11 Tips to Keep Your Social Media Marketing Focused

From SMT Magazine
Monday, September 17, 2012 | Bruce Johnston, LinkedIn Evangelist & Sales Coach

Today I want to share with you a mix of key concepts that should be integrated into your social media marketing (SMM) plan, along with a couple of ideas that are easy to get mixed up.

What you want to accomplish:

• Content must be interesting and it must help the reader with a problem that he or she has.
• The reader should want to read more content like this from you.
• The reader should to want to share this content with his colleagues.
• The reader should to want to know more about your company.
• The reader should to want to talk with you.

Don’t Go Nuts Right Away

“Go nuts” doesn’t sound very businesslike, but I think it conveys the concept very well. Huge campaigns take huge time, effort, and money. Ramp up steadily and see what’s working and what isn’t.

Don’t Confuse Easy with Effective

I see this all the time. Using Facebook and Twitter to just send company news. I can just see the company executives going “Hmph. It’s just as I thought--this whole social media thing is a crock.” One of the concepts that all kinds of people miss is that SMM isn’t free money. You don’t just post anything online and wait for the money to roll in. SMM is like anything else in business or in life. You tend to get results out of it in relation to quantity and quality of effort put in. What you call a "brand awareness campaign” I may call a "waste of time.”

Join Conversations in Industry & User Groups

This is part of  “go where your customers are.” Contribute. Say something interesting. Get noticed. There are so many blatant sales pitches in some of these forums that a thoughtful, articulate comment will have twice the impact.

Keep it Short & Simple

People have short attention spans. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. The fact is, everyone has so much on their plates these days that they just don’t have the time to devote to long content. A 30-minute how-to video on YouTube may be great, but sectioning it into 10 three-minute videos is much better. And maybe 15 two-minute videos would be better still. Keep your content short and simple and to the point.

Be consistent: Don’t Mix Business with Personal

If you are using your Twitter account as a business platform, stop using it for personal use. While social media is less formal than most of us are used to in the business world, remember that you are using it for business. You don’t want to confuse your business reader by interjecting Tweets on your review of the new Batman movie.

Do I Need to Say it Again? Have Great Content

Say I have a network of 1,000 Twitter followers, 1,000 Facebook fans, and 1,000 LinkedIn connections. If you send a tweet with an update that you are exhibiting at a tradeshow is that valuable content I want to share with my network? Pretty unlikely.
But, if you tweet and reference a story about a novel new way you have solved a quality problem that I and my professional peers wrestle with every day? Well, that, my friend, gets shared.

Measure Potential Viewers

Measure potential impressions, that is, the number of times your content could have been read. Examples of this in the old world: The potential number of impressions for an ad on TV is equal to the total viewership of that show. In my case, I post to my blog three times a week, then link the blog to my LinkedIn account, where the posts can be seen as status updates by my 1,000 connections. So, I have a potential 3,000 impressions a week.

Measure Content Interactions

This is where you count re-tweets, shares, visits to your blog, likes and similar activities. Count the times people are actually interacting with your content.

Count Engagement Interactions

Count comments, questions, opt-ins, and any interaction the reader has with you.

Experiment and try different things

Try a lot of little changes. Adjust the length of blog posts. Publish content at different times of the day. Experiment with different headlines. There are a thousand little things you can do. Your job is to always be striving to optimize your content and its delivery such that you maximize your opportunities for engagement.

There’s a lot to learn with SMM. And a lot of things to do, and do well, to get the really spectacular results that are possible.

Twenty years ago, the new tool was e-mail. Completely new concept, something completely different that no one was used to. In many companies, we saw a lot of resistance. In 10 years, it went from no one using it to everyone using it.
Now, SMM is the new tool available to you. You will use it. It’s just a question of whether you’d rather be one of the first or one of the last.

Strengthen Your Marketing

 From Semplice Industry Marketing

Industrial companies today are struggling to get an appreciable return on their marketing dollar. It's not surprising considering the challenges companies like yours are faced with:

• Cost per visitor reached at trade shows has been trending sharply upward since 2005
• Trade publication print circulation continues its decline while at the same time ad prices rise to cover increased printing and postal costs
• Actual digital readership of trade publications is not yet bridging the gulf
• Industry publications are folding, merging or going "online only," reducing the number of outlets available for your message
• 31% of banner ads are blocked by user software
• Banner ads that aren't blocked are often placed in what have become "no-see" zones on web pages 
• When people do click through to your site from an ad, you can't tie those clicks to revenue
• Social media is the hot new thing, but how do you turn that into something that actually meets your bottom-line marketing objectives?

The system isn't broken—your company just may not have had a chance to adapt to its changes yet.

Free new guide, Get the Marketing Results You Need (to Meet YourTargets & Grow Your Company), gives you the basis for getting your marketing on track so that you can bring more money in the door while lowering your cost to acquire it.

New to Social Media Marketing? Your First Campaign

Bruce Johnston, LinkedIn Evangelist & Sales Coach, SMT Magazine

You’ve convinced the powers that be at your company that this social media phenomenon is something that can help your company or organization increase sales. Now what? In putting together your first campaign you need to do two things right above all else: You need to know when to be modest and when to be aggressive. Getting this right will make your first campaign a success.

Be Aggressive in Your Research

Many social media gurus insist that you should just begin publishing and figure it out as you go along. I think this is lousy advice. It doesn’t take much work to get an idea what your readers and potential customers want to hear. They want help with their problems. You may be able to guess what some of their problems are, but it doesn’t take that much more work to call them and find out for sure. I prefer what I call the 80% rule: Get to the point where you think you’re 80% right, and your readers will help you adjust and get the remaining 20%.

Be Modest in Your Goals

You may have grandiose ideas in your head and, for now, that’s exactly where they should stay. This is going to be your first effort, your pilot program. You want it to go well, so start with something simple. If you envision putting out content from nine different people on five topics from three of your company’s departments over a blog, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, with all this generating hundreds of sales leads...maybe you should scale those back. Stop thinking total war and start thinking skirmishes instead. My recommendation is to run a modest program whose main goal is to show that it can work and is worth investing more time and money.

Be Modest with Your Channels

How about you just use one channel to start. Work at understanding what works on a blog or on Twitter. Become good and really understand a channel before you add the next one. And, while we’re at it, make your first channel one that you have some familiarity with already. See who you have that are already Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn users. Put these talents to good use.

Be Modest with the Amount of Scheduled Content

Thinking of five blog posts a week? How about two or three instead? And make the posts short. Your readers' attention spans are short; they’re on the run all day. Class does not equal mass in social media marketing. It’s much easier to expand your content offering as you hit your stride than it is to cut back on it. The optics on cutting back never looks good to your readers and potential customers.

Be Aggressive in Your Listening, Monitoring, and Analysis

With these three areas, it’s not so much a case of spending much time and effort, it’s a case of most companies not putting in any effort at all. How many times have you seen a blog where the entry just trails off, or a company using Facebook where all the entries suddenly stop? I call this “abandoned social syndrome” (we’ll not use the acronym for now, thank you). These people just shrugged their shoulders and said “this isn’t working” and gave up. Instead, listen to what is going on; listen to your reader’s comments and questions. Everything said, and sometimes the things not said, gives you clues as to what you could do next.

A 7-Point Checklist for Effective Social Media Marketing

Bruce Johnston, LinkedIn Evangelist & Sales Coach

Here are the key things you have to do, and the key decisions you need to make to have a good, workable social media marketing plan.

First, decide on your goals. You may wish to use social media to consolidate, improve, or even change your image or brand. You may wish to generate sales revenue. You may wish to use it to conduct customer or product research using surveys and interaction with your followers or connections.

In structuring your goals, make them as simple and measurable as possible. Unless you have an atrocious brand image, I recommend going for more sales leads (I have yet to talk to someone who has said, "No, thanks. We have quite enough sales leads."). A well-executed sales lead campaign will have the side effect of positive improvement in your brand image.

Second, choose your media channel or channels. Many companies suffer from over reach in their social media campaigns--they try to do too much, underestimate the commitment required, and wind up with meagre content to share over their social media, occasional posts, and low-interest levels from their target market. They wonder what happened to their grand plans and ultimately give up. The simple fact is that one or two channels may give you 90% of the effectiveness that seven channels would.

I mention two channels because one channel is almost always your corporate blog. We will come back to blogging in future columns, but blog is usually the centre of your social media strategy.

For B2B I am partial to LinkedIn as the preferred social media. Aside from offering multiple ways to get your message out, familiarity with LinkedIn provides other benefits. For marketing, LinkedIn is a good place to gather competitive intelligence. And for sales, LinkedIn is a great place for searching for target companies and for getting in-depth information on the people at those companies.

Third, allocate resources. You’ve figured out what you have to do; now you need to figure out who’s going to do it. Who’s in charge overall? Who’s writing the content? Who’s participating in forums like the LinkedIn groups mentioned above? How often are you doing all these things? Who's is following up on inquiries?

Fourth, make sure your content is great. It needs to have value for your target audience and it can’t be a sales pitch. This is where most people get stuck. They think that if they write about “things you need to look for in a (their product area) vendor” it won’t be seen as a rather transparent sales pitch. Wrong. It will. If you do this sort of thing, the market will give you the ultimate sign of social media rejection: They will ignore you. I’ll make content the subject of a separate column, because it’s the one of the key areas where social media campaigns fail.