Did you know that consumers are now spending more time on social media networks than any other form? It is amazing how fast you can learn from social strategy tips, Social media sites and new ideas are spreading fast. Are you a social media strategist? What are you doing to take advantage of a proactive social media strategy?
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Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions.
By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms. However, few marketers have been able to exploit them as well as they can.
As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to unlock the potential of the social web.
Most marketers, in fact, use social media. Why? They use ordinary media to broadcast messages.
We need to work hard on engagement and building relationships.
And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems.
Consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves in their conversations. They appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.
That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy.
Most breakthrough organizations aren’t built on a bundle of wonderment, novelty and new ideas. In fact, they usually involve just one big idea. The rest is execution, patience, tactics, and people.
The ability to see what’s happening and to act on it. The rest is doing the stuff we already know how to do, the stuff we’ve seen before, but doing it beautifully. You probably don’t need yet another new idea. Better to figure out what to do with the ones you’ve got.
For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.
Before I get started, let me ask you a question. What do you think is the best way of being proactive in a social media strategy?
We would love to hear your answer. Could you do us a favor and insert your answer in the comments section? Our readers and we would much appreciate that.
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Here are some good ways you can capitalize on social media and improve your customer engagement and relationship building.
Put these seven social elements a social media strategist should use in their business’s proactive strategy:
Market Research
Nothing new here, as this was always important to the business.
What is new is the access to millions of consumer communications, which represents a gold mine of data, available at the low cost of your ability to mine it.
Public Relations
Social networks represent a direct channel to consumers.
You need to craft new, compelling messages for them, without selling.
Brand Marketing
Increase the value of your brand through this communications channel. Reinforce old relationships, build new ones, and stretch the real-life of both with the value utilities you can provide.
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Social Media Strategist … Customer Support
Many ways to add value to the products and services you provide, while increasing your image.
New Product / Service / Business Model Development
Leverage the public pool of the ‘collective brain’ to define and test new market opportunities.
Social Media Strategist … Consumer Education
Create valuable discussion boards and other means to respond to ‘asks the expert’ type of information.
Ask your customers for information/education they would like to see.
Promotions
Reach more customers with added communications channels. Integrate all of your channels to improve the information and messages you provide.
Social Listening
Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying (with lots of emphasis on listening). It has been long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and I’d say it is the best marketing technique in one’s arsenal.
Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real-time.
Rishad Tobaccowala, on his blog, gives a nice overview of social listening. Among his insights is that you shouldn’t keep your efforts sequestered in an isolated social unit any more than you would wall off other types of research.
Rather, you need to make sure to integrate social listening into your overall marketing and customer service efforts.
He also makes the apt observation that heavy influencers are not necessarily heavy users (in fact, they don’t need to consume your product at all). So social media may be the only real shot you have to interact with some of those who can affect how your brand is perceived.
Another nice thing about social listening is how easy it is to integrate it into the rest of your marketing intelligence. It can help shape and augment focus groups, monitor mass media campaigns and combine with other real-time resources such as Google Insights.
In the end, your strategy should tell your story in a way that builds on your brand image and integrates all of your marketing efforts.
Consider our list of enablers for a proactive social media strategy we use with our clients:
A customer’s experience … creates the best marketing. It gives your customers something good to talk about. Ways to improve your customer experience needs to be a plank in your strategy.
Customer conversations … are the basis of word of mouth marketing, your most important strategic element.
Marketing strategy … needs to be about service and value, not product and price. You don’t want to be a commodity … ever, so keep your eye on your value discrimination and your service.
Customer relationships … are the backbone of building trust. Customer trust is the most important reason a customer selects a business. What are the ways you are attempting to build customer trust?
Advocates … are your best promotion method. Use them to spread your messages and lead the conversations among customers.
Customer retention … is much cheaper than acquisition. Spend your maximum time and money on retaining your best existing customers.
All customers … are not equal. Know who your best customers are and put most of your attention on them.
The bottom line
Social media is a ‘pull’ and not a ‘push’ medium. It is two-way conversations … where response time is very important.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips, and you will be leading the way.
How many of these strategies have you tried in your business? Please share a story or two about some of your social media campaigns.
