Editorial Articles

To use Social Media effectively you need a strategy.

Social networks like Twitter has 50 million tweets a day, Facebook has 24 million people in the UK using it on average 50 minutes per day. YouTube has 50 billion views per month, and the latest site Foursquare, is a location-based social networking platform.

Too many SME’s are signing up to different social networks and not seeing the return on their investment. Why is this?

First you must understand who your target audience is online. There are some great tools to help you with that; www.quantcast.com helps define, buy and deliver to lookalike audiences of millions across the web. Real-time search engine; www.technorati.com used for blogs, tracks what is current and popular. A great place to find where your keywords (words that define your business) are being spoken about in real-time is www.socialmention.com, a search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news and videos. You can also use it to see who is talking about your competitors.

Each social network has its own unique way of working, so do your homework and define which ones are the most suitable for your business. Once you have a clear understanding decide what you want your goals to be, by using a LEAD strategy.

First Listen: Start by seeing how your target audience engages and how your competitors are telling their story; www.Twello.com can help you find people on Twitter in your niche. Experiment with sharing some information and tell your story. A great tool for that is www.hootsuite.com which allows you to test every piece of content you share, using its “Stats” function as well as sharing your content to 7 different social networks at once. It also allows you to automate the whole process. Apply these results over a few networks, always testing and tracking, to achieve even better results. Finally keep Developing your knowledge and applying new strategies, by using other networks and tools throughout this process. (See www.cheekybeach.com case study and see how they increased their online sales by 300% in 5 weeks)

Social media is about communication from human to human, and that’s achieved through building relationships, connecting with the influencers, getting them to become advocates and allowing them to become the social salesman by influencing their community through “word of mouth”. So changing your mind-set from B2B or B2C, to DTC “Direct to Consumer”, is the first step in allowing your business to become social.

Capturing information about your target audience is a key component to the success of any business, so choose a system that allows you to build a database of your customers using a CRM that grows as your business grows, allowing you to automate your online marketing, which is linked to your website and ecommerce facility www.kazeliuk.com  is cloud computing software, which facilitates all of this and more.

Social networking takes time to see a return on your investment. So whoever you decide to give this (30 - 60 minutes a day) task to, be it yourself, employee or virtual assistant, once you’ve got it right, the power of “word of mouth” and “business automation” will become key players in the future of your business growth.

Warren Knight
Social Commerce Expert
Blog: www.warrenknight.co.uk/blog
Twitter: wvrknight