Читать книгу The Social Media Advantage - Holly Berkley - Страница 9

The biggest mistake marketers make with social media, regardless of industry, is interrupting rather than contributing to the conversation. By using your own employee resources to add expertise to conversations, you can provide more authentic value to target audiences.

“My twitter feed highlights social media, marketing and business/technology news, with a spotlight on our industries,” described Reale of how each employee contributes different content to the segmented Twitter followers. “Another Reed employee, Kathy, is a technical writer for building product manufacturers. Kathy tweets a good deal about manufacturing and she follows and talks to manufacturers on her Twitter feed. She understands their pain points, the stuff that keeps them up at night.” We’ll talk more about how you can engage your employees in social media in Chapter 5.

For companies trying to reach several different target audience groups, segmentation allows the ability to provide specific information that is useful and relevant to the needs of each audience group. The result of this relevant information is that it can, in turn, develop stronger, deeper connections with each audience. Reale believes this type of segmentation will help Reed Construction Data develop better products by listening to feedback and asking questions to the right audiences. And Twitter is not the only social network to benefit from segmentation. We are also seeing more businesses that have set up multiple blogs, each focusing on different topics to appeal to various audiences. You can also set up lists within your Facebook profile so that specific messages will only go out to those “friends” most interested in your company updates. To set up a different list in Facebook, simply click on “Friends”, then “Edit Friends.” From here, you will see a link that says “Create a List.” This will allow you to name the list and add certain Facebook friends to that list. Similar lists can also be set up in Google+. These lists are called Circles.

It is important to note that social networks are not just for the young. Internet users between ages 34-44 are dominating the social media space, becoming the fastest adopters of social media use. This audience represents the incoming wave of industry leaders since they will be the 50-year-olds likely running larger corporations and in charge of making major company purchasing decisions in 10 years. From our conversations with such industry folks, they understand that using social media helps them reach a variety of business goals efficiently, from positioning themselves as knowledgable, to finding new clients, to keeping a pulse on what is happening in the their industry.

While the large social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+) can provide great reach and access to many people, small businesses are learning that the more niche, topic-specific social networks can actually provide better access to potential clients directly seeking their services. For example, CosMed Plastic Surgery Center (www.cosmedclinic.com) frequently posts answers to community health questions in plastic surgery and weight loss online communities: MakeMeHeal.com and ObesityHelp.com. People who participate on these forums represent a core audience for the plastic surgery center and allow them to build a more personal connection with potential customers who may hesitate to share health concerns on a more public forum such as Facebook.

Social media happens fast, and new niche networks and blogs arise almost daily. A great tool to help you stay current with these websites and also monitor the pulse of the online conversation your industry is Google Alerts. This is a free tool that will email you when your chosen keywords are talked about online. Simply go to google.com/alerts and enter keyword phrases, such as your company name and hot topics related to your industry, along with your email address to be notified each time anything related to these topics appears online. As professional social media and communications consultants, Google Alerts is an invaluable tool to discover new blogs and smaller, more niche communities that are discussing hot topics where our clients would benefit from being heard.

Sometimes what looks like the smallest online community to an outsider can actually have powerful voices developing opinions and dialogue that will eventually spill over to the more trendy social networks. Understanding these core audiences, who the key influencers are, what issues are most important to them and how to get your company, products and services in their good graces can be an invaluable asset. Listening, monitoring and helping to guide dialogue on these niche, smaller sites can help you better understand the thought process behind what motivates your core audiences to support your company and your future products and services.

This listening technique can also help you avoid a major PR nightmare on sensitive projects. It allows you to see negative comments coming before the conversations gain leverage in front of major media channels on the bigger social networks.

In addition to helping you discover new places your company should engage, setting up a Google Alert with your own company name as the keyword allows you to be notified anytime anyone online is talking about your company. Being able to listen in to what audiences are saying about you and having a chance to respond is what gives social media such powerful reach. If you are simply using social media to post press releases and company announcements you are missing the point of social networking. Monitoring the online responses to these press releases and announcements is the real power of social media.

As you dive deeper into social media, you will want to use more advanced social monitoring tools. Companies like Lithium Technologies (ScoutLabs.com) and Radian 6 (http://www.radian6.com) allow you to track and engage with anyone who is mentioning your company on the social web. Using either of these website tools, simply type in your company name or a product name and see what people on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, websites or news articles are saying about your company and products. Almost anything that is mentioned on the social web will pop up using these listening tools. These social monitoring tools go deeper than Google Alerts as you can actually click on the post from the application and respond to the online discussion in one step.

Social media monitoring tools can also be valuable at helping you monitor your competition. For example, while consulting for Verizon, we used the Scout Labs dashboard (now a part of Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring) to compare online sentiment for AT&T to Verizon. Within seconds, a graph showed that Verizon has more mentions and more positive overall sentiment on the social web than AT&T.

The social web is essentially the world’s biggest focus group allowing you true insight into what your customers are saying. Additionally and better than the focus group, the social web gives you the real-time ability to respond and add to this discussion. You don’t have to be a major company like Verizon to generate an overwhelming amount of social comments from customers that need responses from your company. Perhaps you are just in the midst of a heated online debate about a new project, which is developing hundreds of posts you’ll need to monitor. Fortunately, applications like Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring not only show you every place your company name is mentioned, but conveniently sorts posts in order of priority, so you can know which posts are most important to respond to. The program determines priorities based on several critical factors, such as how much traffic the web site gets, Google rank, how many people are actively reacting/responding to the post and perhaps most importantly, the online influence of the person who made the comment.