A Brief Recap and Additional Q & A from our Recent Social Media Webinar
First, a big thank you to everyone who joined me on Tuesday for our webinar, Social Media – What’s the Point? Time is incredibly valuable these days, and it means a lot that you chose to spend it here.
In the presentation, I focused on three key points.
• All relevant media is becoming increasingly more social.
• Integrate social media into your total marketing strategy.
• Move beyond Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
Additional points that seemed to resonate with participants are:
• Companies and brands can participate in social media, and do it right.
• Social media marketing is more effective at growing brand affinity than generating leads and sales.
• Listen to your friends, fans, and followers to discover, and then engage with them on the topics that are interesting to them.
At the end of the presentation, there were several questions that arose which I was unable to address due to time. I’d like to respond to a few of them here.
If you are new to social media for your brand, what are your suggestions for starting out?
Just as one size does not really fit all, neither does one social media platform fit every business. Start by getting a personal recommendation from someone who is both active in social media, and who knows you and your business well. They can suggest the platform that might feel most natural for you.
Twitter can be a counter-intuitive for the first-time user, but it’s great for listening for mentions of your brand or business. Follow colleagues or industry knowledge leaders to get information that is relevant to your work. Follow customers who are already using Twitter. Reach out to both for feedback on how you’re doing. Use Twitter Search to find mentions of your brand, and set up TweetBeep and Google Alerts to receive email notifications.
Facebook fan pages work well for personal community interaction and engagement. Leverage the information tab to talk about who you are and what you do in a casual voice. Post updates about things that are happening in your company, both public-facing activities, and occasional behind-the-scenes operations. Respond when fans comment on your posts or write their own posts on your wall. Use the photos and the events features when you have something cool going on that you want to share.
If you’re a local food, travel, or entertainment business, consider starting with Yelp. Search for your company and read what Yelpers are saying. Claim your business and email your reviewers. Thank those who wrote a positive review for visiting your establishment and sharing their experience with others. Reach out to those who wrote a negative review to address points of pain to ask for ideas on how to improve service.
Wherever you begin, keep it simple. Choose one platform and focus on it for one month. Learn its features. Build new relationships. And don’t be afraid to experiment a bit to find what forms of engagement work best. You can always branch out as you get more comfortable.
What are your thoughts on agencies tweeting on behalf of clients?
Authenticity and transparency are key to a successful social media presence. There is nothing transparent about ghost-tweeting. No one knows your business as well as you do, and while an agency may be on point with your brand messaging, unique aspects of personality get lost when posting happens by proxy. After all, there are certain things that can only be captured when you are in-house, like the sudden invasion of beloved four-legged friends on ‘take your dog to work’ day.
Another challenge is timeliness. Whether it’s sharing breaking news in your industry, or responding to a mention of your brand, few clients are willing to give an agency the autonomy to tweet without some sort of approval process. Publishing schedules are common, but from preparation to approval to posting, your breaking article might have broken over a week ago. Customer service responses that have to go from agency to client back to agency for posting can often result in a delay of several hours, a full business day, or more.
That’s not to say that an agency can’t ever post on a client’s behalf. Where we have found success is providing content support when a client has a busy season that prevents them from maintaining a regular posting schedule. In those cases, we have tweeted, posted Facebook updates, and written blog posts in the voice of the brand to supplement content authored by the client.
Where an agency provides the most value is in navigating the social media landscape and identifying opportunities. We can be a virtual knowledge rolodex of social platforms, a guide during set-up and implementation, a resource for ongoing questions, and an idea hub for new opportunities.
Do you use a particular CRM to save all social media discussions or customer information?
There are several social monitoring tools that have been designed to help companies track mentions and follow customer interactions. Two of the most widely used are Radian 6 and CoTweet. Social media is an evolving space, and there is not yet a single software suite that will meet your every monitoring need. Remember, social media is about being social; software cannot substitute for human engagement. You will have to invest time and energy in mining and interpreting the data, whether it is collected by technology, or your own manual search efforts.
We have posted the presentation deck on Slideshare, and a recording of the webinar on Blip.TV. Download and view to your heart’s content. If we can help in any way, please let us know.
