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An Intro To Social Media
The document provides an overview of how social media can enhance communication and engagement strategies for brands and events. It outlines the importance of setting goals, creating interactive content, and monitoring audience feedback while citing examples like Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and BMW’s X1 launch to demonstrate effective social media use. Key recommendations include listening to audience sentiments, creating valuable content, and tailoring approaches based on specific objectives.
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An Intro To Social Media
- 1. AN INTRO TOSOCIAL MEDIA Sarah Willis
- 2. “The term SocialMedia refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue.”
- 3. How can SocialMedia work for you? • Research networks / key competitors • Target specific audiences and groups • Viral propaganda • Word of mouth/ Advocacy • Compliments Marketing Strategy • Continuous engagement pre/ during / post event • Tailor your product / event to meet needs of customer • Search engine visibility • Market research / feedback on event • Increase credibility within the industry & share knowledge
- 4. How can SocialMedia work for you? • Two-way communication • Ensure your product/ event is fit for purpose • Allows you to create an extended online community • Keep customers up to date and interested in your brand • Increased attendance at events • Create a buzz further afield about your event • Extend internally – staff forums to increase staff morale & satisfaction and update staff on news • Upload video and audio of your event • Offer Exclusive offers for loyal customers
- 5. Reputation Sales & Marketing Management Research & insight Engage with the ‘right’ Provides the opportunity Better understand what target customer groups to manage a brand customers think of your online with a passion for reputation programme brand, products and your brand/event and and improve consumer services and the industry as a whole. opinion of your brand. communications. Achieve high levels of React in in near real time Provides your brand with awareness, interests and to praise, questions or the opportunity to engagement in your issues. convey its personality products and services by and connect with informing, entertaining Proactively empower customers and prospects or being useful. fans to advocate in a more informal messaging further. manner.
- 6. Suggested Approach 1. Decideyour goals. 2. Determine what you want social media to do for you. 3. Set your Strategy to include the tools you will use and how active you will be. 4. Pre plan what you are going to post, share, tweet, like or bookmark. 5. Decide what activities will you participate in to build interaction. 6. Monitor your Strategy. Measure your audiences and results and be prepared to change it over time according to audience behavior /feedback.
- 7.
- 8. Barack Obama’s PresidentialCampaign • Over 3 million individual donors were mobilised through social media • Motivated over 2m social networking participants • Created and promoted more than 200,000 offline events across the country • Total of 6.5million donations online • $500 million in donations online • More than 13m people provided email addresses to the campaign website over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 types of messages • Over 2 billion e-mails landed in inboxes • The campaign website helped create over 2 million user profiles • There were over 400,000 blog entries • People spent more than 14 million hours watching over 1,000 Obama campaign-related videos on YouTube • There were over 50m views of Obama Campaign via YouTube • 1.2 billion minutes of YouTube view time
- 9. BMW launch ofthe X1 BMW have dedicated a whole Facebook page to the X1 to target younger audiences and only releasing partial or blurred images until the car was officially launched.
- 10. Getting started • Listening– Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? Radian6, BuzzGain, Crimson Hexagon • Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication • Comment/Communicate – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on various channels, encouraging them to visit you
- 11. Some things tothink about… • Who will be in charge of your Social Media? • Set Guidelines • Set a risk management plan • Have audience in mind • Keep your content valid and interesting • RT interesting news from others/ reply to comments • Hootsuite allows you to update Twitter, facebook and linkedIn all at once if you want them all to promote the same message • Your online presence will be about online branding, educating your customer and engaging the public
- 12. Top Tips • ApplyGoogle analytics to measure success of your facebook page • Offer a custom welcome page / sell yourself • Make it interactive • ‘Tease’ your audience • Give audience all the info • Recognise fans / loyal followers (fan of the day/ VIP guest passes to events)
- 13. And lastly…. • Youhave to learn to use social media the right way for your own needs • There is no one size fits all social media strategy • What works for some may not work for you • When promoting any event/brand/product always provide a link to your website/ brands website • Measure your approach • Ensure it is fit for purpose • Change messages according to your annual strategy, business targets, aims and objectives
- 14. Any Questions? Sarah Willis @ 2Communicate
Editor's Notes
- #4 Twitter, Facebook, MySpace: These are just a few of the growing number of online social communities out there on the web. These are great places to make friends and keep in touch with old ones but there is also a growing consensus that social media sites have great marketing value that can be leveraged to advertise your event or business. Offering opportunities to find other key competitors and build networks with like for like businesses. Just imagine...let's say you organise a marathon...there are thousands of online communities out there where people gather every day to discuss running tips, conditioning routines, the events they have completed and the events that they are thinking of registering for. This is exactly the audience you want to market your event to! The trick is to find a way make a presence for yourself in these groups and generate a following of your own. Most of these sites do not offer conventional advertising opportunities for businesses. Let's face it, if you are going to talk with your friends and discuss your favorites hobbies, you do not want to be barraged with pop up windows and tile advertisements. Social media sites generally do not offer advertising space because they know they will lose visitors and the number of visitors they have is the number one indication of how popular they are, which in turn will recruit more users. So here's the key to marketing your event to these groups of enthusiasts: become another member of the group! Simply immerse yourself in the group and interact with them. Share training tips, provide useful and valuable feedback to the topic of conversation in the forum, and post videos that would be of interest to community members. For all your postings, include the name of your event and link to your event website in your signature. The key is to advertise subtly. Rather than yell and shout about how great your event is, make some friends and then in the process post a few photos of your event from last year, talk about other events in the area and mention you have your own, offer some free merchandise with your event logo on it...before you know it, one person will tell another, then that person will tell someone else. All of the sudden, there is a buzz in the community and people are reaching out to you for more information about your event and where they can go to learn more. While in theory this looks quite easy to do, it can be challenging to break into an established community and not come off as a spammer or strictly a salesperson. But if done right, social media marketing can be an extremely inexpensive and effective method deploying the best type of advertising: word of mouth.
- #6 Suggested 4 social media platforms to target are facebook, twitter, youtube and linkedinAll offering: Sales & marketing – ensure you are targeting and marketing to the right people. Reputation management – create advocates for your event and brand. Research insight – understand your customer to ensure you deliver an event they will attend.
- #7 1. What are your goals? What do you want social media to do for you?2. How do you achieve the goals? Knowing what you want, what then is your plan of action to get things moving? Under these you might have to consider:What tools will you use?How active will you be?What activities will I apply in my profile pages so that everything I post, share, tweet, like or bookmark will give people the idea of what my business is all about?What activities do I participate in to build interaction? What content from others that I find relevant to my business do I recommend and share to my community to keep things tied in?3. How do I know what activities I’m doing are working or not working? What else can I add into my strategy to improve it and get better results?
- #8 President Obama began his campaign with a YouTube video called ‘it begins with us’. Obama used social media to gain his supporters, and put himself out there. He has over 1.5 million friends on MySpace and Facebook, and he currently has over 45,000 followers on Twitter. This personal activity in social networks allows him to quickly get the word out across multiple platforms.Obama and YouTubeBarack Obama has done a great job of making sure his speeches sound as good on YouTube in their entirety as they do on the evening news with just a clip. He's also gambled on YouTube's audience by creating a strong presence on the website. Historically, young voters have been high on enthusiasm but low on voter turnout. But Obama has been able to utilize social media to buck that trend.Obama and Social NetworkingMy.BarackObama allows users to create their own profile complete with a customized description, friends list and personal blog. They can also join groups, participate in fund raising, and arrange events all from an interface that is both easy-to-use and familiar to any Facebook or MySpace user.
- #10 BMW owns and maintains 54 separate Facebook pages pertaining to its various geographic regions, business segments and products, each of which were evaluated for this study.
- #11 Listening: Find out who is talking about your product, discover everything from customer age, to gender and location. Insights provides you with the details you need to not only forge stronger connections than ever before with your fan base, but to also to further develop your social media strategy. Insights even lets you discover trends you weren’t sure existed.Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication. This might include blogging, making video or audio, creating email newsletters, and anything else you’re building to contribute something to the space. It might be posting those event photos in Flickr and on Facebook. Whatever it is, creating content of some kind should take up 1/4 of your social media efforts, as this is the way you get found. Search engines thrive on new content. Humans seek out new material. The more you can be helpful, the better your opportunitiesfor Commenting/Communicating – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on the various channels where they reach you. If that’s Twitter, email, or wherever you hang out, fine. In the commenting timeframe, I also include sharing. Be sure to tweet links to great articles, use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Facebook share, and all the other various tools that help people find the good stuff. In Google reader, a simple SHIFT-S gives an article a whole lot of new potential fans. In here, I might also add the act of linking in and connecting with people on various networks.
- #13 Here are some examples of some pages already set up by various brands. Offer a Custom Welcome PageMany of the most highly engaged Facebook fan pages have leveraged the ability to take non-fans to a custom welcome page instead of taking them directly to their wall.Notice how Bare Escentuals features there award winning product line which is probably what drove the visitor to the page in the first place.2. Make it interactive: The biggest advantage a Facebook Fan page offers is the ability to interact with your customers - the opportunity to dialogue. Make sure to highlight this interactivity on the welcome tab. Notice how BMW shows a video that features two of their fans. I also like the design of their call-to-action. Another way you can make your page interactive is by adding a bit of personalization to your Facebook Fan page and adding your visitors name to the page.3.. Tease your audience. Depending on your brand and on what you are offering on yourFacebook fan page you may not want to open your kimono all at once. I have seen many pages like Red Bull use a graphic that teases their visitors to like them first before they engage with your content. A note of caution here: a. people must have some really strong reasons to like your brand in the first place b. the content you offer after the tease better not disappoint them.4. Give them all the info. I highly suggest you have an additional tab to talk about the people behind your company and don’t forget to fill out all the information on your info tab (including several links) and on your about section.