Presented to the Ottawa TiE Institute: Social Media 101
Social Media - Learn the ABC's of Social Media Marketing
Attendees will learn how to develop a social media strategy, including how to get started with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly, we'll discuss how to leverage these marketing channels for optimum results.
Your LinkedIn Makeover: Sociocosmos Presence Package
The ABCs of Social Media - A 101 Presentation
1. The ABCs of
Social Media
Marketing
Shawna Tregunna, President - ReSoMe Inc.
2. Social Media isn’t something that
you “do”, instead you have to “be”
social.
- Peter Thompson, Tickle: Social Marketing for Tech Companies
3. Audience
Like a comedian, motivational speaker or great sales person
your goal is to engage your target audience and inspire a
response, to do that you need to know your audience and
what will move them.
4. Define Your Audience
B2B or B2C?
Are they engaging with friends or professionals?
Find your industry influencers
Who is already controlling the conversation, can
they be a partner or are they the competition?
Can you reach them all on one platform, with
one voice?
Do you need multiple voices, multiple personas on
multiple platforms?
5. Business Objectives
Do not get caught up in the “vanity metrics” that tie in with
social media, focus on goals and objectives that directly
impact your business in a positive, measurable way.
6. Business Objectives
Make a list of all business objectives that you
hope your social media plan can impact then
pick 3 to focus on:
Web traffic to site
Link clicks
Positive brand mentions
Increased commendations/referrals/testimonials
Increased inbound links
Community reach
Conversion forms
Newsletter sign ups
Specialty codes/promotions; direct sales
7. Company Story / Content
People tune out for commercials and tune in for the show, they
care about characters and respond to great stories. Be the
show, not the commercial.
8. Extend Your Brand Guide
Before you start posting online, go through the
same process you would when defining a
branding guide, but do it for your brand voice
Define your brand personality
Define your topics of interest
Define your sense of humour
Define your response rates
Define common responses
Predict what you will initiate and have to respond
to on social media and script what you can so
you are prepared!
9. Plan Your Content
Set up a content calendar and make someone
accountable for it, plan 3-6 months in advance
and aim to have it created a month in advance
Blog posts
Infographics
White papers
Newsletters
Themes
Interviews
Press releases
Videos…
15. Money
Outsourcing
Community Management
Content Creation
Ads
Facebooks ads
Google AdWords
Data
Software analysis of
trends, influencers
Measurement
16. We don’t have a choice on whether
we do social media, the question is
how well we do it.
- Erik Qualman
17. Twitter Quick Start
Find and follow your target audience
Use lists to follow and organize who you follow
Use private lists to track the competition, prospects
Engage in relevant twitter chats, hashtag
conversations
Search for and respond to questions
Schedule planned content but engage in real
time
18. Facebook Quick Start
Assign an ad budget
Create an ad campaign that supports your
business objectives
Create a fan page with a keyword rich “About”
section
Post visual content: videos and photos
Use seductive leads on articles: write for click
throughs
19. Blog Quick Start
Decide on a frequency and stick to it! (Once a
week or more is best!)
Learn basic on page SEO strategies
Incorporate keywords in posts & titles, use meta tags,
include images and media with proper tags, cross
link posts to other parts of your website and blog
Comment on other influential blogs in a
conversational way
Get your blog into relevant syndication streams
20. Google+ Quick Start
Set up Google authorship for all authors on your
blog
Add a +1 button to your site
Set up a personal and brand page, push followers
back and forth in circles and groups
Claim your Google places listing and validate it,
add images, keywords
Auto post all publications to Google for indexing
and social search ranking
Tie Google+ to your YouTube channel
21. LinkedIn Quick Start
Have all team members set up polished personal
profiles and link to business page
Set up product and services pages on your
company profile, include individual contacts in the
product pages
Join & participate in groups and proactively grow
your network via groups
For B2B or relevant B2C businesses consider LinkedIn
ads
Ask for referrals from relevant contacts, add media
to your profile
Social Media is about the people that use the social platforms, the people that lurk, the people that engage, the people that influence, the people that buy, click, share, rate, like, comment and post.Knowing your audience, who they are, where they are (platform), what they are talking about, the language they use. Do you need to approach different segments on different platforms? Run different campaigns for different markets? Check out your competitions followers and how the engage, think about how you can reach them in a unique way that might be more effective.
Know your influencers before you get going in social media, you don’t want to be jumping into a negative situation or a severe bias blind! Think about how you can develop and empower evangelists, once you reach your audience you want them to become fans, clients and evangelists and start a PR/sales team for you! Begin with that end in mind; how will you make them fall in love? If you have a larger blogging network or see one exists see how you can leverage th blogging network to help boost your brand through reviews or partnerships. No need to rebuild Rome if you can just partner up with the Emperor for a while to help you get started!
Business Objectives are not vanity metrics these are hard and fast objectives that impact your business.
Know how the web, your website and social media can feed into your funnel; gathering a lot of followers but not having a plan to guide them through your funnel or towards your goals makes it a wasted effort. When you set a goal make sure it feeds into business goals (out side of social media) and map out how to get from your efforts to the end result. If you can’t track it or measure it, don’t waste your time on it. Most social media tools have what to track that may take a little programming to put in place but they are worth it as you can see from tweet to check out their processand if and when they fall off the conversion path and if there is a pattern!
People hate commercials, they go to great lengths to skip them, miss them or avoid them. To make your company interesting you need to have story, something people can relate to, get interested in, it needs to have characters that they can identify with and build relationships with. Build stories, not ads. I could have just as easily called this content but the magic is in the story, not the words.
Do not over script and don’t forget that you are building relationships, not spouting boilerplate policies – that wont win you any fans! Will you use emoticons, American or British spelling, will you use memes, jokes or side with specific causes, political angles or social issues? What type of small talk will you engage in? Local small talk? Sports teams? Food? Office antics?
Remember it is not content for contents sake, everything should the in with the business objectives
There are benefits to having a corporate presence as well as having key individuals having a public personal presence as well. Many people will open up to and chat with a person before they chat with a brand but a brand still have value from a customer service and general info standpoint.
As entrepreneurs we rarely have all the things or enough of even one thing to throw into something like a marketing plan.
If nothing else, claim your names on all profiles so you have them and more importantly so others don’t! Twitter is the water cooler of social media, you can chat to anyone about anything here!
See the Upworthy headline strategy; Facebook is less about engagement and more about content and the exposure you can get with that content. The data and targeting of Facebook make it appealing for all kinds of businesses but be ready to spend some money on advertising!
Sharing unique content that links back to your blog gets everyone one step closer to converting on your website in other way. Don’t blog for the sake of blogging, the blog post is the bait the template is your conversion tool. Avoid selling in your blog posts, instead, demonstrate expertise. Subscribe to SEOMoz