Using Social media at your advantage.

The article is available in PDF variant here.

When marketers, PRs, and salespersons are approaching a customer they are doing it in some formal way. However, they will have more impact if they do it more “socially”, like they are on a cup of coffee with the customer.

There are a few different channels that you want to consider when approaching customers with your brand or business, or even yourself – Facebook, Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn. The last two are a little bit different.

What is Social Media Marketing?

According to Wikipedia, this is “also known as social influence marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, and online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service.”

Actually is something more – if done right, it helps you build good relations with your customers.

Why should I use social media to promote my brand?

Nowadays customers require transparency, and how you give them transparent view? Sharing your thoughts and for example, plan to introduce a new service. Of course you have to manage your knowledge and share just the needed. Heck, even I do not share everything I know here – this is part of the knowledge management, it is like girls – as little you show them about yourself, as more they are curious about you (SIDE NOTE: girls, please do not mark me as playboy or something).

That way people feel they are engaged with your brand – if the message is communicated properly, they can even become advocates of your brand.

For example via blogging you are building an image of professional expertise in your area.

Here are a few basic things you can do with social media:

·Support — use websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn to build up your authority via their different features such as Pages, Events, Groups, and many more

·Publicize — social media allows people to share things of interest with everyone, increasing the visibility of your business and yourself;

·Control — detect and then prevent “leaks” (disclosures) as well as inadvertent privacy violations;

·Enhance — manage your company brand and reputation, either proactively as a function of marketing, or reactively as a preventative measure against bad publicity. *

*Reference from “The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media”. A FREE book provided in PDF format.

However here is one example of social media done WRONG. A company CIO decided that he wants to invest in social media as a PR tool. However, he and his PR agents were surprised to see that their brand is already taken on the social tools. It came out that one developer decided years ago to register an account with the company name and brand.

No one has been caring for the social media presentations during that time since at that time no one has been using it for that purpose, and customers, partners and even competitors were visiting the pages on Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you are not acting on social media sites, it does not mean that your brand is sleeping there. If there is such thing somewhere, you need to verify it is done right – in this example, the CIO has lost CONTROL over the marketing and could not prevent the “leaks”. I am not saying that you have to disallow your users to comment on your products – you have to give them what you have promised (this is a basic PR method).

Another bad example: allowing your customers to review and rate your services/products. If something happens and the service or product is not working properly, then your “advocates” can turn against you publishing bad ratings and bad reviews. And do not forget that your future or current customers are always aware of other customers’ experience.

Different social channels

Now let’s talk about the different social channels:

1.Blogging:

First of all – a blog is a long term investment, but it has high ROI (return of investment). This is a simple way of publishing articles, and it is relatively cheap. However it has to be done on regular basis – never abandon the ship, stick with your blog – I know, it requires great commitment and amount of time, but in long term it is worth it.

Via blogging you gain:

•Gaining trust — by writing informative and authoritative articles, over time you’ll build confidence, trust, respect and a sense of “expert status” around your business.

•A sense of community — you’re engaging with your customers in a conversational style that’s difficult to replicate by other means. And by allowing people to comment on your articles, you’re encouraging those people to participate, giving them a reason to return.

•Better communications — a blog is essentially a publishing platform, where you control the content of your articles, and also when those articles get published.

What should I talk about in my blog? Well, there are a lot of topics – you can share about a service that you are planning to introduce in the future, you can write about relevant topics to your industry *cough* Financial Crisis and Engineers *cough*. There are a lot of options… and one more tip – when talking about a service or a product, use SEO’ed words. For example, when mentioning “LINQ”, introduce it as “Microsoft LINQ”.

2.Social Sites

In this category I include Facebook and Twitter. I will speak here only about Facebook. It allows you to

•Create a page where you can fully customize its content and invite people to join and share your interests. By joining, their so called “wall” feed will notify their contacts that they have become fans of your brand/service/product. How to attract them? Various ways – the best that works is a movie, for example “behind the scenes” type.

•Groups – similar to pages, but the content is in a predefined layout, i.e. you cannot change its HTML. You can mail all fans in a group and announce them an upcoming event for example.

•Announce events – again you can share upcoming events about your business. If communicated properly, people joined in the event will even become advocates to your business, and promote it passionately among their contacts.

•Social Ads – allows targeting your audience on different basis such as age, sex, location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political views, and relationship status.

3.“Professional” Social Sites

I will talk about LinkedIn and Digg.

LinkedIn is considered as a large contact book. There you post your profile in a way that describes your professional experience much like a CV. Some basic features:

•Profile Page

This is the place where you represent yourself, your professional background and associate with current and previous employers. This is the place where partners, colleagues and managers could post an endorsement letter for you.

•Company Profile

A profile that represents the company, each person worked for the company would have a link in his/her profile to the company profile that would appear just on mouse-over in a nice tooltip.

•Ads and applications

Ads a similar to Facebook ads with the difference that you can target professionals in an area of interest.

Applications are still not of great interest, but there is one particular called “Company Buzz” gathering from groups, news items, etc. information about your company. That way you can see what others speak about you and your business.

•Groups – groups are a great place to gather professionals from one or different areas of interest. There they share knowledge, interesting posts, news articles, services. However, the groups there are not targeted to promote directly your services unless you want to get the boot right off the bat, so they need to be approached with respect and carefulness.

If you create yourself a group, then you need a lot of time to manage it and clear the needless spam. However, that is the best way to attract professionals from different areas in your business.

Digg on the other hand is more like a news feeder where people submit videos, news articles, or images. The best part it has Facebook connect feature that automatically (oh, well it requires a couple of clicks) allows you to share your posted items on Facebook.

The news are indexed in a similar way to the new Microsoft Bing search engine – the more people “digg” your submitted item, the more relevant result becomes when is searched.

By “digg” it means someone liked the news item. In addition, you can see user comments, and even see how someone has voted for other user answers.

Conclusion

So… should you use Social media to position your brand? Yes, definitely, but make sure you do it RIGHT, otherwise it can have negative impact. Consult with professionals who already have done this on the channels mentioned above – that is why they are there for, sharing their knowledge and experience. You can be sure that they will not make a whole business strategy how to act, but it will give your marketing department some basic ideas and directions how they can proceed.

Thanks for your time, I hope you enjoyed reading the article!