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Social Media to promote your business [ 17th March 2010, 22:18:44 ]

Social Media to promote your business

The "Using Social Media to Promote Your Business" course was run at Southend Business Hub - University of Essex on Wednesday 10th February. Here are my notes on what I took away from the course. They give an introduction to the type of marketing you can do with social media, and gives ideas of what tools you should be using, and how you should be using them.

Type of marketing you can do

Marketing funnel

WOM - Word of Mouth, is a very beneficial form of marketing, as people trust the things they hear from people they know, over and above any other source. Using social media can encourage WOM. How to get WOM, do something remarkable.

Traditionally businesses use interruption marketing, where the consumer is interrupted from what they are doing in order to convey the marketing message; e.g. a TV advert, a newspaper advert, someone cold calling you, or someone interrupting you in the street. The opposite of interruption marketing is permission marketing; where the consumer has agreed to receive marketing information; this can be ticking a box to agree to receiving marketing emails, or in social media for example signing up to a Facebook group for a brand, thus agreeing to receive updates regarding that brand.

Inbound marketing is related to permission marketing and it is the type of marketing that can be done using social media tools. Inbound marketing, described here at Wikipedia;

"Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin's idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers "earn their way in" (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to "buy, beg, or bug their way in" (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively). Next best action marketing can also be applied." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing

The tools

Example Social Media tools that can be utilised;

Social media brands
Social media tools/platforms

The opportunity

You should use your knowledge to produce high quality information resources. Your most valuable asset is the knowledge you have about your field, be that what your business is producing, what you're selling or the service you are offering, etc. Making that information available to consumers means they will be able to find your content on the web, and will see you are an expert. So consumers or businesses will see you are an expert and will think, well they are an expert on that topic, I am going to contact them to fulfill my current need.

Optimise the content (using SEO) and publish online. The content should be optimised in order to be searchable by consumers via search engines, and you should publish links to the content via social media services. This will mean your network of contacts will see your content, and if they share or comment on your content, all their connections will also have an opportunity to see your content. In Twitter you can retweet content, and this means a user who reads your feed, re-posts your content on their feed, this means their followers (connections) will then be able to see your content. In doing this content can be very rapidly shared and seen by a large number of people.

I will stress the importance of quality; you must not spam your audience, and only good quality content of interest to your network will be shared by your network.

Engage in an online conversation with your network of opted in contacts. Remember this is permission marketing, so not only will your connections / contacts have the opportunity to view your content, but you can engage in conversation with these people. On twitter when people tweet / @message you then you should respond. Having these conversations in public will enable a wider audience to hear about you, and if you handle these questions and comments quickly and in a professional manner then it will encourage people to engage with you.

The process

  1. Create - Blog post, presentation, video, comment, press release, tweet, forum post, podcast, white paper, photo, article
  2. Optimise - Employ good SEO to make the content findable
  3. Publish - On the service/tool of your choice
  4. Share - Share via other tools e.g. Ning and on social bookmarking sites such as Digg digg.com

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way of sharing links that you find on the internet with others, friends, contacts, or the wider web population. Typical social bookmarking sites are Digg http://digg.com/ (where popular links rise to the top) or delicious http://delicious.com/. But social bookmarking can be thought of sharing content with other social networking sites, such as facebook and twitter as well. You can get widgets for your website that encourage people to share your content via social bookmarking such as AddThis addthis.com and ShareThis sharethis.com.

What should you publish?

You should publish knowledge about your field (product, service, etc) that the general consumer would not know, and would be of value to them.

How often should you publish?

This should be as much as possible and as often as possible. All these tools are free to sign up to and use. So on the face of it, it costs nothing. However what it does cost is time. You need to spend time creating the content, and perhaps time to research you content. It also takes time to monitor these tools, and engage people in conversation, and respond to what people are saying. However the trainer said he spends 1/2 hour each morning checking twitter, responding to posts and using it to get up to date with news in his area. He also sets aside 2 hours per week to create content to publish e.g. blog posts.

Why is inbound marketing so powerful?

Viral marketing

Viral marketing is related to word of mouth, it relates to the process whereby content is shared, and becomes very popular and is viewed by millions of people. It is like getting a number one hit single. For example the Susan Boyle first audition was said to go viral with over 38 million views. However a more realistic successful viral campaign for a small business maybe to reach out to a couple of thousand people. An example was given of a fence company in the US where the guy publishes a how to document, and he went from having maybe 5-10 views per week to having 1-2000 views of the content. He also captured these people's email addresses, so he gained a large number of leads for his business.

Blogging

Blogger

You should write about what you know. Brainstorm ideas for content to create, and schedule in at least one a week. If the question is still, yeah but what should I write? Think about answering the following questions;

The quality of your blog posts will help them be viewed and be shared. Good titles may take the forms;

It is important to have comments turned on, on your blog, to enable people to comment on your posts. Its not good enough just to have your own blog, you need to read other blogs in your field, and post comments on their content. Having user comments on your blog opens up the risk that someone might post something negative about you or your business. Research shows that having negative comments as well as positive comments is an advantage, because people can see you are real. It's about how you deal with these negative comments; if you respond promptly, explain your side of the story and deal with them in a professional manner, then that will be sufficient. If the person continues to leave negative comments you can remove the comments using moderation, and possibly block the person (depending on the blogging service you are using).

Every post matters; each new post has the potential to be at the top of google for its particular keywords. Spend time not money on marketing. Use social media monitoring tools to keep an eye on what people are saying about you, and topics of interest to your business. For example you can use Tweekdeck and save searches to monitor activity on Twitter.

It is best to write >250 characters for a blog post (google prefers content over 250 characters). You can do huge long posts, this is fine to.

The trainer suggests that it takes 4-6 months of effort to get results from social media, compared to 3-4 months of effort to get results from SEO.

You can use a service such as Feedburner www.feedburner.com to create RSS feeds and email subscriptions for you content. You can use tags and keywords to segment your content and optimise it for search.

Tips on how to write a great blog

Blog etiquette

Twitter

How to use Twitter for business

Twitter Tips

Twitter bird

Facebook for business

Linked in

Conclusion

Social media uses inbound marketing or permission marketing, and therefore is a much more powerful form of marketing compared to traditional interruption marketing. The tools you use are free. Its all about dedicating the time to produce quality content and interact with your contacts. If you do this it encourages Word of Mouth (WOM) referrals and in 4-6 months you will hopefully see an increase in leads as a direct result of using social media. Its all about creating quality content, and then publishing it and sharing it and interacting with your contacts.

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Author: Kevin Gordon
Location: Essex - United Kingdom
Hosted On: DataFlame

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