If you have been thinking of marketing your brand or products using social media but have not gone about doing it, what are you waiting for?
Don’t ever let technology or unfamiliarity pose as a barrier to your progress.
To help you get a head start on social media marketing, here are a few tips that I think are essential for success.
1. Understand Your Consumers
Consumers belong to different groups and understanding their group characteristics can help a lot in deciding which social media tool to use for your messages. It serves, as a good reminder that just because social media is hot does not mean all its tools are suitable for you.
Take a look at the Technographics ladder taken from Groundswell, a book written by Charlene LI and Josh Bernoff.
Say your target consumers are “Creators”, what do you do and what do you engage in? One thing you can conclude from this is that your consumers are social media savvy. They are willing to participate and that’s good news for you!
Get them to make videos about your brand, create ad banners and badges for them to place in their own blogs and let them design your next packaging. The possibilities are endless but the key is to let your consumers promote the brand for you.
Pringles Design Your Own Can
Charity: Water Ad Banners
Nonetheless, you will realize that most consumers fall under “Joiners”. They visit social media networking sites, read blogs and comments and watch videos. They don’t exactly generate much content but they have presence online and are receptive to the media.
What you need to do is basically to engage them. Be where they are and get them interested to watch, read and hear about you.
Carl’s Junior YouTube Channel
Nike’s Online Resources
Starbucks Facebook Page Updates Fans on Events
2. Always be Personal and Engaging
Yes I have been nagging about this but this is truly important. The difference between having a website and a social media tool is the 2-way communication that social media can offer you. Respond to your followers and fans, respect their opinions and provide value to them.
Starbucks® Gets Personal on Twitter
Seventeen Magazine Facebook Friend of the Month
Seventeen Magazine MySpace Fun Stuff
3. Use Analytics
Deciding which social media tool to engage in is difficult. Deciding on how to utilize it is even more challenging. Most of the time we make a decision based on intuition and experience. However, this does not need to be the case once you have made the first step into trying out certain selected tools and strategies.
Using analytics can help you find out which social media tools are bringing your website consistent traffic and fulfilling your goals. Most of the time, the results are rather surprising.
If you think Facebook would bring you most of the traffic and hence, put more effort into it, you might be disappointed if upon measurement that isn’t the case.
In fact, neglected tools might work better. Always keep your options open and look out for new media tools to extend reach. Sometimes from the analytics, you will notice traffic coming from new social media sources. Check them out and see if they can help you achieve your goals!
Be careful when using web analytics to measure social media ROI. Check out our article on 5 common mistakes when measuring social media ROI.
