What is Social Media?
‘Social Media’ is a popular buzzword for a large number of connectivity tools that allow you to form a direct connection with nearly anyone who has a computer, tablet, or a web-enabled cell phone.
Almost everyone with these tools has an account at one or more of the following, where you can find them and befriend them:
Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, 4Square, CafeMom, etc, etc, etc…
The list goes on… and some places are better places than others for finding a particular group of people. Some are highly useful to business people but useless to retail outlets, such as LinkedIn.
Who are you looking to market to? Who is your public?
- Looking for moms? You should be on cafemom.
- Looking for writers or bloggers? Consider Ning – they have some active writers groups.
- Looking for bibliophiles? Consider Shelfari in addition to your other options.
- Looking for musicians? MySpace needs to be on your list.
- Looking for small to medium sized businesses? You need to be on LinkedIn.
- Looking for web professionals, techies or scientists? You should add digg.com
These are only a few of the myriad options available to a marketer in social networks. There are literally small social networks for every possible group, race, creed, gender, interest, or activity.
However, Facebook also has groups for each of these within their network, which can be targeted there. And the person you’re trying to reach, as long as they’re into social networking, has a higher likelihood of being reachable through facebook than most other places.
Why not just use my existing promotional tactics?
Wherever you do market yourself, social media is different than standard media. Much as email was in the 1990s, social media is an unacceptable place to boldly market yourself through hard-sell strategies. If you’re going to advertise there, you need to do it in as interesting, engaging, informative and responsive manner as possible. If you say \”Buy Now!\” or \”Click here!\” no one will. Instead give teasers, find people using social media to ask a question and then answer it with information related to what you sell, offer support for your products through social media, or otherwise engage their interest. These people are not searching for you. They don’t know yet that you answer a need, as they may not even realize they have a need for your products.
Why Should I be Marketing on Social Media?
You’re speaking to them where they are MOST interested and most responsive.
Using Social Media properly pays dividends in activity, word of mouth, interested prospects, or even your happy customers telling others how great you are. Using it poorly will turn any social media opportunity into a wasteland of one-way communication: you yelling into the void without response, angering your potential clients. Using it too poorly can actually generate negative buzz.
Not using it at all, not responding to what your public are saying about you in social media circles is also a bad idea. Sometimes I will be contacted to investigate why a particular company’s business dried up overnight. And then I’ll find that they angered a client who left a bad review in a social network and they never handled that person’s upset. Your unhappy customers, once they’ve spoken to you once about their unhappiness, are more likely to spill their upset into a social network now than they are to speak to you again on the matter. So keep your ear to the ground – pay attention to who talks about you and where – and you won’t get run down.
Twitter is mostly a great place to market B2B (Business to Business) since most of the active users that might potentially buy/signup/interact are business users. The remainder of Twitter’s users rarely or never interact. It can also be used for B2C (Business to Consumer) but that takes special skill.
Twitter is the fastest growing, allowing endless tiny thoughts to flow over and past the user in a sort of endless stream. But really, less than 5% of Twitter’s users could be considered power users – people who are truly engaged.
Facebook is where everyone and their momma (literally) has an account now, and can be found whiling away endless hours discussing their own status updates and commenting on the status updates of others. As far as engagement goes, there is no better network in 2010 than Facebook.
Plus, if you’re willing to pay for placement on their ad network, they have the best demographics breakdown and capabilities of any online venue – far outstripping anything offered anywhere else. If you want to target women between the ages of 31 and 32 who live in Indiana, are married with small children, and who have read Mark Twain books or who like to travel? And only advertise to them on their birthday? You can find them there, and you can target them that carefully. It’s a marketer’s dream. Not only is the data thousands of times more likely than at any other site to be accurate, it’s also timely, since it’s up to the minute.
Considering the size of a potential audience at Facebook (400 million daily users as of early 2010), it would be easy to trip up and spend your entire budget marketing to the wrong crowd. Especially since the amount of energy running through the wires there is HUGE. One client of mine who is using facebook’s paid advertising, targets a VERY specific list – about as specific as it gets – and it still shows to over 4 million daily users right now, generating thousands of clicks a week. If I were handling their advertising on facebook poorly, I could easily waste their entire budget. Fortunately, that client’s cost per acquisition (cost per lead, not click) is as good or better at Facebook than at Google. The moral of this story is that you must already know who your customers are, who you want to advertise to exactly, before you market on facebook.
I will be writing more on this and on the two routes to market yourself in social media shortly.
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Desi Matlock has been helping clients market themselves in social media (never as herself) since 2006.