Choose the Right Social Media Channel for Your Market

Darren Rowse, of Problogger fame, is currently promoting a free webinar with professional blogger Ana White.   White, who lives in a house that she hand-built with her husband in Alaska, makes a living publishing a blog about DIY and furniture making.

That is not entirely unusual.  According to Forbes there may be as many as 3.9 million “mommy bloggers” and some of them have been hugely successful.  What was interesting about Darren Rowse’s marketing blurb though was the nugget of information that White’s most important source of traffic is Pinterest.  With a readership of around three million unique visitors a month, that makes the image-based social media site a hugely valuable source of revenue.

For many, particularly male, social media sellers, that might sound a little strange.  That Pinterest has undergone massive growth recently is well-known.  That investing time and effort in the site can produce more rewards than time put into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn should be an eye-opener.

So when should you step away from social media’s Big Three and focus on one of the smaller services?

Who Uses Pinterest?

Demographics will play the biggest part, of course.  Pinterest is as much as 87 percent female and its users come from high-earning households.  That makes the site a good match for a female blogger writing about home décor that costs a bit of money.  But it also makes it a good option for anyone selling to female buyers — provided that they have good images of their products (pictures to which they own the copyright) and are willing to put in the groundwork to ensure that their images are spread across the network.  That means commenting on and repinnning other people’s pins, the same kind of activity that always works on social media.

Demographics of a different kind can make looking abroad an option too.  While social media marketers in the US like to talk of Twitter and LinkedIn as the biggest and most important networks on the Web after Facebook, both those sites are smaller than QZone, a kind of Chinese MySpace.  Sina Weibo, China’s main microblogging service has more than 300 million users — and the attention of many Western brands including Ikea, Nike and Luis Vuitton.  VKontakte is a kind of Russian Facebook with more than 135 million users. 

If you are looking to market beyond the English-speaking world then you should be looking at activity on one of the social media sites whose native language is not English.  That might not be simple.  You might have to hire local freelancers to do the tweeting and the posting for you, and if you cannot read what they are writing, you might have to give them a lot of trust.  But when you are starting from nothing, at least the results in terms of traffic flows and sales will be fast and dramatic as you make inroads into that new market.

Social media is not just a method of making sales; in fact, I would say that social media is mostly just support for sales and to build trust.  But each social media platform is a channel to reach a particular market.  You should be certain that the channel you use reaches the market you want to pitch — even if that means turning away from one of the big sites.

For the founders of Instagram, it really was a remarkable coup. The sale of the photo-sharing app for a billion dollars to Facebook has made its founders Kevin Systrom, who owns 45 percent of the company, and Mike Krieger, who immediately cashed in $100 million, incredibly rich in an incredibly short space of time. 

Nice for them but what does the deal mean for us, the users of Instagram and Facebook who are wondering how social media is likely to develop and how we should be using it to make sales?

In all of the discussions that followed the sale, a couple of interesting points stood out.

The first was the valuation.

Instagram is completely free. The app is free to download and free to use. There’s no freemium model and no ads — at least not yet. The company, which is just two years old and employs only thirteen full-time staff has no revenue and no revenue model.

The reason that Mark Zuckerberg (and the purchase appears to be entirely his decision) thought the company was worth a billion dollars was because of the potential value of its user base. With 30 million iPhone users, Zuckerberg valued Instagram’s members at $28 each.

Facebook, which is estimated to be worth $100 billion, has seen its users valued at $118 each.

Those are figures that should get every social media-based sales person thinking. How much of that $118 can you extract from each of the followers and fans that you collect?

Not all of it, of course — and no entrepreneur should feel disappointed when he/she pulls in much less. Not only might those estimates be inflated, they represent the total value of all the information a user provides. A user who follows your company only offers a small amount of information, and only some of that information might be relevant (or true).

A look at a user’s profile might tell you where he lives, where he studied and what music he likes — allowing you to target your offers geographically — but you might not have any use for his taste in movies or love of fantasy books. That information though would be valuable to other sellers.

But you should be able to work out the value of your social media followers to your business. The next time you issue a promotion exclusively through social media, count up the revenue that offer brings in and divide it by the number of followers who might have seen it on your Facebook page.

That will give you an idea of the value of your users — and a target to beat for your next social media offer.

Share Your Pictures on the Move

The other point that stood out was that Mark Zuckerberg saw the value in a photo-sharing app based on a mobile platform. Facebook has always been weak on mobile computing. (It came very late to the iPad party, for example.) Its large investment in one of the leaders in mobile apps shows that it believes mobile sharing is going to be increasingly important.

Social media sellers aren’t just going to be sharing their pictures through Instagram. We’re more likely to be doing it on the road, in the street, and on the sofa.

What I want to stress: You as a business marketing on the Internet MUST understand what Mark Zuckerberg understood.  Tablets and smart phones are the future of digital marketing.  I suggest that you figure out how to do it…and do it well. 

Profit from a Valuable New Habit

In the early 1900s, Claude C.  Hopkins found himself with a problem.  A leading figure in the new but booming advertising industry, a friend had asked him for help selling a new brand of toothpaste.  

Hopkins had beaten some major challenges before.  He had increased sales of Schlitz beer by telling people that the bottles were cleaned with "live steam" — which was, in fact, how all beer bottles were washed.  And he had successfully pushed Palmolive by persuading women that Cleopatra used the soap in her bath.  But advertising the new Pepsodent represented a whole new problem: at the time, barely 7 percent of Americans bought toothpaste.  Ten years later, that figure had risen to 65 percent.

Hopkins had done something that happens very rarely but which can have massive consequences: he had changed a habit.

America is Changing the Way It Watches TV

Something similar is happening now.  According to a new report from Forrester (http://goo.gl/Y7GLA) the habit of Americans to spend their evenings passively in front of a television screen is changing.  The report states that 85 percent of US tablet owners use their device while watching television, while data from Nielsen suggests that as much as 30 percent of time spent on a tablet coincides with time in front of the box.

Some companies have already noticed.  USA Networks and DC Comics worked together to create a graphic novel to complement the TV show “Burn Notice.”  But all marketers should understand that the estimated 50 million people who have bought an iPad (and the few others who opted for an Android device) are likely to be engaging with your brand with half-an-eye on the television and NO eye on commercials.

That means that at peak time, you know where they are likely to be and what they are likely to be doing.  

If you know that the demographic for your product is likely to be interested in a particular television show, it will pay not just to tweet about the show but to tweet during the show, using a related hashtag to capture your market's attention and pull them towards your website.

You can also make sure that you are present on Facebook during the show so that when someone makes a comment related to the program, you are right there with them, demonstrating that you share their interest, and deepening your connection.

Of course, not all your potential customers are going to own a tablet computer — but many will, and knowing where they will be at a set time gives you a major advantage.

And you will even be able to check your progress.  As you tweet and comment on social media during a television show, you should find that your connections increase and sales figures show an increase in the number of sales made between eight and ten in the evening.  

If the sales do increase, you will have given yourself a valuable new habit.  If it does not happen, you will have a good excuse for watching TV when normally you too busy.  Right?

Here is why Facebook bought Instagram

by OM MALIK  •  APRIL 9, 2012

The big advantage of social media as a marketing tool is that it is free. Whether you are building a Facebook timeline, a Twitter stream, or a LinkedIn account, you will not be asked for any cash. When it comes to buying leads ready to convert into customers, you cannot beat social media for value.

But you can beat it for time.

Social media success does not happen overnight. It takes time to identify the key influencers in your field, to build a community of followers and to be seen as an important agent in your industry. That happens gradually as your tweets are re-tweeted, your links are shared, and your posts receive comments. As that happens, your name spreads, more people follow you and your brand grows on social media sites.

That sort of growth, however, takes place over months and even years. It does not happen from one week to the next.

That is why social media companies are able to rely on advertising as their main revenue source. They can mine their data to shorten the time it takes to alert certain demographics to the presence of a brand. Facebook has ads that appear on the side of the page (and now next to images, too) that can be targeted as finely as marital status and interests, as well as geographic location.

Twitter has a smaller range of promoted tweets in search results and timelines, promoted trends and even promoted accounts that push messages from businesses into the view of potential customers. While they sound disruptive as an attempt by a business to intrude into a private conversation, the ads have been well received by users. No less than 14 percent of respondents in one survey said that they had re-tweeted a promoted tweet. (As the ads are paid for by actions that include clicks and re-tweeting, that is both a sign of their effectiveness and their cost.)

1. Rule to know: Social Media does not deliver sales; Social Media amplifies sales.
   

But while the ads on social media sites can be well targeted, their effectiveness is debatable. One survey of Facebook ads has suggested that they are more likely to be remembered than television ads; another survey, though, found that their click-through rates are significantly lower than those of other online ads. While Twitter’s promoted tweets have delivered high levels of engagement, they seem to boost brand awareness rather than increase sales immediately.

You Cannot Buy Trust on Social Media

Even if Facebook’s ads had high click-through rates, and even if promoted tweets did generate regular sales, the ads still would not be an effective substitute for slow natural growth on social media.

1. Rule to remember: Time buys trust
   

That is because success on social media is not about building up large numbers of followers, contacts, and fans. (We have begun to see the harassers, as I call them, who think that sending out a tweet an hour or a day has some sort of positive effect.) It happens when you build trust. The more you engage with your community, answer their questions, provide them with valuable information and bring them into your business, the more they will want to do business with you. That sort of relationship is built over time. It does not always generate immediate sales, but it does lead to the kind of long-term commitment that leads to firm brand loyalty. That is not something that ads can buy — but it is something that time buys on social media.

1. Rule to use: Begin with the social medium LinkedIn.  USE IT RIGHT!
   

The Role of Images in Your Social Media Marketing 

It is easy to forget, when you are cutting down a tweet to make it fit 140 characters, that Twitter actually lets you communicate with a thousand words. You will not be able to fit all of those words into the timeline, of course, but that is the value of a picture — and Twitter does allow pictures.

It is a relatively new thing. Twitter launched without any imaging ability at all. Like hash tags, pictures attached to tweets were an innovation that came from the community, in this case from TwitPic. Now images are built-in and every profile comes with a camera roll that contains the user’s images, and which anyone can browse.

And it is likely that people do. 

Check out the profile of someone interesting on Twitter or a business you are considering following on the site and it is almost inevitable that you will find yourself looking through their images. It is a much faster way than reading their tweets to discover who they are. 

For individuals, that picture roll is likely to contain shots of themselves and their family — and, too often, of their lunch and their desserts. Businesses should be focused on offering behind-the-scenes shots, images from sales events and any appearances of their product in the media. 

And Here is the President with Our Product

One company that does this very well is tablet case-maker Dodocase. The company’s image stream on Twitter contains more than 40 photographs. Some of the images show the cases in production. Others depict the company’s stall and the product at craft fairs. A few show the case when it pops up on television shows. 

The effect is to pull the reader in, to give them bonus glimpses of a product they admire and a company they love. The pictures help to deepen the relationship with the customer.

On Facebook, the images do even more; the company has 99 photos on its Wall alone, including a shot of a Dodocase sitting on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. Other images though have been tagged. This shot, for example, shows a couple of people wearing the company logo during a bike race. By tagging those people, though, the picture does not just become available for them to see; it is also pushed onto their profiles where their contacts see them. 

That is a strategy that is been used to great effect by wedding photographers in particular. After the shoot, photographers have been known to upload a selection of images then tag the people in those images. The photographer will not know the names of everyone in the photo but he can invite others to add their own tags. The tagging pushes the image onto a guest’s page and puts a sample of his product in front of more people who match his market demographic.

So a business using social media can post product photos and behind-the-scene photos. It can upload images of their product being used in all sorts of interesting ways (although few can manage to land a shot of their item on the President’s desk). And it can post images of customers — and expect those customers to bring in more customers.

Did somebody say a picture is worth a thousand words? 

Social media marketing feels like a universal solution.  Sales not strong enough?   Create a Facebook page.  Engagement not high enough?  Write more tweets.  Profile not big enough?  Run a campaign that targets influencers.

Whatever your business…whatever you are selling, pull the levers in the social media machine and you should find more money rolling out the other end.  Right?  Well, ahem….

Business is never that easy, and consumers do not all behave in the same way.  Beyond, a digital marketing firm, has been working with a number of partners to examine different kinds of social consumers and how they buy.  One notable conclusion is that how a customer researches a product — and what leads them to buy it — depends largely on the type of product they are purchasing.

Travel, for example, tends to be booked after looking through a search engine.  For cars and electronics, customers are more likely to head straight for the brand’s website.  Fashion items will be picked up through online ads.  Baby products will be reached through Facebook, music through YouTube, and restaurants through FourSquare.

It is All Intuitive Stuff. 

When you are making a big purchase of a complex item — like a car or a digital SLR — you want to know as much about it as possible.  You want to use the site’s 360 degree animated images to look the item over as though you were sitting in it or holding it, and you want to examine all the features listed and understand exactly what the product can do. 

Travel is a hugely competitive industry with deals that change all the time and provides a range of different ways of delivering the same result through different routes and an assortment of hotels and places to stay.  The best way to get the latest and most up-to-date information is by checking search engines.

And when you are looking for something as simple but as important baby products, trust is the most important factor — and that is delivered from the friends and contacts on social media sites.

So does that mean only companies with products with mass appeal and which sell on safety and reliability need to use social media?

Certainly not.  Customers do not just look for recommendations for baby products on Facebook.  They also look for music on the site, as well as beauty products, fashion items and restaurants.  They also review electronics on YouTube, as well as on Twitter, and search for kitchen appliances.

In short, the path from interest to purchase is never straight and includes stops at a number of different stations.  A buyer might gather information about a new pushchair from the brand’s site, for example, before asking friends on Facebook whether anyone has used it and can recommend it.

For sellers, that makes understanding customer behavior vital.  You need to know what your customers are doing when they reach social media sites, what information they are looking for, and — most importantly — what are the triggers that encourage them to make their final buying decision. 

You want to make sure that your sales funnel, even as it crosses media from websites through YouTube to Twitter, delivers all the knowledge the lead needs to give you a sale.  Is it possible to discover this path?  One of the great characteristics of social media marketing is that it can be analyzed in detail...a great opportunity to spend marketing money judiciously. 

 I forgot to wish everyone a successful Christmas.  Please!

StumbleUpon redesign gives the site a fresher, more visual look that is easier to navigate and simpler to use. The introduction of Channels provides a separate space where brands and companies can promote themselves, a less obviously commercial version of the site’s Paid Discovery service which some 60,000 products, publishers and other sellers have already used.

For marketers though, the question is whether they should be using it at all.

StumleUpon recently landed its 20 millionth member. Although that’s only a fraction of the 800 million or so people who regularly use Facebook if those 20 million people include your core buyers, then being active on the site might well be an important part of your social media strategy — or should be.

The site throws up some unique challenges though. It’s a social bookmarking service rather than a fully-fledged social media site. Think of Facebook with only the option to like (and un-like) a site, and those sites thrown up to visitors almost at random so that they “stumble upon” new publishers and firms with content and products that interest them.

It’s the “almost” that makes the difference. Click the Stumble button and StumbleUpon will offer a page based on interests, preferences and friends. The site tries to target pages to its readers, a system that allows for some influence. Recommend pages in the same field as your firm’s, follow other Stumblers and suggest more pages, and there’s a better chance that your own Web pages can win more views. That’s useful if your main goal on social media is to drive traffic to your website. 

And that can happen. A recommendation on StumbleUpon can deliver a sudden spike in view numbers. Once that happens, the page can sometimes turn up again, delivering occasional spikes in popularity.

Digg — another social bookmarking site —  has been known to deliver even bigger spikes but the site is also known for not delivering sales. Win a high ranking on Digg and the sudden burst of popularity can be enough to crash even mid-sized servers. Companies have found that very few of those new visitors bother to click through or buy.

It all comes down not to functionality but to demographics. StumbleUpon was long thought of as the “everyman” of social bookmarking sites, a place that was simple enough for anyone to use and where the Web pages offered covered a broad range of topics. (On Digg, you can expect to find lots of weird news stories, technology links and raving reviews of Ron Paul.) That title has probably now been taken by Facebook. But StumbleUpon’s users might be more geeky than many thought.

Analysis of StumbleUpon traffic to websites has revealed that the site’s readers are heavy Firefox users, with as many as 93 percent using the open source browser. One site came up with a profile of the typical StumbleUpon user as a 26-year-old, middle class, Firefox-using student with a big screen and a PC.

The question for marketers though is whether those students are likely to be buying our products. You can figure that out by tracking those visitors through Google Analytics to the purchase page. 

If you are getting traffic from StumbleUpon — and that traffic is buying — you are going to need to learn more about StumbleUpon’s new design.

Google’s recent announcement that it is going to be retiring a bunch of its products has got people wondering.  If the company is prepared to kill off Wave after less than two years — a tool that Techcrunch described as one of the most ambitious products it had ever seen — will the company one day pull the plug on Google+?

Those banging the drum for the social network’s demise point out that membership has flattened out.  After racing to 40 million members in the months since its launch, activity on the site has remained relatively stable.  People who use social media rushed to join and see what all the fuss was about, but it does not appear that mainstream users have been tempted by the promise of Circles to abandon Facebook for the Google competitor.

So give it another year or two and we should be waving goodbye to Google+.

But perhaps not!  And whether we should celebrate its demise is questionable.

Sure, the thought of having to use yet another social network to market products is unlikely to make many sellers happy.  And the idea that markets might be fragmented across different platforms is always going to mean more work for the same results.  But Google+ did bring some valuable new tools to the social marketing field.

The ability to build Circles, Google+’s main advantage, is a powerful marketing device.  It might have been created with the idea of allowing members to separate the posts they want their friends to see from the posts they want their relatives to read, but it also allows marketers to segment their lists.  

That is hugely valuable.

Being able to ensure that particular posts are only read by the people most likely to respond to them will help to ensure maximum conversion rates.

How frequently firms are doing this is hard to say.  Companies have not started releasing figures and it may be too early anyway to build enough data to draw conclusions about the strategy’s effectiveness.  But while it should yield better conversions, it will mean significantly more effort: organizing the Circles; monitoring activities in each of those Circles; and creating different posts for each of those groups of buyers.

Should Google+ fail and the market stay concentrated solely on Facebook, it could save us all a lot of effort.

But it is unlikely to happen.  Not just because Google has so much invested in Google+.  And not just because the search company cannot easily do without its own social media platform at a time when Facebook pages are as important as website URLs.

It is unlikely to happen because Facebook has already started copying many of the biggest new features that Google+ brought to social media.

Subscriptions and lists might not be as user-friendly as Circles but they do the same thing: they allow users to read posts from people — and brands — they don’t know; and they allow marketers to send different messages to different groups of people.

And, one more thing: Google is not finished building Google+ and its social media marketing strategies.   I think we should look for some positive surprises ahead.   What do you think?

General Motors might be struggling but when it comes to social media, at least, its Cadillac brand seems to know exactly what it is doing. Reach the marque’s Facebook page and the first thing you will see is a beautiful shot of the “All-New Cadillac XTS.”

That is tempting enough but what you will also see is a good example of the range of skills that any social media marketer now has to master.

The area above the fold, on the screen before you have to scroll, looks like a magazine ad. The car is properly photographed, and beneath it are a few lines of copy describing its features. 

So we already know that behind this social media page lies the work of a professional photographer and the work of a professional copywriter. But that is not all. You can also see more images of the car, not just by clicking the Photos tab on the left of the page (as you would expect) but by pressing the dots on the image itself.

In addition to the photographer and the copywriter then, you can add a developer because someone has gone to the trouble of creating an app for the company’s Facebook page. And a film-maker because as you shift down the page, you will find a pair of videos that can be chosen by selecting a little screen-like widget.

That is just the landing page. Move across to take a look at the Cadillac ATS, and you get more of the same… with one interesting addition. At the top of the page is a big red banner urging viewers to “Click the Like button to unlock NEW photos of the ATS below.”

That is a cheeky bit of social media marketing. Cadillac relies on the like button to spread its message virally and withholds some of the most tempting goodies until visitors have paid by sharing with their friends.

It is all complicated stuff which is what you would expect from a firm with the kind of advertising budget that is more usually used to pay for national television ads. 

But none of these things represent the meat of the Cadillac’s Facebook presence. That happens when you press the first menu item on the left of the page — and reach the Wall. Most of the posts here read like news items from the company’s PR department. One fairly typical post says:

Each of our past and present creations has inspired the chic design and performance of our latest model. Introducing the XTS, Cadillac’s all new luxury sedan

But even those posts are capable of almost a thousand likes and 175 comments each. Where the page really comes alive though  — and where it start to build a meaningful connection with its readers — is when the company thanks its “dedicated community” for picking up half a million fans and rewards them with a new album of images.

What you can find on the Cadillac Facebook page then is more than a piece of corporate social media real estate. It is a combination of all the elements that any professional social media presence has to contain, from the professional images, copy and development of the landing page, through the blatant pitching for viral sharing, to the personal gratitude for the engagement. 

Some of those skills will be familiar to anyone with hands-on experience of marketing. Others will be learned through management and outsourcing. But they all make a professional Facebook presence that builds a community and keeps it close.