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...If you are employed in social media marketing, it is time for a healthy dose of reality followed by some serious soul searching and career planning. Some of you are lucky enough to work in the rare companies that create advocates with great products, service and mission and thus are equipped to leverage social media for marketing gain; most work at companies that have inflated their opportunities in the medium and are floundering with their social media marketing and content strategies.
Here's the way a large number of social media professionals today go about justifying their programs, along with some recent data that may (and should) scare the hell out of you if you work in social media marketing...
Excellent case study on how a Napa Valley winery hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty.How can wineries use social media to increase sales when the law prohibits them from giving away product samples?Whitehall Lane, a 20-year-old Napa Valley winery run by the Leonardini family, has hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty....
Ever heard the saying "Failing to plan is planning to fail?" That old but wise adage often rings true when it comes to social-media marketing. Creating a detailed, goal-oriented social-media strategy is just as important as having a rock solid business plan.
"If your social-media plan is to just wing it, your fans and potential customers are going to know," says Amy Porterfield, social media strategist and co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies (Wiley, 2013).
Worse, it could turn them off of your brand and on to your competitors.To attract and engage social-media fans and followers -- and ideally convert them into customers -- you'll need to carefully map out a clear, effective social-media strategy. Here are some questions you should ask when building your company's social-marketing plan....
Charlene and I recently published a report that documented the 6 Stages of Social Business Transformation. In the process, we discovered the most common mistakes and successes businesses experienced along their journey. What was most surprising however, not really, was the cavernous disconnect between social media strategy and overall business objectives. - Only 34% of businesses feel that their social strategy is connected to business outcomes. - Just 28% of companies we studied feel that they have a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. - Only half said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”
The report was written to help strategists bridge the gap by understanding where they are, where they want to be, and how to get there efficiently. Charlene and I also noticed that the most elite companies among those we studied shared seven success factors in their social business strategy. Rather than publish a follow up report, we experimented with an ebook format. The result is a 100 page resource guide that will help you expedite and enhance your path to transformation....
Ian Cleary founded RazorSocial.com and built it into an award-winning blog in only six months. I invited Ian to Marketing Smarts to discuss his approach to content creation, as well as the tools he used to build his blog audience, email list, and social media following.Ian is a social media tools and technology specialist; he is also a respected speaker on social media, technology, and blogging. His blog, RazorSocial, was named one of the Top 10 Social Media blogs of 2013 in the annual Social Media Examiner blog awards after only six months of operation. Here are just a few highlights from our conversation....
There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.
Mastering the use of hashtags takes practice, testing, experimenting, and more practice. Thankfully, there are few things you can keep in mind that will make the journey much easier. Here are some basic techniques for using hashtags that should help you find your own strategy pretty easily…
With so many individuals and companies competing for attention on social media, it can seem nearly impossible to make your voice heard above the crowd. However, compelling social media content is a quick way to earn attention and brand loyalty. So what can you do to take your social media strategy from “blah” to viral? Here are some tips...
Coca-Cola says social media accounted for only 0.01 percent of Coke's direct sales. Other research and sales professionals suggest the exact opposite trend.... Coca-Cola has been on the vanguard of using social media to drive sales; it created a Facebook Page in December of 2008 (almost a full month before rival brand Pepsi) and to date has 62 million fans and growing. It joined Twitter in March 2009, and has cultivated an active presence on Tumblr, Pintrest, MySpace, YouTube, and Instagram. But according to Mr. Schmidt, all that social media engagement has directly affected sales by only 0.01 percent. Has the entire commercial mechanism been hoodwinked into believing in social media’s sales effectiveness? In our interviews with the following industry professionals, we discover that social media actually is an effective tool in the sales process, but there is a lot more to it than initially meets the eye....
...In order to sell the field that everyone is talking about, but on which few can illuminate, we first need to reframe the conversation. Instead of striving for Merriam-Webster precision, social media strategists would do better to focus on case studies. Specifically, social media strategist Ari Herzog has argued, when you reach for the term “social media,” don’t spew broad buzzwords like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube....
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There are enough restaurants in New York City for one person to eat out every night for 54 years and never visit the same place twice.
If WalMart employees were an army, it would have the second largest military in the world.
Do these facts help your of social media strategy? Most likely not. You probably now know not to anger WalMart employees, and just booked a flight to New York City....
Goals not tools! Do you have a social media strategy? Now, be honest. Is it a comprehensive social media strategy or just a bunch of tactics run by the seat of your pants?Angela Hausman shares how to build a strong and effective social media strategy for every organization
So you want to get good at social media?
You need to have a plan. A guidebook. A strategy.You need some rules.
And rule number one? That’s obey the rules. As for rules number two through eighty, check out this fantastic infographic courtesy of Jeremy Waite, head of social strategy at Adobe.
And remember: while you can’t get anything done in the world without rules, sometimes it’s just as important to know exactly when you need to break them.*...
A comprehensive study from market research firm Vision Critical indicates just how important social media is (and will continue to be) for brands, especially when considering product sales. Called From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, the report reveals — based on 6,000+ survey respondents — that consumers are often more likely to purchase items after seeing them and/or interacting with posts about them on the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
More specifically, “4 in 10 social media users have purchased an item online or in-store after sharing or favoriting it on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest,” according to the report. Additionally, it found that Pinterest is the site most likely to drive “spontaneous purchasing.”
An article about the report on Cantech Letter summarized some key findings, noting that “social media drives both in-store and online purchases in almost equal numbers. 38% of people who have liked, shared or commented on a product on Facebook have gone on to buy the product. And 43% of people who have favorited or shared a product on any social media platform ultimately purchased it. Facebook is still king in terms of volume, with 75% of respondents logging in daily, compared with 17% for Twitter and Pinterest.”...
For many businesses, especially small ones, social media is a time-suck. Being active and creating relevant content has a way of unintentionally consuming precious time. Added to this, businesses can’t easily track or attribute social media activity to sales and profits. In fact, more often than not, social media incurs hidden costs.
So what’s a business to do?
Despite these drawbacks, your small business can leverage the power of social media to get prospects, customers, fans and the public engaged with your brand and content by being selective and targeted in your use of these platforms based on the different phases of the purchase process....
Want to get your c-suite using Twitter and Facebook? Use these tips to help get them on the hook.... Getting executives in social media isn't as simple as signing up for a Twitter handle and asking them to tweet. Instead, you've got to be strategic if you want to get on board. By following these five steps, you can develop a socially savvy executive team; 1) Pick the right executives for the job. 2) Show them why they should care. 3) Let the benefits get personal. 4) Set them up for success. 5) Maintain momentum by checking in periodically....
Which Social Media Tool is Best for My Small Business? Social media marketing is a vast landscape. When you decide it’s time you started making better use of social media to promote your small business, it’s easy to get distracted for hours looking at all the different social networks and wondering: ‘Which of these should I be using?’ Let’s break this down and look at the big networks one at a time....
What do you know about your audience? Are your fans, friends, or followers engaged? Do you have a plan>? What are others saying about you and how are you responding? Use this checklist to determine how healthy your social media strategy is.... You may be posting on a regular basis and growing your list of fans, friends, and followers. But is it really enough? A healthy social media strategy will take into consideration the needs of your prospects and customers, as well as finding ways to efficiently plan, track, and measure your efforts. But the question remains, how can you really determine if your social media strategy has a pulse?...
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![How to Build an Award-Winning Blog in Just Six Months: Ian Cleary of RazorSocial Talks to Marketing Smarts [Podcast] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/E1cIEyWauQs57y8go0QSdjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
All I can say is that I never really did get 'on' this bandwagon in the sense of trying to milk it for money. I've always thought that most of what I saw/see on FB and Twitter is extremely silly bullshit Who has time for such stuff is hard for me to image...especially nowadays with the economy in the tank.
I've always thought that any kind of content should have some real value to the reader whether they're your customer or not. And furthermore that it should be just as much a type of self expression as anything else.
People will make a decision about whether or not they want to 'like' or 'follow' you based on the perception they get of you as a person...or, in the case of companies, by their impression on what the companies really stands for and what they 'do' (and how it benefits people).