Facebook, Twitter and the other social media sites are a great and efficient way to reach customers, strengthen customer loyalty and foster their engagements. However, too often companies do not differentiate between the different platforms and join a social media site just to say they did. It is hard to find exact statistics on the subject, but about 79% of businesses have a Facebook page, 59% are on Twitter, 39% have a blog and 33% have a Youtube account. So here is a guide to teach you how to use your social media sites

What do users expect?

Customers do not like your page or add you to their circles for your benefit, they want to get something out of it. Across all social media platform, this is what users responded:

Almost half of the users say they follow a brand to get discounts and deal, followed by users who love the brand and just want to follow it. It doesn’t mean you need to share the same links and info on all of your platforms.

What content should I share?

We just saw creating and sharing exclusive deals and promotions is a sure way to make your customers happy but there are some other things you can share.

• On Facebook share pictures, videos, news, interesting anecdotes, product releases. Facebook is the site where you can vary your posts the most. It is better to always post content on Facebook rather than link to it, so publish photos or create albums through Facebook instead of posting a link to the same album on your site or external app. The same type of content would be appropriate on Google+
• On Twitter post links, short anecdotes and link to your other material. You can also post some pictures but not a full album like you would do on Facebook. Twitter is a great place to post more impromptu pictures. Do not hesitate to interact with your followers and to answer questions or respond to comments*.
• On your blog you can post more content at once than on the other sites, therefore blogs are a good place to make announcements, give advice/tutorials/recipes, post about industry news or show the inside of your company.
• Youtube is a great platform for more complicated content such as how-tos; a landscaping company could show how to repot a plant or a plumber can show how to snake a drain. Youtube is also a good place to post interviews, teasers or short documentaries on what happens inside your company.
• LinkedIn is best used for professional content such as press releases, company news, your take on industry news and events and employment offers.

*When replying to comments on Twitter, if you start your tweet with @username, only followers that follow both you and @username will see the tweet in their timelines. Therefore, most of the time your followers will not see your reply on their timelines and it does not count as a post, just like in our Coca-Cola picture above. So feel free to respond to as many comments as you want, they will only appear when Twitter users go on your Twitter page directly.

How often should I post?

How often you should post varies greatly according to the site. This is our recommendation from the most often to the least:

• With Twitter, it is a lot easier to filter information and followers tend to glance at their timelines. You are expected to post often and we recommend posting at least once or twice a day up to every 30 minutes or so, especially if you do not want to be overlooked.
• On Facebook and Google+, we recommend posting at least every two days up to three or four times a day.
• The number of posts on your blog varies greatly with the content you provide. It is a lot harder to provide filler content on a blog than it is on Twitter. Therefore, post as often as you have content but try to post at least twice a month, and up to 2 or 3 posts a day. If you post several times a day, try and variety the type of postings such as a video, a short article with pictures or a longer article with more reading.
• Activity on LinkedIn is a lot sparser than on the previous site, one post a week to one post a day is a good bracket.
• Just like a blog, posting on Youtube depends of how much content you have to post. Most of your customer will access your Youtube account from other social sites rather than just follow your channel. Therefore post videos on Youtube anytime you need to publish a video.

Social media is a great tool to communicate with your customers, to generate leads, sales, and to create customer loyalty. In addition, most of social media is free, easy to use, and available to all. Because of all of these reasons, some businesses do not feel the need to measure social media effectiveness: it’s free and it’s beneficial, so why bother?

However, finding information to post, preparing the post, replying to customers are all essential steps to creating an online presence. So whether you do your own social media or hire someone to do it, you need to know if it’s increasing your revenue or not.

In a survey by Chief Marketer titled “2011 Social Marketing Survey”, we learn that 52% of marketing of professional survey think it is hard to measure ROI for social media, and 42% say it is difficult to track and see results. Nevertheless, all still continue with their social media campaigns.

Chief Marketer also asked – for those who do measure ROI – how they measure it. The results show us that 60% of marketers use the number of fans or followers. We will see at the end of the article why this is not a good idea.

To help the more than 52% who are having troubles calculating ROI, here are a few tips on measuring your campaign’s effectiveness.

Content being shared

How much your fans share and interact with your contents is one of the easiest ways to calculate your ROI. No matter what business you are in, you can share links, posts, news or other information that can be monitored. The more content is shared, the more customers interact with your brand, see your brand and will be more likely to buy your brand rather than your competitor’s.

There are two main ways you can go about to doing this:

1. Have your web developer set up an analytics account for your website. Your analytics account will tell you where visitors on your website come from (Google, Facebook, Twitter, directly from your address) and you will see how many visitors come to your site. You can cross reference the dates on your analytics account to the date of your social media postings, and analyze what pages they visit, how long they stay and conclude which type of posting works best for you. Another, more in-depth technique you can use is URL tagging. This is a little more complicated and time consuming so it’s best suited if you have a web marketing team. By “tagging” the links that you post on your social sites, you will be able to sort your analytics by type of post, content or campaign, and can even isolate individual posts. For example, if you launch a Christmas campaign, you will be able to differentiate it from your year-round campaign and measure its effectiveness, or compare different ads. Google Analytics is free and available to all.
2. You can use a social media management tool such as HootSuite, or TweetDeck that will automatically record your tweets, posts and links on different sites and provide you with statistics.

Measuring leads

Social media can be a great tool for lead generation… if you measure them. A lead can be a customer filling out a contact form, requesting a demo, visiting your online store, or just accessing your contact information. The best way to measure those leads is once again with a tool like Google Analytics and creating goals; if you have a marketing team, they will be the one responsible for goals. You can refer to our post on measuring your website’s ROI to know more about setting up goals.

To isolate the leads coming from social media, you can either use URL tagging, or you can also create custom segments comprised off all the social media sites you use. Both of these methods will allow you to see the leads generated only by your social media efforts. Tagging takes more time but it also more precise if you want to see results according to different campaigns. Don’t forget to give your lead a dollar value to know if the time and labor you spend on  the leads you are receiving offset social media.

Measuring sales

Measuring sales works the same way as measuring leads. For some types of business where sales volume is relatively low, measuring lead proves more accurate. However if you have a high sales volume, measuring sales made through your social media campaigns is the ultimate way to know if your efforts are really paying out.

The number of fan/followers/friends

The numbers of followers/fans/friends that you have is not an accurate way of calculating ROI. Some fans can be passive and completely overlook your marketing efforts, while others will be very responsive. For instructions on how to interpret your numbers of fans, read this article: What are Facebook Fans Worth?

Social media is a great way to generate leads for your business. However, between Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogs, Youtube, Flickr… the possibilities are numerous. Marketers need to set goals and create a marketing plan in order to stay focused. A study from MarketingSherpa shows which social media platforms are the most efficient at generating leads for B2B and B2C.

Blogging is the most constantly efficient platform for getting new leads, both for B2B and B2C. This is not surprising since blog posts bring considerable value to their readers.

For B2B, LinkedIn seem to be the most effective lead generating platform. Indeed, LinkedIn users are online to display their experience and services on their topic of expertise. It is also the network the least obstructed by distracting information.

Facebook is the clear winner when it comes to B2C. With more than 700 million users, Facebook as the largest audience out of all the social media platforms. It is also a place where users go to relax, and share in a very informal settings a lot more prone to attracting customers rather than businesses.

Also noteworthy is Twitter, better than Facebook for B2B but better than LinkedIn at B2C. Youtube and other video sharing sites are also worth mentioning, especially if you are marketing complex or highly visual information.

Is it a good idea to have your employees promote your business on social media sites?

Letting your employees talk about your business on social media sites is an easy way to advertise and attract viral attention. A lot of companies already use websites like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube to post pictures, videos, work in progress, company news, and even coupons. Some of these companies also encourage their employees to talk about the company on their own profiles to help spread the word.

However, this practice can be risky. Divulging sensitive company information, using inconsistent branding messages or posting company information in the wrong place are all probable mistakes. With large companies, it would be almost impossible to control all that is being said. Once you post something online it is available for the world to see and cannot be undone. To avoid this, law experts suggest implementing the following guidelines:

• Establish communication expectations. Be consistent with the brand, stay appropriate and have longer-form articles go through an approval process before they’re published.
• Be clear about confidential information. Communicate to your employee what is considered confidential for your company: new products, contracts, or company procedures.
• Get the clients’ OKs. Even if something seems appropriate to you, it may not be to your clients. Ask them if you can talk about what your company does for them.
• Be careful with copyright. Always make sure that you have the rights to the material you wish to post.

It’s becoming very common for companies to create a Facebook page for their brand; it’s easy, it’s free and anybody can have access to it. However, really getting into Facebook marketing takes time and a lot of commitment. So we’re left wondering: is this really worth it?

We’ve seen answers ranging from $0 to $136 but it really depends on how you interact with your fans. Putting a dollar amount on a Facebook fan is nearly impossible, but you can get an idea of whether or not your efforts are working. So how can you measure the results? Use your page’s insights and look for these statistics:

• Interactions (comments, posts and “likes”) are the most important piece of information. They tell you what percentage of your fans interacts with your page and at the same time advertise your brand to their friends. Every time one of your fans takes an action on your posts, his or her Facebook friends see someone they know interact and in a way recommend your brand. A fan that interacts is a fan susceptible of staying loyal and spending money on your brand.
• Impressions, how many people actually see your posts. But keep in mind when a user just scrolls over your post in their news feeds without reading, it counts as an impression. Impressions are a good indicator of when you should post updates. If updates posted at 10 am gather less impressions than the one posted at lunch time, it means you should post more during lunchtime.
• “Likes” are the least important factor. You may have a thousand likes but if your fans don’t interact with you they are almost literally worthless. The number of “unlikes” is what you should keep your eye on. If it increases it means you’re doing something wrong and your fans are going out of their way to hide you. You need to analyse what is wrong and change your strategy.

So keep in mind: interact with your fans by including calls to actions, ask for their opinion, show them things they want to see, reward them by offering coupons. Use your page’s insight to see what posts your fans react to the most, if the “unlikes” are rising, and to understand your fans better. It will help you maximize the value of your fans and your time!

“A company blog not only drives huge numbers of traffic toward your website, but it also solidifies your place as a thought leader in the industry. With strong original content, people will see you as an authority figure while your company becomes a trusted brand.”

To ensure your blog is maximizing its potential to attract sales, this blog recommends that you do the following:

• Include calls to action in every blog post.
• Create great offers that customers can’t resist.
• Optimize your landing page to guarantee a conversion.

Read that entire post at Smartblogs http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2011/02/09/blogging-to-turn-your-brand-into-a-thought-leader/

Contact Matmon Internet if you’re interested in setting up a wordpress blog for your business.