This is Social Media

Tweet, blog, link and post your way to business success

Guy Clapperton

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781906465704
• eBook ISBN: 9781906465902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

*UPDATED FOR 2011. Including new info on mobile devices, new platforms and location based social networking.*

Anyone in business can use social media to increase brand awareness, customer loyalty and sales. This is Social Media shows you how.

You might already be social networking on Facebook, or even microblogging on Twitter. One thing's for sure though; you're too busy to muck about on these sites all day, not really knowing how to get any decent play out of them. You're looking for profitability, not gimmicks.

Many organizations, large and small, are using social media and social networking to build robust communities of followers, stay ahead of the competition and increase profits. Are you missing a trick? This is the definitive guide to using the whole spectrum of social media in an efficient and measurable way in order to market your business. It covers Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, MySpace, Blogs, Podcasts, Mobile and much, much more. Each site is assessed not as an end in itself but as means of delivering a business result.

With simple, practical steps, real life examples and quick definitions to explain the jargon, you'll soon understand the world of social media and have access to a range of social networking tactics that will help you reach new customers and clients, as well as get your existing ones to do more business with you.

1

ONE SIZE WON’T FIT ALL

I’ll start by saying something contentious: you might not need social media at all. This book doesn’t advocate social media for the sake of it. Rather, it helps you look at your business and your desired outcome and work backwards to find the best way to achieve that. It’s all about business planning and using the technology that’s available and easy; it’s not about how clever the technology itself is.

To be a little more constructive, social media may not be the answer to your business problem because there’s every possibility you haven’t defined the problem itself well enough yet. Throughout this book you’ll find me looking for an objective, a desired outcome in any social media endeavour – this is a business book rather than something about leisure so you need to focus on that outcome.

Say you’re a window cleaner in Edinburgh and you want more customers. You do a little decorating on the side and you’d like to make some more money out of this, so you set up a website and start writing a blog. I’m basing this on a real-life example of someone who once asked me how they could use the web to expand their window cleaning business.

A blog, or web log, is essentially an online diary you upload regularly to the Internet. Other people can subscribe and get your updates through a mail newsreader or other means, and they can also comment if you allow that.

So you’ve got the website and you’ve got the blog. We’ll go into ways of putting a professional-looking blog up later, but for the moment let’s assume it looks snazzy and you’re not finding any technical problems. Now, what are you going to write on this new online diary? Let’s guess:

• Monday, cleaned some windows.
• Tuesday, cleaned some windows.
• Wednesday, strained ankle slightly cleaning windows…

Apologies to any window cleaner reading this, you’re probably an interesting person, but we’re talking about a professional blog rather than a personal one. Oh, and someone in Boulder. Colorado might think you sound like a really neat person to employ, but if you’re in Edinburgh you’re not going to decamp to America to clean this person’s windows.

You don’t need social media at all. What you need is to change the sign on your van to ‘decorator’ so people see it in the area in which you work. You need to change your written bills to include the word ‘decorator’ somewhere so that your existing customers, who already use your services quite happily, will think of you in another context. You can, if you’re feeling flush, take out an ad in the local paper, or maybe – just maybe – an online directory like Yell.com. But you don’t need social media.

As I’ve already said, this book won’t bang on about technology for its own sake. For example, for a while I had my Facebook, Plaxo and Twitter feeds synchronized so that the updates always say the same thing, give or take a few minutes’ updating across the different networks (don’t worry about the names, we’ll come on to those later). And I have no idea how it worked. I don’t want to know how it works, just as I don’t want to know exactly how my car works as long as it gets me around. What I care about is that once I was running about trying to keep a whole load of information feeds updated and now I don’t have to. In other words, I knew which question I needed the technology to answer before I started adding bits to the way my set-up worked. That’s the way we’re going to work through this book – starting with an objective and working from there.

Your Objective

Why did you buy (or borrow) this book? What was your objective? That’s a serious question. It’s not a book you’d buy for your leisure time or to unwind at the end of a long day. Presumably you bought it because you wanted to improve your existing business, or to start the right way when you begin a new one. One thing is almost certain though. When you bought the book you thought about your desired result and not the process. You didn’t think: I’m going to walk into the store and lift this book off the shelf then take it to the checkout people and pay for it, or I’m going to buy it from an online bookseller. The process itself would have been of very little interest.

For some reason a lot of people lose sight of this when it comes to setting up some sort of social media for their business. They think: I ought to get onto Facebook because I’ve heard a lot of businesses are doing it; some people have apparently done well from appearing on MySpace, so I ought to do the same; I ought to be on Twitter because so is everybody else. So they focus on Facebook or MySpace rather than any likely outcome or what’s going to go into making their use of these media effective. In no other part of their business will they have been so inclined to put a process in place as an end in itself. This book takes that idea apart and puts the desired outcome first.

So, what exactly do you want to achieve for your business through this strange new technology?

Let’s say you want more customers; as straightforward as that. That’s a respectable aim. Who exactly are your existing customers? How do they behave?

Start by thinking about how you regard certain categories of client. Get away from preconceptions and prejudgements. If you’re selling to an older customer base, do you think they won’t be using this stuff very much? When she heard I was writing this book, my mother-in-law told me she thought that was strange, as she didn’t think I used Facebook very much. She certainly did, to keep networked with her colleagues at the retail chain where she works. She’d been looking at my page and didn’t think I was using it as well as I could. I now know my mother-in-law is monitoring my Facebook account: beware, it could be you!

She was mistaken in one thing: my use of Facebook is entirely appropriate for someone wanting to use it primarily as a source of sales leads and keeping in contact with editors. But I’d made the classic mistake of thinking someone from an older generation would be on other websites. If I’d been selling services or goods to my mother-in-law I’d have missed a possible means of contacting her, and a very cheap one at that.

So, who are your customers and how do they behave? Above all, do they behave as you think they do? There are ways of finding out. If you were going to take out an advertisement in a local newspaper, you’d find out which one your clients read by talking to them and asking. There’s nothing wrong with getting a few customers to fill out a questionnaire and finding out what they actually do in terms of ordinary media, social media, how well they respond to fliers through the door, all that stuff.

Once you’ve found out a bit about if and how they use social media, read through the sections in Chapter 3 and think about what sort of expectations people on that network will have. It is simply no use sailing onto Twitter and announcing that you have a sale of cheap yachts happening from Saturday to Monday; only people who follow you voluntarily will find out about it. Here are a couple of basic guidelines that apply to most social media:

• Facebook, Twitter et al. have millions of users, but you won’t be heard by all of them, people need to make a conscious decision to follow you first. So in terms of attracting new customers a particular site might or might not be right; if someone’s searching Twitter for your particular goods or service you might strike it lucky, but equally you might not.
• It’s the same with setting up a profile on Facebook, or even a discussion group or forum. Never forget that you’ll be seen only by your ‘friends’, people who’ve decided to hook up with you on the site. It’s a bit like the early days of the Internet when some people thought just putting a website up would increase their business, and were then bewildered when it didn’t do so. People have to be persuaded to come to your website or your Facebook page. Then you have to keep them there with compelling information, competitions, whatever is appropriate. Fail to attract the customer and you might as well be knocking at the door of an empty house trying to sell your wares.

Follow: following someone, in Facebook terms, means keeping in touch with their updates – you have to opt in to follow someone or you won’t see what they’ve written.

Friends: ‘Friends’ on Facebook are people with whom you’ve made a link so their updates appear on your home page and yours on theirs. In Twitter-land, Friends are just people you follow, whether they follow you back or not. So according to Twitter Stephen Fry is my friend; if you ever meet him and ask, he’ll confirm – no doubt politely – that we’ve never met.

I’m not trying to put you off, it’s just a matter of working from the desired outcome backwards. Let’s continue assuming that you want new customers; say, 10 more people to come into your classical music shop. Working backwards, how do these people get into your shop? How do they hear about it?

Crucially, do they all hear about it through social media? I’ll bet they don’t. If you’re going to get to all your potential customers, then working backwards should help you get an idea of what you need: word of mouth, local ads, and yes, probably social networks. Remember the word ‘networks’, it’s particularly important. A network is an engaged group of people who’ve spoken to each other and told their friends about you. So, working backwards another step, what did they tell each other? Presumably not that you go online every five minutes to advertise your shop. They might, though, tell each other if you were a particularly knowledgeable source of information on classical music; maybe you have a particular passion for Baroque and can answer just about any question that’s put to you in that area. That’s something that might well get classical music buffs flooding to your Facebook site in numbers. At that point you might want to think about whether you should sell online too if you have enough customers, so you link your Facebook site to an online store and people start buying from you after engaging with you for some advice. You might find the profile of your customers has changed a little, but that doesn’t matter. In this instance you’ve found a new set of customers and it didn’t cost much. You’ve learned that engagement comes before the exchange of money and that’s also fine. It’s a productive use of your time.

Network: a network can mean (and does, in this chapter) a group of people with a shared interest; elsewhere in the book it’ll be used to describe a group of people online, or a specific network like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

Getting new customers is one objective, making more money out of your existing customers is another. New customers are and difficult to find, while making more money out of your existing customers is frequently easier and cheaper, as you’re likely to get their attention a great deal more easily. The question is how to make them spend more or somehow become an advocate of your brand, which you can often achieve through social media.

In the preface we looked at photographer Simon Apps and his success using Twitter. It’s interesting to note that his objective was pretty clearly to attract more customers, but to do this he had to get away from simply being corporate. ‘I found trying to do corporate tweets that were suitable to appear on the website very difficult and to be honest, quite boring. So within a week I had created a new Twitter account, @simonapps, which is not published on the front page of the site but deeper within the site on my biog page at http://www.professional-images.com/who.htm, therefore making it clear that it was my personal account,’ he says. ‘It is this account that has attracted the followers, so I guess I must be doing something right! Clearly, building a relationship with the person and not the business is the way to go. Personally I find people I follow that do nothing but try and sell their services extremely tedious and tend to ignore them whilst scanning through the tweets of those I’m following. Ultimately they will be unfollowed.’

Unfollowed means dropped from another Tweeter’s radar. If you’ve been unfollowed they won’t see your tweets any more.

Rose and Crown

Rose ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: THE BACKDROP TO SOCIAL NETWORKING
• 1 ONE SIZE WON’T FIT ALL
• 2 YOUR BUSINESS AS THE RECIPIENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
• 3 A WHO’S WHO OF SOCIAL MEDIA
• 4 WHERE WILL PEOPLE FIND YOU?
• 5 THE JOY OF TEXT
• 6 WHY DON’T WE DO IT ON THE ROAD?
• 7 COME TOGETHER
• 8 WHERE IS THIS GOING?
• LIST OF DEFINITIONS IN THIS BOOK