Social Media Marketing strategy includes a few best practices to employ in order for businesses to conduct themselves successfully. The most important of which is engaging the network of fans that are interested in following your presence with content they will want to interact with. Although the endorsement of your brand is apparent when a user follows you, there is also and understood conversation that will occur surrounding the overall interests in the industry you conduct business in. Because your fans are interested in topics beyond just your propriety content, it is important to find ways to integrate external content like industry news, history, trending topics, and overall knowledge of the trade to leverage and encourage potential conversations and fan growth. Becoming a source for your fans to rely on for additional content provides more opportunity for you to exposure your brand as a thought leader. Some simple tools exist that can aid in creating this type of social media content. Outlined below are a few tools that any marketer can use to get a daily resource for industry topics and trends from both businesses and individuals to share with their own network.
Google Alerts – This free tool is not new to many marketers, but probably isn’t used as often as it should be. We recommend setting up a daily alert with your company name, to monitor reputation management. You will want to set up alerts for industry keywords to be able to generate content based on these searches, which provide fresh content from various sources. You may also consider creating alerts for you top competitors, to keep an eye on what self-promotional marketing efforts they are publishing online.
Storify – This small social network allows a user to search for a topic/keyword and then aggregate multiple sources into a single story. We recommend trying out this tool because the search feature targets social media networks. You start with a keyword search within Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flicker, or Google to see results for Tweets, Images, Videos, Links, and Posts. This content can be repurposed either in a single article or as individual posts to your network of choice.
Bottlenose – This new site describes itself as a “public discovery portal”. It will allow a visitor to conduct a search that will stream in trending conversations from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and more by offering a live stream of photos, videos, and posts. We recommend setting up a free account to have access to the built in Dashboard and Sonar features when linking your social media accounts and rss feeds to the tool. This also includes a publishing feature, where you can post updates directly from the site to different accounts you have connected it to.
Tools like these are free and easy to use to target trends and create content that can be good to share with your growing social community. Know what the audience is interested in with each network you participate in, so you will understand what content will be best suited toward starting conversations with them. Make sure to add your own voice to these industry trends by asking questions and providing insight into the external content you are sharing. If you are not sure about what content you should generate to share with your target audience, then contact us for a social media strategy that will enhance you company’s online presence.
Many of us have become well versed in the various social networks. Whether for fun or business, the amount of time spent on social networks continues to grow. Companies, both large and small, have gone from a slight toe dip in the water, to swimming laps in Olympic sized pools. Though the number of social media channels continues to grow, this blog post will focus solely on Twitter.
Twitter defines itself as “a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.” This translates into everyday people being able to “follow” their favorite actresses every move (no kidding, some celebrities have been known to tweet on a minute to minute basis) and keep anyone interested aware in real time of hunger pangs, the difficulty of a spinning class, getting cut off in traffic, that they are at Starbucks, where they are going to dinner, etc.
So I guess that’s considered some of the fun stuff Twitter is known for, but what about the business component?
For some organizations, Twitter has taken the term customer service to a whole new dimension. This goes beyond setting up a company page, which every business ought to do, by the way.
A friend of mine recently tweeted, Oh Zappos I hate you!! Why don’t you have my size?!?!?! Within 30 minutes, she was contacted (via Twitter of course) from @Zappos_Service with: Oh no! We want to help you find perfect shoes. What size/style were you interested in? Maybe we can find them elsewhere. This is a perfect example of a company that is truly on their A Game. Personally, I think Zappos rocks in every capacity, so it is not shocking that they are savvy in Social Media.
How did Zappos know that my friend was tweeting about them, when she does not follow their company? They more than likely have some sort of “Twitter Alerts” (think Google Alerts) in place to monitor what is being said, as well as to protect their brand. Tweet Beep and Tweet Alarm are two of the many services you can utilize for this effort.
It is safe to say that customer service as we once knew will soon become obsolete; the days of sitting on hold with a representative are numbered. We are a society that is consumed with instant gratification and Twitter and other social networks provide us with the immediate support we crave.
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