Have you noticed that many TV advertisements feature a Facebook logo and that celebrities are talking about their Twitter accounts nowaday?
This is because businesses are waking up to the fact that they need to be using Social Media Marketing alongside their offline marketing. Your website is still the hub of your online activities especially if you want to build a mailing list or sell anything but really savvy business owners are using that website and their social media profiles, along with direct response / internet marketing techniques to strengthen the relationship with their existing customers, and build a relationship with their “potential future customers”.
Jeff Bullas says “Digital marketing as a percentage of marketing spend including social media is growing much faster than traditional marketing. Ford has announced that it will be spending 25% of its marketing on digital which is 100% more than the market average of 12% according to Reuters and is concentrating a lot of dollars in social media competitions due to its success with its Ford Fiesta Movement campaign”. Read more here >>>
However, there is a right way and a wrong way to use Social Media to build your business. And while many companies are springing up to offer Social Media Services, beware the ones that use techniques such as automated tweets – which are percieved as spam and turn a potential future customer off, as quick as lightning.
The most successful companies are either assigning someone in-house to interact online for them, Twittering (which updates sites like Linked In, Ecademy etc), interacting with the visitors to their Pages on Facebook, OR they are, more and more often, hiring real human beings to do it for them.
These Social Media Managers, as they are coming to be called, are sociable creatures and often have been very good at networking too. They look after the Social Media Presence for a company; they sign into your account and “put on the hat” of that company for a time and interact online, for them, as if they WERE them.
Your Social Media Manager will seek out people who are interested in your product or service, or who are asking for recommendations, or referrals, who may be influencers in the niche (large followings), then they follow and interact with them in real time. They post links ot videos, blog postings, news items or articles of interest to your target market (having set up Google Alerts to bring those items to their notice).
They can also, at carefully selected intervals, post out promotional offers but the ratio of real content to sales messages has to be carefully managed. It’s much more effective to think of your website / blog as your main sales forum, with all your Social Media activity geared towards generating traffic to that sales forum.
To give you an idea, in the first company that we hooked up with a Twitter account (back in 2007, yes, we’ve been tweeting that long!) and Facebook Page, we noticed from our Google Analytics, that Twitter and Facebook were the second and third biggest sources of FREE traffic to our sites, after Google Organic Search Results.
Once you generate traffic to your site, then the role of your website is purely that of optimising conversion from traffic to subscribers – also known as hot, exclusive leads – and you can start split testing offers until sales start happening.
If you do not yet have a tried and tested system for creating and then converting your Social Media activities to traffic, subscribers and sales, why not book a Business Strategy Session today?