Archive for February, 2010

The unique feature of social media marketing is that it is based on the idea that your company has the ability to instantly communicate with consumers. The following tips can be followed to ensure your future clients will be engaged in your content.

1. Choose a theme to base your month around. For example if your business is a restaurant and you have already anticipated the arrival of a new wine selection spend the next month talking about that wine. Have short status updates about the history of the wine, start discussion topics on what wines people prefer, and focus on building excitement about the “unveiling” of your new product.
2. Timing is everything. Social Media is built on the “now”, what’s an interesting and engaging topic today my not suit tomorrow. Don’t be afraid to change gears in the middle of your “themed” month to tie in current events to your product. If you are an insurance agent and breaking news pertaining to your industry has just been released, make sure you use that in your blogs, tweets and status updates.
3. Ask questions. Human nature is such that we feel inclined over the internet to answer questions, take quizzes, and help others. If your messages are open ended you are inviting people in and valuing their opinion.
4. A long drawn out status update may be weaker than a short but sweet one. Status updates are not intended to be equivalent to mass emails. Short frequent messages are the answer to a successful social media campaign.
5. Participation is expected with social media. Not only are you hoping and expecting your new “friends” to participate in your conversation, you are expected to engage yourself in their content. Obviously if you have over 5,000 friends it is impossible to comment on all of their pages but, should topics arise that may pertain to your industry commenting is a must.

Successful social media campaigns are built around communication. Correct goals, implementing those goals, and measuring results are the key to gaining quality relationships.

To most of us, something viral or a “virus” is a bad thing.   Infectious disease and computer viruses are typically known as things that spread very fast with bad consequences.  Now, the word viral has taken on a whole new positive definition.  For web purposes a video, image or text spread by “word of mouth” on the Internet or by e-mail for humorous, political or marketing purposes is considered viral and can truly promote your business with astronomical results. Social media content is viral because it’s spreads so quickly once it is posted.

What makes something viral?  To create something viral; whether it’s a humorous or shocking video, a funny joke, a cute picture, or a great story; is a piece of the Internet that people want to share with the people they know.  And that is the key, there is an element of that tidbit that people want to read or see and pass along.

All search engines scour content on the web with two specific missions: to find information most related to your search criteria and to find the most viewed content related to your search criteria.  That means if your content is relevant and popular you have succeeded in creating viral content. 

When involving your organization in social media marketing your content is King.  Everyimage, video, link, and text is contributing to the enormous amount of search-able information on the web.

Creating a video that gets rapidly passed around, a tweet that is re-tweeted, and a status update that is commented on by friends of your network, contributes to making your social media content more viral.  The more attention it receives now, the more attention it will obtain in the future. 

How do you create something that will become viral?  You have to follow trends and be a trend setter.  If you have already established social media profiles for yourself or your business then you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• What are your friends and followers finding humorous? 
• What hot news topics are they following?
• What other images have they found interesting? 
• What websites are they suggesting?

Relating your business to what’s going on around you is essential for creating viral content.  People respond better to things that relate to their interests, because they want to part of the “now”.  If you can contribute content that is relatable to your potential clients or even better, set trends for topics that your customers are talking about, then the future of your social media content is guaranteed to become viral.

Social Media is being described as something that is: “transforming people from content consumers into content producers”. 

Ever read a blog or comment about a product you were interested in purchasing?  Maybe you were considering purchasing a bookshelf at target online and you read through the comments to see how easy it was to put together?  That act of simply reading that comment section catapulted you into the wild and crazy world of social media.

Every comment section, blog post, Facebook status update, Linkedin profile, and “tweet” are spilled onto the web and all of that information is transformed into content searchable by engines such as Google.  What does this mean for your business? It means that simply having a website or having your businesses information on yellowpages.com is not enough. Consumers trust information from fellow consumers.  They also trust information from sources they feel they have a relationship with.  An events promoter in their local area that they have added as a friend to their Facebook will provide them with consistent information about the happenings in their area.  Over time, a trust is built with that business person. This “relationship marketing”  is the core of using social media  to a businesses best advantage. Let’s face it, consumers are educated enough to understand that a company’s website is biased yet, a fellow consumer that purchased a bookcase just like them is not.  A press release is biased, but an informational blog about how to barbeque correctly may not be. 

The idea that consumers want to be provided information rather than be sold on a product is a unique feature to Social Media. Developing a close relationship with a large number of clients via the internet is a lot less arduous then you may think.  The average Facebook user has 130 friends.  A status update that a member posts can reach 130 friends immediately, every comment that one of those 130 friends places on your status update can be view by their friends.  If one status update is commented on by 5 friends 650 people can potentially view that comment within a matter of seconds.  That’s one comment that may have only taken seconds to produce.    The small scenario above is just an example of the reach Social Media has. 

Social Media is calling for businesses small and large to get active, build relationships and provide information.  Plenty of Social Media experts exist.  Hiring an expert to guide your company into the future is a viable decision.  Social Media can only grow bigger, and the faster a business can get involved the better relationships they can build for the future.