Continuing from where we left off from yesterday, here are steps three and four of our discussion.
Step 3- Creating and Maintaining Connections.
You have set realistic goals.You know what you want to say, and who you want to say it to.How come you have no listeners?
First thing to work on is capturing your own.No one wants to follow someone who is following 500 people, but has no followers.That’s like following a groupie, instead of following the band.Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your social media presence be.However, the quickest way to build is to go after your warm market.Get your strong relationships to follow.Start with your employees.Get your families involved. Some of the strongest marketing campaigns have started grassroot before they exploded into the mainstream.If you have strong relationships with your customers, get them involved.
Once you have the ball rolling, you can start with some incentives.FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, and Twitter should all be at the ready for an incentive based marketing campaign.You want people taking an active role in stopping by your location, whether physically (FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places) or just by saying you company name (Twitter).These are considered “Cold Market” and line up with your traditional marketing approach.Fun, short incentives are the most effective.“Show your tweet at the register” campaigns encourage interaction, following, and make the customer feel special.
Previously, people would do email campaigns, where they would send coupons, and state, “print this coupon for XXX savings.”What does this do for your business?It means you have a way of communicating with that one customer.However, if instead, you are telling your customer, “Tweet ‘@mycompany saved me 10%’ for 10% savings” not only is the customer happy, buying, and saving money, but they are telling their social group that you are saving them money.Which would you prefer?One customer’s email, or 50 customers coming into your store immediately to buy your product?
Step 4- Multiply Your Face.
One word – Branding.You have a webpage, and a channel on each and every social media outlet you can think of, but can the average Joe tell who you are?Does this look like your signature on the bottom of an email?
John Smith
www.facebook.com/mycompanyfacebook
www.youtube/mycompanypageonyoutube
If you aren’t uniform, you are harder to find.Don’t be hard to find.Sometimes, it is hard to stay uniform.If you are a small business, and have a common name, “Mike’s Auto Body” it is going to be hard to own this common a name on every domain.Therefore, be creative out of the box.When you create your website, go for “www.mikesautobodyMA.com” and then brand yourself as the only Mike’s auto in MA worth visiting. If you have to have a second name, make sure it’s just a second name, and not a third, forth, etc.
There are people out there that say, “Put a face to your company.Don’t have a corporate logo on your accounts.People want to talk to people, not to companies.”Let’s take a look at successful companies.The avatarfor CNN is the CNN logo.Google, Twitter, E! online, Coca-Cola, etc.All of the companies that people follow have their logo.People will follow companies, if they are companies that are worth following, and have successfully branded themselves.The only way to successfully brand yourself is to have uniformity.You can have lots of faces for your company.Since Step #2 was having your employees take an active role on your social media sites, you will have plenty of faces.
Check back tomorrow for Part 3, our final part of this series.
