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84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family and friends about products – making these recommendations the information source ranked highest for trustworthiness.
So with this in mind you can understand the influence Facebook is having on company brands and services. A simple like and share can bring you straight into your consumers living room with a personal endorsement and with consumers spending up to 2 hours a day on social media platforms it is a platform that business can not afford to ignore.
However to many business are not utilising Social Media with the respect that it deserves nor the online consumer. It is simply not enough to post and comment expecting a like and sale you need to treat Social Media as a fundamental element of your business.
This blog post will focus on the 7 core steps for your business to actually get your business social media to provide a legitimate bottom line return.
1) Have a social strategy that aligns with a clear business objective
To often we are asked to provided a social media campaign for our clients that have just been bolted onto the marketing strategy with no clear goals or KPI’s. Even worse the campaign typically does not even reflect the actual business product or service. So integrated your social media into your overall marketing plan complete your traditional marketing with the real time customer engagement offered by social media platforms.
2) Define a clear role for social with your traditional marketing.
“TV is still king, then papers and magazines, then radio, but social media is right down there in terms of influence” says Joe Twyman at pollsters YouGov in relation to the great “Social Media” General Election of 2015. Again, to often, we have seen traditional marketing campaigns been discarded by our clients in lieu of the considerably cheaper and vastly popular option of Social Media. @InternautMedia we recommend that we initially work your social media marketing around your traditional marketing and balance both approaches. Then when you start to see the continual results of online engagement you should review your traditional marketing.
3) Your online activity reflects the scale of your business.
If your business objective is to drive penetration of a select product into a niche marketplace, why is your social media activity focusing on engaging the mass public? Marketers should not loss sense of the demographic focus of there business and target only where their product will sell.
4) Your content won’t go viral by itself alone – you have to work at it.
It is a rarity for content to be so good that it will go viral all by itself. Many a production agency has convinced a brand manager that their content will be so good it will go viral all on its own and yet it never happens.
So what is Viral – YouTube personality Kevin Nalty, aka Nalts, asks the question “How many views do you need to be viral?” In 2011 he said, “A few years ago, a video could be considered “viral” if it hit a million views.” But Nalts updated that definition. He said, “A video, I submit, is “viral” if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3-7 day period.
So bearing this in mind prepare to put the work in online if you want to go viral.
5) Remember Facebook is friends first; not business.
To often business forget that Facebook is used for social communication and interaction with friends and family. As we say at Internaut Media view Facebook as being a guest in someones home; so treat it accordingly and with the respect that it deserves. Make sure your campaign is one that engages your customer base. Your content must be relevant to your product and its customer. Do not champion your product or service – champion your customer instead.
6) If you publish you need to respond sooner rather than later.
Remember that while you may schedule your posts for when their customer demographic is online you are not scheduled to respond. Make sure that you have a defined turn around time for all of your responses to your customer queries, comments and posts online. Share this time with your customers online and on your social media platforms and finally make sure you stick to it 🙂
7) You will have to pay to be seen on Facebook if you want sales.
With the decline of organic reach on Facebook no campaign will truly work for you and your business unless you use Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is still the most inexpensive marketing option within bot traditional and online sectors. It also works as it allows you to post directly onto your targeted consumer audience. Not only that the data that it captures allows you to enhance your campaign to ensure a greater return in engagement and audience capture.
As you can see all of the above is really common sense which is what business is. A customer will purchase your product and/or service for the simple element they need to or want to. Once you remember that, all of your posts online will be easier to create 🙂