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For some time now I’ve been extending my own social media activity, slowly. When you don’t have lots of staff and massive budgets and you are focused on helping your customer its a tough thing to do and get right. You know what it should look like but creating and engaging amongst everything else you are doing is a tall order indeed.
Just being in a position to “listen” or watch the conversations unfold can be very eye opening and you begin to get a feel for what people are saying, doing and why.
It’s always been said that people buy from people and social media IS the real time marketing equivalent of that as people prefer to read and listen to opinions about products and services from fellow consumers and peers which is great if you have a business with the resources and capacity to create that presence and your customers are using social media to discuss what you do for them.
None the less, simple tools like twitter can have an immediate effect with little technical skill or masses of content creation if you are willing to find and connect with people, contribute and share and sometimes the most random connections turn out to be vary valuable.
Instead of just wading in with haste in reply to something or making statements that don’t necessarily reflect your mutually held beliefs and instead of just touting corporate policy, take the time to take the “corporate” out of the conversation and realise that through value, trust and authenticity, which means real people with real views, you can get heard above the crowds and word spreads.
Be open to the truth, no matter how much it hurts
Exposing your business to social media will attract the good and the bad. People will share with you their views and be pretty direct about it. In fact Dell discovered to its horror what customers really thought about its service from Tweets on Twitter and Facebook comments. Dell worked on acknowledging and understanding the problem and find a resolution. The end result was a $6.5m global revenue increase attributed to Twitter alone. Wow!
What’s strange is that people have been complaining to businesses for a long time but the message did not seem to get through, probably because the internal communication systems were even worse than their external ones, so businesses can even benefit from adopting social media methods internally to connect people and teams together and allow them to share their voice and to do away with the old draconian structures. Almost like an ordered chaos.
Don’t just spend blindly, engage and create (mash up)
When times are tough and you are either faced with a recession or limited marketing funds, channels like social media can become even more important as there is a very low, if not almost zero direct cost of entry, just your time and effort (which has indirect costs of course).
It’s easy to see what your efforts bring as you can monitor traffic to your site and see what activity occurs and conversions such as people taking a defined action like downloading something.
Free tools like google analytics are a good place to start if you have a limited or zero budget and you should start small and grow you activity gradually, and remember to keep at it and be consistent.
Let real people, with real personalities share your values
To make social media work you need the right people who are impassioned about using social media and yes that could be you the owner if you are a small business. If it’s new to you then there will be a bit of a learning curve, but start with the simple platforms like Twitter and go from there into either your own blog or use established networking and social media sites such as Facebook, or for business eCademy.
ComCast in the US has done a great job of putting a real personality in touch with its marketing as it actually offers friendly Twitter customer support with real staff along with their profile and photo of the person instead of the company logo. This makes for a very friendly and personal interface, just the sort of open customer contact point that can create shared value.
Think before you communicate, ask does my response reflect the above points
I’m sure like me you’ve written the odd email and hit the send button, then realised that if you had waited for your feelings to settle down a little and leave the room you would have had more clarity and probably would have replied in a different way avoiding upsetting or offending somebody in the process which was not the real intention of your response, just the knee-jerk reaction we all naturally suffer from.
In one extreme case a representative from Ryan Air waded into a Twitter conversation giving them the “big I am” corporate cold shoulder which as you can imagine was not well received. Soon after the Tweets were pulled and I’m sure somebody had their legs slapped or indeed fingers removed (joke btw).
Be willing to test, and be willing to focus where you meet your market
Its easy to get caught up in all this stuff and be everywhere and get nowhere. I’ve got accounts all over the place, some of which I gradually learn to use and build, some of which I have focused on more because I could see better potential, others just languish. There is nothing wrong with that.
However it is impossible to be everywhere, touch every conversation and have worthwhile exchanges so you need to find what’s right for you and spend time communicating with your audiences in that place, developing your presence and what values you will be sharing.
Whether you realise it or not every business these days is being discussed on the web, like it or not, so you may as well take part and learn from it.
Find your own social media voice
In the beginning you may struggle to find your own voice in all of this, but like all good musical artists or painters and writers you start by reusing what you aspire to be and in doing that, and exploring it and pushing boundaries you begin to define who your are and what your relationship with your world is and your own voice will find itself.
There are a ton of gurus and experts out there saying it has to be like this or like that, the bottom line though is its different for everybody so step into the playground and find your own place, in your own way.
It might be worth giving giving some thought to why your voice should be there in the first place and I found these interesting points on escaping mediocrity. Its like doing some market research on the conversations currently taking place in your market to understand how yours might fit in.
- How are they talking about this niche?
- Are they speaking in broad theoretical terms or very tactical terms?
- What’s their personality?
- What needs are being unmet?
- Is my voice needed?
Still unsure about social media marketing
A survey entitled ‘How Do Small to Medium Businesses Market Themselves?’ from Daryl Willcox Publishing has revealed that 27% of those questioned used social media platforms such as blogging, Twitter, Facebook and online forums as part of their marketing activity. More interesting facts can be found on UtalkMarketing.
I thought you might appreciate this nice piece of work which illustrates the point nicely.
What part of social media do you need to do better ?
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