In this course, we'll cover
- the social media landscape, get to know select social media channels, look at creating social media content,
- implement and monitor social media marketing,
- measure the impact of social media marketing
- how to start social media marketing for small business
It's important to remember your business marketing objectives and key performance indicators, KPIs, through all of your marketing efforts.
What Is Social Media?
Social media is the name for Web sites or applications that enable users to create and share content with others, usually via a social network or people brought together by some relationship or shared interests. An average person now has 5 social media accounts and spends more than an hour and a half on them daily. That's powerful because users of social media are not just talking. Research shows that 43% of people are more likely to purchase a new product when they have learned about it through social channels. The social media landscape has exploded.
Most people, when thinking of social media, think of Facebook, but there are thousands of players. Some of them are niche and appeal to specific groups of people with shared interests. Others are broad and appeal to almost everyone.
New social media channels pop up every day and current ones change course. Here are some of the most popular social media sites,
Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, and many other social media sites.
Many think social media is about going viral or it's only a good social media campaign if it's seen by millions. That is not the case. Social media channels are hugely valuable to marketers, primarily, because they allow you to
find niche audiences, build relationships with your customers get feedback from them.
They are also pretty cost-efficient. Social media channels can be cost-efficient because they can be used for free. Marketers can also pay to advertise in them; referred to as paid social ads. But, in this course, we're focused on how to use these social media channels for free. While there may be no cost imposed by these channels for marketers to use them, marketing in these channels does require resources and time and, of course, a plan.
Social MedIa Frameworks
There are many social media channels and millions of different people use them.
How do you approach social media marketing?
There are two popular frameworks you will hear referenced, POST and TALKING.
The talking framework builds on the post framework and provides a very practical approach to putting a plan together. let's look at POST first and then we will explain the talking framework.
POST
is a methodology for social marketing success created by market research firm Forrester. The model dictates four steps: people, objectives, strategy, and technology.
The idea is to ask yourself
what kind of people use your product or service? How do they behave online? What are your marketing objectives? Are you interested in listening to gain insights or do you want your customers to generate more awareness? What is your strategy? Meaning what do you want to get out of relationships with customers? Which direction do you want to take them? What is the underlying value proposition? What technologies should you use? How much time and resources will they take?
What you decide here depends on your answers for people, objectives, and strategy.
Thinking through these questions will help you choose which channels make the most sense for you and help you determine how to best use them.
TALKING
is a social media framework for building your social media strategy and tactics that were inspired by POST and created by Jill Quick. Jill uses a systematic approach to creating a social media plan.
- Tribes mean to define and build your segments and personas.
- Activities mean understanding their social activities and footprints.
- Listening means take the time to understand the conversation landscape.
- KPI means Key Performance Indicators. Measure your efforts.
- Investment means identify resources, technology, and the time you'll need to implement your social media plan.
- Network means to discover and engage with influencers.
- Goals mean to be sure to link your efforts back to your business and marketing objectives.
Many new marketers make the mistake of posting to social media channels in an unorganized fashion and with no plan. You need a plan before you start using social media. And that plan should tie back to your marketing objective. Without one, you'll waste a lot of time, effort and may even get your brand in trouble.
The talking framework can help you focus on
the crucial questions when putting your plan together.
With your plan in hand, the process is pretty straightforward. You'll start by doing research. Reading posts in your industry, listening to conversations about your product or service, finding key influencers in your space, and then doing outreach, make comments, and personally invite engagement with your company brand or message. Then you'll create content. This can be a tweet, post, blog, picture, video, and more. Then you'll promote it.
You'll think of creative and timely ways to promote your content and engage fans. Next, you'll monitor your efforts by checking accounts, responding to comments, dealing with customer issues etcetera.
And finally, you'll manage your efforts by tracking engagement with Bitly as (link shortener) URLs,
UTM links and analytics.
Which social media channels are right for you?
Social media channels are no different from other channels and that they require that you understand your customer, their activities, and interests. Does your target audience maintain a profile on
networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook? Do they read blogs or watch videos, post reviews or create content? Do they even bother with social media?
You can get a lot of that information from your customer empathy maps and by exploring the social media landscape. Much of the social media landscape fall into six main categories publishing, sharing, messaging, discussing, collaborating, and networking.
These categories describe how the respective social media channels are primarily used. It's important to keep that in mind as well when you choose your channel and create content to fit that channel. You'll want to map your customer persona, their activities, and interests to the social media channels that match best.
For example, if your customers are avid readers, you may want to focus on a channel for publishing content to reach them like Medium.
Maybe your customers are people who use your tools to create. In that case, you might find your target audience in a place where they are sharing their creations like Behance.
Your customers might be a certain age group that is heavily engaged in talking with each other. In that case, you'll use a messaging channel like KIK.
Perhaps your customers like to discuss their learning or hobbies. In that case, you'll use a discussion like Quora.
Or your customers could best be found at work. In that case, you'll use a collaboration channel like Slack.
Or your customers might be focused on their careers. In that case, you'll use a networking channel like LinkedIn.
In most cases, your customers are engaged in all sorts of activities at different times and you'll use a combination of these channel types to reach your audience.
What about the most popular social media sites.
Many of these channels serve multiple purposes.
Finally, you'll want to outline your social media plan in a spreadsheet to stay organized.
in the next article, You will get to know Social Media Channels deeply and Learning about How to findand reach out to key influencers.
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