SES London 2011 – How to use Social Media for your Business?

Social Media has now become a major piece of the search marketing puzzle.  You can already see how important it has become with the number of sessions offered at SES London this year about this topic. Lisa Myers, CEO, Verve Search, in her session at SES “Introduction to Social Media” gave some valuable tips on how to use it effectively.

So …what’s social media?

Personally I use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Windows Live Spaces… Are all these part of what’s called “social media”? According to Lisa Myers, Social Media is about you and what all of us are doing with these technologies and tools. Lisa gave us some stats to show how social media is becoming huge!

Facebook:  - 500 million active users - of which 50% log on every day! – over 60 million status updates every day

Twitter: - 75 million accounts (of which15 million active) - 65 million tweets per day

Now which country do you think has the highest Twitter’s reach? I thought it would be North America, but apparently Brazil is the most active on Twitter.

Lisa gave us some great examples of social media activities that large companies are executing. Take Pepsi: after 23 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Super Bowl ads they decided to ditch the SuperBowl and poured 1/3 of its' total annual marketing budget into a cause-driven social marketing campaign in 2010: The Refresh Project

So… How should we use Social Media for Business?

The Main Rules are:

1. Listen
2. Engage
3. Be honest

The 3 media pillars to remember are social networking, viral, online PR.

To have a successful social media strategy we should first understand what our objective is: branding/awareness, traffic generation, link generation, conversions or a mix of them? Then we should ask ourselves who our target is. Depending on our target, we can determine which channel we need to use. For example, if I would target  a 50 + audience, Twitter might not be the best medium to advertise my company.

Now, where to start with Social Media?

Blogging - your social home on the web

The first thing to do is blogging! This is the best social medium for a business to start with. It gives the product or your services a personable voice, develops a positive online reputation and expands your content to reach a wider audience.

But don't underestimate it! Before starting, we should consider few things:

• What is going to be the main topic of the blog (categories)
• Who is going to be blogging (source appropriate bloggers). Finding the right bloggers is going to determine the success of the blog.
• Who is going to be managing the blog? You need to make sure the blog is up to date.

We can also use tools to help with blogging, publishing and content management systems (for example Wordpress) and use social plugins to make it easier to spread the content.

Online PR – getting your content out on the web

Online PR is not the same as of traditional PR. According to Lisa we should always have something to trade. Why would anyone publish our content otherwise?

What are the things we could trade?

• Content (must be relevant!)
• Discount, competition, giveaways
• Breaking news
• Free “something”: Whitepaper, Best Practice

The process:

• Do your research. Make a list of sites that are interesting. It’s better to have 10 websites you know from where you can get conversions instead of more websites that you don’t know.
• Hung down most appropriate content
• Tone of voice in email, although best to call!
• Tailor your email to person
• Be direct, don’t waffle
• Develop a relationship
• Follow up
• Always be polite and personable!

Viral - usually larger campaigns that appeal to a broader audience

The campaign doesn’t need to be a big and expensive to be effective. But you need great creative idea and a solid execution otherwise it won’t go viral.

When you have a creative idea, make sure to spread the word using the different social media channels don’t just leave it on Youtube or Facebook and wait for it to be discovered. Lisa gave the example of a campaign for a cancer awareness on Facebook. “I like it on the floor…” which was not expensive, easy to do and very successful.

Social Networking - where friends meet tweeps

When we want to get to know our neighbor, do we start by shouting? Of course not! well, it should be the same for our customers. We first need to listen to people to understand them. Twitter is the great place for this.

The key rules of Twitter are:

• Don’t over think it, be personable
• Share information, links. Don’t just re-tweet, you need to have some content as well
• Listen, make sure to make notes of what people are saying- and linking back to people’s tweet from 2 weeks ago for example
• Use #hashtags to organize and search
• Twitter lists are useful if you are following hundreds. Also to discover new people. If you make very good twitter list, people start following you.

After doing all these, you need to monitor your social media activities.

What do you think is going to be the next thing in social media? The world keeps changing. Half of the human race is under 30; they’ve never known a world without the internet. Perhaps we should look at the younger generation, see what sites they are using to understand how social media will evolve.

Cheers,

Nadia

Check out all our coverage of SES London for this week.

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