Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’
Social Media Strategy? Think Like a Reporter
Monday, July 12th, 2010Recent surveys have shown that while businesses are embracing social media in droves, many are doing so without any real strategy in place. Without a strategy, there may be no clear ownership, or definition of success, or measurement, or integration with other marketing and PR efforts—all of which can lead eventually to wasted time and effort, abandoned blogs and Facebook pages, and even the erroneous conclusion that social media doesn’t work for us.
Yet developing such a strategy can be challenging; where does one start? Most of us have, through the classroom, TV shows or somewhere in life, learned about the reporter’s questions: who, what, when, where and why. Just as these questions are critical to solid journalism, so they can be invaluable to social media strategy development.
Who: the first who question is who will be in charge of social media efforts? Responsibility should be placed as high as possible—with the CEO ideally (think Tony Hsieh, or Jonathan Schwartz before the sale to Oracle). If not possible, then responsibility should rest with an executive in marketing, PR, product management or customer service. If absolutely necessary, this leadership can be outsourced, but only as part of a close long-term relationship. Who else will be involved? In all but the smallest companies, there are often multiple individuals tweeting, networking and even contributing to the company blog. In these situations, it’s imperative to have a social media policy in place, encourage subject matter experts (SME’s) to share their unique knowledge, and remember that everyone who participates is acting as a public face for the company—social media isn’t a job for an intern.
What: what type of information will you use to attract a social media following? In b2c, contests, games, apps and coupons are popular content. In the b2b world, thought leadership content is key, but this can take different forms depending on your resources and style: blogs are the most common media, but video, podcasting, online presentations and articles are other ways to share information and education with prospects. What also refers to subject matter—in b2b, that usually means reporting on research, offering a unique perspective on industry developments, solving problems, providing how-to guides, or presenting other information that is of value to your audience and positions your people as the experts.
When: how often will you write new blog posts? Tweet? Update your company’s Facebook page? The answers will be different depending on your company’s resources, the amount of content you have to work with, the number of employees involved in your social media efforts, the specific social media tool and other factors. In general, more is better, and most companies could probably benefit from greater social media activity, not less. There is a risk of over-doing things, particularly on Twitter, but as long as your focus is on adding value rather than self-promotion, few followers are likely to complain. Most companies find that the amount of time they need to devote to social media, particularly to engagement, starts out modestly and increases over time as their blog readership, Twitter following, Facebook fan base and other groups grow.
Where: which social media sites and tools will you use? There’s no question that blogs (which usually mean WordPress), Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have emerged as the “big four” social media venues. According to recent research, these are used by 70% or more of those active in social media (no other single tool was used by more than half of respondents). Twitter is probably the closest thing to a universal social media tool for business, while Facebook is huge in b2c, and LinkedIn is indispensable on the b2b side. These are the tools to start with, but by no means should a social media strategy be limited to these: depending again on talent, resources, corporate personality etc., other tools to take into account include YouTube and Vimeo (video sharing); SlideShare (presentations); social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious and Propeller; online forums (there are specific forums for almost any industry); Ning (for creating your own community or finding others to engage with); PitchEngine (social PR); and social profile sites like VisualCV and PeoplePond, just to name a few.
Why: possibly the most important question of all. What is your company aiming to accomplish through social media? What are your goals? How will you measure them? There are at least a hundred ways to measure social media success and more than a hundred tools for monitoring them. While measuring social media ROI is difficult to do with any precision, it’s important to use what measures you can to help gauge the impact and continually improve your efforts.
Crafting a social media strategy is vital to achieving success and avoiding wasted efforts. It’s a challenging exercise, but one that can made easier by thinking differently—such as like a reporter.
Minnesota’s Social Media Event of the Summer
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010If your small to midsized business is struggling with questions about how to create an effective social media strategy, use social media tools most effectively, make the best use of your time on social media, generate results or other related issues, mark your calendar for this upcoming one-day social media and online marketing event.
On June 24, SCORE will be hosting its Social Media & Internet Marketing Boot Camp in Bloomington. Having shed both its original acronym and somewhat stodgy image several years ago, SCORE today is a dynamic organization that helps startup and growing businesses to maximize their success, through face-to-face counseling, online interaction, webinars, live events, and partnerships with organizations such as the American Express OPEN Forum.
This seminar will cover a wide range of actionable social media and online marketing subject areas, including how to:
- • Develop a social media strategy
- • Use online reputation management (do you know what people are saying about you? and what you can do about it?)
- • Maximize your social networking efforts while minimizing your time
- • Design an effective business website – then optimize it and measure your results
- • Generate revenue through email marketing
- • Use specific social media tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging) most productively for business
And much more. Learn more about the seminar and how it can benefit your business. Hope to see you there!
How to Launch a Successful Blog in 12 Weeks: Lessons from Webbiquity
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010One of the primary reasons most blogs are abandoned is that it takes time to build an audience. It’s demotivating to spend hour upon hour crafting sparkling prose that reveals your most profound industry insights and most valuable guidance, only to see that after weeks of effort, your blog is attracting only a handful of readers per day. How can you avoid that fate and build an audience more quickly?
It can be done. the graph below compares the last three months of traffic on the WebMarketCentral blog, which after four and a half years had built up a sizable and consistent following, to the first three months after launch of the Webbiquity blog. As the graph shows, it took just 12 weeks for traffic to Webbiquity to surpass the traffic level of a far more established blog.
Blog Traffic After Launch - Webbiquity vs. WMC
Granted, in the case of Webbiquity, it helped to have an established blog to link from. But even absent that advantage, traffic to a new blog can be ramped up quickly using the following 12 techniques.
1. Build links to your blog from every possible source. Link to the new blog from your website, Facebook page, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, other social networking and social bookmarking profiles, comments you leave on other blogs—anywhere you can create a link. Add your blog name and link to company email signatures and include it in your corporate newsletter or marketing emails as well.
2. Publicize the blog through offline channels. Include the URL on business cards, brochures, your corporate PowerPoint template, trade show booth signage, etc.
3. Use Twitter. Twitter is the fourth-highest source of traffic to Webbiquity, just behind Google. Of course it helps to have a sizable Twitter following, but the quality of your followers is much more important than the quantity. A few influential followers (with significant followings of their own) who will retweet your blog post links are far more valuable than a boatload of spammy followers who probably never visit your blog in the first place. Blogging and Twittering work together synergystically; writing quality blog content, then tweeting about it, can help increase both your relevant Twitter following and blog readership.
4. SEO the blog. Write compelling, relevant (i.e., don’t try to be too clever) headlines. Include post tags and properly categorize each post. Use keyword-rich post URLS, not meaningless page names like “id=98″. In WordPress, you can set this in Settings…Permalinks. Finally, include relevant page titles, a compelling description, and keywords with each post. For WordPress blogs, two of the best SEO plugins are All In One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO.
5. Promote your blog posts to your relevant LinkedIn groups. If you haven’t already done so, find and join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry, groups that key influencers, potential business partners, and most importantly your sales prospects are likely to be members of. Link to your posts as either discussion items (for posts that ask questions, solicit reader feedback, or address controversial industry issues) or news items (for posts that are more straight reporting of research or how-to type content.)
6. Create “linkable” content. Links can generate direct visits and they are critical for SEO. The best way to obtain links is to attract them naturally, by writing link-worthy content. A variety of content can qualify, including posts that report new information, explain how to solve a problem, take a controversial stand, or make people laugh. A SWOT analysis is one helpful tool to develop killer topics for blog posts.
7. Write guest posts for popular blogs. A great way to reach a new audience, spread your company’s fame and promote your own blog is to write an attention-getting piece for an established industry blog. It helps (greatly) if you already have a relationship with the blogger, but even if you don’t, most bloggers are far more open to offers of a guest post than they are to PR pitches. Politely contact the blog owner, offer to write a guest post on a pertinent topic for the blog, and ask what the requirements are. When using guest-posting as a strategy, it’s best to start with relatively small blogs and work your way up the food chain. An offer to guest post will have far more credibility if you can point to other posts you’ve already written. If you’ve never had a guest post published, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll get your writing to appear on an A-list blog like TechCrunch or Mashable, but—as evidenced by the fact that both do publish guest posts—it is possible to work one’s way up to that level.
8. Use social bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Propeller can help drive traffic and provide links, though some sites including the first three in this list use the insidious nofollow tag, which means the links won’t help with SEO. It’s perfectly acceptable to link to your own content, as long as you don’t promote your own stuff exclusively. And if someone else bookmarks your content—vote it up!
9. Add your blog and feed links to blog directories and RSS syndication sites. These links can help drive direct traffic, increase your blog’s subscribers, and improve the position of your blog in search. Helpful, though slightly out-of-date lists of blog directories and RSS sites can be found on the TopRank blog and Robin Good’s site.
10. Link to other bloggers. The golden rule as applied to blogging would be: link unto others as you would have them link unto you. Almost every blogger appreciates links (it’s high praise that you find their content worth linking to) and many will return the favor in some way; by linking back to you, Tweeting up your blog post, social bookmarking it, etc. Linking to other blogs accomplishes at least three things: it’s social (and therefore may lead to a link back), it’s helpful to your readers (by pointing them to more information on a specific topic), and it demonstrates confidence.
11. Submit your blog to AllTop. This is very popular blog directory. It won’t necessarily drive a lot of direct traffic, but it helps, and you never know—Guy Kawasaki may end up retweeting one of your posts and giving you a huge spike in visits.
12. Add alt tags to images and use SEO-friendly file names. Google’s image search can drive a surprising amount of traffic. To optimize the images in your posts, use appropriate alt tags and descriptive file names (e.g., a photo of a polar bear should be named something like polar-bear.jpg, not image01243.jpg). Proper alt image tags also help with SEO of the post itself.
The first requirement of a successful blog launch is to create quality content and publish on a regular basis; weekly at a minimum, more frequently if possible. The second requirement is patience—being willing to stick with it even if your traffic doesn’t skyrocket immediately. There’s no way around that first requirement, but you’ll need less of the second if you utilize all of the avenues above to help your blog quickly build a respectable following.
How Marketers are Using Social Media for Business: New Report
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010Whatever questions you may have about social media marketing, you’ll probably find the answers in the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from white paper guru Michael Stelzner. This excellent study provides a wide array of answers, statistics and insights. If there was any doubt that social media has become a mainstream marketing channel, 91% of respondents said they are using social media for marketing. Given the nature of the respondents, that figure is very likely higher than the overall business population, but there’s no doubt that social media is now being used in a sizable majority of organizations. Here are a few more of the key findings and my own observations.
The Biggest Question
A year ago, the top questions most marketers had about social media related to tactics, with ROI second. This year, questions about ROI top the list. The report notes that “the question of whether social media works has dropped off the charts completely.” One in three marketers said that measuring results and identifying best practices are their top questions about social media marketing.
Expertise Without Experience?
While 65% of marketers have been involved with social media marketing for a few months, only 14% of businesses are outsourcing any aspect of their social media marketing. This is eerily reminiscent of research findings reported by MarketingSherpa a year ago on the large percentage of marketers who felt they could be social media experts without having social media experience. Diving into social media without guidance from an outside expert risks ineffectiveness at the least, and possibly much worse. You could learn to drive a car without an instructor too, but it’s certainly not recommended. This new report does point out that the use of social media outsourcing does vary by company size, but still only 25 of medium to large enterprises are taking advantage of outside expertise.
Social Media Takes Time
How much time? More than half (56%) of respondents said they spend six hours or more per week on social media marketing, with 30% spending 11 hours or more and 12% spending more than half of their time with social media. Furthermore, the time commitment required grows with experience; those getting started in social media spent on average just an hour per week on it. But for marketers who have been using social media for a few months or longer, the median time jumped to 10 hours per week. That makes perfect sense–as marketers develop more social media connections, it takes longer to manage those relationships. And as social media marketing marketing begins to pay dividends, marketers are motivated to spend more time on it. The one question missing here was what gets included in social media time. Content development is one of the most time-consuming aspects of social media marketing, but other than blogging, it isn’t clear if writing is included in these figures.
Exposure vs. ROI
Interestingly, while guidance on measuring ROI topped the list of questions, “increased exposure for my business” was cited as the top benefit of social media marketing, with 85% of respondents achieving this. The next three most common benefits noted–increased traffic and email subscribers, new business partnerships and help with SEO–are also more measures of exposure than tangible financial return. Metrics related to ROI, such as leads generated and direct sales, were mentioned by only about half of the survey respondents as key benefits of social media marketing.
The report notes that last year, only about a third of marketers said that social media helped reduce their marketing expenses, while nearly half made that claim this year. This seems somewhat surprising; while social definitely reduces media/advertising expenses, it increases labor costs. It would seem logical that for many companies, marketing costs would be shifted, but not necessarily reduced, by the use of social media. Again, it isn’t clear what all gets lumped into this category. If content generation is included, overall costs aren’t likely to change much.
Social Media Means (Business-to) Business…
Nearly 74% of marketers who have been using social media for at least two years report that it has helped them close new sales. B2B marketers were slightly more likely to report increased sales than than their B2C counterparts. And small businesses with anywhere from 2-100 employees were most likely to see this benefit.
Social media is also valuable for establishing new business partnerships. More than half of marketers using social media said it had helped them forge new partnerships. Again, this benefit was more prevalent among b2b companies (61%) than b2b firms (49%).
…But Facebook Means Consumer Marketing
The top social media tools used across all respondents are:
Twitter – 88%
Facebook – 87%
LinkedIn – 78%
Blogging – 70%
Among experienced social media users, those who have been at it for at least two years, an astounding 96% use Twitter. Digging further in the details, b2b marketers are considerably more likely to find value with LinkedIn, and slightly more likely to utilize blogs, than their b2c peers. However, b2c marketers are much more likely to use Facebook; in fact, it is the top social media tool in the b2c space, used by 90% of b2c marketing pros.
What the Future Holds for Social Media Marketing
When asked to look forward, two-thirds of marketers said they plan to increase their use of blogs, Facebook, video, Twitter and LinkedIn. Blogs are the top area in which marketers plan to increase efforts, and small businesses are more enthusiastic about blogging than their larger counterparts.
Only 4% of marketers overall said they have no plans to use Facebook, though again it is favored more highly by consumer than business marketers. 80% of b2c companies, and 85% of large companies, plan to increase efforts here.
93% of all marketers are already using Twitter, and 71% plan to increase this effort.
Consumer marketers are slightly more likely to utilize online video and YouTube than their b2b counterparts (76% vs. 71%), but video is the top area of increased investment for the most experienced social marketers across the two segments.
B2b marketers are significantly more likely (72% vs. 59%) to increase their use of LinkedIn than those on the b2c side.
Finally, mobile marketing is growing in importance, but is a much higher priority for large bc2 companies than for smaller firms or b2b marketing teams.
There’s much more in the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report as well. It’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in the current state and future of social media marketing.
Social Media is Simpler Than You Think
Monday, March 29th, 2010With the tidal wave of how-to articles, jargon and self-proclaimed “social media experts” hitting the online world, it’s easy for marketers and business executives to view social media as something akin to the unexplored regions of the earth as presented on medieval maps—”here be dragons.” Potentially fascinating, but dangerous, mysterious and scary.
Social Media Demystified
In reality, social media marketing is simpler than you’ve probably been led to believe. At its core, social media is not about doing new things, but about doing things you’ve always done as a business person differently. Specifically, social media marketing involves five common, very traditional business activities. It provides a rich new toolset and set of techniques for carrying out these processes, but the processes themselves are familiar: listening, networking, interacting, information sharing, and promoting.
Social Media Listening
Think about “listening” in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing all of the things you do to keep abreast of what’s happening in your industry and your market. What are your competitors up to? What are the trends? What new products and services might help you operate your business more effectively and efficiently? What’s happening with prices? And most importantly: are your customers talking about you? And if so, what are they saying?
Business people have always had to do this, and have used a variety of tools: trade publications, direct conversations with vendors and customers, analyst reports, seminars and other events, trade associations newsletters and other sources. Social media doesn’t change the fact that you do this, but it does do two key things: it makes it easier for people to talk about your business, and it gives you new tools for listening to your market.
Social media reduces the friction of customer communications. Writing and mailing a letter to a company to complain about or praise their products or services is a lot of work. But expressing your opinion on Yelp, epinions, Twitter, Facebook or any social site is easy and takes only a few minutes—and your words reach a far larger audience.
Tools for social media monitoring (listening) range from free (Google Alerts, SM2 Freemium) to low-cost (uberVU) to sophisticated (Vocus, Cision). The brilliant Dan Schawbel of Mashable has written more about free social media monitoring tools and tools worth paying for.
Networking
From the dawn of commerce, business people have always used networking to meet new people and establish new relationships with suppliers, potential partners, industry experts, and most importantly sales prospects. Historically, most of this activity was done face-to-face, at trade shows, conferences, seminars and other industry events.
Physical networking at such events is still important. But social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and tools like Twitter enable you to put this activity on steroids, building online relationships not only with people you’ve physically met but also with smart, interesting people literally across the globe who you’d unlikely ever meet in other contexts. The etiquette is similar (introduce yourself, ask questions, have something interesting to say, don’t immediately go into “hard sell” mode) but the tools are far more powerful and far-reaching than traditional networking.
Interacting
Interacting is simply the conversations that typically follow networking—following up, gathering more information, and asking and answering questions. Again, this is a traditional business activity that’s commonly been done by phone and for most of the last 20 years also via email. For confidential or highly specific communications, these mediums are still ideal.
But again, social media enables you to take interactions to an entirely new level. What about answering common customer or prospect questions? Social media makes it easy to answer such questions online not only for a specific prospect, or even all the prospects you’re aware of, but also for potential prospects not even yet on your radar. Your answer is not only available immediately to a larger group of people, but indexed and globally searchable (so you better have good answers!).
Social networking sites are among the key tools for social interaction, but such conversations can happen almost anywhere on the social web where people are talking about your brand, asking questions about products or services, or simply discussing what’s happening in your industry, including review sites, blogs, wikis and forums.
Information Sharing
Before the internet, sharing an interesting industry news article, how-to guide, coverage of a company or your own thought-leadership content was a tedious task involving copying and then physically mailing or faxing a document to selected recipients. Email made the process much easier, but distribution was still limited to known contacts.
As with listening and responding, social media has dramatically reduced the friction of such information sharing and dramatically expanded the audience. One can now post a link to and short description of interesting information to a LinkedIn group, Facebook page or Twitter stream in seconds and reach an audience of hundreds or thousands of interested individuals. Blog posts, news articles, product reviews, reports, images, videos, customer interviews, presentations and other information can be distributed to large groups with a few mouse clicks. And again, distribution isn’t limited to those you know, but also includes interested parties you’re not yet aware of—this enables prospective buyers to find you, exactly when they are looking for what you have to offer, instead of you having to use expensive, interruptive marketing techniques in the hope of hitting the right buyer at the right time.
Promoting
In terms of advertising, social media is much like other, more traditional online mediums. It’s as easy to place an ad on Facebook as on an industry publication website.
But the power of social media lies in its interactivity, in participation. In this respect, companies need to handle direct promotion carefully. While direct promotion through social media can work well for certain types of businesses (e.g. a restaurant owner tweeting about today’s lunch specials, or a retailer offering special discounts available only to fans on Facebook), it’s a delicate balance for most companies. Particularly in the b2b world, indirect promotion works best. That is, rather than trying use social media to tell people how wonderful your products and services are, it’s much more effective to demonstrate your knowledge by answering questions, sharing interesting and pertinent information, and highlighting third-party endorsements in the form of favorable reviews, blog coverage or customer comments.
Participation in social media is no longer optional for most companies. Customers, pundits and others are already talking about your industry and quite likely your company on these sites. Ignoring such conversations amounts to tacitly endorsing whatever is being said about your firm, your people, and your products or services. Understanding that social media doesn’t involve doing entirely new things as much as doing things you’ve always done, but in new and more powerful ways, should take some of the mystery and fear out of social media engagement.
