We’ve written before about the Small Business Development course Keith & Keleigh took through Clatsop College and with which they continue as alumni. In December the 3 years of students and the alums gather for a joint class and this year’s topic is social networking. Below is a preview of our responses to the questions asked. But first, if you don’t care about anything else, read this:
The power of social networking is in building relationships. Think of the ways you build relationships in real life and then how to replicate or enhance that experience online. You’re building trust. You’re providing some free answers and advice. If you’re compelling enough to follow, you’ll get followed. If you’re followed, you’re going to build trust and relationships and THAT is what ends up making your business the choice when the comes time to purchase what you sell.
Take 2:12 and watch Guerrilla Marketer Seth Godin on facebook and relationship building:
Our site & social network sites There is overlap here but many of the followers of these sites are unique:
- www.beachdog.com (our company blog/website; customer-focused)
- www.facebook.com/beachdogcom (our company facebook page; customer-focused)
- www.facebook.com/funbeach (our tourism-promoting profile; focused on clients’ customers)
- http://twitter.com/beachdogcom (tends to be peer-focused)
- www.youtube.com/beachdogdotcom (our own and some customer videos)
- www.youtube.com/funbeachcom (our own and others’ tourism-promoting videos)
- www.linkedin.com/in/beachdog (definitely peer-focused)
This list is a lot longer than what’s shown here but these are not to be ignored in our Marketing Plan.
How you can make managing your sites easy:
Defining hard vs easy is the first step; what’s hard for YOU? For us, time is the bugaboo, so we automate as much as possible. Yahoo ‘scrapes’ our feed from Twitter & YouTube to create a site of its own and, should we post there, it pushes it back to Twitter. Our company site automatically posts to our facebook page, which in turn posts the first 140 characters to twitter. In other words, any effort we make is populated throughout the appropriate social networks, reducing the time spent.
We’ve found the highest response when we mix it up a little, so we try to blog post to our company site at least 1-3 times per week and then also profile post to each of our facebook pages and Twitter account 1-3 times a week. We don’t always reach those goals but we never let up on the pressure to do so because it works. We’re currently spending about 2 hours per week blogging and maintaining our social network sites.
For the tourism-promoting facebook, we spend more time because we’re managing about 1800 friends through the facebook profile and nearly 1000 through the fan page. Our most popular YouTube video has just under 500 views. We’re currently building these networks and are just starting to feel we’ve built enough to fairly track return on investment. Is time spent here resulting in increased customer loyalty and/or extending the reach to new visitors? Is this investment successfully increasing tourism to the region?
Nick O’Neill wrote a solid, brief article on AllFacebook.com on ‘How To Plan Your Monthly Facebook Page Strategy’: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/09/how-to-plan-your-monthly-facebook-page-strategy. He’s a big fan of planning your strategy, lining up tasks and letting go of the rest. And that’s a good plan because it is very easy to get sidetracked online and waste time.
How do you drive people to your website? How do you use search engines, email and/or social networking?
People are always surprised to hear this but I’m not a huge fan of search engine marketing for most small businesses. There are markets that benefit from it; hotels, for example. And 99% of sites benefit from a basic search engine optimization which will gain them a reasonable organic result for the terms unique to them such as business name + location and what you do + location. Beyond that, the cost of vying for that top-10 spot for a competitive search term is usually more than the return it nets. Many businesses benefit from well-managed adwords; that’s another conversation. The point is we don’t use search engines to drive traffic to our own site, other than in the most natural sense.
90% of our business is word of mouth, so we spend most of our energy and advertising budget making our current customers happy and thanking them for sharing their positive experiences with their friends and colleagues. Social networking fits nicely with that; we can give kudos and links online and share the good works of our clients companies with the rest of our ‘fan’ base.
While we encourage many of our customers to use broadcast email campaigns, we don’t actively engage in these ourselves. Not because they don’t work –they REALLY do. And not because they’re expensive – they’re not. Not because they’re hard to set up or manage – these are both pretty simple, too. We don’t use them because we’re realistic about our own time commitment to the process. These campaigns work best when they are used at regular intervals. We believe they are more harmful than helpful when used erratically and we aren’t currently in a position to use them consistently, so we’re skipping—for now.
How do you actually sell? What do you do on your website to encourage people to buy?
I don’t think of what we do as selling. We solve problems. We help people get more customers and merchandise themselves and their products. As a result, our website is blog-based and about 1/3 to ½ of the posts are telling the stories of the work we’ve done, including the problem that was solved by that work.
We ask our customers to do the same thing; don’t talk about the features, talk about the solution the product or service provides. Talk about it on your site and through your social networks. We also ask them to talk about their experience with us and with other local businesses and to keep it positive. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. If you have something a little negative to say and can follow it up with how that business fixed your concern, great. Otherwise, keep comments community-building–for your sake and theirs.
We do facebook-only specials from time to time, which have turned out to be popular; a code word or a coupon posted only to facebook and pushed to twitter. We once did a video that rewarded viewers with an ‘Easter Egg’ of a coupon at the end and that was a royal flop. In hindsight, I see a way to re-tool that to make it work but…
The power of social networking is in building relationships. Think of the ways you build relationships in real life and then how to replicate or enhance that experience online. You’re building trust. You’re providing some free answers and advice. If you’re compelling enough to follow, you’ll get followed. If you’re followed, you’re going to build trust and relationships and THAT is what ends up making your business the choice when the comes time to purchase what you sell.
How can you tell that what you planned is really happening? How/what do you track? What analytics do you use?
For our company site, we use both logfile stats, read through Analog, and Google Analytics, because they track the same information in vastly different ways. They both cross-check one another and provide different interpretive results for things like, which are algorithmic rather than factual.
For our social networking, I look at how many interactions we are having and how quality they are in terms of relationship building. Facebook gives you a nice tool on your page that analyzes this for you but only you know if those interactions are converting to sales. On a monthly basis, how many staff hours went to engaging online and how many jobs came to us as a result? What kind of jobs were they – the kind we want to attract? If I don’t like the answers, I look at what needs changing – the amount of time we’re spending? The way we’re interacting? What we’re offering our fans? What haven’t we tried? One fabulous aspect of this type of marketing is the instant gratification you get from your efforts. It makes it easy to course correct before you invest too much in any one direction.
Final Thoughts:
Seth Godin and Tom Peters on blogging
