Lessons of NASA social media and marketing design have been around for more than a decade now, so it should be easy to figure out how to leverage it, right? And avoid social media marketing mistakes, for sure. But hold on for a minute. How does it create a NASA winning marketing solution?
What is the importance of social media in your business? Can you learn from NASA? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Marketing? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line goal is relationship building.
How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that social media marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
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 tactics? Or perhaps little to no value at all.
In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social media. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social media is worth using at all. And all of this misinformation creates more and more social media design mistakes.
Here are 16 social media design strategy lessons from NASA that we have all lessons at one time or the other. We’ll review them here in hopes to learn them in the future:
NASA social media focused on fans, not relationships
What would you rather take? More fans/followers or an engaged community that’s ten times smaller? I hope you’d pick the engaged community. Social sites look at how much traction your post generates in relation to the number of followers you have. If the ratio is good, they will start showing your content to more people outside of your circle.
That’s how you generate more traffic: focus on getting the right followers who will become your engaged community.
Hold secrets close to the vest
Google is probably the king of holding secrets close to the vest, but they’re big and can afford to. The rest of us need to reach out and give away the farm. And avoiding secrets at all costs.
Don’t be afraid to email companies and potential customers that you think you can help. What’s the worst thing that they can do… ignore your email?
NASA social media meant more focus on traffic compared to conversion
If social media traffic didn’t convert, do you think Facebook would be worth over 100 billion dollars? And it’s not just Facebook; it’s all the good social media sites. These companies are worth a lot of money because their user base spends money. The users spend enough money to make advertising on these sites profitable.
I’m not saying you need to start spending money on paid social ads, but you should leverage these sites because their visitors do convert.
It starts with traffic, of course, but that is the means and not the ends. The ends are the conversions.
Not only does social media traffic convert, but you can also measure that conversion. By setting up goals within your Google Analytics, you can see how much each of these social sites is generating for you.
It’s always appropriate for a brand to show its personality and some fun. If it’s a personality that wants to be a little weird occasionally, go ahead and get a little weird.
KLM is a great example of this tactic. Yes, most of their posts are about making customers have some fun, and it’s working very well.
Whether you’re a product-based or serviced based company, ask your users to send photos of them using your product or service in exchange for a shot at a prize, or for the honor of being featured on the page.
Happy customers?
NASA social media meant happy customers
Too many companies create happy customers and then fail to leverage their happiness. That is truly missing an awesome opportunity to turn those customers into advocates.
Contact a few of your happy customers and ask them if you can do a case study for them. This is essentially how MarketingSherpa built their business.
When a successful campaign occurred, they would then flip them into a case study. As they generated interest in their company more and more companies started signing up. Eventually, big companies came calling after seeing all the success they were having.
But you don’t have to do a formal case study to leverage happy customers. Testimonials are also powerful tools. Satisfied customers are eager to share their excitement about your company, so make sure you capture and promote that excitement.
NASA social media … many choices
Ever heard of Hick’s law? This law states that the time required for a customer to make a decision is a direct function of the number of available choices. Too many choices are not a good design as they make decisions more difficult. And that is not a good idea, is it?
NASA social media was the best design
Don’t use every inch of white space because you can. Leave some “breathing room” so people can digest your message. We believe the more the better.
Remember people will take away only one or two things from what they see. The clutter of design keeps them from spotting the takeaways you desire.
The whole point of the story in social media design is to effectively deliver the desired call to action. If the audience does not clearly understand the desired call to action after seeing the ad, then you are missing the real opportunity.
Social media was too ambiguous
Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. If the information is ambiguous it certainly won’t be remembered.
Take advantage of a visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has a number of benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal.
A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In visual design, the combination of photography, illustration, videos and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page.
More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
Lessons for visual distractions
Abstract or conceptual visuals tend to distract viewers. People prefer symbolic language and images that relate to the senses. People are far less receptive and responsive to language and images that relate to concepts.
Life is experienced through the senses and using symbolic language and images that express what people feel, see, hear, smell or taste are easier for people to understand
The more you publish, the better off you are
If you have great information to share on a daily basis, that’s awesome. You should use the social web on a daily basis.
But if you don’t, then consider using it less frequently. Don’t publish average or repeat material. It can actually harm your efforts.
Focus on creating high-quality updates and interactions instead of being on these social sites because you have to.
B2B strategies are different than B2C strategies
Every time I write about social media marketing, someone will comment:
“Those tactics look great for companies who target other businesses, but what should I do if I have a consumer-based company?”
Whether you have a consumer-based or business-facing company, you use the same tactics. From sharing great information to respond to people who have questions to promoting your own products and services, the tactics are identical.
What works for one usually works for the other.
Ignoring negative feedback
The worst thing you can do is ignore negative feedback. If someone isn’t happy with you or your company, you shouldn’t ignore that person. Instead, you should embrace criticism and try to improve.
Just look at Comcast. They even have a Twitter channel dedicated to supporting. Every time anyone tweets something negative about them, they apologize and try to help. It doesn’t matter if it is their fault or not, they are continually trying to improve.
As a business owner, you should embrace negative feedback. Respond to it, and try to solve the problem without getting emotional. It will help your business get better.
Not focused on building trust
The world has a trust problem, and according to Nielsen, we marketers are a big part of it. Only 40% of consumers trust marketing content, but 90% trust content from their social networks.
Compounding the problem, there are troublemakers among us, who have flocked to social media to expand their marketing reach, promoting the same alienating content they use in other media. And then they wonder why they don’t see a return on their investment.
It’s time to enlighten our brethren and teach them how we can collectively participate in social media in a way that puts us in a more trustworthy light.
This sin is closely related to the one on lack of trust. When you make a promise to a potential customer in an ad, and then don’t deliver, you most often lose the customer for good. Not a desirable outcome is it?
The bottom line
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true.
Always do your own research, and try to improve. Social media marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
There is more opportunity to fail in social media than to succeed if we treat it like any other design process. Social media requires us to get away from being promotional and sensational and instead treat our customers with special attention to including their thoughts in our offerings.
It means being truly interested in what they have to say in the real world and communicating about the things they care about — with a vocabulary that illustrates they can trust us.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of social media design. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your social media design efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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