Chapter 21

Ten Reasons for Using Social Media

In This Chapter

Recognising why social media matters

Putting social media to work in your business

Ensuring that you stay ahead of the pack

The Oxford Dictionary has a suitably pithy definition of social media – ‘websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking’. Social media can be seen as a collection of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

Social media may be still in its infancy, but it’s prolific and influential. That using social media for business has become a mainstream activity is evident in the fact that the options are numerous and expanding fast. Aside from the usual suspects – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – hundreds of sector-specific sites exist. Pinterest, for example, is a tool for collecting and organising pictures of things that inspire you. YouTube provides a forum for people to inform billions of people around the world by distributing videos for free. eHarmony, Match.com and 6,000 other dating sites aim to help the lonely find love. Social bookmarking sites, including Digg, Delicious, Newsvine, and Reddit allow users to recommend online news stories, music and videos. Then you have word-of-mouth forums including blogs, company-sponsored discussion boards and chat rooms, and consumer product or service ratings websites and forums like Skytrax airlines rating, TripAdvisor and local-business review site Yelp. Social media sites make up at least half of the top 20 websites in most regions of the world. So you need to incorporate social media into your marketing plan, and in chapter I offer ten reasons to back up that assertion.

Visit Social Media Examiner (www.socialmediaexaminer.com/getting-started) where you can find tips on how to get started on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube, as well as how to get your first blog (a web page where people record and share opinions) and podcast (a digital file containing video or audio material that can be accessed online) off the ground.

Augmenting Your Marketing Budget

Offline marketing is expensive. Using conventional media such as posters, leaflets, radio or TV costs hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds up front. A small firm’s marketing budget can quickly become exhausted and you may not have any certainty of results going route. Plus, measuring the response from any form of offline advertising is notoriously difficult. In contrast, you can dip your toe in the social media water for virtually no cost except a few hours’ work, a worthwhile trade to make while getting your business going. Even better, social media comes with inbuilt measurement systems so you can see just how many bangs you’re getting for your buck.

Companies such as Ning (www.ning.com) and Engagor (http://engagor.com) help you create social media such as podcasts, forums (which are like blogs where people cluster around specific interest topics) and blogs while providing tools to measure, monitor and manage your social media activity. Both sites offer a free trial and basic services from just £18 per month.

Acquiring Cost-Effective Exposure

You need exposure when starting a business. After all, how are you going to reach people and sell them your wares if they don’t know that you exist? Equally, cost-effectiveness is a buzzword for business start-ups where money is often tight. The good news is that you need to devote just a few hours each week to social media activities, which cost you nothing but that time, in order to get some serious online visibility as a result of your efforts.

Social Media Examiner’s 2013 report (which you can find online, at www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2013.pdf) sets out to uncover the ‘who, what, where, when, and why’ of social media marketing. They surveyed over 3,000 marketers and found the following:

• For 89 per cent of respondents, social media marketing has generated more business exposure.
• A total of 64 per cent saw sales-lead generation increase by using social media for six hours or less per week.
• For 86 per cent, social media was important for their business (up from eighty three percent the previous year).
• Around 79 per cent had integrated their social media marketing with their traditional marketing activities.

Different social media reach different audiences, so consider where you’retrying to gain exposure when choosing which social media to employ. Facebook dominates in the business-to-consumer space (67 per cent of marketers select it as their number-one choice). However, in the business-to-business world, LinkedIn and Facebook are in joint first place, at 29 per cent each. Blogging and Twitter play a much more important role for business-to-business marketers, at 19 per cent and 16 per cent respectively, but for business-to-consumers the shares are 11 per cent and 10 per cent.

Increasing Website Traffic

To grow your business, you want more people who can buy or tell others to buy your products to visit your website, so you’ve got to snare those who are idly surfing the Internet or looking at other sites and draw them to your website. Through using social media, you can put out topical and interesting messages to attract surfers’ attention. As soon as they take the bait and visit your website, you can expose them to any other messages or promotional material that you want them to see. Unfortunately, general browsing covers millions of websites, making targeting users near-impossible and prohibitively expensive. Social media traffic, by contrast, is concentrated in no more than a dozen networks in the English-speaking world or in easily identified sector-specific areas such as those covered by networks like TripAdvisor or eHarmony.

Your job is to find which social media are used most by the market you sell into and put your hooks there. For most small businesses, Twitter is a good place to start. Twitter is where people read breaking news, so if what you want to communicate is topical and time-dependent, Twitter can be a useful social media for you to use. (Find out everything you need to know about building up your business profile on Twitter at the For Dummies online resource: www.dummies.com/how-to/internet/Blogging-Social-Networking/Twitter/Getting-Started.html.) You can monitor and manage tweets using a free online organiser such as TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com) or Hootsuite (www.Hootsuite.com), which has the added advantage of enabling to you manage and analyse other social media you’re using, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, in one place.

Moving up Search Engine Rankings

Over 500 million different websites are on the Internet today, so when you search for something on Google, Bing or Yahoo!, a lot of activity is triggered. If you type ‘greetings cards’ into Google, you get 68,900,000 results, for example. If your website doesn’t appear on the first few pages, however, there’s little chance that anyone is going to plough on to find it. Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps you move up the rankings (I cover topic in Chapter 15), and an essential part of an SEO strategy these days is to ride on the back of your social media traffic to move up the rankings.

Search engines are always looking for ways to eliminate low-quality results, making algorithm changes that affect the way search marketing is conducted. If you can get influential sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest gathering attention about your business, your ‘quality rating’ (as far as the search engines are concerned) can go up, taking your ranking up with it. The trick is to give readers a reason to pass your message on to as many people as possible and to give them a reason to visit your website. You can achieve trick by putting high-quality copy in your social media that links back to your website. For example, you can invite your blog readers to share their experiences of using products such as those you sell and provide facts that link back to a report on the subject on your website. Having your social media linked directly through to your website in way can be an effective strategy for improving website traffic.

The online news aggregator and blog, Huffington Post, is ranked highly by Alexa (www.alexa.com/siteinfo/huffingtonpost.com), the web information company that monitors web traffic. The Huffington Post blog is on its main web page (www.huffingtonpost.co.uk), together with its Facebook and Twitter links. Interesting Huffington blogs or tweets get shared and new readers are tempted to visit Huffington’s website, so increasing the traffic, which then translates into a higher overall website ranking.

The 2013 Social Media Marketing Report, sponsored by the Social Media Examiner website, reported the following:

• A total of 45 per cent of firms who used social media for less than 12 months moved up the search rankings.
• Improved search engine rankings were most prevalent among those who used social media for two years or longer, with more than 62 per cent reporting a rise.
• Marketers selling to other businesses were more likely to achieve improved rankings (60 per cent) than those selling to consumers (56 per cent).

Consider using SocialOomph (www.socialoomph.com), which enables you to automate a range of tasks including scheduling and publishing recurring tweets, updating Facebook and LinkedIn pages and a whole mass of social media activity that can save you hours of work every week. When you've registered a free account, you can take the free and fully functional trial of SocialOomph Professional. Thereafter, you pay once every fortnight payments and you don’t have to enter any long-term contracts.

Improving Market Intelligence

Social media has transformed the way people exchange information. Today people with similar interests band together in different online communities, sharing information and exchanging views on blogs and forums. Both are excellent sources of continuous information on industry issues, customers and competitors. Anyone and everyone can, and does, express their comments through blogs and forums, and many blogs exist on any topic. So, you can use blogs and forums as a means to research your market.

To find blogs and forums of interest:

• Visit Globe of Blogs (http://globeofblogs.com), which has over 50,000 blogs listed.
• Simply using the Google search engine (www.google.com/blogsearch) is also a good way into the world’s blogs and forums.

Use information from the blogs and forums you follow to arrive at a crowd forecast: one that relies on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to get sense of what people are feeling. For example, the average of estimates provided by a group of individuals is more accurate than most of the individual estimates. Crowd forecasting enables you to balance expert perspectives with that of a wider audience for a more representative view of where a trend is heading.

You can also set up your own blog. Launching your own blog needn’t be hard. Blogger for example, is Google’s free tool for creating blogs, and you can set up a Blogger account in three easy steps: create an account, name your blog and choose a template. Then you can start blogging, and set up other blogs with the same account. You can read stories about how other small businesses have used blogging and find the link to set up your own Google blogging account at http://buzz.blogger.com.

Why not use your blog as a platform for running a survey? Use online survey sites such as Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and Free Online Surveys (http://freeonlinesurveys.com) to canvas your customers’ opinions and even their intentions; for example, by asking when they’re likely to buy your type of products again. (You can find everything you need to structure your questionnaire in Chapter 4.)

Attracting Interest to Generate Sales Leads

The trick in promoting a product or service is to recognise the stages in the sale process: attention, interest, desire and, finally, a sale. You can think of anyone who responds to a well-targeted social media initiative as being at the attention or interest stage in the selling process. Some of those people go on to look for more information on your website. Not all responses result in a purchase immediately; nevertheless, the response has a value.

Top of the scale is a person who becomes an immediate customer. Farther down, there’s still value if the person becomes a customer later on or recommends you to a friend or colleague with a greater need for your product than he has himself. Finally, if he never buys or recommends you to others but you can identify the person’s characteristics, you can eliminate him and others like him from your future marketing efforts and so become more effective and efficient – valuable commodities in themselves.

When starting a business or later on, when you’re planning for growth – say, by launching a new product or service – social media can be a valuable way to generate that all-important initial ‘buzz’. Social media provides the ideal vehicle to channel your creative juices and generate innovative ways to get the word out about your business, product or service. In that way, you can create anticipation and build up enough excitement to get people talking and so generate those vital initial sales leads.

When Ford wanted to re-enter the small car market with the Fiesta, it gave 100 social media influencers a Fiesta to test drive for six months. Every month, the influencers had to complete a mission and document their experiences on various social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The effects of the campaign were sensational: Fiesta generated 6.5 million YouTube views, received 50,000 requests (sales leads, if you like) for information about the car and sold 10,000 cars in the first six days post-release.

Consider using Hootsuite (who offer a free trial to whet your appetite), an essential tool for managing Twitter and other social networks. Hootsuite produces analytic reports that show how effective your various activities are. In this way, you can see just how many potential leads you’re generating. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial here: http://signup.hootsuite.com/signup-pro.

You find essential ideas on how to use marketing effectively, including how to get your potential customers’ attention, in Chapter 10.

Growing Real Sales

Generating a buzz of interest is one thing, but you can get a lot more than that from a social media drive; you can push the real sales curve up too. In a recent analysis of more than 60 Facebook marketing campaigns, 49 per cent reported a return on investment of more than five times, and 70 per cent had a return on investment greater than three times.

You can tap forums for more than ideas; you can induce people there to part with upfront cash, given the right proposition. To give an example, Hotel Chocolat, one of the UK’s prestigious ‘cool brands’, did just that. Angus Thirlwell, Hotel Chocolat’s co-founder, launched a chocolate tasting club (you can find it at www.hotelchocolat.com/uk/tasting-club) to develop recipes and ideas. To join the club, you have to place an initial order for £9.95 worth of chocolates, representing a 60 per cent saving on the retail price. For that, you get a box of chocolates, tasting notes and a free gift. From there, you can continue and become a Tasting Club member and get new selections regularly sent to your door. Social media strategy is a neater and more effective way of generating a customer’s first order than by using a crude discount on its own. That the tasting club now has 100,000 members is proof of that particular pudding.

As part of ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign for Old Spice in 2010, advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy launched a social media blitz. Over three days their team filmed 180-odd videos around the clock, responding directly to fans and celebrities in near-real time. Total campaign impressions since February 2010 have now reached approximately 1.2 billion. The videos have received over 34 million aggregate views with a total of 38,535 YouTube comments. Old Spice has become the all-time most viewed sponsored channel on YouTube, and best of all, since the campaign ‘Mustafa’ (an Old Spice product) sales have increased by 27 per cent year on year. In the three months after the height of the social media campaign, sales were up by 55 per cent, reaching 107 per cent in the final month and making Old Spice the number one bodywash brand for men.

Keeping Pace with Market Leaders

Like it or not, social media marketing is here to stay and you have to have a strategy and presence online to be considered a serious player in the business arena today. You’re ‘visible’ on the Internet if only by default. Your prospects, clients, potential employees, business partners or backers find it odd if they can’t locate a social media presence in any of the mainstream media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or at least a blog or forum on the business’s website.

Keeping pace in social media isn’t just about being on a large number of media sites. That can be time-consuming for a small business founder as by having presence on a social media site, your customers expect you to be actively engaged there. You’d have to keep current, fresh conversations flowing constantly. Rather, the challenge is how to keep up-to-date with which social media sites your customers use the most. An ideal way to master challenge is to read Social Media Marketing For Dummies by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond (Wiley). This book is an indispensable resource for small businesses and start-ups looking for low-cost online marketing strategies. It shows you how to identify social media sites that appeal to your target audience and find out which social platform works best for which objectives. You can also find out how to monitor results and assess your program’s effectiveness.

You couldn’t get a more conservative company than Caterpillar – the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural engines and industrial gas turbines, and a name associated with yellow bulldozers and building sites. Despite its conservatism, the company has a dedicated social media program manager, and social media technologies provide them with the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their customer–business relationships. Caterpillar recognises the power of the big three social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – but is also exploring other platforms used in specific areas of the world as well as social media tools such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla. Through its careful use of social media, Caterpillar is maintaining its position as market leader.

Check out your competition’s social media presence regularly, at least once a month, or when you check your own Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums.

Creating Loyalty

Social media can be harnessed to create a devoted following, and a devoted following is as good as money in the bank (see the Hotel Chocolat example in the earlier ‘Growing Real Sales’ section). Acquiring customers is an expensive process: you have to find them, woo them and win their custom. Once you have them onside, they cost less to keep, they spend more money with you and are less price-sensitive than new customers. Retaining them does more than almost any other marketing strategy to grow your profit margin, and using social media is a low-cost way to keep them onside. Studies have shown that increasing customer retention rates by just 5 per cent increases profits by 25 to 95 per cent, which just goes to prove that a little more loyalty can go a long way in helping a new business to succeed.

In Social CRM For Dummies (Wiley), Kyle Lacy, Stephanie Diamond and Jon Ferrara take a detailed look at building a customer loyalty and advocacy programme and offer their insights on a mass of ways to harness social media tools to help you retain and harvest value from your customer base.

Generating Referrals

If you want your business to grow and prosper in the long haul, you have to build up your customer base, and that in turn means you have to carry out some form of advertising and promotion activity. The most trusted form of promotion is the unbiased recommendation of someone whose judgement is trusted and who doesn’t stand to gain from their advice. That sounds much like the definition of any positive conversation stream on a blog or a substantial body of followers on Facebook. Indeed, the beauty of social media is that all the hard work – thinking up nice things to say about your products – is done by your satisfied or, better still, delighted customers. By turning your customers into evangelists for your company, you boost your bottom line. You do, however, have to get it right in the first place. Social media can be a double-edged sword. If things go wrong, the word gets out loud and clear – and at lightning speed.

In Social Media Engagement For Dummies, by Aliza Sherman and Danielle Elliott Smith (Wiley), you can find out how to build and grow relationships with followers and customers, craft content just for them, analyse how they’re responding, and refocus and refresh your campaigns accordingly.