Posts Tagged social marketing
Seattle Social Media Marketing: Using Facebook for Branding Not Market
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on February 2, 2015
Seattle Social Media Marketing: Using Facebook for Branding Not Marketing
Facebook may be one of the most popular social platforms, but recently, many marketers have begun to doubt the actual value of using it for business. While metrics show that most Facebook pages do not push a lot of sales, the platform is still a powerful marketing tool for branding, including customer service, consumer advice, and brand awareness. While many marketers mistakenly approach the platform as sales only, and push poorly converting ads and pitches over the page, to create low interaction and low engagement, there is a better, more efficient and more profitable way to use Facebook.
Why Doesn’t Facebook Work for Sales?
Most consumers use social media for sharing content, making connections, consumption of other content, and controlling their media. These are known as the 4 Cs of social media, and essentially motivate every user action on social media, including Facebook. Essentially, if you are not offering informative, entertaining, or valuable content and not connecting with them, they won’t want anything to do with you. Because most managers attempt to push products and services, they do not fall into the category of interests for Facebook users. Most are not there to buy something, but rather, to be entertained, and to get information.
How This Works For You
Every business has a brand, and part of that brand should be quality customer service, an informative and friendly attitude, and consistency. Posting to Facebook allows you to drive all of these impressions, by responding to consumers and replying to comments to engage your audience, consistently sharing helpful and entertaining information related to your business, offering value in the form of coupons or how-to’s and tips, and building a quality reputation through good reviews and positive comments.
Because more and more social users are now looking up businesses on Facebook as a way to vet them before making a purchase, all of these branding goals are important for you as a business. Facebook might not directly drive a sale that you can track using metrics, but it can convince your potential customer that you are a valid business, ready to offer quality services or products.
So Can You Make Money With Facebook?
Sometimes you can make money directly from Facebook, but more often, it will simply help to reinforce your brand image, give users a place to look you up, and serve as a customer support hub. While you can offer product information, advice, and tips that may lead to a purchase, your sole goal should usually be the information and advice, rather than the sale, because spammy sales tactics don’t really work that well anymore. You can push the occasional sale by offering discounts, coupons, and offers to your Facebook fans, but if you overuse it, it will loose value. Instead, consider Facebook as a valuable branding platform for your business. If you use it correctly, it can help your consumers through every step of the buying process, even if it doesn’t necessarily directly drive the sale.
If you want to know more about using your page for social branding, contact Rory Martin, a professional Seattle social media marketing team, for a consultation.
Seattle Social Media Management: Social ROI
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on November 25, 2014
We’ve all seen posts and videos go viral on social media and make their owners thousands or in some cases, even millions. But, how does the return on investment of the web hold up for small, every day Seattle businesses who often have considerably less to spend on promotion and marketing. If you’re wondering whether Social Media Marketing even has an ROI, then you’ve probably never had a professionally managed social campaign. There are dozens of ways to make money off of social, but most small businesses just end up spending and sometimes wasting time on their social media. However, Social ROI does exist.
How Does Social ROI Work?
Social ROI, or return on investment, mostly results from sales generated through your social campaign. For the most part, this means that you have to use analytics and tracking to ascertain where you’re sales are coming from, how many click-through’s are coming through from your pages, and how many of those clicks are turning into sales. The easiest way to generate social revenue on a page with a lot of active followers is to post a discount code. When people use the discount code, you earn social revenue. For example, a restaurant shares an offer on their page where social users can show a coupon on their phone, or print it out, and come in to get free drinks. So, for example, if13 people come in with the coupon, you’ve generated 13 sales, even at a discount. If you offer a bring a friend or a referral discount, you can generate new customers. For example, if you offer a 30% discount to new likes to the page, new followers on Twitter, or to new email subscribers, you can create social revenue from entirely new customers who have never been to your business before. If you have a website with online items, driving sales becomes even easier, because you can build up a fan base who expect to see sales, promotions, and items that they want to buy.
How Do You Get There?
If you have a social media page of any kind then you know that there’s a big difference between ‘social ROI’ and getting there. Managing and growing a page is a lot of work, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. The trick is to be consistent, offer valuable information on your page in addition to sales and promotions, answer questions and be helpful, and add in a little interest through memes or photos. Growing a customer base organically isn’t always easy, but you can also direct old customers there and encourage them to post on your wall or leave a review, which means that others will see you.
Seattle’s social media managers have been creating a visible profit for local businesses for years, and there’s no reason why you can’t see the same benefits. Hiring a professional social management company gets you the benefit of a properly managed social channel, so that you can experience as much ROI as possible. If you want to know more about having a professional social media manager help your business, contact us today to discuss your needs, or your goals.
Seattle Social Media: Utilizing Your Social to Find Customers or Clients
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Networking on January 14, 2013
Most people think of social media as ‘advertising’ ‘a waste of time’, or even, ‘an unfortunate necessity’, but did you know that you can use your local Seattle social media to find customers and clients who are actually interested in what you have to sell? While traditional advertising such as paying Google to post ads, or even paying a website to post ads can be effective, the new SEO, and the new advertising can be best used through social. But how do you use social to find your customers and clients?
Build a Targeted Following
Whether you’re looking for local Seattle followers, or international followers from around the world, you have to make sure they are targeted. Anyone can go around and add hundreds of followers in the hopes that they add them back, but those followers aren’t likely to be interested or active on your page. Instead, you should engage in a variety of techniques designed to help build your followers with people who are actually interested in your business. Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or any of a number of other social sites, you should first focus on having a number of followers. This makes you attractive to potential followers.
From there, you should search followers via keywords and then keep checking back to see if they have followed you back. As a rule, the more followers you have the more that will follow you without doing anything. There are a variety of tools including Tweepi for Twitter, Buddy Media for Facebook, and a range of other websites can all be used to manage and follow or un-follow people.
Interact With Your Followers
Once you’ve got a following, you should concentrate on targeting and communicating with interested people. If you are planning on advertising and finding customers and clients via Facebook, it is more important that you decide how and when to add followers. Building a genuinely targeted following there is most important because you have no way to contact them other than via your feed and messaging system.
On Twitter, you can use hashtags to contact people looking for your services. For example, using #SeattleSocial in your hashtag on Twitter or Google + could target anyone looking for information or services on Social media in Seattle.
Make Sales or Find Clients
Making sales and clients via your social network is not always easy, and it’s not always a guaranteed method of sales. What you can do with your social is build interest by sharing your products and information in a way that appeals to your followers. Instead of just sharing your products, talk about them, ask questions; ask what people would like to see, show samples of your work, and interact with interested clients.
Retweeting and sharing similar products, or talking about how these products work together with your own can gain you a base of followers who like similar things, and being polite, informative, and helpful to people who contact you can help you as well.
While you might not get hundreds of customers from your Seattle social media strategy, you can certainly expect to find a few. A couple of things to keep in mind are that you should use semantic keywords in your posts, hashtags where applicable, and always make sure that your posts are public so that they can be found in search. Importantly, you will need a good social marketing plan, a good website or landing page, and products and services worth sharing. If your followers like what you share, they might just become your clients.
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