It's not hard to find advice on how to get started using social media in business. Every consultant who has ever completed an engagement has an opinion. The problem is, much of that advice boils down to: "Just dive in and start tweeting." Not helpful, and not likely to lead to successful outcomes. More deliberation is in order.
The first question to answer is where social media can fit into your company's overall outreach efforts. Social media aren't one thing, despite our tendency as an industry to speak about them as if they were, and their uses inside companies can be various. Social media can be used as a promotional tool (Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare fit well here); as a PR vehicle (blogs); as a real-time aid to customer service (Twitter); and as a vehicle for customer engagement (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). Like the elephant in the fable of the blind men, writes Robin Neifield, social media "can resemble an odd assortment of different shapes and sizes, textures, and appendages, but when taken together, it's a powerful animal that leaves a big footprint."
Narrowing down to marketing, let's say you've decided to investigate how social media can work in your programs to increase customer engagement. You'll want to plan your strategy, do research, and set guidelines -- this infographic is a good roadmap of initial steps, and summarizes B2Bento's whitepaper on the use of social media in B2B marketing.
In the research phase, you need to figure out where in the social landscape your customers are. Where are the conversations happening? What trends are customers concerned with? Who are the influencers, who the evangelists? Finding this all out takes research that goes beyond simply exploring the keywords you might already be using in SEO or pay-per-click campaigns.
Liana Evans sketches out 10 research tools, from free to enterprise level, that can help you determine where to focus your efforts in the social space. They range from simple buzz trackers such as Google Alerts to sophisticated sentiment analysis packages, including the widely used Radian6 (here is a detailed review of the latter). Google Insights and Twitter Trends can give you a leg up on the jargon and slang that may be used in these media around your industry. Tools such as Technorati, Compete, and Quantcast can help you find influencers and evangelists, and get a bead on their reputations.
Research into keywords and trending topics can also pay off in benefits for pay-per-click display advertising, as Hollis Thomases explains. Researching competitors using tools such as SEMRush, SpyFU (pardon the expression), or AdGooRoo (ditto) can give further insight into what keywords are most applicable to your marketing efforts.
What lessons have you learned along the trail to productive use of social media for marketing? Please share your insights in the comments below.
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Regarding metrics, Keith, I must admit that I know of no solution that will supply a "helpdesk" sort of backend to Twitter and will accommodate analytics, though there probably are companies that offer such a product. But for the moment, companies are happy enough to use Twitter for customer service, even just at the most basic level. Having customers raving about you is a nice thing even if you can't keep track of the number of smiles you get.
Lucy -- true thing. I heard a couple of anecdotes at the conference I just attended that make an even stronger statement about the power of reaching out to, especially, disgruntled customers by Twitter. In both stories, an extremely upset customer was transformed by that simple act into a rabid supporter and evangelist. At some level, what drives people nuts is simply feeling they're not being listened to. Provide proof that you are listening, and you make a convert out of them.
Most definitely there needs to be some sort of measurement done in the endeavor as a company engages in social media. Otherwise there may be no justification that can be allowed to continue the actions. Also if can provide a means in which to effectively adjust the social media marketing strategy as well.
From what I've seen, using social media for customer support is as simple as getting people who communicate well and have a heart for the customer. These are the same people you'd put on the phones, but slightly more inclined to writing than speaking. That's the main cost: good labor.
Is it fair to say that applying social media to customer service requires less planning than other uses to which those media could be put? Do you apply any metrics at all to, e.g., Twitter used for customer support? Do you know how much it costs to keep this channel open?
On the other hand, there are those who are familiar enough with these tools but have no marketing mindset whatsoever. After I got my current job, I was told that most of the other candidates simply said that they have accounts in these social media sites, and they assume they could already do digital marketing just because of that. Not a good sign when nearly everybody in this day and age have Facebook.
My degree is in marketing communications (i.e. communications used for marketing purposes). In my years of managing social media, I've come to the conclusion that it's more appropriate to think of social media as communication tools in general rather than as marketing tools exclusively.
Why is that? It's mainly because marketing always demands explicit intent. It relies on strategy, objectives, per-channel plans, etc. While I love doing strategy, I also recognize that there are some things in business that don't require so much intentionality, such as making communication channels accessible to our customers. I've found that having a Facebook page isn't mostly about fulfilling an explicit marketing objective--it's more about having the lines open for customers to converse with my company. We do have feature articles on our wall, but a lot of it is simply receiving feedback and making customers see that we're listening. Yes, those fulfill marketing objectives too, but they don't require as much planning. Customer service makes sense universally. It's just a matter of opening the lines of communication so that customer service becomes possible.
cvargas - I have bookmarked an article for later reading from another site, premise being we're past the "just jump in" stage with social media. You need to have goals and ways to measure whether you've achieved those goals, even while you experiment.
This is the point where education comes into play for those executives. Not only do they need to be educated about the various forms available, but also the proper ways in which to utilize them for their own company's benefit. Being the latest and greatest way to communicate to consumers and other businesses, does not mean that it is the best way of approaching those target groups.
A look back at The CMO Site's polls this year, on subjects including millennial marketing, the effectiveness of social media marketing, and CMO/CIO relations.
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