Digital Marketing Consultant

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.

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? 

http://rdd.me/qzpv1ird

How Valuable is an Old Social Media Post?

Twitter’s new arrangement with Datasift that lets the company previously known as TweetMeme sort through two years’ worth of historical tweets is likely to have social media professionals scratching their heads rather than rushing to the search engine. 

It is not just that the price, which begins at $1,000 per month for “individuals or developers” and rises to $15,000 per month for “big companies and big data lovers,” will cut out most small firms.  It is that even if we had a social media budget that big, it is not certain that the spend would be worthwhile. 

Search has always been a problem on Twitter.  Until now, regular users could sort through a week of old tweets while corporate users could filter out a month.  That was always a nuisance if you were trying to track down a tweet that you remembered seeing on someone’s timeline a couple of months ago, but those individual tweets were usually more interesting than valuable.  They might be links to article that had some helpful information or a comment that you wanted to preserve.  It means that you have to use the “favorite” button as a bookmark rather than as a list of the best tweets — but if you do lose a tweet, the loss is rarely major.

The new service, says Datasift, will help large companies sort through the tweets that were posted at a particular time, such as when a product was launched or while a television campaign was under way.  An ad firm that wanted to know why a previous campaign did not work as they put together a proposal for a new client, for example, would be able to go back and see what Twitter users liked and did not like about the ads as they were broadcast.  They can measure the sentiment of the tweets and identify the twitterers with the biggest “klout” for the brand.

For Small Social Media Marketers, Post Toasties Matter More!

That is fine and valuable for large firms working with new clients, but for small businesses, it is the present that matters more (especially for reputation management).  I call them Post Toasties and you have to watch out for them.  If someone makes a comment of any kind on the Internet about you or your company, you want to know.  You don’t want to get toasted (or roasted) by a “postie” and not be able to answer it.

Additionally, as a social media marketer, you need to have your ear to the ground now, not an eye on the past.  You need to know what people are saying about your market and which people are saying it as events are happening today.  When you have that information — something that is much easier for small firms to do than large companies — previously expressed sentiments become largely a matter of history.

[As a footnote for small social media marketers, Twitter is the slow rolling out it’s sponsored tweets program.  At the moment, the program is only available to US-based businesses that use American Express.  It is expected to roll out generally at the end of March. 

If that is shown to send targeted ads to users in a way that does not irritate them and which actually converts, then it will change everything for commercial Twitter users.  It would certainly have a greater effect for the future of small businesses on Twitter than the ability to search through the past.]

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!

Say this three times: Will there be a repeat or a retreat on the retweet?  No prize, however.

Some uses of Twitter though are far from subtle. The sponsored placements in trending topics and at the top of timelines are meant to be unobtrusive but they’re always a bit pushy. They get eyeballs, might win clicks and may deliver sales but viewers know they are seeing advertising.

This year, Wendy’s, the fast food chain, took two approaches to marketing on Twitter: one subtle and the other bold.

The subtle campaign, which was run by ad agency the Kaplan Thaler Group, just came to an end. Using an account called @GirlBehindSix, the company ran a Twitter-based game show with prizes that began with $1,000 to six followers who retweeted the rules, then ran through mopeds, sleeping bags, turntables and host of other expensive goodies. The aim was to raise awareness of a new burger that would take sixth place on the chain’s menu.

Within about a month, the timeline had picked up 33,000 followers. In mid-November, it revealed its true identity and has since been trying to shift those followers over to Wendy’s timeline by promising more prizes over in that timeline.

I want you to keep reading, so I am inserting this picture of Wendy herself to keep you interested:

But I digress...

As that stealth campaign was coming to an end, Twitter announced that the chain had won the Golden Tweet Award for the most retweeted post. The tweet? “RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd”

That was a pretty blatant piece of advertising. It was essentially a bribe offered to Twitter’s community to spread the name of the company across the site. The original tweet was sent on June 15^th, and although Wendy’s has not said how many retweets it received, the campaign has been reported as raising $50,000 for charity which would translate into 100,000 posts.

So that is two different campaigns: one complex and subtle, the other simple and direct. Both had an impact and both worked… at least as far as winning followers and views are concerned.

The real question, of course, is whether those views translated into sales and whether those sales more than made up for the cost of the campaign. $50,000 is not a small sum but not all of those who saw it would have retweeted the post, making the cost per viewer a fraction of 50 cents each. If a typical customer spends $10 in Wendy’s then the company would need that campaign to produce 5,000 extra sales — 5 percent of the 100,000 people who retweeted or perhaps half a percent of all the people who saw Wendy’s name in other people’s timelines and didn’t retweet. That sounds feasible, and it doesn’t include the halo (and the tax deduction) that the company gains from donating money to charity.

The game show campaign may have cost a similar amount in prizes alone. Again, we don’t have figures that show whether it paid its way but not all of @GirlBehindSix’s followers have moved to Wendy’s timeline and some were no doubt put off by the campaign’s stealthy approach.

The campaign was clever and complex — as you would expect from an ad agency — but whether it was more effective than simply bribing Twitter followers with a charitable donation is questionable.

But, then again, I only eat their chili, so what do I know?

Some of the best users of social media are the people traditionally thought of as the weakest at marketing.  Authors have become experts at using Facebook, and in particular Twitter, to stay in touch with their readers and build their brands.  Neil Gaiman, for example, the British author of American Gods, Coraline and the Sandman comic book series, skips Facebook but maintains a blog on Tumblr and an active Twitter account with more than 1.65 million followers.

He uses his stream to talk about books, to interact with his fans and also to promote the events in which he participates with his wife, performer Amanda Palmer.

It would be great if we could put a figure on the value that sort of activity can bring for a business.

Fortunately, we can.

Gaiman recently tweeted that he had been offered $12,500 from a fast food company to tweet a recommendation to their restaurants.  That valued his followers at around 7.6 cents each.  (He turned the offer down.)

Or rather this offer valued the Twitter contacts as an advertising resource at 7.6 cents each. According to research firm Nielsen, the typical short-term return on an advertising spend is nine cents for every dollar.  That fast food company then was expecting Neil Gaiman’s 1.65 million followers to immediately spend at least $13,625 in their restaurants if Gaiman were to endorse them, valuing them at a little over 8 cents each.

Indirect Endorsements Are Lazy Advertising

But celebrity endorsements like these have limited effect.  They are what ad man hero Don Draper dismissed in Mad Men once as “lazy advertising.”  Neil Gaiman does not tweet about restaurants so the fast chain was hoping that his star power — and most importantly, the trust that his timeline has built with his followers — could translate into some cash.

Presumably if Neil Gaiman were to recommend a book, the result would be far more valuable.  And if he were to start talking about one of his own books, a novel that he was about to release, it would be more valuable still.  

That is where your business’s online presence kicks in.  It is much harder for small or medium-sized business to pick up a following as large as a superstar author’s.   And it is harder to build with corporate customers the same level of trust and personal closeness that Neil Gaiman has managed to build with his fans.

But all of that effort — the tweets and the images, the opinion-sharing and the responding — does have a real value.  

It is something that is easily forgotten as you are doing all of the social media activity that you are supposed to do to build a business.  There’s no immediate return from answering a tweet or posting your opinion about a new product accessory.  There is no sudden rush to your website when you write a comment about a conference you’re attending or a colleague you just met with a great idea.  

But all of that activity continues to build an asset.  It deepens the relationship you have with your followers — and it adds a few numbers to the value of that relationship so that when you’re ready to cash in with a product announcement, you can save more than 8 cents from every follower.

A new report (shown above) by email marketing firm Constant Contact and researchers Chadwick Martin Bailey has thrown up a bunch of interesting statistics about Twitter and the relationship between brands and customers on the site. Many of those figures, taken from a survey of 1,491 US-based consumers aged over 18, are reason to put a smile on any marketer’s face.

In particular:

• 60% of people are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following it.
• 50% of people are more likely to buy from a brand after following it.
• 75% of people who follow brands have never un-followed one.

For businesses that already have long lists of Twitter followers, that’s great news. It means that those lists are rich with both evangelists and customers, and they’re stable — a valuable asset indeed.

But here’s what really stands out from the survey. When it came to the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, the breakdown was:

• 64% — “I am a customer of the company”
• 61% — “To be the first to know information about the brand”
• 48% — “To receive discounts and promotions”
• 36% — “To gain access to exclusive content”
• 28% — “To receive content/information to re-tweet and share with others”

Just under half of brand followers then were looking for discounts while the top two reasons had nothing to do with anything as solid as saving money on their next purchase. Instead, the biggest factors driving people to follow a brand on Twitter — with all that says about the prospect’s willingness to provide recommendations, purchase and stay loyal — are a more amorphous sense of belonging.

People follow brands on Twitter because they associate themselves with the company and want to feel that they have a special relationship with it. It’s the same reason that Apple fanboys read sites like MacRumors and CultofMac, even though much of the information the sites contain is wrong and the accurate details filter into the mainstream press eventually anyway. They read because they’re already fanboys and keeping tabs on Apple’s rumors is what fanboys do.

Companies that don’t have Apple’s cult appeal will need to work a little harder. If people are following brand streams because they already feel a sense of loyalty, the hard work is being done before they reach the social media site. It’s being done through image, through the company’s story, through all of the branding techniques that marketers have used for years to build loyalty among customers.

It’s a valuable lesson to remember: social media sites like Twitter are invaluable tools for measuring brand loyalty, harnessing brand loyalty, generating referrals, sparking purchases and keeping customers loyal. But they’re not complete replacements for the traditional marketing methods that create that loyalty in the first place.

If we go back to the statistics above about the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, I would suggest that the top two statistics are because of the following three. In other words, use Twitter to offer the discounts/special offers and then you will gain more of those who like to be fans.

If the Internet had been built for marketers, converting your message to sales would have been straightforward. Leads would build up naturally in your contact lists and turning them into customers would take no more effort than posting a tweet with a link or writing an email with a limited-time offer.  But it doesn’t work.

It is often said that the Internet was built for information and for entertainment. The commercial applications became clear later, and that means the marketing tools online are blunter, clumsier, and less reliable than the kind of scripts handed out to telemarketers or the training undergone by corporate reps. When it comes to marketing through Twitter, for example, response rates can be low and conversions even lower. 

The reason is obvious:  How can I trust a stranger?

The conversion rates vary depending on the relationship between the tweeter and the reader. According to one analysis, the highest response rates are from members of communities such as churches, clubs, and organizations who are four times more likely to click a link in a tweet than followers of a business or a consumer site. 

Right or wrong: “I trust and know my social crowd.”  Prospects following tweets posted by a business will click a link only 2.2% of “reach,” with “reach” defined as the number of a profile’s followers multiplied by the number of tweets posted.

Obviously, an action from a prospect on Twitter isn’t just about the content of the tweet. With just 140 characters — minus the characters for the link — there will be little you can do to persuade someone to click through. The click-through rate will mostly be dictated by the nature of the relationship with the prospect. (And the sales will also depend on the quality of the copy on the other side of the link.)  

Think of a “tweet” as a reminder: “Hey, I am here.”

You can think of this as a microcosm of the entire sales process. A sale takes place when a prospect gains trust. Only when a salesperson assures the prospect that his money will deliver exactly what the prospect needs will the prospect make the purchase and walk away from the deal satisfied. 

All the presenting of benefits, the overcoming of objections, the attempts to identify stumbling blocks and reassure the prospect that you will deliver a solution to those problems are intended to build that trust.

A link placed in a Twitter timeline can be one attempt to close the deal. But before the deal is closed, you first have to build that relationship of trust.

Social Media Marketing is a technique with the “weakness” that the relationship is built slowly. Twitter is a small part of it, the least important actually.  Part of that is because of the way Twitter works. Tweets appear on a timeline and are pushed down the page quickly as new tweets pile in on top. If little more than 2.2% of your followers are clicking your links, it is partly because less than half have seen it. 

Repeating your tweets is one option, but a better choice is to make your tweet so valuable that readers click through to read it exclusively.

When your prospects trust your information to that degree, you have a level of trust high enough to feel confident that they will be clicking your links included in the tweet, too.