Social Media
Social Media Overview
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Social media has become increasingly important all over the world as well as in the marketplace. Social media has changed the way we communicate person to person and business to consumer. With all of the emerging technology and social media, businesses do not commonly use social media as a source for marketing. Sometimes it is a lack of awareness and sometimes it is resistance to change.
The biggest reason that businesses do not use social media is because best practices have not been tested and developed for the various different platforms. You need to know the likely outcome before you invest time and resources into a social media tool.
One of the biggest road blocks for companies that want to include social media as a marketing strategy is that there are so many different social platforms. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp are just a few of the hundreds available. You don’t want to make an investment in time or money until you know what the opportunity is. We don’t recommend using social media as a marketing tool until you have researched the social media category, evaluated each platform and are ready to dedicate the time and monetary resources to make it work. Social media is not a stand alone strategy. It should sync with your current marketing plan and focus on the core elements of your brand and identity.
Making a Commitment to Social Media
In order to start a viable social media strategy, you must be able to commit to a coherent strategy that syncs with your business.
- You must be willing to dedicate a person to frequently updating and maintaining your social media tool.
- The person that is maintaining your tool should have a written document defining your objectives, procedures and communication parameters.
- When setting up communication parameters, you must know what you want to achieve and what you want to avoid.
- You need to be comfortable with the fact that you cannot control what is said about your company or product on social media.
- You must have a policy for handling falsehoods that creep into your site from an angry competitor or unsatisfied customer.
- You need to develop a policy on how to remove slander. This means that you need to develop criteria on what is considered slanderous.
- You also need to create a best practice on how to alert the public of the removal of slanderous content.
- You must maintain your character within your social media tool. You cannot let your employee see a comment and go off on the person that made it. If this happens, your brand is diminished and will be seen as less desirable.
- You must be willing to have more than just your marketing manager have input on what is shared via your social media marketing tool.
For example, a product manager is developing an upgrade for a product that you are selling. Customers are clamoring to find more out about the improved product. You may not be able to afford customer loss before the release of the upgrade. In this case, you would have the product manager weigh in on your social media site to re-assure the audience about the upgrade. By involving various experts in your enterprise, you are creating a high value, legitimate conversation with your stakeholders that will be valuable for your brand.
Conversely, trying to only speak through a marketing channel, Marketing Representative or PR person can make your brand seem closed and not open to discussion.
Please note that if you are not comfortable with other people in your organization conversing about your brand, you should stay with passive content similar to your website content.
If you are willing to utilize the above principles then you are ready to start your research and pursue your social media marketing tool.
Social Media vs Centralized Media
In a centralized media model, you are working with the concept of one to many when it comes to messaging and impressions. Social media is quite a contrast to centralized media. You are having a conversation that is open to many people.
Social media starts with a conversation about one thing and branches off into multiple other conversations. These branches create a problem for some marketers in the sense that these other conversations are not able to be controlled or even monitored.
To make a social media strategy work, you are starting a conversation with your stakeholders. These conversations are inherently de-centralized and that means different people in the organization need to participate. Your social media organizer cannot answer all of the questions that are asked because people do not want to hear the messenger speak, they want to hear what the developers, designers and engineers have to say.
Facebook and Your Business
Facebook has been around since 2004 and has gained over 400 Million users. A business that is using Facebook as their social media tool will be able to make a lot of impressions that can be both good and bad. You must remember that people have profiles but businesses have brand pages.
Facebook is the most viable choice for a business environment that is Business to Consumer (B2C).
In a B2C environment, you can promote brand awareness and feature products that you are developing. You can create a brand page for your company and gain followers or ‘Fans’. Once you get fans, you can start building out more brand pages that can promote certain products that are very popular.
As previously stated, you must be able to monitor, manage and maintain your pages. If you do not you are wasting time and resources.
Here is a simple check list to get you started:
- You need to designate a person to monitor, manage, maintain and update your facebook daily as a part of their job description.
- You also need to decide who in your organization will be conversing on which topic threads. This is where you bring in your experts to inform your stakeholders about your brand and what is up and coming.
- Determine a frequency of updates. Are you going to update daily, weekly? The more frequent the updates, the better your results will be.
For example: You have a special product that is coming out 6 months from now and you want to start getting people excited about it. You create an individual brand page for the product that links back to your main page. This new page for the product starts out very vehemently with constant updates and lots of really interesting information about your product. You are getting lots of positive feedback and all of a sudden it is a month before release and your developers are very busy tying up all of the loose ends. The developers were doing all of the updating before but now they do not have time. In this case, your consumers can start to lose interest and start to wonder or worry. They could start to think that you are no longer updating because the product is in trouble or maybe going away. Even though this is not true, it could hurt your reputation and sales. Preventing this sort of situation is another big reason that you need to invest time and dedicate resources. If time is not invested, you will surely start to lose the confidence of your stakeholders.
- You also need to lay down rules of engagement for discussions. Make sure that compliments are responded to gratefully and humbly. Complaints are responded to openly with a reasoned and concerned tone. You are making a name for yourself and again, ‘hot head’ is not what you are looking for. Maintain your friendly, open, trustworthy character on your Facebook.
In a B2B environment, we do not recommend using Facebook as a marketing tool. Facebook, or any other social media site, should NOT be used as a replacement for a website. Your Facebook listing should only be a supplement to your website. You should link between your site and your Facebook. Any information on your Facebook listing should be search engine optimized and searchable.
In Summary
You should only go into a social media strategy after you have researched it. You should not jump into anything just because it is new. New isn’t always better.
You also need to maintain your social media site and be sure that you are getting the most qualified exposure that you possibly can. A dedicated person is required to manage and execute a social media presence. If you don’t have the financial resources to fund that, don’t go into social media.
BrainWave has been helping companies with their Emarketing needs for more than 10 years. Contact us now to discuss your new website goals and objectives.
