What should a company think about before getting active in SoMe?
• Which channels are the best for each customer group?
First of all, a company should define what is their
corporate strategy and social media strategy, what outcome they want to get.
Then they should analyze each social media channel and how it can benefit their
business, choose the most effective channel.
·
Facebook: the most used SoMe channel by
companies, no matter big or small
·
YouTube: used mostly by bigger companies, but
even small companies can benefit from it
·
Instagram: rapidly growing, use of short videos
(storytelling)
o
Fashion companies
o
Companies selling to women
o
Food & retail industry
o
Automobile industry
·
Twitter: not as strong as used to be
o
Big brands
o
Newspapers
o
Sports teams
o
Organizations
o
Celebrities
o
Politicians
Social media strategy
1.
Research
a.
Ideal client
i.
Age & gender
ii.
Geographic location
iii.
Interests
iv.
Websites they visit most often, i.e. Facebook,
Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google (Gmail)
v.
Motivation to buy
b.
Product/offer
c.
Ideal SoMe website
d.
Competition
2.
Content
a.
Facebook content
b.
Photos & infographics
c.
Videos
d.
Free report, mindmap
e.
Online seminar & webinar
f.
Articles
3.
Interact
a.
SoMe platforms
b.
In person
c.
Phone
d.
Webinar/online seminar
e.
Email
f.
Survey
4.
Measurement
a.
Sales
b.
New leads, people in email list
c.
New interactions
d.
New followers
e.
Comments
f.
Website visits
Social Media Crisis Management
Possible reasons:
1.
Posting a link/status meant for a personal site
2.
Typos turning into disastrous words
3.
Inappropriate/unwarranted opinions
4.
Insensitive statements
5.
Releasing an announcement/news too early
6.
False rewards that you can’t provide/didn’t mean
7.
Account hacked
Actions to be done:
LISTEN → ASSESS → ENGAGE → REPEAT
• How to attract and engage the target audience?
·
Using hashtags
·
Share (most important) – comment – like – it all
increases company visibility
Social Bakers
Analyze:
1.
Cover image + text
2.
Media (photos & videos)
3.
Way of communicating
You can see TOP10 Brands (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
Google+, LinkedIn) in terms of SoMe activity
LikeAlyzer
You can see similar brands’ pages with highest like rank, your
mistakes and ways to improve.
To get more customer engagement:
1.
Who is your ideal client?
2.
Optimize posts for smartphones
3.
Use emotions
4.
Ask information from the customers
5.
Ask for the last comment
How to write engaging Facebook posts:
1.
Be natural – not boring and friendly
2.
Be relevant
3.
Be visual – choose good images & videos
4.
Be succinct – start with a question, use 80 or
less characters
5.
Be emotional
6.
Ask fans to express opinions – call to action
7.
Post quotes – inspirational and relevant (with
images)
8.
Play right – do not ask for likes & shares
9.
Use full links
10.
Be yourself
YouTube
·
YouTube has more than a billion unique users
every month
·
An internet user spends 88% of their time on the
pages that have videos
·
90% of internet users confirm that seeing an
explanatory video about a product supports their decision to buy
Video marketing tips:
1.
Define the main goal of your video
2.
Define your ideal client
3.
Plan who will record your video and when
4.
Define your budget
5.
Decide who will appear in your video
6.
Create a list of themes that you can record
tutorial videos about
7.
Identify frequently asked questions and make a
video for each of them
·
Make a clear & simple introduction about the
theme
·
Create convincing “calls to action” in the video
·
Learn from your past mistakes
·
Figure out which video camera is right for you
·
Select the correct video editing program
·
Use a tripod to make sure that your video is stable
·
Make sure you have good sound in your videos and
improve visual impact with additional lighting
·
Upload & optimize your videos in the way
right on YouTube
·
Improve the quality of your video by editing or
adding music
·
Add your video to a reproduction list to
maximize visits
·
Motivate visitors to like and subscribe to your
channel
·
Add annotations to your video to get calls to
action
·
Invite people to share your video on other SoMe
·
Find out most important metrics in the YouTube
statistics
·
Share your video on other SoMe channels
·
Use Google Trends to find out most used words
and use them in the description of your video/post
What are the company’s objectives for SoMe engagement?
• What do companies try to achieve by using SoMe (for instance Relationship
Building)?
7 Reasons You Need to Be Using Social Media As Your Customer Service Portal
When most marketers and business owners think about the
advantages of social media for their business, they think about attracting new
customers to the business. Smart business owners and marketers focus on
relationship building, either through regular content marketing or by having
conversations with customers who are already familiar with the brand.
Straightforward and effective, this type of strategy has
helped thousands of businesses spark new life into their marketing
campaigns—but I believe social media has a much broader potential for business
development and customer retention.
Customer service is evolving to match the rapid growth and
development of new communication media, and today’s most popular social media
platforms are the perfect opportunity to capitalize on that trend. When today’s
customers try to get in touch with a customer service representative, they
encounter various challenges:
·
Find and call a phone number. Unless the number
is immediate, just finding the number can be difficult. Wait times, lengthy unproductive
conversations, and multiple call transfers are all disadvantages that can leave
a sour taste in your customer’s mouth.
·
Submit a contact form. It’s an impersonal
experience, and customers never know where the contact form is going, when it
will be replied to, or by whom.
·
Send an email. Invisible and impersonal, much
communication can get lost over email, and responses often take days.
·
Seek out a service representative. It’s the best
option for most customers, giving them a friendly, personal, and authoritative
response. However, it can be costly and inefficient to have dedicated account
representatives ready for each customer.
Using social media as your customer service portal can
compensate for many of these disadvantages. While it’s still developing as a
medium, there are a number of reasons why it’s possible and advantageous to get
started with it now.
Reason 1:
Communication Is Immediate
When people are upset, or when they need answers to their
questions, they want a response right away. They don’t want to wait 24 hours
for their email to be read, sorted, and responded to. They don’t want to wait
on hold for 30 minutes.
One of the most beautiful elements of social media is its
immediacy. The minute somebody makes a post on your Facebook wall or a post
mentioning your brand, your admin will receive a notification to take action.
This is also a slight vulnerability—customers expect immediate responses when
posting on social media, so if your response team isn’t prepared, it could cost
you—but if you can respond within minutes of the original post, you’ll be able
to make your customer very happy. This is especially effective for customers
dealing with an urgent problem, such as a flight delay or a technological
malfunction before a presentation.
Reason 2: You Give
People a More Personal Brand Experience
As I detailed in Google Authorship and Personal Branding:
Why the Individual Beats the Corporate, people tend to favor dealing with other
people rather than corporations. Managing your customer service through social
media will give you the best of both worlds. People will immediately recognize
and call out to your brand, but it will be a person reaching out in response.
There won’t be any automatically generated emails. There won’t be any
tone-based phone menus. It’s just a question, followed by an answer.
Social media also allows you to think carefully about your
response and present it in a more casual, conversational tone. This way, you
can retain your brand voice while writing and communicating like a human, thus
humanizing your brand.
Reason 3: The
Conversation Is Transparent
This works both ways. For the customer, transparency is all
about vindication. When customers are upset, they want to be heard, and posting
on social media is the perfect way to be heard. By allowing your customers to
make their complaints or questions public in this way, you’re giving them an
immediate outlet. They feel in control, and appreciate the urgency companies
feel to respond when the issue is made public.
For companies, transparency means that other potential
customers get to see how well you handle the situation. If you can answer a
customer’s concerns quickly, nicely, and effectively, you’ll instantly leave
all of your followers with a good feeling—confidence that your customer service
is top-notch.
Reason 4: You’re
Encouraging More Brand Mentions
More interactions on social media means you have more
opportunities to point back to your own brand. Your customers will mention your
brand in their posts, making you visible to all their contacts. Even if they
come to you with a concern or an issue, you’ll get brand visibility and an
opportunity to show off your ability to quickly and effectively and correct the
problem. When relevant, you can also post links to your site for more
information. No matter how you handle questions and comments, you’ll be encouraging
more activity and more brand mentions, which can help your SEO rankings.
Reason 5: Follow-up
Is Easy
Depending on how long it takes for the problem to be
resolved, following up with your customer is fast and easy. If you manage to
resolve the problem with a quick answer, you can immediately ask whether or not
the interaction was helpful. If it wasn’t, you have an opportunity to take
further action—rather than forcing the customer through another round of
calling or emailing. If it was helpful, you have a publicly visible follow-up
interaction that ends on a positive note. You can also make a note to follow up
a few days later with a private message to make sure the customer is still
satisfied.
Reason 6: Social
Users Are More Likely to Talk About Their Experience
This is a selfish reason, but it’s an extraordinarily
advantageous one. Intuitively, the people most likely to use social media are
the people who like to socialize. The most active users have hundreds of
followers and friends on various social media profiles, and they’re used to
posting updates regularly.
How you respond to these people is significant, because they
are more likely to tell others about their experience with your brand. If you
treat them well, they’ll share a positive experience with their extended social
network—and you’ll get access to new potential fans and customers. Harness
their popularity by giving them an unforgettably positive interaction.
Reason 7: You
Eliminate the Funnel
Customers hate the funnel. When customers reach out to you,
they want to be responded to in the same medium. Otherwise, they feel like they
are being sent through a mechanical series of hoops, which leaves them with an
alienated, impersonal feeling. Many major companies make the mistake of
ushering people through one dedicated communication channel, usually a phone
number or an email address, and isolating customers who reach out in any other
method.
For example, if a customer reaches out on Facebook, they
want to be responded to on Facebook. They don’t want to see a formulaic welcome
message with instructions to call an 800 number. Eliminate the “funnel” by
having dynamic customer interactions on every platform.
Is the success of SoMe engagement measureable? If yes, how?
• What are the KPI’s of Social Media engagement?
How to measure social media success?
Set clear and
realistic goals and targets:
Social media is not the answer to all of your business
prayers, however it is a brilliant means to an end goal. In order to measure the success of your
social activity, ensure you set clear objectives and realistic goals to aim
for, as well as understanding why each is being hailed as a success measure.
This may be reaching a certain number of new followers, lead conversions, re-tweets
etc. If you’re hitting these then you’ll know your social activity is working,
and if you’re not, look at where you’re focusing your efforts. Keep pushing
yourself by gradually making these objectives harder to achieve and as your
social media skills increase so will your business success. One easy measure to employ is ‘where were we
able to start this conversation that lead to the sale?’…and what was the
process from there.
Social media measuring tools:
There’s an array of different social media management tools
out there to enable you to monitor every aspect of your social activity. These
include measuring your click-through stats, likes, retweets, follower growth,
post shares…the list really is endless! The platforms themselves also offer great
monitoring tools.
Here’s just a few:
– Facebook’s metrics
are great for showing you how successful your social media activity is,
audience make-up, peak traffic etc.
- Twitter search
your company name, this allows you to monitor your Twitter rep by bringing up
potential news, pictures and tweets that your brand has been mentioned in. If
you’re a big enough brand, adding the # before your name will allow you to see
all tweets that directly reference you, allowing you to gage sentiment.
- Technorati –
Technorati will notify your brand has been mentioned in the blogosphere.
- Monitor This –
‘MonitorThis’ is a little more technical, but worth it. You can have it watch
over 20 different search engine feeds and make an .opml file that you can put
into your RSS Feeder to display any results.
- Hootsuite,
Tweetdeck, Sprout Social, Meltwater Buzz etc. there are an array of ‘social
media dashboards’ that allow you to post and monitor the success of
all your social media posts, showing you amongst others, conversation volume
and the sentiment of mentions. These platforms can flag up all mentions of
search queries you enter, the good, bad and indifferent, allowing you to gain a
great overview of your social media success
Cost savings:
Social media allows cost effective access to powerful
marketing, networking and lead generation tools by giving you access to free
and low-cost platforms to reach customers on a global scale. There is no other
free/low cost and instant marketing form like it and therefore allowing you to
compete with big brands and budgets.
Social media has truly ‘levelled the playing field’ and no longer is it
just the big budget brands that get their activities winning accolade and
business. A strategy and plan is a must
though! You just need to be smart with your application of simple yet effective
activities and by following a strategy and plan so you can measure success, and
adapt and modify as you go. Any fool can
make something complicated; yet making something simple takes a lot hard work
and talent!
Time savings:
By measuring how much time your business has saved by using
social media to achieve it’s goals quicker, you are able to see a clear ‘Return
on Involvement’. If you are spending hours on social media with very little to
show for it, then you are most certainly doing something wrong. One quick and
easy time saving exercise is to schedule ‘proactive’ tweets and posts (without
looking like a robot!); you are able to
mitigate the need to be sat for hours on end on social networking sites day-in
day-out, and ultimately save yourself a lot of time, dealing only ‘reactively’
when required.
Analyzing brand
recognition:
Social media is a great way for a business to raise brand
awareness. Use monitor tools to search for your brand name, e.g. Meltwater Buzz
will give you an n overview of the sentiment from posts mentioning your brand,
allowing you to see how you are being perceived. Whilst monitoring your Twitter
mentions allows you to see when and why people are talking about you. If you’re
getting lots of positive mentions then you’ll know your social media activity
is paying off!
Mentions by
influencers:
These mentions can be priceless, yet difficult to measure
tangibly; if you are being retweeted and discussed by industry expert then you
know you’re ‘doing’ social media right. This shows that you’re sharing engaging
and interesting content and reveals others are finding your social media feeds
useful. Ensure you set clear goals for who you would like to interact with
online and if your content is being picked up by these people then this is a
clear measurement of your social success.
Follower growth/industry
expert positioning:
After you post content about a specific subject, you may see
your followers (from this industry), likes and favorites increase. This is
because people follow those feeds and people who provide value and insight to
them, providing them with rich and interesting online content. If your
followers/connections are continually increasing and if you’re getting lots of
new industry professionals look at (in the case of LinkedIn) or engage with
your feed then your social media activity is clearly proving a big success.
Ensure you continue posting engaging content, a mixture of both your company
blogs and news and 3rd party content to give people a reason to follow you.
Better internal
collaboration:
If you’re seeing better employee engagement and better
communication between internal departments then this is a great way to measure
the success of your social media use. Businesses that use social media are
proven to have a better collaborative working environment as they reap the
rewards of the cost and time efficiencies that social media can bring. Through
better internal communications you will soon see better external comms.
• Are there any specific tracking methods depending on the company’s
objective of SoMe engagement?
Why Measure?
In order to measure the effectiveness of your social
campaigns, it’s critical that you know your objective.
Ask yourself why you are considering including social media
in your overall marketing campaign in the first place. How will your efforts
impact your revenue and grow your business?
You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place along with
a timeframe in which to achieve the goal.
Now you can determine which social media platform aligns
with your objectives.
For example, if you’re trying to reach a female audience and
your business lends well to pictures and images, you might want to consider
Pinterest.
If you’re a business-to-business brand marketing an upcoming
conference, you’ll want to consider LinkedIn.
#1: Quantify Your
Social Media Listening
“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact.
It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy
about that.” – Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media
(@FrankEliason)
Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social
media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your
customers, you’re missing the point of social media.
But how do you measure listening and how does it impact your
revenue?
In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter to
answer that question.
·
In Twitter’s search field, enter your business
name
·
You can then select whether you want to view
Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all” tweets containing your
business name or tweets that contain your business name from only those people
you follow.
·
As you filter the tweets, look through them and
decide whom you’d like to follow. These are likely either potential customers
or your current customers.
·
Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage
with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever
possible.
·
Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too,
especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to search specific terms
related to your business that people who are near your location are talking
about.
·
Twitter is an amazing tool for providing
real-time customer service. You can learn things like:
o
Exactly how many people you’re helping
o
If you’re growing that number of people
o
The issues customers are experiencing with your
business
o
What’s broken in your business
At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the
problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and
improvements within your business. You can measure the direct impact on your
business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new
fixes give you.
#2: Create a Rating
System for Your Social Engagement
“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at
how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media
(@scottmonty)
This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when you’re
trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response
to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.
Here’s how it works.
Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build
buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch
and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of
update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging
more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.
Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest
but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.
At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective
to a numeric goal. Then, use a tiered point system to weight different types of
engagement according to which is most valuable to you.
Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:
·
Likes: 1 point each
·
Comments: 5 points each
·
Shares: 10 points each
During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you
determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal
or not.
You can create similar point systems on any of the social
channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points
for a retweet.
#3: Add Tons of
Value, Then Sell and Measure
“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)
This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book
and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your
customers before asking for the sale.
For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new
healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the
new menu over an upcoming weekend.
Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a
Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content
around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook
Page about farmers’ markets in your area.
Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.
Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook
Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can
quantify.
Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:
Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to
determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign,
thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where
your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the
landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly
see how successful your campaign is.
How to set up a SoMe Plan?
• What should companies take into consideration before implementing the
SoMe Plan?
Before setting up your social networking site, it’s
important to have clear goals and expectations. The following questions can act
as a guideline for getting started:
·
Who is your audience?
·
What do you want to accomplish through social
media?
·
How do you want your audience to respond?
·
Have you integrated social media into your
larger communications plan? Social media should be complementary to your
website and other marketing materials.
·
Which social media platform is right for your department?
Do research and learn about the various social networking sites, then decide
which one is best suited based on your audience and goals.
·
Do you have a plan of action for monitoring and
moderating conversations on your social media page, positive or negative?
While these questions are meant to help you get started, a
more formal social media plan can help you formulate your overall approach and
involvement with social media.
5 Keys to Creating a Winning Social Media Plan
1. Realistic Metrics for Social Media Success
In order to achieve success, you first need to define what
success will look like on social media.
Take a critical look at how you use social media now. Has it
been working for you? Are you able to see any growth as a result? Do you know
how to measure that growth?
Now, ask yourself what it is that you want to accomplish.
Common social media goals can be enhancing customer awareness, promoting staff
accomplishments, and sharing information about your company. Whatever your end
goals may be, try to break them down into easily definable and measurable
objectives. Be specific when you do this, so that you’ll be able to see
definitively what is moving you towards completing these objectives.
As you get more of a feel for what social marketing can achieve,
and what you need it to do for you, you’ll be able to refine your goals and
make them more realistic. Also, this is a great time to review your overall
marketing plan as you look for ways to increase your social media presence.
2. Active and Nurtured Community
Who is reaching out to you on social and is already,
organically engaging with your brand? How can you nurture and grow that
community in an authentic way that also supports your team’s overall marketing
efforts?
What other methods could you use to connect with your
audience, and how could you link your efforts to make them more effective?
Define these personas and remember that they will determine your success or
failure, so make sure that you know who they are, and how to best connect with them.
3. Content and Promotion
The Internet is a dynamic and evolving creature, which means
that the content that you create for your social media has to be dynamic as
well.
A common pitfall among many organizations is not having
enough fresh and interesting content for social media. Strive for content that
is relevant, current, and genuinely applicable to your audience today.
Plan ahead and dedicate resources for your social media
efforts. It’s critical to have a content calendar to organize when you’re going
to generate content and manage when the content will be pushed out.
Will you have employees who will write it, or do you plan to
use freelancers? Decide who will be creating the assignments and monitoring the
quality of the work, and ensure that your social media plan not only allows for
regular updates and posts, but speaks the language of that particular social
network.
4. Social Networks Relevant to Your Business
Focus on specific social media networks that will most help
you attract and engage your audience.
This goes hand in hand with factor #2 above—the community
you will be nurturing. How does your company want to connect with current and
prospective customers. Is your brand voice personal or professional? Do you
have resources for a two-way conversation, or will your strategy focus on
broadcasting?
The demographics of your base are also important here. How
old are they? What is their gender? Further defining your audience will greatly
help you choose the social network that works best for your audience.
5. Open and Transparent Communication
The open-forum format of social media means your company
will benefit from direct communication with your customers. In all interactions
with customers on social, authenticity and transparency is key.
Allow customers to use social media to share their
feedback—show appreciation for positive feedback with positive responses, and
address negative feedback head-on. Don’t make the mistake of deleting negative
posts. Instead, show your customers that they’ve been heard, apologize and
accept responsibility, and when possible, use feedback to improve how you do
business.
Make sure that whomever is in charge of social media knows how
to respond, and is working closely with your internal PR team to manage these
inevitable situations.
Sources:
·
The University of Chicago. Prepare a Social
Media Plan. 2015 (http://communications.uchicago.edu/social-media-guide/prepare-social-media-plan)
·
Leung, S. Template For Success: 5 Keys to
Creating A Winning Social Media Plan. 2014 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/03/creating-winning-social-media-plan/)
·
DeMers, J. 7 Reasons You Need to Be Using Social
Media As Your Customer Service Portal. 2014 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/12/7-reasons-you-need-to-be-using-social-media-as-your-customer-service-portal/2/)
·
Mulready, R. 3 Simple Ways to Measure Your
Social Media Results. 2013 (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-strategies-to-measure-your-social-media/)
·
Pauw, E. 9 Ways to Measure Your Social Media
Success. 2014 (http://www.business2community.com/social-media/9-ways-measure-social-media-success-0938017)
·
Rouhiainen, L. Social Media Marketing in Modern
Business. Online course (COM8HH004). 2015 (http://hhmoodle.haaga-helia.fi/pluginfile.php/375137/mod_resource/content/1/socialmediainmodernbusiness.pdf)
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