Social Media 101: Engaging and Connecting with Your Customers

Social Media 101 Engaging & connecting with customers

August 8, 2012

Agenda

• Overview top social media outlets

• What are some of the tools & tricks?

• How do you measure success?

• Practical application (30 min. optional)

It’s about Engaging People

Having Conversations

Leveraging Word of Mouth

Capitalizing on Testimonials

Studies show online conversations are good predictors— • box office revenues • electoral outcomes • What your customers think!

Having a Presence and SEO

List and link your

business:

• Google maps

• Bing

• Manta

• Yahoo

• City Search

• Yellow Pages

• Yelp

Company Name vs. Individual Post

• Multiple profiles means more work

• Family and friends want different content than business colleagues

– Individuals can use Facebook lists or Google+ circles

– Facebook company pages have more features

– Linkedin groups, unless you are big, aren’t very strong

• Facebook company page has more features

Be intentional with your access and purpose

The Big Four Facebook Twitter YouTube Linkedin

B2C B2C and B2B B2C B2B

800 M+ users 108 M US/465 M worldwide

490 M+ est. 161 M professionals men (63%) women (37%)

• Lots of power users and less interaction than Twitter. Most seek people they know.

• Easy to extend beyond friends-open to people they don’t know

• Largest viewership of any video site

• Excellent for networking and warming leads

• Most seek people they are acquainted with

• Focuses on personal sharing

• Biz page: 1-to-1 messaging, pin a top status, cover photo, very discount oriented

• Can mass email • Users are more trusting

and more social • More political

• More about connecting to contacts and brands than friends

• Becoming more entertainment & sports focused

• Most racially diverse mainstream outlet

• 2nd largest search engine next to Google-SEO

• Link to website very visible

• Good video repository and can embed videos

• Enables you to position self as an expert

• Online resume • Link to website very

visible • 3 out of 4 there for

business purpose • Reporters use to

validate expertise

405-700 min per month 21 min. per month 15-25 min. a day • 8 min per visit (17 min mo. )

18-44 yr. olds (50% log in every day)

26-54 yr. olds (log in 1 or twice a month)

44+ yrs. Old (most have $100K household income)

Ethical Tips and Tricks

• Provide full disclosure

• Link to your business website or create a page on your website for

listing your relationships

• Cite your business identity in your profile

• Make a hash tag notation #spon (sponsored), #paid (paid), #rep

(represent), and #samp (sample)

• State you are sharing your personal opinion

• Tag a Video, Audio blog, or Podcast (rolling credits and caveats)

• Do not pay for, or run contests to promote recommendations/reviews

Etiquette Tips and Tricks • Always acknowledge when someone mentions

you, either with a direct message, like, or reply

• Respond to input quickly

• Promote yourself only 20% of the time

• Refrain from yelling--using all caps bold, underlining, and use exclamation marks sparingly (besides it makes it hard to read on a phone)

• Don’t tag nonusers or send email invitations to nonusers without their consent

• Educate, inform or increase awareness-don’t use direct mail language or mislead people

• Automated twitter accounts and purchasing followers or friends never leads to good business

• Always give credit to sources

• Counter negative comments in a respectful, yet direct manner

• Seldom repeat material unless you reframe it

• Remember please and thank you!

It’s a work party! Don’t be a bore.

Engagement Tips and Tricks

• Be concise

• Be visual

• Join Linkedin groups

• Like, recommend, share

• Use surveys and polls—share results too!

• Ask pertinent questions

• Promote your social media channels

• Reply and/or thank others for good information

• Participate in the Linkedin question and answer forums

Off-line or real life rules apply!

• Thank those that compliment but don’t retweet every recommendation

• Directly engage others using the + or @ symbol

• It’s all about liking this and hating that—learn from it!

Time Management Tips and Tricks

• Create a content/editorial calendar

and plan quarterly-focusing on one

topic per month

• Schedule posts for the week(s) but

check in periodically (think about

scheduling time to monitor)

• Use a Smartphone app to check in

when you are killing time

There’s an app for that

Content Management Tips and Tricks

• Share images

• Shorten links using bit.ly

• Provide links only some of the time

• Share personal interests

• Collect evergreen material

• Encourage others to send you material

• Recycle website information

• Quote people

• Share stats and data

• Use industry trade news or corporate/parent affiliations as a news source

• Retweet (Twitter) or share other people’s content

• Check out your competition and see what they are doing, and be open to competitors

• InternetSlang.com, is a reliable source for acronyms.

Be authentic-share the real you

Measurement Tips and Tricks

• Have fun, experiment

• Measure weekly/monthly

• Use a free tool to generate reports

• Only measure actionable data and use it

The Klout Jury is Still Out

Average score = 20

1. How many people you influence

2. How much you influence them

3. The influence of your network

What should you measure?

--Fans/Followers

--Shares

--Retweets

--Impressions

--Click-through rate

--Bounce rate

--Page view length

--Return visits

--Calls

--Leads

--Sales

Managing and Measurement Tools

PAID FREE

HootSuite: team access, schedule and monitor

many channels, integrated with more analytics,

more robust report feature

TweetDeck: schedule and monitor tweets

(Twitter) only

Hubspot: measurement and listening - a rare

combo; prettiest reports; good for doing research.

HootSuite: schedule and monitor many channels,

integrated with analytics

CustomScoop: Scans YouTube, Facebook and

Twitter, plus online news resources; intuitive for

research; automatically emails

reports/PDF’s/excel docs/etc.

Buffer: Finds the best times to schedule your

tweets and Facebook posts; allows multiple bit.ly

accounts.

Actionly: measure everything including page

views, clicks, revenue, retweets, etc. and set up

campaigns; publish from multiple networks and

accounts; track conversations; analyzes

sentiment and create custom reports

Crowdbooster: Freemium model; analyzes

account to show when users most engage with

tweets and suggests scheduled time based on the

algorithm; multiple bit.ly accounts as well but only

with paid program

Crowdbooster: Freemium model; analyzes and

shows when users most engaged and suggests

scheduled time; multiple bit.ly accounts

Dynamic Tweets: very basic, easy tool that

schedules tweets (Twitter), and search through

old tweets

Let’s Network!