Four (ok twelve) Reasons to Build a Social Media Strategy
As a small business social media strategist, I’m very happy to see so many companies finally beginning to recognize the need to invest some of their marketing dollars into social media. I’m even happier to see how many of them are willing and able to dedicate some internal staff to the matter. On the other hand, I’m finding that many of these companies have absolutely no idea WHY they need a social media strategy. They just feel the pressure to get involved and hope something will come from it.
Unfortunately, that’s no way to build a strategy. What good does it do to invest time and money into a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other number of social media outlets if you have no goals, no measurement and quite frankly, no idea why you’re there.
What companies need to do is embrace the benefits of social media while very carefully thinking through the goals of their outreach efforts. Different goals will require different strategies. Taking a shotgun approach of simply trying to “get out there” will rarely result in a solid payoff. It’s far better to sit down and carefully consider what your company’s goals are and to build backward to create a strategy that’s most likely to meet those goals.
Here are four key reasons why your company needs to consider planning and launching a social media campaign.
Reason #1: Social Media Gives You Unprecedented Ability to Listen to Your Customers
For companies that don’t already have some type of social media strategy in place, this is usually the best place to start. While it takes a little bit of common sense and guidance to create an active and vocal outreach plan that will deliver results, pretty much anyone is capable of listening to the existing conversation.
The goal here is threefold.
Basically, companies need to view social media as a sort of endless focus group they can tap at any point in time. For companies that invest in listening and really sit down to consider how this information impacts them, there’s amazingly valuable information available. Using this information to impact all forms of marketing can make this specific strategy perfect for companies who don’t have time to invest in a social media voice, but who want to reap some of the benefits.
Reason #2: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Build or Introduce a Brand
Sometimes, the entire goal of a social media strategy is to create awareness about a new product, a service or a brand. Consumers are heading online in droves to have conversations and thanks to the explosion of interest in microblogging, social networks and blogs, they’re talking about more topics and reaching more people than ever before.
Getting a customer to talk about your product used to mean they mentioned it to a handful of friends or co-workers. These days getting them to talk about it might mean they share it with hundreds of friends on Facebook, thousands of contacts on Twitter or even tens or hundreds of thousands of readers on a blog. That’s a massive amount of potential exposure.
Let’s take a look at three different ways of approaching this one:
Reason #3: Social Media Gives You a Unique Way to Gather Feedback
Another excellent reason to turn to social media is the ability to gather feedback from your target audience. While this may sound similar to the concept of listening to the conversation, there’s a strong difference in the two goals. Listening is focused purely on listening to the existing conversation without trying to influence it’s direction. Using social media as a feedback channel is all about actively soliciting input, ideas and even complaints about your products or services.
The thing to remember with this type of social media strategy is that it takes some serious investment. You can’t just show up on a popular social media channel and ask people to tell you what they think. You have make a heavy investment into building relationships first.
There are several different ways to do this:
Reason #4: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Demonstrate Personality
One of the single greatest advantages the Internet and social media has given small business owners is the ability to once again go head to head with their big box counterparts. A decade ago, this was because web sites gave no indication of business size. The small mom and pop shop could have a site that looked just as good, was priced just as good and carried just as much inventory as a company like Sears or Walmart. These days, smart small businesses are using social media not only as an equalizer, but as a competitive advantage.
You don’t have to look far to find a story of a consumer who feels unappreciated or ignored by a larger brand who has made them unhappy. No one likes to sit on hold for 2 hours trying to lodge a complaint or have a product replaced. Smaller brands who sell the same product at the same price but actually answer the telephone have the chance to differentiate themselves and bring in loads of new customers. Beyond that, small companies who establish a voice via their blog or social media outlets have the chance to build credibility by building relationships directly with consumers.
Here are a handful of ways to use social media to do just that:
To be honest, there are dozens…maybe even hundreds of reasons to get involved with social media. These are just some of the strongest. What it all boils down to is this; your customers are online and they are using social media to communicate. If you aren’t, you’re business is missing opportunities. No one says you have to master every use of social media all at once, but you’re doing yourself (and your bottom line) a disservice if you don’t at least give some thought toward creeping into the social media space to do a little listening.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, the Social Media Faculty Chair for MarketMotive and offers small business social media strategy & consulting. Jennifer enjoys the challenge of finding unique and creative ways to connect with consumers without spending a fortune in marketing dollars. Though she now prefers to work with small businesses, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children.
It’s better choice, to try Social Media in this times. In globalization times like now, we must open to each other for build our personal business.
Great ideas for me to pass on to my small business clients. So many of them don’t know what or how to do in regards to social media. It’s critical that they first understand why they’re doing it, then developing a strategy, as you point out above.
And on top of that, businesses need to integrate their website SEO strategies into their social media efforts.
Thanks for the information!
Jennifer,
This is an excellent overview of how to effectively use social media.
I am a musician as well as a b2b marketing/advertising professional.
Everything you’ve laid out here is applicable to independent artists as well as small businesses. Thank you, for laying this information out in a succinct and shareable way.
Pam Mark Hall
This is a well written piece. Much like social networking has taken time to get adopted, social media is an area that small businesses especially can take advantage of. Obviously, it’s a low cost of entry, but you still have big players ignoring it, so the small guys can get in there and do some damage if they don’t wait too long..
Jennifer,
I think that reason 4.1 brushes against a point that many smaller businesses are missing, and that’s the fact that after years of small companies using automated voice mails, and call forwarding and static contact forms on their website to look like bigger companies; today these bigger companies are killing themselves to look more like single people. Newer, and smaller businesses need to use that to their advantage.
Elijah
That’s an excellent point…the fact that large companies are now killing themselves to look small.
It’s hard though. You grow to a certain size and legal takes on oversight for all corporate communication and the death grip begins. It’s hard to be free enough to communicate the way companies need to when they always have to worry about someone coming in with a lawsuit or launching a massive social media campaign against them.
It’s easy enough for us to say “well don’t do something stupid and you don’t have to worry about it’ but we all know it’s just not that simple. You can’t please every customer every time and no matter how hard a company works, someone will eventually take offense.
But I do still believe the companies that go to that effort to make their customer communications more personalized again are reaping the benefits in terms of better customer experience and increased loyalty.
It does level the playing field a bit. Large companies can spend a lot on advertising, but smaller companies can set up a Facebook or Twitter account and get there message out for free. Many of these social sites are addictive so once you establish a following, you visitors will be able to read comments you post every day.
Social media is really the core element of everything else happening in the online industry and its impact to business. Without knowing which to market the customers, how will they be able to be satisfied, the brand that a company should focus according to their needs and many other options to create relationship with them, there’ll be no reason to sell at all. We marketers do sell because of our consumers and not because we just wanted to earn. And in this case, it’s a great point to stress these important strategies to be improved for the coming year.
What a great article Jennifer!
You didn’t cover what social media is not — like just another advertising channel with lots of eyeballs. I’ve talked to several small businesses recently that want to get into social media, and they tell me that they want to do it by purchasing advertising on Facebook.
When I tell them that social media are about engaging with customers and gathering feedback, they look uncomfortable. They still want to control the message reaching consumers and broadcast that message, and they haven’t yet realized that their ability to control their image, message, and reputation has already slipped away.
I’m going to print out copies of your article and give them to these folks as a cogent explanation of how social media works. Thanks again for your insights!
one thing i got out of this post was to use social media to find out what people think of my brand and my competitors.
I never really thought about it that way. I’m always thinking of using social media sites to just get more traffic and customers, but never really used them to get ideas on how to improve my products.
thanks for this posts it’s got me thinking about some actionable items i need to get on this week.
Great post Jennifer, i liked the number 4 point, a chance to Demonstrate Personality.
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