Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.
Here is an interesting article from seomoz.org that explains some of the bigger social media sites.
Avallo can help you set up accounts and pages on the following sites:
- My Space
The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.
This list of connections can then be used in a number of ways:
- A contact network is built up consisting of direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second degree connections) and also the connections of second degree connections (termed third degree connections). This network can be used to gain an introduction to someone you wish to know through a mutual, trusted contact.
- The network can be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one's contact network.
- Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
- Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.
Facebook “profiles” are commonly used to socialize, but Facebook “pages” are more suited to a businesses. Pages are similar to profiles, but they tagged as a category of business type, given a title instead of a person’s name, and have several other business-related features such as a place to keep detailed business information. If you already have a Facebook account, you can simply add a page for your business.
MySpace
Some businesses have built MySpace pages with product images and prices linked to their official site, while others have made MySpace their only retail outlet, like eBay’s retailers. Following are some best-practices tips to successfully market your product using MySpace.
What about Twitter?
We just can't be an expert on everything and I suspect that I will be "tweeting" soon. Here is a list by Chris Brogan from his blog on "50 Ideas on Using Twitter for business.
- Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
- Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
- Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. This doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
- Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
- Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
- Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
- Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
- Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
- Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
- Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.
- Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
- Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
- When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
- Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
- Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
- Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, it doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
- When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
- Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
- Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. - Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
- Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.
- You don’t have to read every tweet.
- You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
- Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
- Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
- 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
- If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
- If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
- Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
- If someone says you’re using Twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt-out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
- Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.
- Twitter takes up time.
- Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
- Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
- There are other ways to do this.
- As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
- Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
- Twitter is just for technonerds.
- Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
- Twitter doesn’t replace direct e-mail marketing.
- Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.
- Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
- Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
- Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
- Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
- Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
- Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
- Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
- Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
- Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
- Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)