Social Media Basics

SOCIAL MEDIA BASICS:
UNDERSTANDING WEB 2.0 AND
ENGAGING YOUR AUDIENCES

Graham Garner
Assoc. VP for Marketing and Communication
Wartburg College
Social media handle: garnergraham

Tuesday, October 16, 12

WHAT IS
WEB 2.0?


Web sites that allow users to interact and
collaborate with each other in a social media
dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a
virtual community, in contrast to websites where
users are limited to passive viewing of content
created for them.


WHAT IS
WEB 2.0?
• Social networking sites
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Video sharing sites
• Hosted services
• Web applications
• Mashups
• Folksonomies


Expect to ﬁnd:
• Connections to other people
• Advertising based on your interests
• Opportunities to comment, like or share
• Suggestions for further involvement, based on activity
• Virtual rewards (badges, mayorships, points, rankings,
etc.)


mies (Now in

10 “RULES” FOR SOCIAL
ADVERTISING
by Leslie Poston, from Social Media Playbook by Eloqua

ADVERTISING
When you think of social advertising, you might think of the ads
you see on the side of your Facebook proﬁle ﬁrst, and you
would be partially right. Social advertising is about advertising
on social networks. It’s also about enticing people to interact
with your ads and your brand, not just block them out.


ADVERTISING
Social advertising challenges the brand to appeal to the
customer in new ways. After all, brands are not always a
welcomed participant in the social Web. The idea is for your ad
to complement – even augment – your audience’s social
experience and enhance brand engagement and trigger
purchase transactions.


ADVERTISING
Social advertising is designed to leverage what the ad platform
knows about the potential customer’s interests and values.
When executed effectively, social advertising is a powerful
brand afﬁnity tool. It can even inspire friend-to-friend
recommendations, which is one of the most powerful forms of
advertising. Executed poorly, social advertising may result in
critical (and permanent) brand reviews and negative ad
interactions – from blocking the ad to becoming the latest
negative Twitter trending topic.


ADVERTISING
Always be mindful of not only who your audience is and where
they congregate online, but also what their values are and how
they want to interact with you.

So how do you go about doing it? How do you engage your
audience on social ad platforms in a way that complements
their social experience? You start with these 10 steps:


1 FIND YOUR AUDIENCE

Assuming that you know where your potential customers are
can get you into a situation where you overspend on your ad
budget. Taking the time to research your target demographic
and ﬁnd out where they spend their time online and on mobile
services will only save you money and time in the end.


2 DON’T OVERSPEND

Do you really need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
on one ad campaign? Are you paying attention to your daily and
monthly spend with ongoing ads that are charged to credit
cards and easily forgotten, like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn’s Display
Ads and the tried and true Google Adwords? The internet is a
treasure trove of information. Spend your time before you
spend your money.


3 KEEP IT SHORT

If you thought mastering the 140-character tweet was easy,
you’re in luck. Folks have a short attention span, and you’ll need
to use those 140-character elevator pitch skills you’ve been
honing to catch their eye as quickly as possible, then use your
content skills to make their attention stick to your brand long
enough to engage.


4 MAXIMIZE KEYWORDS

One way to avoid wasting your money is to become a keyword
ninja. Sites like Google make it easy with tools like the free
Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/
KeywordToolExternal), but there are a plethora of options out
there for brands looking to see what words bring them the
most traction, what words their competitors use and what
people search for related to their industry.


5 DON’T FORGET YOUR
CALLS TO ACTION
Marketers talk about calls to action often. There is a reason for
that: people are simply more likely to engage with your brand if
you tell them to … then make it easy. Whether you have them
click a button, ﬁll out a form, retweet something for you or
whatever else you can think of, making it clear what you need
your potential customer to do will make it that much more
likely to actually get done. Remember, social advertising is all
about engagement - make it simple.


6 DRIVE CUSTOMERS HOME
(TO YOUR WEBPAGE)
As a brand, you want to have a presence on appropriate social
networking sites, but try to avoid having the sites be your only
online presence. Your best bet for tracking metrics and enticing
customers to engage and buy is to have a great website and
use your social advertising to drive customers to your targeted
landing pages.


7 BEWARE OF SPREADING
YOURSELF TOO THIN
Pick a couple of social advertising sites at a time. Trying to blast
the entire Internet with your social ads is not only a waste of
money and time, but harder to track and ﬁne tune. Less
frequent, higher quality ad engagement in a more targeted and
audience appropriate way is always better.


8 REVERE RELEVANCE

Make sure your social ads are relevant to the audience they are
being delivered to. Advertising summer’s hottest tearaway jeans/
shorts would be a great ﬁt for Facebook or Twitter, and even
geolocation services if you have brick and mortar stores, but
LinkedIn and SlideShare most likely won’t be a ﬁt for that
clothing type or brand. In the end, relevance is key.


9 KEEP IT SIMPLE

Great use of keywords and appropriate audience targeting are
not going to help you if you don’t follow the KISS rule (Keep It
Simple Stupid). Once you get your potential customer engaged
don’t make it difﬁcult to interact with or participate in your ad
campaign. The less clicks you ask folks to make, the shorter the
forms you have them ﬁll out, the easier you make it for them to
share and interact, the better your social advertising campaign
will perform.


10 ENGAGE AND ENTERTAIN

We all know the golden days of a captive television or radio
audience are long gone, but the tendency to broadcast is still
there. You’re tossing your brand voice into a sea of hundreds of
thousands of brand voices. People choose which ones they
listen to, and the more engaging, human and entertaining or
informative you can be, the more likely it is that they will
choose you. Once people choose a brand they are 64% more
likely to become brand loyal to that brand.


THE BIG ONES


FACEBOOK

YOUTUBE

TWITTER

FOURSQUARE

GETGLUE

FLICKR

Invite.


RESPOND.


ENGAGE.


BE DIFFERENT.

We’re hardwired
to notice what
stands out.


YOU HAVE TO BE THERE TO
STAND OUT.


Graham Garner
Assoc. VP for Marketing and Communication
Wartburg College
Social media handle: garnergraham
graham.garner@wartburg.edu or
garnergraham@gmail.com


Social Media Basics

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