2. •
•
•
•
Why social media works for
small businesses
How to listen first before
launching your campaign
How to create a social media
strategy
What elements make up a
successful campaign
@ericjohnellis
6. Will Social Media Work For You?
• People buy from
you for your
expertise
• Social media will
help your expertise
become more well
known
7. How Do You Get Started?
1. Listen first
2. Create a Strategy and a
plan before jumping in
3. Create a profile that helps
people verify your
legitimacy
9. Where Do You Get Started?
•
Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/minneapolis
•
Twitter http://www.twitter.com
•
Facebook Pages
http://www.facebook.com/pages/
•
Blogging
• http://wordpress.com/
• http://www.typepad.com/
•
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/
•
LinkedIn Company Page
http://www.linkedin.com/company/ad
d/show
•
Pinterest
https://pinterest.com/join/signup/
•
Google+ https://plus.google.com/
10. Sample Strategic Plan
Identify Objectives
•Restate your objective so that it is “SMART” (specific, measurable,
attainable, realistic, and time-based)
•Tie your objectives back to your overall company goals
Tie to your
overall goals
To make money and
to stay in business
To increase the
number of new
“clients”
To stay connected
with clients and
provide better
customer service
Objective
Increase “client” base by
10% in next 6 months, recruit
new “clients”, draw traffic to
website
Keep the local community
updated on happenings,
discounts, events in increase
sales by 5% in the next
month
Understand how “clients” use
social media and monitor
what “clients” are saying
about your company
increasing client
engagement by 20% year
over year
11. Create Your Strategy
• Identify Audience
• Who do you need to reach to meet your objective? Why this
target?
• Is this a target group identified in your company’s
communications plan?
• What key points do you want to make with your audience?
• What social media tools are they currently using?
• Where do those people live online?
• Do you have a built-in community, or do you need to create one?
Free tip: Using Facebook Custom Audiences, you can upload your
email database into Facebook to see if your current customers are
already on Facebook by matching the email address you have to
the one associated with Facebook. That match rate could
determine if your customer database is already on Facebook.
12. Turning Strategies into Actions, Find & Follow, Listen & Learn
Build A Listening Dashboard
If I told you that you could
listen in on your
customers and
prospects…
Would you listen?
17. RSS
• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) allows
you to subscribe to any website that has
one of these
in the address bar. You
can then track every site you’re
subscribed to without having to go to
each individual site.
26.
Who will implement?
–
–
–
–
Can you allocate a minimum of five hours per week to your
strategy once you've passed the learning curve?
Do you have the most efficient work flow and tasks in place?
Do you need any outside expertise?
Will your work depend on any other resource or person?
28. Some Guidelines for social media
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Be transparent and state where you work
Never represent yourself or your organization in
a false or misleading way
When disagreeing, keep it appropriate and polite
Behave diplomatically if writing about
competition
Never comment on anything related to
legal matters
Never participate in social media when the topic
being discussed may be considered a crisis
situation
Be smart about protecting yourself, your
privacy, and your company’s confidential
information
29. What Do You Take Away?
• Put a plan in place before you jump in
• Your blog or website should be the center of your
social marketing efforts
• Establish a consistent habit of posting, and stick
to it
• Mix up your content types
• Integrate, integrate, integrate
• Use calls to action to entice people to stick around
• Keep an eye on what people are saying about you
and your competitors
• Measure, measure, measure
Hello thanks for taking time to tune in today! My name is Eric Ellis and I’m excited to present some social media strategies to you today.
I’d like you to think of this as a valuable learning opportunity…
A chance to hear about how social media can help your business be successful
Ask questions
And don’t forget to follow our deluxe corp social channels for articles. You can also follow me at ericjohnellis on Twitter.
To start things off, I want you to know that social media is still alive and well and still actually growing! This graph from Pew Research shows growth in the major social media channels out there like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. And who’s responsible for this growth? If you thought it was the younger generation… You’d be wrong actually! Fast Company released statistics in November 2013 that saw the 55-64 year old growth on Twitter specifically has grown 79% since 2012. Facebook grew 46% for that same demographic! And 93% of businesses are on social media! I still have conversations with people today that consider social media as a fad, or a flash in the pan. I’m here to tell you that social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and all the others may not exist forever, BUT, social media will only expand and take on new experiences.
Not only will new social media network channels arise, the ways at which we experience them will also change. From Pew Research, 2013 statistics showed that 40% of all social media experiences happen on a cell phone or smartphone. This is a huge finding! Not only do you reach people via social media where they live and work… but you ALSO reach them every where they go. Keep this in mind as you plan your marketing campaigns. If you are a brick and mortar retail store or have products in brick and mortar stores, realize that you can ACTUALLY be reaching your customer while he or she is INSIDE your store, shopping your products. Or that your customer may actually be comparing products side by side while on retail shelves.
So, let's take a look at the social media landscape. There are hundreds of different social media channels, we'll talk about how you can determine which ones might be good for your business. It can seem overwhelming at first but I suggest you start out with only a few and learn to do them well before you expand. Not every new social media channel that comes out is the perfect fit for every business.
You got into business for a reason, The most common mistake with social media is thinking your expertise is common knowledge. Just because you know your industry like the back of your hand doesn't mean that everyone does. You can use social media to share your expertise.
People already hire you or buy from you because of your expertise, you don’t have to be a celebrity to be relevant on the web. As long as you know your business and share that knowledge, people will hire you for your expertise.
You already are someone who has valuable information, is a trusted source and knows how to communicate in a friendly, effective, and possibly even, entertaining manner as a business owner. Use that!
Social media and the Internet have leveled the playing field for small business owners, helping them foster closer relationships with clients and identify potential customers. Although small business owners are under much pressure to generate new customers, they also spend time nurturing and maintaining their existing clients as well and social media is the perfect venue for this.
I hear from a lot of people that they are overwhelmed with where to start. So, how do you get started?
Being intentional about how you approach social media and what roll it plays in your overall marketing plan is key. Creating a strategy from which to move forward will help you organize and determine resources necessary to be successful. If someone besides yourself is managing your online communities make sure you empower them to speak about your products and services, arm them with useful information and have a plan in place for escalating an issue. Be aware of privacy and have a policy in place that everyone adheres to. Being personal and transparent is also key, people like to know who they are speaking with. Integrate your social media content. If you write a blog post share it out on your other channels, create a video to accompany it and post it on YouTube, integration is the key. And remember, Facebook is NOT a strategy!
What social media channels should I be on? This is a tricky question and totally depends on your business. Let’s start by saying that I suggest everyone should have a website with a blog regardless of what you do. It will be the hub of all your articles and activity and house all of the information that you share out on other social networks. As an example, a blog is a repository for all of our content. Once there is a post in place I can share it out on social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Once you become somewhat experienced at blogging you can decide what other social media platforms you want to use based on where you see the most conversations for your industry taking place.
We’ll go into how to find out where you clients are a little later, but I wanted to share with you the links that will help you get started. You may have already seen this funny little breakdown on social media sites, but I think it’s a funny way of explaining these sites.
It takes less than 5 minutes to set up a Twitter Account, not much time for a Facebook Page either. It's as easy as 1-2-3. But before you do (even if you’ve done so already) think about what you are trying to achieve with social media. Is it more customers, more exposure, more sales? You need to take some time to answer and reflect on your responses. Write them down as we did in the sample here. Make sure they are SMART, that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time based. If you are unsure how to put in place objectives you may want to seek guidance from the right professionals. This is an important step, don't skip it!
You need to identify your audience by asking yourself these types of questions and then using the listening techniques I’ll go over next to answer some of them.
Here is where we can answer some of those earlier questions. What social media tools are they currently using? Where do your clients and prospects live online?
So, we’ll start by building a listening dashboard
If you don’t already have a google account, now is the time to set one up. You will need it to take advantage of several services that Google provides.
You will want to determine what keywords you’d like to listen for. As an example, if you are a Pizza shop you might listen for “I love pizza”, “Im hungry for pizza”, pizza coupon, “good place for pizza”, “good place to eat”, or some of your competitors names, have a number of Google Alerts set up to be delivered to my email daily. Occasionally I set some up to be delivered in real-time. This tool covers the web well, but not social media.
You can use Google blog search to find industry related blogs that you would like to follow. In this case we used the key words commercial remodel to find relevant and related blogs. You can then subscribe to Blog alerts which will send you a notice when these blogs have new posts.
I recommend setting up a newsfeed that you can peruse on a daily basis. I would include competitors’ blogs, sector blogs, internal blogs, news feeds, and any other online information you want to keep track of. There are a number of news aggregators out there including Netvibes, NewsGator, Feed Demon and others. Find one you like. You can manage feeds, label them, and even share your feed collection with others.
Facebook some time ago also released “Graph Search”. This is essentially the Google Search of Facebook. If you really want to see who your target audience is, and you already have a Facebook presence, try typing in “People who like my page”. This will give you a quick download of people complete with their about section populated. You can even narrow down further to refine by demographic. Especially if you have a smaller community, this is a great way to research your audience by seeing their interests, where they work, what they do for work and even where they live.
With over 2,000 new tweets posted every second, there's a heck of a lot of information to wade through on Twitter, especially if you're looking for something specific. I use Twitters advanced search option when I want to get valuable Twitter search results. I also use a basic search in Twitter with the phrase “my new business” because we want to make sure we capture and celebrate new small businesses that start up every week! We then reach out directly to those identified with the phrase “my new business” to offer them words of encouragement, advice or even offers if it feels right. It’s shocking I’m sure for a brand to directly reach out to users like this, but it’s also powerful! Over 50% of those that we reach out to directly respond, 40% of them turn around and follow us! What other marketing channel gets you these response rates?
Social Mention is good for real-time searches. Depending on how strong and precise your search term is, you will get good results. You can see from the dashboard above that there are two ways to search: on social platforms or on the web platforms on the “All” pull-down menu on top. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works well for you.
Finally, here are a few reasons why you should monitor your brand online:
Discover early warning signs of negative or false information that can trigger a crisis, if left unattended.
Identify your key critics and watchdogs; key influencers and advocates.
Identify which social media channels best suit your organizational culture, and which ones your stakeholders frequent.
Follow your competitors and discover what is engaging and trending in your sector.
Uncover ethical blind spots your organization may have.
This is just a short list of free tools you can piece together for a good monitoring system. Do you have a monitoring system set up? How does it work?
Now that you have your listening dashboard in place and have a better understanding of what social media channels you want to be in then, take an inventory of what social media channels where you are currently participating and where you are in the process with each. You will need a home for all of your content to sit, do you have a website or a blog that you can make your central repository? List also the channels that you would like to participate in in the coming year based on what you have learned from listening. This helps you build a road map for your plan.
Then take a look at each one of the channels and the purpose each will fulfill. Determine how you are going to measure what success looks like. Is it “Likes”, followers to your page or are you looking for possible customer leads?
With Twitter you can look at how many followers you have, how many times you are mentioned, like the example here or how many Retweets you receive on a specific tweet.
You can also use your blog in the same manner.
So, you may wonder how am I going to come up with that much content? I’ve got a few ideas for you:
Think of your fans and followers as your VIPs. Give them things your transient customers won’t see:
Offer a peak behind the scenes – photos of your warehouse, pictures of your employee outtings and so on
Put your website content to work – write a short paragraph about one of your services and link back to that page on your website
Answer the questions clients ask most often – Do a running Q & A
Share photos to increase location and product awareness
Social exclusive promotions
Hold contests
Ask followers for new product feedback
People become loyal to other people, not brands. If you run a pizza shop you can spend time on Twitter talking about your passion for pizzas and your history with the pizza making, you can talk about your quest for finding the right ingredients and interact with other people who have similar passions.
Social media is a fantastic way to break down the barriers of facelessness. By showing your potential customers the people or the secret sauce behind the business you are giving yourself a chance to be different from all the other competition. They will become loyal to you.
Now that you have a plan in place, you will better understand what kinds of resources you’ll need to implement it and keep it current. Do you need to bring someone in from the outside to help? I wouldn’t suggest hiring your nephew for this, hire a reputable company that can show you some solid past results. I know Deluxe offers social media set up and ongoing support among others that are out there.
Remember, social media strategy is cyclical and also ever-changing. Many great strategies have been thwarted by unsuspecting circumstances!
Post meaningful, respectful comments
Stick to your area of expertise
Use common sense and common courtesy
Behave diplomatically if writing about competition, have the facts straight and appropriate permissions
So, what should you take away from all of this? Put a plan in place that enhances what you are already doing for marketing, social media should be just one piece of your overall strategy. Remember, you’ll need a place for your content to sit whether it’s a blog or your website. Use what you find out by listening and monitoring posts to understand what content resonates with your audience. Experiment and mix things up. And measure to see what resonates!
Remember, you’re unique and your business is unique. You have something to offer that sets you apart from big brands. You have a unique brand story and voice. Use this to your advantage. Here’s a sample of my latest blog post on deluxe.com/blog. Two big ways you can WIN in social media is 1) Commit: commit to using and implementing great social media experiences, regularly! 2) Converge: Converge your marketing channels with social media. Use social media as another form of touch-point to your customer. If you use email marketing, direct marketing, converge those with social media!
Lastly, follow our Deluxe Corp channels for small business related content and experiences.
