social media marketing

You have products and services. You have a website, a blog, and you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Yet business is flat. Nothing’s happening. You have to ask yourself this question. “What makes my brand so compelling that people will talk about it and share it with friends?” In other words, you can’t flourish in the social media environment unless you genuinely have something to say. That’s how Stephen King sells more novels than the average writer; he tells better stories. You have to have a compelling narrative. With so much on the internet, readers simply will not share content unless it’s compelling. You need a content strategy.

Online, Coke’s competition isn’t Pepsi and Wal-Mart’s competitor isn’t Target. Your competition is everyone competing for consumer attention, everyone who’s saying something interesting. Your story must be more interesting. As you determine your content strategy, ask yourself:

1. What specialty do I want to be known for? (Personal injury law, for example)

2. What are my readers’ concerns? (Let’s say injuries from automobile accidents)

3. How do I develop compelling content? (Create, for example, blogs and videos that offer safety tips and show how easily accidents can happen. Follow a likable plaintiff through the entire claim process from accident to settlement. Notify readers about pertinent new legislation or new safety technology that may impact them.)

You’ll know your content strategy is working when you’re attracting new customers and your sales go up. If that isn’t happening, tweak your strategy. Go back to your social media sites and determine what your audience has found compelling in the past. Conduct a “listening” campaign, identify the “influencers” in your audience, and find out what they’re saying. Create content that responds to their needs and interests. If you don’t feel particularly creative, contact a social media marketing firm that can manage your social media marketing and create the compelling content that works best for you and your audience.

Social media marketing seems to give us control. We decide what content to post; we decide when and where to post it; and analytics tell us what the result will be. It’s all precise, rational, and scientific … until one of your customers doesn’t behave as you expected. A marketer can fumble an online customer service opportunity by ignoring a customer’s message or by responding inadequately. Your customers don’t care what your plans and perceptions are regarding Facebook and Twitter. They will use social media for customer service whether you like it or not. It’s the available way they can get your attention quickly and publicly. Here are some tips for turning customer service situations into positive marketing opportunities:

1. Take personal responsibility. Whether you’re the person who will actually “fix” the customer’s issue is unimportant. If you can address the issue, do it. If you aren’t quite sure how to address the issue, here’s a trick; pretend the customer is your mother! Would you tell Mom to fill out a customer service form at your company’s main website? Of course not. You would ask questions, make calls, and do what it takes to solve her problem. Just think of your customers as “Mom.”

2. Establish a regular procedure for handling online customer complaints. If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ve seen business owners and managers caught off guard, responding inarticulately, sometimes getting defensive. It’s as if they cannot imagine that someone might have a complaint or issue. You need a routine method for responding promptly and routing complaints to the right person. Whoever manages your social media marketing should know both how to respond and how to make sure the complaint receives an appropriate response.

3. Identify the “influencers” in your audience and keep them pleased. Your analytics should give you the basic profiles of those who frequently engage with your brand and post on your pages. When someone makes the effort to contact you, it gives you the chance to make a genuinely good impression on everyone visiting the page. Listening to customers, and letting them know you’re listening, is imperative; solving a problem can turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal, returning customer. Excellent customer service encourages people to share with their friends, and sometimes they’ll even get excited. (“Hey, the doohickey I bought from XYZ Co. didn’t work, so they sent me a good one AND some free samples and discount codes!”) A complaint can be a blessing in disguise, a chance to prove that you actually care about your customers.

Good social media marketing happens when we care and when we’re nice. And you already know how to do that.

In 2013, social media marketers placed more emphasis on mobile devices and gained a greater understanding of their global audience and its diversity. Those trends will continue in the new year along with these growing trends that should become the focus of social media marketing in 2014.

1. Image sites will continue to explode this year. In 2013, you couldn’t log into LinkedIn or Facebook without seeing a graphic or a video. Images and videos can express messages that plain text just can’t. Visual content will become an increasingly inescapable part of marketing strategies in 2014. Sites like Tumblr and Instagram will continue to grow their audiences. Resourceful marketers will determine how to best position their brand on these visually-oriented sites. Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, and Instagram will become more important to those seeking a younger audience.

2. More platform-specific content will be created this yearSocial media marketing used to consist of casting a wide net and hoping against hope to snag someone with it. However, as individual social media networks are now attracting more precisely-defined audiences, marketers will be compelled to create platform-specific content for each platform’s particular audience.

3. Paid social media advertising will explode this year. Anyone who’s been on Facebook or Twitter recently has seen a “promoted” post. Paid social media advertising provides a platform that is proving to be much more effective than older forms of online advertising in terms of both effectiveness and overall ROI. Promoted tweets have shown a 1-to-3 percent engagement rate, while Facebook ads have a click-through rate around 0.2 percent. The cost-per-click is much lower than the older forms of online advertising. Studies are also showing that social media advertising is more effective on mobile devices; that’s important to consider, since by the end of 2014, there will be over 1.4 billion smartphones in use around the globe.

Marketers everywhere are struggling to deal with an overabundance of information like never before. The trick is digesting the data efficiently and turning it into profitable marketing decisions.

Social media marketing lets you gather information and provides the tools to acquire it from a number of locations. The role of online marketers is to interpret the data and make it useful. Google Analytics and other tools make this information easy to understand. You can study keyword searches, demographics, top referrers, and a world of other information. Here are some ideas for using marketing data to boost your social media marketing efforts:

1. Before you gather information, know why you need it. Have a specific question in mind that the data you analyze should answer. Don’t try to measure or analyze everything. Too much data will serve to hide the information that’s genuinely useful to you.

2. Sometimes it’s hard to visualize data without plotting it. Don’t hesitate to create the visuals you need to detect changes in crucial marketing figures over time. Select the tools that help you do that. Don’t be reticent to seek marketing advice and expertise from a social media marketing firm.

3. Share results with everyone in your organization. Listen to their input. Write up your results so that they’re easy for everyone to understand.

4. Make decisions on the basis of the data. If net-surfers are landing on your home page but leaving your site before visiting other pages, make the changes that entice them to stay and explore.

Metrics will tell you about your audience, the times they visit, the pages they like, where they’re located, and much more. The days of marketing by hunch and instinct are over. Social media marketing is data-driven in the 21st century, and social media marketers now possess remarkable new tools for achieving success.

If you were to look at only the raw numbers, Google+ is likely to be written off by many as a waste of their time. Google+ has 29 million unique monthly users on its website; Facebook boasts 128 million monthly users. Google+ has 41 million users on smartphones, while Facebook has 108 million on phones (according to the Nielsen Company).

But despite the lower numbers, Google+ remains vital to social media marketing for a number of reasons:

1. Google+ helps you and your posts get seen by more potential clients. And as Google obtains more data about you, it can match you more accurately to detailed searches. Sure, if someone looks for a “San Diego Personal Injury Attorney” or a “Nashville Real Estate Agent,” you want to be high in the search engine rankings. But if someone is searching for information on “nursing home abuse in California” or “music festivals in Nashville,” and you blog about those topics, you want to be ranked high in those searches, too. Using Google+ is one good way to accomplish that.

2. Your Google+ user profile will usually appear on a Google search for your name (unless you happen to share a name with a famous or historical figure). The profile includes a your photo, your business contact information, and a link to your Google+ content.

3. Let the Google Authorship feature complement your Google+ user profile. Once you’ve created your Google+ profile, you may choose to link it to what you publish on your blog. Google Authorship increases the perception of you as an industry leader or as an authority in your profession.

Different social networks attract different kinds of consumers. On Google+ there’s some overlap with Facebook and LinkedIn, but you’ll also connect with potential clients you probably wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.

One of the big questions about social media marketing is the question about sales. How much selling should you conduct on social media? Are Twitter and Facebook the proper forums for sales? Or is social media strictly for engagement and generating interest? Do you leave the actual selling to your paid advertising and sales people? There’s no single right answer. The right answer for you depends on a great many variables.

To determine that answer, start by measuring the number of your social media posts that focus on engagement against the number that focuses on sales. You may need to tweak that ratio. SuperHeroStuff.com launched their Facebook page in 2012, where they post something eight times every day. Four of the posts are general and focus on engaging their audience; the other four posts promote specific items for sale. The addition of a Facebook page was the only marketing change the business made from 2011 to 2012. In 2012, their sales rose by 150 percent.

There’s a great deal of concern that direct selling “turns off” your social media audience, but SuperHeroStuff.com broke all the “rules,” and it worked.

Of course, everyone should avoid posting irrelevant and forced sales pitches. A focus on marketing and engagement are imperative to create a comfortable environment and to set up future sales. A good salesperson in a real-world, face-to-face situation with customers might pitch the product only 10 percent of the time while chatting up the customer (“engagement”) 90 percent of the time.

Sell when it’s appropriate. SuperHeroStuff.com gathered an audience that loves a particular type of product; it would be a disservice to that audience not to offer them good deals on popular products. The 50-50 approach works well for that business. Try different kinds of posts for your own business and find out what approach works best for you. One last thought: This kind of experimentation takes both time and creativity, so don’t hesitate to employ a social media marketing firm to manage your marketing campaigns and to create innovative content that engages, grows, and retains your audience.