpose. Do you want your Facebook page to be a place where you have meaningful dialogues with your customers? Or a site that promotes your products, provides promotional codes and discount coupons, announces your sales, and the like? Or is your page a place to share stories about your people and business to better humanize your brand? When you answer and prioritize these questions and others like them, you’re better poised to make your Facebook efforts pay off.
Set your goals. Facebook offers many different opportunities and outcomes for businesses in all areas. The trick is to set specific goals and have a plan to help you measure your progress toward achieving them while using your time wisely.
Some goals you can achieve through Facebook include
- Discovering what trends, attitudes, and needs are important to your customers at a given time
- Interacting with customers to discover what they like about your products and brand and what else you can be doing
- Attracting more prospects by posting about relevant topics
- Driving customers and prospects to your website, where you can better direct them toward a transaction
- Growing your email permission database through Facebook promotions
- Communicating with customers and prospects for whom you don’t have an email address
- Building your social presence and prospect base through likes, comments, and shares of your current followers
- Creating a stronger brand image
- Putting together a community, or a hive, around your brand
These same steps apply to other social media pages and channels, so just repeat the steps that apply when building out your brand’s digital presence.
The following sections present some tips and examples that will enable you to succeed at reaching many of these goals. But first, keep in mind that you can’t achieve any of these goals unless you have followers and friends connected to your page. Use all your social channels to invite people to connect with you on Facebook (and others like LinkedIn), and post content that’s worth sharing with their friends to build your base. Always include links for your page on your website, emails, content elements, and in marketing materials.
Consider doing an email campaign for the sole purpose of getting people to follow you on Facebook and other channels. Let consumers know what they’ll gain in terms of insights and interaction if they choose to follow or connect with you.
Determine your metrics
Like any program, make sure you have a mechanism to measure the impact of your efforts toward your goals so you can see whether you need more resources to keep up with the opportunities created or need to make some changes to have a better impact.
Facebook Insights — a dashboard with metrics and analytics for your page — is available on business pages and provides valuable insights to help you see what your followers liked and didn’t like, engagement level per post, which posts got the most likes, and whether you got likes from searches, shares from others, or Facebook advertisements, and more. It’s important to pay attention to trends and comments on your page so you can discover what matters most and identify problems before they escalate.
Learn
Opportunities to learn valuable and actionable insights on Facebook are many. For example, you can find out what matters most to your followers and what drives behavior from the dialogue you create, the questions you post, the comments you get back, the posts your customers like or don’t like, games your customers play, and by watching what your competitors are doing.
Ask questions. Most people like to comment on Facebook and have their voice heard. Just look at all the “talk” during a political season, surrounding a common cause, or about a sports matchup. Posting questions for your followers can provide some great insights from their answers and comments.
For example, if you’re a carpet cleaning company, here are some questions you may want to ask:
- When it comes to cleaning your carpets, what motivates you most?
- Having your house look clean and fresh?
- Getting rid of germs that can affect your health?
- Getting that brand new look back again?
People often respond if they like you, want to voice their opinion, or if you offer an incentive. Facebook has a poll application (find it at www.facebook.com/simple.polls) you can use to create and post and monitor results, making it easy to analyze. Or you can just post a question and see what kind of dialogue it inspires. With Facebook’s poll application, you can share your poll by email, which helps increase traffic to your page.
If you have a small following, be careful about using the polls app versus just posting questions to spark dialogue. If few people respond to your poll, it can send a signal that you aren’t worth following on Facebook.
Make your question or poll open-ended and thought provoking rather than a yes-or-no question. Instead of, “Do you like watching soccer?” ask, “What do you like most about watching women’s soccer matches?” Doing so will help you discover your customers’ values and motivators.
You need to monitor your page and control the content instead of letting others control it for you. You don’t want customers to go to your Facebook page and see customer complaints to which no one responded. When this happens, newcomers to your site see a good reason not to do business with you and no explanation or resolution that could inspire them to still give you a chance.
Interact
Clearly, you can interact with customers in many ways on Facebook; you’re really just limited by your time and imagination. Because Coca-Cola has one of the most liked and followed Facebook pages, with more than 117 million likes and followers, its page is a good one from which to gain ideas and inspiration.
Coke interacts with Facebook fans by frequently posting about things that matter to them. On November 15, 2018, for example, a post about supporting wildfire relief efforts in California got nearly 500 likes and 124 shares. And when someone posts about Coke, the brand responds. One fan commented on how he liked the little Coke cans but couldn’t find them. Coke responded by asking for his zip code (in a personal message, of course) so it could help him find them. On another occasion, a fan asked whether Santa would give him a job. Regardless of whether this was sarcastic or serious, Coke responded with a link to its employment page.
The key to building relationships on Facebook is twofold:
- Post content worth reading and commenting on.
- Respond to the good, the bad, the funny, and the serious.
If consumers feel ignored or invisible on your page, you’ll lose them.
If you want shares to help build your reach, the most effective way is to post things that are fun, engaging, humorous, or just really cool. Cool photos, funny videos, and inspirational stories seem to get the most shares.
Build
Keep in mind that the best content isn’t always about driving a sale but more about engaging and creating rapport, trust, and communications with your followers. When you achieve these attributes, sales will follow. The best content strategy is to post fun, positive, inspiring, and relatable content that tells a story in which your customers can see themselves.
Creating content that gets a response, dialogue, and leads
Creating a story in which readers can easily see themselves is the best way to spark interaction, dialogue, and new leads. But simply posting a well-written status update isn’t likely going to fill up your inbox with new prospects waiting to be sold something. However, if you post content that invites response and interaction that includes others’ thoughts, feedback, and expertise, you will be more likely to start a conversation that could get you the right kinds of leads for your business.
Here are some tips for lead-generating content on Facebook:
- Be brief. Note that people typically have short attention spans, which seem to be getting shorter all the time with all the distractions and demands on their attention. To up engagement, keep your content short. If you want to provide more information about a topic in a post, provide a link to a full article.
- Direct to your website. Directing people to your website for more information on a post you shared is always a good idea, and then be sure to follow up by asking people for their email to get the full story. Offer white papers, links to columns, links to news coverage for your brand, and so on. You can also post about special sales and discounts available on your website.
- Invite a response. Don’t just post a point, an opinion, or a fact. Spark dialogue by asking fans what they think. Do they agree? Share your stories and encourage followers to do the same. One comment often inspires another, which makes your page more interesting and gives fans more attention for their own voice, too.
- Provide tips. People like how-to tips and will often follow a site just to get more. If you have something of value that’s actionable and helps others, post it. If you can, break up your list of how-to tips into a series to give you content that inspires people to come back for more.
- Use hashtags. Hashtags simply give your post more chances of getting seen, on Facebook and on other channels. Include at least one but not too many, and some research says that two work best.
Prepare a content plan and stick with it. It’s easy to spend all day posting and reading comments on your page and others’ pages and accomplish little, if anything, else. To avoid wasting your time and that of your followers and friends, make your content meaningful and actionable.
Facebook is best used for interacting and building relationships. If you use it too much to promote sales and offers, you risk losing credibility and fans.
Advertising on Facebook
If you’re not able to build your base through the tactics in the previous sections, or you want to get to mass quickly, consider advertising on Facebook. You can do this through boosting your post for a nominal fee or by purchasing Page Like or Offer ads. Here’s the difference:
- Boosting post: You pay a nominal free to get your post pushed out to people in a demographic you choose. The more you pay, the more people see your post.
- Page like ads: These are ads with a Like button for your page that are sent to audiences of your choice. If they “like” the button, they become followers of your page.
- Offer ads: You can use an Offer function provided by Facebook to post offers on your page. You can pay to have that offer boosted to people not following you to get more exposure for it. If you have a Facebook page, you likely see these in your News Feed quite a bit.
Building Your Twitter Presence
Although Twitter can be frustrating for the long-winded because you have to keep your posts to 280 characters or less, it does add value for building your brand’s presence. For one, Twitter helps start conversations with followers and can be used to post links to your more in-depth content on LinkedIn, Facebook, and, of course, your website. (Flip to Chapter 5 in Book 2 for more about building your own website.)
A key advantage of Twitter is that it helps you find people with similar interests by suggesting people you can follow. And if you post enough interesting content on a given topic, Twitter encourages others to follow you, too.
You can build your Twitter base by doing the following:
- Searching a keyword related to your brand and then clicking on People associated with that term. For example, searching “consumer behavior” on Twitter results in dozens upon dozens of people to follow.
- Including hashtags for your tweets so that people can find your posts.
- Posting your Twitter handle in your email signature, on your web page, and on handouts for trade shows and live events. Encourage followers on your other social channels to follow you on Twitter as well.
- Creating an interesting profile page and tweeting regularly about things that are of interest to consumers interested in your product and brand.
- Tweeting about something more than just your latest offer or white paper. Start conversations on objective themes to attract like-minded people.
- Linking your Twitter account to your Facebook account so that your tweets show up on Facebook, too.
Twitter has more than 300 million monthly global users and is still growing. It keeps you connected in real time to your customers and maintains your presence in channels that consumers use daily in all industries.
Igniting Your Social Presence on Instagram
Instagram is a photo-centric social network that lets you tell your story through imagery — photos and videos. It’s popular among younger audiences and omits a lot of the chatter, good and bad, from other social sites. As of June 2018, Instagram had around 1 billion monthly active users, making it another must-use site for reaching today’s consumers.
Because a picture can be “worth a thousand words,” Instagram is a great way to communicate quickly about brand events or happenings and to tell your story through the power of images. Most people access it via their smartphone, which limits your reach, but it helps boost your mobile strategy and share your brand stories.
The best way to be successful on Instagram is to use high-quality photos that are interesting, inspiring, and engaging. You can also upload your Instagram photos to other social sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare.
Expanding Your Network through LinkedIn
Although many people use LinkedIn to advance their careers and build far-reaching professional networks, LinkedIn also serves a valuable role for businesses. It’s different from other social media channels and needs to be treated as such, or it can backfire on you. For one, LinkedIn is not for promoting products and attracting leads; it’s for promoting your industry expertise, knowledge, insights, and business happenings and for posting your job openings. LinkedIn is widely used by B2B brands to identify decision makers at companies with whom they’d like a relationship and to strike up a meaningful conversation. Many companies in the B2C space use it to promote their workplace culture and attract new employees because it has a popular job center, which attracts job seekers and employers.
As of this writing, LinkedIn has more than 600 million members, making it another must channel for businesses, especially B2B. IBM’s page is a great example of how businesses can use LinkedIn. It has more than 5.2 million followers and keeps the content on target and worth reading.
Here’s a brief overview of the fundamental elements of a LinkedIn page for businesses:
- About Us: Like personal profiles on LinkedIn, your page starts with a summary of your business. You can state whatever you want to about your company and change it as often as you want to.
- Connections: LinkedIn shows visitors to your page any common connections you both have so they can see who else values your page and whom they can reach out to for an introduction or conversation. Having a big network makes you and your brand more valuable to others and sends a signal that you’re successful at what you do because people want to follow your insights.
- Showcase pages: You can add showcase pages to your main page that provide details about your product lines. For example, IBM has 14 showcase pages, which include IBM Watson Health, IBM Watson Internet of Things, and IBM Mobile.
- Updates: Your updates are your posts, articles, links to articles, insights you want to share, and other information that helps define your brand. For a business, these may include inspirational quotes from your CEO, financial results, announcements about live events on other channels, such as Facebook, and insights about your product and development and of your corporate social responsibility.
The following sections explore some of the best features on LinkedIn for businesses and marketers alike.
Groups
A good use of LinkedIn is to create your own group. Find a topic of interest in which you’re a thought leader and start a group to share insights and exchange ideas. If you start a group, your role is to set the rules, monitor posts, manage posts, initiate conversations, and keep it going. Every time a new post is made on your group page, all members get an email notification, which helps to keep your topic and expertise on members’ minds. A group is tough to keep up with if you’re stretched for time, so make sure you have a plan for keeping your group active and inspired.
Here are some tips for getting a group going:
- Define the purpose. Is this group for exchanging ideas about innovations, solutions, trends, breakthroughs, and case studies on a given topic?
- Set the rules. Put your purpose and rules on your site for all to see. If your rules are no job posts or promotions of any kind, follow through. As the manager, you can delete posts and eliminate violators.
- Invite members of your network to join, and promote your group on your individual page as well as other social channels. Keep inviting people to join regularly, because the bigger the group, the greater your network and reach.
- Monitor all activity. If you set your group up to be an open group, you’ll likely get a lot of fake accounts and spam posts. If you don’t delete these, you may lose the members you value.
- Post often. Post articles, insights, links to white papers, videos, research findings, event coverage, and personnel news. Keep your content business-oriented and leave the promotional, fun posts for other channels like Facebook and Twitter.
Engagement
The best way to get noticed on LinkedIn is to post meaningful articles or updates several times a week if possible. Topics that get engagement include articles you’ve written, news coverage of your brand, events, trade shows, personnel news, how-to guides, checklists, and links to your blog or new information on your website.
Here are some tips for driving engagement:
- Include a link to a landing page in your posts; by doing so, you can double your engagement.
- Post thoughtful questions and encourage others to share their insights.
- Add an image. LinkedIn claims that images can result in a 98 percent higher comment rate.
- Link to your videos on YouTube, which will play directly in your LinkedIn feed and could increase your share rate by 75 percent.
- Respond to comments in a way that encourages more comments and gets more people commenting.
For every post, LinkedIn provides analytics, such as the number of impressions, clicks, interactions, and percentage of engagement to help you see which topics do best. Like other sites, you can pay to sponsor an update for more money and more exposure.
Promoting Your Brand with Pinterest
With an average monthly active user number of around 250 million, Pinterest can’t be ignored, especially by B2C businesses that want their products and creative uses of their products to go viral. Pinterest is widely used as a bookmark of ideas for recipes, home decorating, crafts, holiday décor and goodies, fashion, and do-it-yourself projects.
Per a recent report posted on www.expandedramblings.com, a site that posts stats about various social channels, 60 percent of Pinterest users are female and roughly 40 percent are male. Around 55 percent of online shoppers in the United States claim that Pinterest is their favorite social media platform.
So if you cater to women who like to make, bake, follow fashion trends, and the like, Pinterest just might be for you. If users like your post, they can really increase your exposure by sending it to their email and Facebook contacts or sharing it on other social channels.
Pinterest is an idea board. You pin what you like, and your pins get communicated via other social channels, giving the creators of those ideas added exposure. The better the picture and the most clever the ideas, the greater the number of pins you’ll receive.
You can create boards of images and ideas of interest to you and include images from others on these boards. If people click on these images, they can be directed away from your page so be careful about sending viewers to other pages or sites.
Pinterest can also be a good place to sell your products. You can promote your pin like on other sites and even set up a shopping cart so people can purchase from you without leaving Pinterest. The shopping cart works much like those on Amazon.com and eBay. You’re buying from a seller using its platform. If you use Pinterest for business, make sure you set up a business account so you can get analytics about your most popular pins, shares, repins, likes, and demographic information about those visiting your Pinterest account.