Social Media Marketing
We are turning into mixed media users between traditional-
and social media. Social media has radically changed marketing. Social media
has become part of the everyday life for both consumers and companies and it is
widely used as a marketing tool. (transl. Kontu 2015)
Yet a moment ago it was sufficient to be present in social
media without thinking about what the company wants to reach, and what can be
obtained. Now, social media is a key channel for reaching your customers,
guided by business objectives. It provides a fast and efficient way to reach
your target group in different ways. (transl. Kontu 2015)
Social media has a massive selection of different platforms.
The most familiar are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, Blogger
and Google+. New social media platforms are created all the time. The challenge
is to select the right channels that suit the best to promote the objectives of
your company. It is essential to know your customers and understand what they
expect from interaction. (transl. Kontu 2015)
Social media has raised the importance of individuals to a
new level. Today, public comments on Facebook or Twitter get as much attention
as a moment ago, a story from the biggest media companies. For the companies,
the situation has changed radically. You must be able to pick up some relevant
company-related messages and comments, and also to react to them. (transl.
Kontu 2015)
For any business, social media is a world of possibilities
that can and should be used. Companies have to be careful about what you want
to perceive with the content and how you customers will react. The basis must
lie on the company's business strategy, which is then supported by social
media. (transl. Kontu 2015)
More and more companies have also taken seen the possibility
of social media as a channel for customer service. Social media platforms are efficient
places to provide guidance, to answer questions or receive feedback. Social
media marketing can easily used for customer service and customer relationship
maintenance as well as the after sales process. Social media is also widely
used to support the marketing of new products and services. In social media the
company will be closer to the customer's everyday life and may actively offer
fresh solutions to customer needs. (transl. Kontu 2015)
Social media has proven to be also effective in the corporate
product development as a open brainstorming tool. You may discuss with
consumers on what kind of features they expect from the products and what kind
of things they want. The result can provide the company with hundreds of new ideas,
tips and wishes. (transl. Kontu 2015)
Many people think that the usage of traditional media
channels is decreasing and the traffic is moving to the social media channels. Another advantage of using social media
channels is that the contents are transferred smoothly between different
channels. People may share articles or comments to others who will then
continue on commenting and sharing. This way it is easy to consumer to share
their opinions and experiences of different products and services. Social media
complements the content life cycle, together with other channels. For marketers,
social media has meant plenty of new opportunities to meet the customers.
(transl. Kontu 2015)
Social media changes the publishing times dramatically. We
have moved almost in real time and to a world where the comments, questions and
answers follow each other. This also creates challenges. If the social media is
under a crisis, no comments can be suspended or moved to the next week, and it
has to be taken care of immediately. This is why the crisis communication plans
must be kept up to date. Responsibility for social media belongs to the company's
management or people assigned to it. They have the power to react, respond and
make comments on quickly for all possible situations. To insure the best
outcome the social media updates should not be completely outsourced. (transl.
Kontu 2015)
Resistance towards social media often comes from the
uncertainty and lack of knowledge. We do not have a choice on whether we do
social media the choice is how well we do it. (Rouhiainen 2015)
Different channels like Facebook that can sell a lot and is
the biggest social media. Youtube get across the creditability and most of the
small/middle size companies are not using but there is a opportunity in a
storytelling and a use of video marketing. Instagram is best suitable for fashion companies and companies
selling especially for women. Also food and retail industry and automobile
industry. Twitter is not as strong as it used to be. Most commonly the
big brands and newspapers, sports teams, organizations, celebrities,
politicians are using. Pinterest is not growing as fast as Instagram and it does
not have as good mobile app (Rouhiainen 2015)
There are many direct benefits social media has for a
company such as;
- Increase exposure
- Increase traffic
- Developed loyal fans
- Provide marketplace insight
- Generated leads
- Improved search rankings
- Grown business partnerships
- Reduced marketing expenses
- Improved sales (Rouhiainen 2015)
Addition to this there is also important indirect benefits
of social media that will show in long term. Also, social media is an effective
customer service channel.
For smaller companies the social media offers the
possibility to move quicker and grow faster with less expense. (Rouhiainen
2015)
The social media Strategy
The bigger the company the more complex the social media
strategies are.
- Research – Who is my competition? Who is my customer?
- Content – What do we post?
- Interact – How much interaction we need to get us closer to the buying decision?
- Measurement – How we can get great results and what kind of results we are getting?
We cannot use social media effectively if we do not measure
the results (Rouhiainen 2015)
Research
Monitor your competition tools:
1)
Google Alerts –to follow your competitors
(names) and industry (keywords)
2)
Socialmention – what are the people talking
about in social media. (segmentation, keywords, top users, top hashtags,
sources etc.) (Rouhiainen 2015)
Content Marketing – generate interesting content what
your ideal customer is looking for
1)
Facebook content – asking questions, being
natural
2)
Photos & Infographics (f.ex Instagram)
3)
Videos – how does your product work, how does it
help your customer (f.ex Youtube)
4)
Free report, mindmap
5)
Online seminar & webinar (for B-to-B
companies)
6)
Articles (also Blogs)
Content calendar (bobangus.com) - the main idea is to order
or make a strategy on the content you are going to publish and when you are
going to publish them on the different social media platforms. (Rouhiainen
2015)
Interact – depends on the value of the product and
service you are selling (for less valuable products you need less interaction
than for more valuable ones). You can learn from your customer and their needs
by interacting. You can interact by:
- Social media platforms
- In-person
- Phone
- Webinar/Online seminar
- Survey (Rouhiainen 2015)
Measurement
- Sales (how many sales is coming from social media – promotions/where did they hear from you)
- New leads, people in email list
- New interactions
- New followers – statistics
- Comments
- Website visits (Rouhiainen 2015)
How companies leverage Facebook in marketing?
# will show all the post on Facebook that are using the same
# in their campaign or post. (Used more in Twitter)
Facebook marketing is inexpensive way of marketing and
offers great opportunities.
How to analyze Facebook pages in different industries?
·
Analyse what the other similar companies are
doing
o
Same industry
o
Same area
o
Competitors
·
What are they posting?
·
Which medias are they using?
·
What kind of texts they have posted?
o
Questions, hastags, go to action
·
Good cover image
·
How to improve? (Rouhiainen 2015)
Tools to analyze your Facebook campaigns
Social Bakers – Fashion and Beauty (Jan 2015)
·
How is some used in different countries?
·
How is some used in different industries?
(Rouhiainen 2015)
Google – city, industry, PB page
LikeAlyzer.com (copy the link of your Facebook page)
·
Will give you recommendations
·
Will show similar brands
·
Pages with highest likerank (Rouhiainen 2015)
How to use Facebook
-Get more engagement to success
·
more reaches with less media support
-Be creative!
·
Use it wisely and use the same post only once
(or do not repeat within a short period of time)
·
Get people to comment
·
Ask questions from people
·
Easy and simple campaign (Rouhiainen 2015)
How emotions affect Facebook’s newsfeed?
Who is our ideal client?
·
People visit their own newsfeed rather than a
company site and they want to see new content in their newsfeed.
·
Those posts related to emotions gets usually the
most engagement
·
Start with a question
·
Remember that a lot of people are using smart
phones and tablets (Rouhiainen 2015)
10
Tips to write engaging Facebook post
- Be natural – not too formal or boring
- Be relevant – post posts for immediate action/campaigns, holidays etc
- Be visual – choose good images
- Be succinct – shorter and better
- Be emotional – the most shares posts sway and persuade
- Ask fans – expressed opinions from customers
- Post quotes – people love to relate to great things
- Play right – Don’t game the distribution
- Use full links – full URL’s straight to the desired website
- Be yourself – You behind the company (Rouhiainen 2015)
How to create and manage a Facebook page
·
Create a page – administrators (people who can
administrate the FB page)
·
Create content
·
Promote your page and get likes
·
Facebook Statistics
o
The main indicators: page likes, post reach,
engagement
o
Analyse and measure the success
§
Likes, reach, visits, posts, people
o
Is your FB audience similar to your buying
persona?
o
Which posts are working the best?
o
Where are the external visits coming from?
·
Pages to watch – Facebook competitors
·
Do a monthly social media report (Rouhiainen
2015)
Facebook Advertising
1.
Your advertising objective
a.
What is your goal? – With a clear objective it
is easier to get results
i. Brand
awareness
ii. Increase
sales
iii. Clicks
to website
iv. Page
post engagement
v. More
likes etc.
2.
Your ad
a.
Image
b.
Text
c.
News feed add or first column add
d.
Create specific land place (specific URL-links)
e.
Relevant for your audience
f.
Right timing
3.
Your audience
a.
customer avatar
i. location
ii. age
iii. gender
iv. interests
v. placement
4.
Your budget
a.
Start low and see what works
i. Spend
more or modify if needed
5.
Analyze advertising success stories on Facebook
to get even better results
(Rouhiainen 2015)
Youtube
Youtube is growing and providing more possibilities all the
time. Youtube has more than a billion unique users every month. It is easy and
effective channel to start promoting your company to other countries. There is
every minute 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
Why is video marketing so important? According to statistics
an Internet user spends 88% of their time on a page that has videos and 90% to
Internet traffic will be in video format in the next few years. Also, 90% of
Internet users confirm that seeing an explanatory video about a product
supports their decision to buy
Every company can create their own YouTube channel and start
to promote their business, creating videos about their products and educating
their clients, using video tutorials.
Tips for planning video marketing strategy
- Define the main goal of your videos
- Define your ideal clients
- Plan who will record your videos and when
- Define your budget
- Decide who will appear in the videos
- Create a list of themes that you can record tutorial videos about
- Identify frequently asked questions and make a video for each of the questions
Video recording tips
- Make a clear and simple introduction about the theme of your videos
- Create convincing “calls to action” in your videos
- Learn from the mistakes you have made in previous videos
- Figure out which video camera is right for you
- Select the correct video editing program
- Use a tripod to make sure that your video is stable
- Make sure you have good sound in your videos and improve visual impact with additional lighting
Tips for optimizing YouTube videos
- Upload and optimize your videos in the right way on Youtube
- Improve the quality of your video by editing or adding music (Youtube has more than 100,00 songs you can use)
- Add your videos to a reproduction list to maximize visits
- Motivate visitors to subscribe to your YouTube channel and click the “Like” button on your video
- Add annotations in your video to get “call to action”
- Invite people to share your video on social networks
- Find out the most important metrics in the YouTube statistics
Additional video marketing strategy tips
- Share your videos on Facebook
- Use pictures to promote your videos on Facebook
- Find out whether you can share your video on Google +
- Share your video on Pinterest and create video boards in Pinterest (Share From YouTube)
- Share your videos easily with Twitter and LinkedIn
- Get the maximum benefits from video emails
- Start to use Google Hangout and online conferences
Sources:
Pakki Uusiksi. Kasvokkain. Messukeskus. Juha Kontu. 1/2015.
S 10-11
Course content from Social media marketing in modern business. Lasse Rouhiainen. Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. Spring semester 2015
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti