Category: Social Media

Company’s Strategy for Social Media

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Companies often agonize over how to use social media.  The process can get fairly drawn out but at the end of the day there are only three options available to companies.

 

Strategy 1: Company Communications

Doing a company approach to social media is really about setting up social media channels that get fed company communications.  Any information that the company sends publically should find its way onto every social media channel.  This is an easier strategy to put in place because all social media platforms can get linked through an email platform or social media management tool like hoot suite.  Simply put, it takes less time to manage this process.  It also comes with less risk as central employees or contractors can be used to distribute and manage the information.  So the pros are that it takes less time and closely manages the company message. The down side is that very little one-to-one interaction is available which limits powerful brand or marketing capabilities.

 

Strategy 2: Employee/Individual Communications

Every company is made of individual(s).  This strategy leverages that group of people with the ability to personally interact as representatives of the company.  The benefit here is that, as a group, interactions will be more frequent and personalized which can create a strong bond to the social media audience.  True one-to-one interaction is feasible.  The down side is that those interactions happen in real time and there is a risk of problems being presented on a public forum.  There is also a risk of wasted time as individuals can get drawn into social interactions that provide little value to the company.  Centralized control becomes almost impossible and presenting a unified message is often a challenge.

 

Strategy 3: Hybrid Style

It’s possible to create a hybrid strategy where company communications are distributed across social media channels but individuals also have access to interact with the social media audience.  This provides the pros of a centralized message mixed with personal interaction but also all the risks of less control and more time dedicated to the social media channel.  The added problem is that sometimes company communications can disrupt the personal interactions as the company communications are sent on a schedule rather than real time.

 

There is no right answer to social media strategy.  It’s more of deciding what fits for your company.  Some important things to consider is manpower to dedicate to social media, risks involved with personal interactions, and time invested in managing the channels.  The answers to these questions will help you narrow in on the strategy that works for your company.  Once you choose a strategy, it’s important that all parties involved with the social media channels understand the goal.  Once the goal is clear then it’s easier to dedicate the resources necessary but not waste time on low return activities.

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Set eMarketing Goals Now

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Happy new year.  Like most business goals, now is the time to review your metrics and set goals.  And it can’t be a resolution that’s forgotten after January.  eMarketing is not a “set it and forget it” activity.  It’s an ongoing process of trial, error, and improvement.

Look over your email, social media, and website metrics and set target goals for the end of 2012.  Then break those target goals into quarters.  Finally break the first quarter into a monthly set.  In this way you can make a monthly plan that covers the year.  Each month should be assigned one enhancement that you believe will improve results.

After you set this plan you only need to track results.  Then at the end of the year you’ll have numbers that support or inform your plan of action.  So next year’s plan can be a bit more precise.  Over a few years time your eMarketing plan will be pinpoint accurate with reliable projections on what to expect.

But it all starts by setting goals now . . .

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web Maintenance , , , , , ,

Should I Include the Price?

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A question that pops up is whether a price should be advertised right off the bat or on a second level that people have to navigate to.  The answer to this depends on space limitations, price appeal, and communication vehicle. But as a guiding rule pricing should be included unless it’s a complex product, service, or offer where pricing is not easily outlined.

For something simple like a banner ad or a social media update a price likely shouldn’t be included unless it’s a selling point.  The reason for this is purely functional, there’s not enough room to focus on anything but incentives to click.  However the landing page should display pricing clearly if possible so that users aren’t frustrated in finding it.

For website pages or detailed communications the answer is yes, unless it’s a complex product or service where pricing models would be unreasonably complex.  It’s frustrating for users to see a straightforward offer or product and not see pricing.  Furthermore it becomes a headache for the site owner because they will be flooded with, “how much does x cost,” questions.

Basically the answer is to include a price as soon as it’s feasible.  If you are offering something simple and have a defined price it’s best to include it early.  Your audience is going to want to see pricing so it’s better to be direct rather than make additional steps that can appear like it’s trying to be concealed.

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Multimedia Strategy: Video – Host or Post

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Video is becoming more and more prevalent on websites.  And why not? If done well it can be a powerful marketing tool.  But what is the best way to get your video content online?  There are two options host or post.

Posting to an external site has advantages:

  • Easy to upload video
  • No bandwidth costs
  • Lots of traffic
  • Easy to share (embed, email links, rss feeds, etc)
  • Serves as a pseudo social media platform

But there are also some disadvantages:

  • Videos are watched on their site, not yours.
  • No link benefit if people embed/share your video
  • Limited analytics to understand user engagement, video bounce rate, etc
  • Tend to be lower quality
  • Ads appear on your content
  • Limited length/duration
  • No custom branding

So taking pros and the cons I tend to use a hybrid strategy.  For shorter length video where highest quality is not a concern put them on a video sharing site (like youtube).  Everything that’s on youtube can be embedded into your site.  This provides the benefit  of uploading video using their pre-set tools and the extra exposure online.  When embedded on your own site you also gain better tracking and can brand the page to ideally suit your online marketing campaigns.

If high quality, duration, or limited compression is a concern, always host the video on your own site.  This is necessary because the video sharing sites won’t support it and  time consuming work-arounds are necessary which make it an inefficient strategy.

Using this method is a way to get some of the benefits of hosting and posting while minimizing the limitations.

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Online Marketing: Don’t Mistake New for Better.

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I was recently informed by a client that they needed to step up their social media presence because “email is on the way out”.  That was a shock to me as most of my clients (this one included) see a nice return on their email marketing investment.  In fact, industry wide email marketing boasts a leading ROI among online marketing efforts with $42.08 generated from every dollar spent.  In short, my client was mistaken.  He’d made the error of thinking “new” was “better”.

Social media seems to be the new “new”.  It’s one of the first things out of people’s mouths when internet marketing comes up.  And I don’t mean to pick on social media, it’s a valuable tool.  It just shouldn’t be put on a pedestal above older communication channels that still outperform it.

An older example is when CSS layouts were first appearing.  Many companies rushed to update their pages for the new “standard”.  The problem was that many of the web browsers weren’t quite up to speed in rendering these sites so web developers had to create multiple versions for individual browsers.  That made developing the site significantly more expensive.  The difference between jumping on CSS layouts when it was new and when browser support increased was potentially tens of thousands of dollars.  At the end of the day there was no difference between a tabled layout and a CSS layout to most users but the early adopters could revel in the “newness” for a short period of time.

Neglecting other marketing channels to do what’s “new” can be very problematic when resources are shifted to a new media that does not perform as well as an older one.  It’s like trading a dollar for a quarter, it might be shinier but there’s no financial upside.

Of course I’m not suggesting that you let your online marketing stagnate into a tried and true rut.  Innovation and new technology will come up and many times it should be adopted.  But focus on effectiveness not newness.  When you keep track of what’s performing best it keeps the allure of “new” out of your decision making.  Online marketing is about increasing awareness of a company, driving opportunities, and ultimately having a positive impact on the bottom line.  Newness is hard pressed to affect any of those things on its own.

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Social Media: I like You . . .

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Remember in elementary or middle school when you were told that someone “liked you”?  That tended to be the most consequential thing a young teenager could hear.  If liker or likee worked up enough they might speak a little bit.  Then what happened?  Other class mates might be abuzz with the new “couple” but very little tended to actually happen between the two people in question.  That’s a social media like, it makes you feel good but at the end of the day it’s not worth much.

Liking or following does not mean someone is really interested in your company, let alone an advocate.  A second tier to social media marketing should shoot for real engagement and conversion.

An example of good social media can be seen in most video game launches today.  First they send out announcements, trailers, and teaser material typically with links to social media pages.  This starts a trickle of “likers” but only dedicated fans are committed to buying the game at this point.

As the game gets closer and pre-orders are available it’s common for sweepstakes or exclusive downloadable content to be made available.  The dedicated group obviously takes advantage of these offers but many fringe “likers” then begin to be drawn in.  Both the committed followers and enticed followers are likely to buy.

Finally at release the marketing switches to last chance/release celebration.  This is designed to pull in anyone on the fence and create a sense of urgency.

Imagine if the video game company just put out information on the game and were satisfied with the people that liked them.  They’d miss out on a substantial market segment and generate little revenue that wouldn’t have happened organically.

I often site this example to business people and they scoff and say, “People don’t get pumped up over our product or service like they would a game.”  To some extent that’s true, it’s hard to imagine most business clients rabidly looking through marketing material for promotions or anxiously awaiting a service release date.  But that doesn’t mean that the structure can’t be similar.

Use social media as an information platform so that you’ll get “likers”.  But don’t fool yourself in to believing that’s an achievement.  You have to use social media for a second level of engagement.  Most companies have valuable content or offers that can take the social media audience to a new level.  Tracking who and how many people take advantage of those offers provides a more concrete metric of social media marketing effectiveness because it’s a sounder foundation.  Not a meaningless “like”.

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Honest Social Media Evaluation

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Social Media has become a popular marketing topic.  That’s not news to anyone.  In fact, I’d suggest it’s become a trendy topic.  The problem with trendy things is that people tend to overweight the importance assigned to it.  Social media seems to be heading that direction.  Many marketers overemphasize the engagement levels of their social media audience to artificially inflate its importance.

To make a valid assessment of your social media channels, solid metrics need to be established.  In other words, it’s not worth spending a lot of time working on social networks if your audience isn’t paying attention.  Generating a list of people that accepted a single request is not valuable.  An engaged audience that pays attention to, and acts on, your communications is the goal.  So how can a marketer assess social media engagement?

The first rule is that just showing up doesn’t count as engagement.  A like click for your Facebook fan page is not engagement.  A follower on Twitter is not automatically engaged.  Gaining a contact in LinkedIn is not an engagement, etc.  Any of these activities are just showing up.  Sure, it’s a critical part of becoming engaged but not the act itself.

A better gauge would be someone on Facebook who liked the fan page and takes part in discussions or references links in their own communications.  Someone who retweets your posts is engaged.  Some one who provides a referral or joins your company group on LinkedIn is engaged.  Simply put, someone needs to actively interact with your content or offer to be engaged.

Engagement is flexible and can be custom defined from marketer to marketer.  Ideally a marketer should be able to put some general metrics on engaged contacts.  Social media can be a powerful communication channel but over-inflating its value often leads to neglecting other marketing efforts that might offer better ROI.

While translating social media marketing to a bottom line dollar can be difficult, marketers need to be careful they aren’t looking at social media through rose colored glasses.  After all, most of us have accepted a Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact we don’t really care for.  Just because they show up doesn’t mean we want anything to do with them.  Same goes for your company’s social media interactions.

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, But Which Words are You Saying?

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Pictures (and multimedia) can be worth a thousand words.  Just make sure that the images used in your online marketing are the ones you want to say.

Years ago most images on a website (at least professional ones) were analyzed, if not labored over.  The reason was that every page counted and just the right image was necessary to make the most of the sites marketing potential.

With the explosion of social media and link farms there is a lot of new content hitting the web.  And as you’d expect when quantity spikes, quality often plummets.  Social media and content management tools have been great in opening the web up to anyone who can use the internet.  Unfortunately this lack of restraints can lead to too much content being produced in a low quality manner.

Of course for many applications a low quality doesn’t matter.  No one is going to criticize a poorly shot photograph from vacation that someone places on Facebook.  However, if you are representing a company or organization, that will reflect poorly.

For example, I get Tweets from a company that regularly posts poorly shot and often pointless photographs of events they hold.  The people in the photos are never identified and aren’t recognizable because these snapshots are usually taken too far away.  In short they are pointless.  The company would be better served in buying stock photos of groups of people looking at speakers.  At least the photos would be well composed.

Don’t get trapped in the quantity trap. Take the time to only create and release quality materials that are pertinent to your audience.  There is a lot of drive now to maximize the use of social media and build links.  Both of those are admirable goals but only if the content being created is up to par.  After all, dumping a lot of poor quality or pointless material onto the internet might generate a few clicks but your credibility will gradually erode.

Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion, Social Media, Web Maintenance ,

Define Success: Social Media

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There is one metric that most people use to measure social media:

  • Contacts (LinkedIn)
  • Followers (Twitter)
  • Friends (Facebook)

However the number of people watching is not always the most important number to review.  Certainly social media is about interaction but our ultimate goal is what needs to be kept in mind.

For example I worked with a client who was frustrated by a lack of followers on Twitter.  Upon review we discovered that no notification or promos were put in place for the Twitter account.  It basically existed to feed other social media systems.  Under that goal it was a complete success.  It had been well set up and the Tweets were feeding multiple system.

This was more of a misunderstanding but it shows how legitimate goal can be mixed up.  Twitter was serving the intended function it was designed for in this case.

Remember, social media needs to be gauged by the opportunities it generates.  An audience that doesn’t interact is fairly worthless.  Don’t assume that contacts, followers, or friends is a measure of success.  It’s more of a gauge for the number of opportunities you have for success.

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Define Success for Your Online Marketing

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It’s common for people to use general metric standards as a guideline for success when analyzing online marketing data.  This can lead to real problems with their campaigns because it doesn’t take into account individualized goals.

Each webpage, email communication, or social media post needs to have a clearly defined metric for success rather than being analyzed on general metrics. General metrics like visitors, open/click rates, or post views can be misleading on the effectiveness of online marketing.  This data is informative but should not be the measuring stick for most online marketing initiatives.

In upcoming posts we’ll look at three separate areas of online marketing and general metrics that people use to measure success.  We’ll then outline how in many cases the general metrics are feeding false assumptions.  The three areas we will focus on are:

  • Email Marketing
  • Website
  • Social Media
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