Social media continues to be the buzz leader online. We’re no doubt helping clients succeed in with social media marketing as well as other online marketing vehicles like search, email marketing, and web analytics/optimization.
A few things are worth considering again. Social media’s biggest draw is the volume and growth rates. Everyone really is doing it. 300MM users can’t be wrong. Facebook is on track to hit 500MM users, so it’s not something to be ignored.
By the same token, like many other online vehicles, there are limited opportunities for any real ‘instant gratification.’ Like anything else, to make social media work, you need a plan. Many folks aren’t going to make the investment in an “unproven” medium (unproven, as they haven’t done it, and therefore cannot consider it “proven”) beyond putting up a fan page, or running some ads.
Here’s a simple approach. Write once, and syndicate. This article for example is being syndicated to Facebook and Twitter, there are a number of software tools to do this.
Once you get your FB and Twitter pages up and formatted in a brand appropriate fashion, you’ll want to turn your focus to generating responses and getting your content distributed by third parties “socially.” The jargon for this is getting re-tweeted (shared) and getting posted on a wall or “liked” on Facebook.
When these events happen, you are getting incremental and free exposure to all those connected to the people viewing your content through social media and your blog. This is where things take off in social media. The growth of impressions, awareness and engagement can be geometric, and the targets you reach this way generally share demo’s and profiles with the original prospects and customers you sent your message to.
The key to making this possible is… great content. Much the same as poor copy will reduce the direct marketing performance of any program, weak content that fails to resonate with your target audience will fail to garner the social distribution. This is an investment you cannot afford not to make if your going to get social media right.
Next post on social media, we’ll share an experiment we’ve done with targeting and day parting ads on Facebook, and some interesting metrics we discovered.