A Social media strategy is exactly the same as planning your December vacation.  First you look at your budget, define where you want to go, then search for available places in the area and make a booking. Sometimes you need to decide which vehicle will be the best for the vacation months before your trip. You start to plan your route, which routes to take, where to stop for breakfast and approximately what time you will reach your destination. Planning your social media is exactly the same – your need to plan your strategy upfront and everybody in your company needs to know which vehicles to use and the direction you are going in.

Let’s start with your destination:  Say your destination is building a large fan base, your roadmap and vehicles will defer from a destination of having a high engagement rate. For a high engagement rate you will post richer media e.g. images, ask for likes and comments whereas for a large fan base you will rather run a competition.

Choose your vehicles: If you want more engagement you need to choose Facebook and Twitter as your vehicle to get to your destination. You need to keep your target market in mind and also what you want to share. On Facebook you can easily share blog posts, videos, images and ask questions. Twitter, however, is best for short to the point updates. On Twitter 54.6% are women and 45.4% are men.
The statistics will also help you define your vehicles.

Plan your route: Start every month planning your route to get to you destination. Sit upfront with your campaign and schedule all your updates and tweets for the month. Remember to re-view, revise and re-schedule your plan, there might be news in the middle of the month that you can share.

My key, my car, I’m driving:  Remember that your social media platforms are your company’s voice to the public. Never post negative comments on your wall, don’t be aggressive, have a crisis management strategy in place just in case someone wants to bad-mouth your organisation.

Lastly, you are part of the social media world, whether you have a Facebook page/ Twitter account or not, people are talking about you!

Happy Marketing!

You might have heard about the traditional 5 key metrics in measuring your marketing and online marketing success:

1. Awareness
2. Influence
3. Attitude
4. Response
5. Value

But what if there was a different approach we should be taking in our measurement?  One that will clearly define whether or not we need to rework and refine our own messaging and positioning in the marketplace?  The 6^th Key metric, in fact, encompasses them all, and lies in the term we (not so) loosely term: Customer Value Management.

So let us explore…

1. Awareness
   Getting awareness right in the sense of volume to your site, your brand name and your social presence, is a great way of measuring your marketing success.  In terms of Customer Value Management (CVM), though, this does not clearly indicate our success in getting our message across.The measurement here is to ensure that your brand persona or messaging clearly outlines your value proposition, and that it is interpreted this way.  People build trust relationships, and if they do not understand what you’re representing and understand your positioning, they won’t trust your brand and interact.

   It’s not about what you say, but about how they interpret it.

2. Influence
   To measure your influence in understanding that people believe in you so much and enjoy the influence you have in their decision making process, that they want to keep you close. They want you to not only influence them, but also the people around them continuously.
   
   
3. Attitude
   Oftentimes we measure attitude by what we hear people say about our brand or marketing messages.  Let’s turn it around and start by looking at our own attitudes.  If our attitudes are right, if what we say and do make people want to draw near and feel the need to connect and affiliate, then we got it right.  If not, we need to go back to the proverbial drawing board and re-assess where the attitude pointing outwards should or could be adjusted.
   
   
4. Response
   Traditionally response is seen as the response to your message.  Increased sales, increased revenue and more likes and fans in the social realm.  These are all good principles to measure response and have been the driving force behind charts and graphs for years.  And they work.But in terms of the customer and their value, we need to look at our own response to their response.  When faced with a challenge, do we respond with an open mind, or do we react arrogantly?  Do we welcome their opinions on our brand, or follow the regiment ways of mass media, not allowing them to form part of our ethos?

   People don’t care what we know, until they know that we care.
   

5. Value
   And finally – instead of seeing our clients and marketing as just the impact on our bottom line, seeing what value we are adding to them. This is exactly the shift marketing needs to make when we look at our brands becoming interactive instead of trying to dictate to the mass media and enforcing our ideas on the predominantly ‘prosumer’ market.

   Our measurement in engagement value should provide the flexibility and insight to measure whether or not the market is letting us in.

Most of us love the idea (still) of speaking or broadcasting our ideas and values.  The world has changed and is changing as we speak.  New measurement metrics are key to keeping abreast of our client partners, and in this measurement, crucial to our realignment of voice and strategy.

Influence and Collaboration: Robin Pullen, BCI

Social media is all about, well, being social.  The platform was developed to interact (again and more frequently) with the people around us as we live in a more-and-more isolated environment.

As this media evolved and took the shape of groups, chats, instant messaging, professional contacts and job portals, some of the pioneers in ‘social for corporates’ have, it would seem, missed the point.

We are bombarded by a myriad of marketing messages daily.  Emails take the average user approximately 2,7seconds to analyse and assess whether or not it will be opened, read, or instantly deleted.  Ad breaks on television are almost longer than the program itself and almost every website you enter has flashing advertising banners screaming for you to hear their message.

What we want, more than anything, is to be human.  We want to have people (and companies) to interact with us in such a way that it is kept fun, inspirational and even emotional.  We want to be respected for our likes and interests – not some marketing faux.

Direct marketing used to know us by name – social media allows companies to ‘know’ us for us.

Getting a company or brand liked by nations on a social space, is certainly then not a marketing message.  It is an interaction.  A care.  Based on the knowledge gained by constant interaction with the ‘we’ following your company or brand.

Social media is a platform, thus, not for marketing products or services per se, but to be and remain social with the people who care about your brand as much as you do… People who believe in your ethos, trust you, and know that your brand development would mean the development of self.

Why are companies with Facebook profiles on the hunt for more “Likes”?
It could be one of the following reasons or in most cases all of them:
To gain more social media fans, to gain brand exposure, to position their brands in the eyes of the consumers, and ultimately to effectively utilise this medium to run competitions and promotions.
As the Social Media Expert at SAbest it intrigues me as to why Facebook users do not want to like a Company or Brand on Facebook. I did some research to see why and what expectations people have when they do interact with a Company or Brand socially.

There are various reasons why Facebook fans don’t “Like” a Company on Facebook:

• 54% don’t want to be bombarded with messages or ads,
• 45% don’t want to give any companies access to personal profile information,
• 29% don’t want companies to contact them through Facebook,
• 23% don’t see the benefit of it,
• 4% don’t understand what it means to “Like” a company.

If a Facebook fan likes your Company page, it is very important to observe that they do so with an expectation. People don’t just “Like” every page on Facebook, they “Like” it for a reason. Fans like Company pages to gain access to exclusive content, events, sales or promotions.

47% of users “Like” a page to receive updates about the company, persons or organisation in their newsfeed. 26% want to interact with the page owner. The survey also shows that only 24% want to be contacted through other social media channels such as Twitter once they have interacted with a company on Facebook. 37% do not expect anything to happen.

Media such as photos and videos always perform well on Facebook. It grabs attention in newsfeeds and it is easy to share.

Just ask. People like to interact with each other so ask for those opinions on topics, and if you want your fans to share favourite content, go ahead – ask them.

One of a fan’s expectations is that the page owners will thank them for their replies and for sharing their opinions. From time to time, talk about things other than your products. Wish them happy holidays. Ask them fun questions or to share their personal stories.

Remember, if a fan likes your page; interact with them, because it’s one of the biggest expectations any Facebook Fan has.

Google is in the process of simplifying user experience by scrapping products that haven’t met their  goals, or merging them as features into other  products. Though I myself hadn’t heard of some of these features, I was interested to research what tools they had experimented with in order to achieve the Google we all love. Google’s continued pursuit of innovation and user experience perfection is inspiring to say the least.  Below are some of their test products that didn’t quite make their ‘Google cut’.

• Google Friend Connect – gave web masters the ability to add social features to their sites by embedding a few lines of code. The feature will be retired as of 1^st March 2012 for non-blogger sites. Affected sites have been encouraged to create a Google+ page, and add a Google+ badge to their site so they can keep in touch with their community of followers via their page.

• Google Gears – browser extension allowed creation of offline web applications. As part of efforts to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, as of 1^st December 2011, Gears based Gmail and Calendar offline will no longer work and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. Gmail, Calendar and Docs can instead be accessed offline in Chrome.

• Google Wave – a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. Development on Google Wave was stopped over a year ago, but as of 31^st January 2012 Wave will become read-only and no new “Waves” will be created. On 30^th April 2012 Wave will be turned off completely. Individual Waves can still be exported until the feature is turned off, but there are still open-source projects such as Apache Wave and Walkaround which offer equal functionality.

• Knol – aimed to improve web content by allowing experts to collaborate on in-depth articles (similar to Wikipedia). Annotum, “an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress” [1], has been created in order to continue the work of Knol – which will no longer be available as of 1^st October 2012.

These are just a few of the products Google will be scrapping, their aim: “to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience”[1], which, in turn, will benefit not only users but advertisers as well.

To find out how we can help your site to rank better on Google, take a look at our Search Engine Optimization page

References:

1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html