In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media design. Here we define social media design as the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.
Social media design usually centers on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. Company messages, stories, and helpful information spreads from user to user and presumably resonate because it provides relevant, interesting, and/or useful information. Hence, this form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid media.
We think of social media as just another marketing channel when we need to instead think of it as the influencer of all channels.
To improve your social media design, you must improve social networking and customer engagement. We have found 9 ways to accomplish these improvements that we use with our clients:
Know as much or more than your audience … valuable content is essential
It is all about quality … quality is much more valuable than quantity
It is about building relationships … meaning conversation is required. Don’t add to the noise
A picture or image … is worth 1000 words. Visual marketing is growing rapidly
Keep your messages … short, simple, and relevant
Define … specific objectives for your campaigns
Measure your accomplishments … against your objectives. Learn and apply to learn
There are NO shortcuts … it requires time and energy
It requires persistence and patience … don’t give up
We are finding more and more businesses are defining meaningful ways to use social media, even if it isn’t always to sell directly.
“Web merchants view social media more as a medium to build up brand awareness and customer loyalty than as a way to drive immediate sales,” says Internet Retailer reporting on its latest survey of 175 companies that sell online.
Survey participants included 85 web-only merchants, 40 consumer brand manufacturers, 34 retail chains, and 16 catalog companies.
Here’s a rundown of the findings by the numbers:
96 percent say social media campaigns are important to the future of their Internet business; 53 percent label them very important.
90 percent have a Facebook page, 75 percent are active on Twitter and 54 percent use Pinterest
51 percent post videos on YouTube, 9 percent use Google+, and 15 percent leverage Instagram.
The more success you have with customer engagement via your social media design, either online or off, the better you are understanding their needs and priorities. Having the best customer insights makes it much easier for you to define your next moves and improve your odds of success.
Please share a social media design experience with this community.
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, and stories per week.
Read more:
8 Popular Social Media Initiatives for Customer Engagement
Social Commerce Business … What Ben and Jerry’s Knows That You Should Know
12 Ways to Build Social Commerce Business through Great Customer Service