Social Media Marketing Best Practices Brent Mclean Is An Account Director At Alterseekers, Inc
Social Media Marketing Best Practices Brent Mclean Is An Account Director At Alterseekers, Inc
Social media has become the new battleground where brands have opportunities to fight for the hearts and mindshare of consumers. While social media is a relatively new phenomenon, it has been hailed as the most important shift in communications technology and media since the advent of the Internet itself. Participation in social media has skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions of active users and is increasing and spreading into broader demographics. People are spending an increasing amount of time (hours on average) on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and also on blogs. Social media sites are increasing and everyday people are reconnecting with old friends, finding new ones, building business relationships, sharing their photos, videos, and thoughts on their lives, the world, and even the brands that they use.
Whether or not you’re tracking and following the conversations, your customers are talking about you online via their social media networks. They are writing about what they like as well as what they don’t like.
The brands that are successful in this new world of social media are those with a solid social media strategy for how to actively participate in the conversation around their brand. Consumer brands like Starbucks, Webkinz, Cold Stone Creamery, and Burger King have built awareness, preference and general goodwill among consumers through active social media marketing efforts.
But is social media marketing all just warm and fuzzy? Hardly! Blendtec achieved a five-fold increase in blender sales with a viral video series “Will it Blend.” Starbucks uses its “My Starbucks Idea” site (powered by the Salesforce.com Cloud) to generate and vet valuable product and promotion concepts. Dell estimates that their social media efforts create about million in revenue. Comcast set up the “@comcastcares” Twitter account to actively monitor and respond to customer complaints and requests – for a vastly better customer experience – which leads to increased retention and better word of mouth. Social media efforts can generate real business value and results, and those results and be tracked and measured.
But for every social media marketing success story, there are hundreds of failures. So many companies have gone to the effort of launching social media sites, but created boring, lifeless pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and blogs that no-one is paying the slightest attention to. Why? Simply put: poor planning. These companies jumped on the bandwagon of social media marketing without developing an adequate plan with business goals and metrics and a relevant creative strategy, and their efforts simply died on the vine.
So who wins in social media? The brands that make a big splash seem to follow a pattern:
Start with a clear objective
If you don’t know what you want your customers to do, then how can you expect them to do it? If you don’t know what your business goals are for your social media marketing efforts, then how can you drive toward them and how will you know when your efforts have worked? You need a social media strategy. You need to set goals, create tactics, measure, and adjust. Slapping some social media pages together is not a plan.
Offer something of real value
Your customers engage in social media to enrich their lives. They are happy to interact with your brand, if you’re giving them valid reasons. Starbucks has 3.7 million Facebook fans on this principle alone! They regularly offer their customer fans coupons and other cool stuff, and it absolutely works.
Show your human side
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, achieved 400,000 visits per month on his blog merely by being honest and human. He was open with his thoughts and opinions and allowed his readers to post comments with the same openness. People respond to human connections over social media. The more real and transparent and the more personable your brand can be, the more you will win in this space.
Entertain
Let’s face it: social media is fun. We share our wacky stories with our friends and family. Likewise, we invite companies and brands into our personal conversation if they’re fun! Burger King gets recognized for their outrageous promotions like the Whopper Sacrifice application in Facebook where users could “sacrifice” ten friends from their list in exchange for a free Whopper. Successful brands have found that they can show a more fun and edgy side in social media than in other channels, and be rewarded accordingly.
Engage in the conversation
Your customers are talking about your brand, and they’re doing it via social media. Shouldn’t you be a part of that conversation? Starbucks embraced this principle with MyStarbucksIdea.com, where users can submit their thoughts and ideas and see progress on what’s being done with those ideas. Many brands monitor mentions of their name online and respond to customers who need help or have a complaint. When done correctly, customers appreciate this level of support and interaction, and retention and referrals will improve accordingly!
Track & Measure Sales Impact
The point of social media marketing is to make money. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so track everything and make sure you’re responding to the information you’re receiving. We’re living in real time and social media has never been so demanding of instant gratification and response.
Earn while you learn
If you’re not making money, then you shouldn’t be in marketing. I’m not talking the hard car salesman here, but everything you do should track back to how it impacts your sales. If something’s not driving sales, then figure out what needs to change. You’re never going to bat 1,000, but the more profitable your marketing efforts are, the more “at bats” you’ll get from your company.
For more information on Social Marketing, please download our Free Webinar on Monetizing Social Media: How Do You Make Money with Facebook and Twitter.
AlterSeekers is a brand promotions agency in New York focusing on promotions consulting and planning, web strategy, social media New York and social media marketing New York (including Twitter consulting), go to market strategy, and overall strategic planning.
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Social Media ROI or Payoff
Social Media ROI or Payoff
We will list some specific companies and numbers below, but first let’s discuss a very important consideration that will affect ROI outcome. There are many ways to implement social media marketing and some may have little or no return on investment. Participating in social media in ways that are effective involve two major components: engagement in the form of conversation (not selling), and active involvement (not a once and forget method of marketing). Companies that utilize social media in the same way that the people they want to target WANT TO BE SOCIAL, will enjoy the most success in terms of ultimately growing brand awareness and ROI online.
While there is still a place for search engine optimization (SEO), where a website is optimized to rank high in the search engines, we now have social media marketing, including social sites that are ranking high in the search engines. No longer do we have to pay thousands of dollars to buy backlinks to a business website. Today, we must spend the TIME that is required to participate in social media for the greatest payoff.
The fact that social media marketing does not have a fixed cost is true because each social media project is unique and will require varying amounts of time, tools, services, etc. A social media plan should include comprehensive use of available social media sites and opportunities for engagement, and should be targeted to the industry, product, or service. A generic plan without a focus on the business will not work.
What most people who work in the social media field understand is that trying to put a cost on conversation is hard to do. Also, social media marketing usually does not produce instant results. If this is true, how do we measure success?
One way is to measure the feedback you are getting. Are there positive responses being posted, and is there growth in terms of numbers of people engaging with the company online? If the business is getting active supporters, they will – in time – spread the word.
It is important to understand that social media marketing takes hard work, consistent effort, and engaging in ways that are helpful, entertaining, educational, or enlightening. This is the way you build a group of followers who want to take action by telling their online friends when you announce something of value.
There are tools to use that can help measure ROI in terms of: your reach, traffic to the website, influence in the market, conversions, and
retention. Google analytics is a free service that can track information for any website. There are other free services and many paid services as well. Links to the website can be tracked with backlink tools. The numbers of fans, followers, members, etc. in social sites is readily accessible in each of the individual sites.
Worthy of repeating is the idea that social media marketing is ongoing and requires active participation. People will not stay engaged if there is not regular, new content posted. There are many other websites that will pull for their attention. If you give them a reason to come back, they will not only come back but tell others to do the same.
Some numbers that testify to the ROI businesses can achieve:
BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.
Dell sold ,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.
Vaynerchuk (WineLibrary.tv) found first hand that ,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, ,500 in Billboard Advertising = 300 new customers, AND with Twitter = 1,800 new customers.
Naked Pizza, all natural Pizzeria in New Orleans, that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” And 85% of their new customers were from Twitter.
Safeway has 62,615 fans of Facebook.
Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.
Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As a result of retweets, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.
Software company Genius.com reports 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities.
Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than ,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than 0,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)
One survey found that 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It.
The takeaway is that if you work your social media plan with integrity and the commitment to contribute value, on an every-day consistent basis, the same as you would do offline in relationships with prospects – it becomes easy and natural. That is what people are looking for in advertising and marketing – and that is what they will reward by doing business with you and referring you to others as well.
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Vicki Zerbee, Social Media Consultant and owner of YourWebSiteMarketingService.com & Wellness Coach and Owner of AntiAgingByDesign.com, is an internet Entrepreneur who looks forward to meeting you. Contact her today to set up a meeting in her web conference room.
Article from articlesbase.com
Categories: Heavy Duty Blenders Tags: Media, Payoff, Social
Social Media ROI
Social Media ROI
Social Media Payoff (ROI) is tough to measure, and some will say you can’t calculate it yet. It is too soon because Social Media Marketing is so new. That being said, there are definite payoffs being enjoyed by businesses of all sizes and in all markets.
We will list some specific companies and numbers below, but first let’s discuss a very important consideration that will affect ROI outcome. There are many ways to implement social media marketing and some may have little or no return on investment. Participating in social media in ways that are effective involve two major components: engagement in the form of conversation (not selling), and active involvement (not a once and forget method of marketing). Companies that utilize social media in the same way that the people they want to target WANT TO BE SOCIAL, will enjoy the most success in terms of ultimately growing brand awareness and ROI online.
While there is still a place for search engine optimization (SEO), where a website is optimized to rank high in the search engines, we now have social media marketing, including social sites that are ranking high in the search engines. No longer do we have to pay thousands of dollars to buy backlinks to a business website. Today, we must spend the TIME that is required to participate in social media for the greatest payoff.
The fact that social media marketing does not have a fixed cost is true because each social media project is unique and will require varying amounts of time, tools, services, etc. A social media plan should include comprehensive use of available social media sites and opportunities for engagement, and should be targeted to the industry, product, or service. A generic plan without a focus on the business will not work.
What most people who work in the social media field understand is that trying to put a cost on conversation is hard to do. Also, social media marketing usually does not produce instant results. If this is true, how do we measure success?
One way is to measure the feedback you are getting. Are there positive responses being posted, and is there growth in terms of numbers of people engaging with the company online? If the business is getting active supporters, they will – in time – spread the word.
It is important to understand that social media marketing takes hard work, consistent effort, and engaging in ways that are helpful, entertaining, educational, or enlightening. This is the way you build a group of followers who want to take action by telling their online friends when you announce something of value.
There are tools to use that can help measure ROI in terms of: your reach, traffic to the website, influence in the market, conversions, and
retention. Google analytics is a free service that can track information for any website. There are other free services and many paid services as well. Links to the website can be tracked with backlink tools. The numbers of fans, followers, members, etc. in social sites is readily accessible in each of the individual sites.
Worthy of repeating is the idea that social media marketing is ongoing and requires active participation. People will not stay engaged if there is not regular, new content posted. There are many other websites that will pull for their attention. If you give them a reason to come back, they will not only come back but tell others to do the same.
Some numbers that testify to the ROI businesses can achieve:
BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.
Dell sold ,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.
Vaynerchuk (WineLibrary.tv) found first hand that ,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, ,500 in Billboard Advertising = 300 new customers, AND with Twitter = 1,800 new customers.
Naked Pizza, all natural Pizzeria in New Orleans, that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” And 85% of their new customers were from Twitter.
Safeway has 62,615 fans of Facebook.
Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.
Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As a result of retweets, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.
Software company Genius.com reports 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities.
Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than ,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than 0,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)
One survey found that 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It.
The takeaway is that if you work your social media plan with integrity and the commitment to contribute value, on an every-day consistent basis, the same as you would do offline in relationships with prospects – it becomes easy and natural. That is what people are looking for in advertising and marketing – and that is what they will reward by doing business with you and referring you to others as well.
At YourWebSiteMarketingService.com our team of Website Marketing and Social Media Marketing Specialists help small business owners effectively market their website on the internet.
From targeting profitable keywords to SEO strategies and social media marketing best practices, we provide reputable, valuable online marketing services.
Visit http://YourWebSiteMarketingService.com to learn more.
http://yourwebsitemarketingservice.com/WebMarketing.html
Article from articlesbase.com
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Categories: Heavy Duty Blenders Tags: Media, Social
Will Social Media Marketing help New Zealand’s best SEO’s win the Quadracentifiable Challenge?
Will Social Media Marketing help New Zealand’s best SEO’s win the Quadracentifiable Challenge?
Links – Mindshare & Branding – Sales – Customer Interaction
Quadracentifiable social media marketing means using social media platforms to fully benefit your website. There are essentially four different types of return that you can expect from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, mindshare/branding, sales and consumer interaction.
Below, a look at each type of return and how you can tap into it, depending on your goals.
1. Links
Using social media for quadracentifiable link building is most popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. We all know that incoming links to your website is great for optimisation purposes. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content can effectively produce hundreds or thousands of new inbound links to your site.
The objective here is to produce a piece of quadracentifiable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the idea is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it’s exposed to their user base. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.
Sites that are best for building links are Digg, Delicious, Netscape, and Reddit.
Mindshare & Branding
Social media marketing goes beyond just traffic and links. It is also great for creating mindshare, branding initiatives, and brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.
Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.
A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods helps engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.
Best sites for creating mindshare are YouTube and MySpace.
Sales
The bottom line for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it is a very indirect process. It is very hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you’re reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you’re selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there’s more there than just a selling message. Any content piece with a strong selling message will not be received well or successful.
The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way. Blendtec, for example, has created a campaign called Will it Blend?, where they take various consumer items (including Chuck Norris) that you would think are impossible to blend and they blend them. This shows off their product is in a way that is compelling for the consumer to watch. Since the launch of the campaign in November, sales for the company have quadrupled. That is truly a quadracentifiable social media marketing campaign!
Customer Interaction
There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.
The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through Blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.
Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.
Another strategy is to build white label social media sites for your customers with topics focused around your brand or industry. Examples of these include: Guitar Center’s King of the Blues, and Dell’s IdeaStorm.
These are all breakdowns for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for quadracentifiable marketing.
Social Media Marketing info and tips bought to you by Optymise Limited, a SEO Company in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Article from articlesbase.com
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Categories: Heavy Duty Blenders Tags: Best, Challenge, Help, Marketing, Media, Quadracentifiable, SEO's, Social, Zealand's
Generation Y And Social Media
Generation Y And Social Media
It is not too often that we Generation Y members can impart wisdom to our superiors with great acceptance. In fact, we have been widely criticized for a lack of work ethic and sense of entitlement. We will be the first to admit, we still have plenty to learn. However, when it comes to the world of new media, we have a keen advantage over our ‘elders’ and can likely teach them a thing or two. After all, we have been involved with social media for years now. Moreover, we’ve been doing it for fun.
Social media is taking corporate America by storm. Executives from large and small businesses alike must educate themselves and follow this trend or it is likely they will slowly become more and more obsolete as change-ready firms leave them in their proverbial ‘dust.’
As communications professionals it is our job to stay informed on this trend. We must understand and convey the most effective ways to communicate our clients’ messages. Until now, new media has been an extension of our social lives. We are able to chat via text in real time using instant messenger or, as we call it, “IM” and we spend hours searching for old friends from across the globe on social networking sites. Who would have imagined that our fun could be repurposed for business life!
Companies worldwide are beginning to use the social networking and video posting sites that we’ve been using for years (not to mention reading our blogs and vlogs), so it is important to not underestimate the technology involved.
It is also vital not to underestimate the knowledge your younger staff has to offer with regard to the best utilization of new media.
We don’t guarantee to be experts and quite frankly, we do not fully understand the capabilities that these emerging technologies can offer, but we would like to share some basic knowledge from a communications perspective.
Social Networking Sites: In the most basic terms, a social networking site connects its members through an online portal. It is parallel to a networking event. Your online profile serves as a virtual business card. It is one of the simplest forms of new media and the first step you should take when adopting a new media strategy.
We suggest you refer to facebook.com, myspace.com or linkedin.com to begin growing your social network. In our opinion facebook.com is more appropriate for top-level executives, where myspace.com serves those individuals more involved in pop-culture that might attract the more unsophisticated side of people’s interests. Linkedin.com is newer and more tailored toward business professionals, and is picking up steam.
Video Posting: If you have not heard of YouTube, you have a lot to learn. For our purposes we won’t hold it against you (just hire a Gen Y’er immediately following the completion of this article). YouTube is a video posting site where any person in the world can create, edit and post video content to the internet.
You probably wonder why the phenomenon of anyone with a computer and a camera becoming an editor, director and executive producer all in one, really matters to you. “Will it Blend?” is your answer. Directly after hiring your Gen Y’er please Google “Will it blend?” It is the story of Tom Dixon, founder of Blendtec who posted video of himself blending ridiculous things such as iPods and marbles. This video resulted in his blender sales increasing an exponential rate. We guarantee you will find this clip interesting and it might even inspire you to grab your video camera and get filming!
Blogging: Blogs are another very simple, albeit powerful, form of new media. Blogs are an individual’s documentation of anything they would like to share with the Internet community. Simply put, a blog is a digital diary with no key.
Some blogs are personal and share life stories: we have a friend with a family in London that posts on a blog two to three times a week to update her family in the States on their pursuits across the ocean.
Some blogs are topic based: as self-proclaimed fashionistas, a large part of our fashion sense is gathered from blogs such as dailycandy and whowhatweardaily, rather than flipping through the pages of the latest InStyle magazine.
Either way you look at it, blogs act as essential sources of information and are an excellent way to quickly reach a broad audience with your message.
As we said before, we are not new media experts. While us Gen Y’ers feel we can boast our knowledge of new media because a lot of this is old hat to us – the truth is, there is still so much we need to learn.
Personal Life versus Professional Life – Where to Draw the Line?: Since social networking sites, uploading photos to the web and watching videos on YouTube for entertainment purposes have come as second nature, we face a dilemma when trying to decipher where our personal life ends and professional life begins on the web.
For example, you can befriend colleagues on Facebook, but there is an awkward, “don’t want to share too much” moment. There is a fine line that constantly shifts and it takes true poise to find the appropriate balance between private and public life. This challenge is constantly irking Gen Y.
Technology Behind the Tool: Also, while we can spend hours messaging friends, blogging and sharing videos, we understand what we’re doing and the overall benefits, but we don’t necessarily understand the technology that goes into making it all happen.
Shorey Public Relations is a communications agency dedicated to unsurpassed service, deep intellect, high energy and remarkable creativity. With offices in Washington, D.C. and Saratoga Springs, New York, Shorey Public Relations team members’ service tech
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Categories: Heavy Duty Blenders Tags: Generation, Media, Social