Key areas we will cover in chapter 1:

• ✓ using social media, and why it’s important
• ✓ explaining social influence
• ✓ growing your business with social media
• ✓ networking and making connections
• ✓ making effective social media and content plans
• ✓ monitoring your social media profitability.

If you think social media is for the young ones and that you are too old to even contemplate it — never mind finding the time or having the resources to do it — then you should read on.

Do I need social media?

I have heard people say, ‘I have no time for social media’, to which I respond, ‘You have no time for marketing your business and building relationships with prospects and customers?’

Think about that for a moment.

Yes it takes effort, but so does every aspect of running a successful business, and there are tools available to help you pull it all together. When we put your plan together later in this chapter, you will see how easy it is.

You may also think that your customers and prospects are not on social media, and so social media can’t help your business. Did you know that the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is females over 55, or that LinkedIn’s most popular sector is ‘service’, with personal profiles for everyone from cheese-makers to the president of the United States? There is a group of people, however large or small, on these channels — or accounts — just waiting for you to put yourself or your brand on their radar.

How cool would it be to get your customers’ feedback in real time, as it is happening? You’ll get both good and not-so-good comments, but the not-so-good comments are as valuable to your business as the good. If the comments show you have an issue in your business that needs fixing, it’s better that you know about it, isn’t it? You can then apologise, react to the issue and make it good for everyone to see.

Sharing your life and finding new friends online is now the norm. But while I don’t want to share my private life with the masses, I am okay about sharing my business life with anyone who is willing to listen. It’s a great way to let interested people know your business exists.

Digital marketing and social influence

By using the online channels, more and more people will get to know that your business or brand exists. Do a great job at getting people talking and sharing, and you’ll find others will happily follow their lead, also known as their social influence.

What is social influence?

The Wikipedia definition of social influence is quite simply:

Social influence occurs when a person’s emotions, opinions, or behaviours are affected by others. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales and marketing.

If you’ve ever read Jonah Berger’s book Invisible Influence you will know that, like his book Contagious, it’s absolutely chock-full of real stories and light-bulb moments — and it is one of the few business books I didn’t want to put down. It takes you down the path of ‘invisible influence’, something I hadn’t thought too much about — until I read the book. Now I am fully aware of those things that do influence me in one way or another. There are plenty of ways you can influence your prospects to buy from you, such as clever marketing campaigns, effective branding, an attractive sales team or a well-known customer-service philosophy. But what about the things you can’t control within your business — the things that influence but are not obviously seen?

Let me explain using some of Berger’s examples and some of my own.

• You take your team out to a restaurant for lunch to celebrate a milestone. You have your eye on the apple pie for dessert but when the waitress collects the dessert orders and you realise you are the only one ordering, you don’t want to eat alone so you immediately change your mind and go without. It was your co-workers who influenced you to change your mind — without you realising it.
• It’s autumn, and the weather is up and down. You never know what to wear. You don’t want to be too hot, or too cold. So you look out the window to see what others are wearing and make your decision from there. In this case, complete strangers are influencing you on what to wear.
• It’s well known that you never eat at a restaurant that has no customers in it. You are influenced to move on because you figure the food mustn’t be any good if no-one is eating there.
• You go to the gym on a particular day purely because your friend is going.
• You buy a book because of the cover design or the description of what’s inside.
• You buy a new cereal when you can see what it looks like through the cellophane window in the box.
• You keep away from a person because they are unkempt.
• You don’t like to open a bottle of wine if there’s no-one to join you.

When did you last buy a book or book accommodation online without checking the review stars? Did the negative reviews stop you from your purchase or was it the five-star reviews that actually made you purchase?

All the time, people and things are influencing even the smallest decisions we make; our job now is to make them positive influences.

Some ways you can influence, starting today:

• Having great team photos on your website instead of stuffy corporate ones might influence visitors to contact you because you look more ‘human’.
• Being seen doing something great for a customer could influence their return, or even influence others to buy from you.

A smartly presented team and environment is much more appealing to a customer than an unkempt one; they will want to stay around longer.

What outside influences are having an impact on your business? It could be something out of your control, such as the weather, or it could be something you can control. Work out what those unseen influences are and see if you can make them work positively for you.

How can influence help you online with digital marketing?

The five-star review system has been around for many decades — it is said that a movie reviewer started it with three stars back in 1928. Three stars meant ‘excellent’, two meant ‘good’ and one star meant ‘mediocre’. No stars at all meant the picture was no good. Restaurants use it, as do hotels. Who wants to stay or eat in a one- or two-star establishment? So the system has been around a long time, and we recognise it as a reasonably safe bet.

Take a post you see in your newsfeed on any given channel. You scan the image and it grabs your attention, or maybe the headline or description appeals to you. You decide to take a closer look and there at the bottom is the ‘social proof’ that something is worth your moment of time. The ad has 1000 likes and 500 shares, as well as 657 comments. Instantly, you realise something must be good about this post and you allow yourself to click on it for more information just to see what all the fuss is about.

Take that same post with no likes, comments or shares and you’d probably pass it by — you probably wouldn’t click on the link because your time is too precious.

It was the social proof of all the activity from others on the post that influenced you to check it out — nothing to do with the post’s design and content at all, but the influence of others.

When you create a post on social media that garners plenty of social interaction or proof, you need to make the most of it. These are the posts you need to promote, put some money behind and allow to run, gathering more and more social proof — social momentum, if you like — as they go. If it’s an ad that’s running well with social proof, keep it running by editing the content rather than stopping it and creating a new one, as social proof can’t be carried over from one ad to another. (More on ads later.)

Social proof is extremely valuable, as we’ve learned, so gather it as you go and keep it working hard for you. Other people’s views on something are far more powerful than you spouting about how good your own product or service is because, frankly, why should anyone believe you? But they will believe a bunch of strangers.

Nothing going on here — move along!

The same can be said about when a visitor finds your Facebook page. Ask yourself what they would find if they visited it right now (if you have one)? Your last post was a month ago? You only have 17 ‘likes’? Your banner image promo is no longer relevant? No-one is conversing with you or anyone else on the page? If that’s what they would see, they would move on, probably quickly, and probably to your competitor. Your lack of activity and digital housekeeping would undoubtedly influence any visitor to move away and may even influence them from contacting you at all. If you currently have such a scenario, either tidy it up or unpublish it until you can.

Social proof is all around us and we can use it to our advantage. Get focused on the social sites where your customers and prospects hang out and start influencing them by interacting with them.

How are you marketing at the moment?

What do you have in your current marketing toolkit? I suspect it contains things such as newsletters, your website, news media articles, internal communications, surveys, TV and radio, events, referrals and possibly the telephone business directory. Most if not all of these tools will have a price tag attached to them, with some being out of a lot of companies’ reach. Not every company can afford to advertise on TV, and certainly not often enough for their ad to be effective over time. Not only can these tools be cost-prohibitive, they can also be a little out of date.

Now consider the social media and online sites that are becoming more and more commonplace. You might not even class some of them as social media, but they are online communication channels nonetheless. The beauty of social media from a cost point of view is that how much you spend is up to you and your budget. Spend up large and you’ll reap the rewards, but you can also do amazing things with a very small budget. So if you are still hanging on to your business directory ad as the most secure way of generating new enquiries, it could be time to think again and move on to something new.

Table 1.1 lists some of the current and new marketing tools.

From a branding point of view, social media platforms enable you to engage with your customers in real time and find out what they want, think or feel at any given time, which makes them a great tool for any company to utilise.

Spoilt for choice

There is a plethora of choice when it comes to social media sites. The obvious ones are Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube, along with Snapchat and Google+. To these we can add online activity such as blogging, webinars, Skype and podcasts. Oh, and don’t forget email marketing!

Long gone are the days of picking up a pen and writing a letter to someone, putting a stamp on the envelope and walking to the postbox to send it — this really doesn’t happen much anymore. Email is now the normal form of business communication, with the telephone a close second. As more and more people are in email overload, I can see that changing — though not for some time yet. And email marketing still very much works because the message is delivered directly to the inbox so the reader doesn’t have to go out in search of it.

As each generation comes into the workplace, it seems to find another way to communicate — Snapchat is that medium for many today. The way we communicate has changed, and it will change again in the future. Who knows what platform will be popular in two, five or 10 years’ time?

How will social media grow your business?

Some companies have been able to grow their business massively by using social media in a clever way. But how can you do it? Simple. You need to:

• engage your customers
• deliver great content
• listen to your customers
• build your business network
• find your cheerleaders and raving fans
• do it all over and over again.

Engage your customers

You may be wondering just what I mean by this, but it is simple. Get your customers interested in what you have to offer. What problem do they need fixing? What need do they want to fulfil? What desires do they have that are not being met?

Deliver great content

Engage them by delivering the right content. This is your chance to provide them with a solution — one that’s just for them. It’s not about telling them how wonderful your product or service is.

Listen to your customers

By talking and listening to your customers and prospects, you will get a feel for what it is they really want from your product or service. Now, you’re not likely to sit and call each and every one of your customers, but by using the social media sites where they hang out, you have an easy set of tools at your disposal to be able to listen effectively.

Build your business network

Building your business network of connections will give you tentacles in all sorts of different industries and places: you may never know how and when you will use them, but they are there for you. By building a large connection base, you can call on select people to point you in the right direction, or reach out to them for help with a quirky need. A connection once reached out for help with an unusual position he had, and I passed his request on to one of my connections, and ... guess what? It was a fit. Some of the stories you will read in this book were sought from my network on LinkedIn. It doesn’t always work out, but I know that without a great connection base, I wouldn’t have the same resources to make use of from time to time.

Find your cheerleaders and raving fans

You will have customers and clients who absolutely love what you do and who couldn’t be happier with your product or service. So how are you currently leveraging from them and rewarding them? Do you even know who they are?

If someone has been a cheerleader of yours without you realising it until now, do something special for them. Send them your new product to try; give them a little extra service if you can. Make them cheer some more, and maybe they will shout about you and your brand more than they already do wherever they hang out online.

Do it all over and over again

Here’s a real example of how a small operator can create a buzz about their brand and engage customers both online and offline.

Your details are not safe online ... or are they?

The more nervous ones among us are concerned that all of our details are out there for anyone to steal. But your details will be secure on the vast majority of social media sites, and are controlled by you (although you do need to double-check your settings occasionally as sites make updates). Remember, too, that your business details — your mobile phone number, landline number and email address — are likely already available for all to see on your website because you want it to be easy for a prospective client or customer to get in touch with you. Of course, I wouldn’t suggest you post your address if you work from home, or other sensitive information, but my point is the choice is yours as to how much to share, and you want your business details out there, so it’s a bit of a non-issue.

What if it goes wrong?

Social media sites enable you to receive real-time feedback, both positive and negative. For example, the NYPD came under fire when it decided to engage with the local community via Twitter. It set up and promoted the hashtag ‘#myNYPD’ to encourage people to share great photos they might have of themselves with the police in the community. Instead, some people decided to use it to post pictures the police would rather the public didn’t see, such as individuals being dragged by their feet as they were removed from protests.

As long as you act quickly when things don’t go according to plan, you can minimise any damage. The internet tends to jump into overdrive from one topic to another quite quickly, so whatever may have gone horribly wrong for you is likely to be old news very soon. (More on security in chapter 14.)

Let’s start networking and making connections

By using sites such as LinkedIn, you can network effectively and make use of other people’s connections that you may want to do business with.

I once asked a question in a group on LinkedIn and a lady from Canada responded. She said she could help me, but knew someone a bit closer to home to me — could she pass my details on? I agreed, and a couple of days later I received a phone call from Sarah. She said my name was familiar to her and asked if I was attending a women’s networking luncheon later that day, which I was. You can imagine, then, that when we both arrived at the function, we made a beeline for each other. It was almost like seeing an old friend again because we had been joined together by the lady in Canada, and we had this great story to tell others. Sarah later became a client and a good friend, and in fact lives only 40 minutes away from me.

So don’t be put off if you think networking online is only for talking to people from other countries and is of no use to you. The world is an incredibly small place now with the use of technology, and even doing business across the other side of the world may not be that hard.

Networking in your pyjamas

If I said to you that there was a networking event taking place nearby and some of the greatest businesspeople you would like to know will be attending, would you make the effort to get to the event? Of course you would. This sort of networking is going on all the time on social networking sites such as LinkedIn. Couple that with the ease of Twitter, and you have a recipe for nurturing relationships with people you may not ordinarily come into contact with.

Not many people read the business pages or another business directory with a view to calling and meeting new business connections, so apart from regular networking events and business appointments, how else can you grow your business network? Face-to-face networking options such as your local chamber of commerce and other business networks will never die — they are undoubtedly the best way to meet other business connections — but online networking can and does run alongside these as an alternative and extra way to meet people, and it will give you the variety you may be lacking. You are not constrained by a venue or time and you can take part at any time of the day that suits you or your business.

Creating a listening post

What about listening? Social media can also be used as a simple listening post that enables you to hear what is being said about a multitude of things, such as your brand, your own name or even information about your competitors. There are tools to enable this to happen easily, so you don’t need to regularly search through Google to hear what others may be saying about you. Listening online gives you the following benefits:

• You can respond to bloggers who have mentioned your brand or your name.
• You can promote positive mentions.
• You can deal with any negative mentions.
• You can monitor your competition.

Tools for listening include:

• Hootsuite — a dashboard tool that makes Twitter easier to use
• Google alerts — set up an alert for a given keyword to your inbox
• Twitter search — search Twitter for keywords; no account needed.

Of course, there are many more listening tools available. Every site has its own mechanisms for ‘listening’.

Getting an effective social media plan together

If you don’t spend a little time making a social media plan, you will more than likely end up attacking it from all angles and your success may be limited, which will only make you feel like the whole thing was a waste of time. If you really hate writing plans, you don’t need to worry too much because your plan only needs to be a simple one-pager. You just need some clear direction so that you know where you are headed and can track your successes. As Jack Welch once said, ‘A strategic plan is simply picking a general direction and implementing it like hell’. So true — my kind of guy.

How do I go about making my one-page plan?

First you need to ask yourself what you want to achieve by using social media over three, six and 12 months. It could be:

• a larger prospect base to talk to
• a certain number of connections and followers
• a monetary amount
• a reputation for being an expert in your field
• a certain number of visitors to your website.

Then ask yourself three questions:

• What is my purpose in using social media?
• What am I hoping to achieve?
• What is my desired outcome?

The ‘purpose’ aspect could be very simple, such as:

• You don’t want your competitors gaining the edge because they are already using social media.
• You realise it is another way of communicating with your prospects.
• You want to grow your business network of connections.

The ‘achieve’ aspect could be:

• You want to attract more customers.
• You want to listen to what is being said.
• You want to gain more brand exposure.

The ‘outcome’ aspect could be:

• You have created and engaged a tribe of fans who have become cheerleaders for your business.
• You have a listening post set up.
• You have a greater network of business connections.
• You have achieved the figure that was your goal.

A template for making a social media plan is provided in table 1.2. See the appendix for a sample completed social media plan. Social media moves and changes so fast that it would be difficult to plan much further ahead than 12 months, but it is important that you have milestones along the way at three and six months, just to check how you are tracking against your goals and to see if you need to make any adjustments. You may find that your goals have changed slightly, so this also needs to be taken into account.

Create a SWOT analysis

Another element to consider adding to your plan is the good old-fashioned SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), which, although it has been around a long time, is still a very effective and easy-to-use tool.

The SWOT analysis can be done as part of your plan, or as an activity on its own. Either way, it is important to see, from a social media point of view, where you and your competitors currently are.

By listing the four headings and asking the questions below of your business, you will end up with four clear areas that show where you may have problems and whether you are travelling in the right direction. Take into account what your competition is currently doing, or what you think they might do. Copy the template in table 1.3 or download it from my website: www.bluebanana20.com/resources. See the appendix for a sample completed SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis details your business’s:

• Strengths. What are you good at? List your strengths and then see how you can leverage them for even greater results.
• Weaknesses. What are you not so good at? What do you need to do to mitigate your weaknesses?
• Opportunities. What are the events and trends that are favourable to you? How can you leverage your opportunities?
• Threats. What are the events and trends that are not favourable to you? How can you mitigate your threats?

Forming the social media team

A common mistake that companies make is to presume that the best person to set up your social media sites is whoever is under less pressure than the rest of the team, and therefore has the most time available. This can very often be the receptionist. Now, although your receptionist may be fantastic at their job, they may not necessarily be a marketer or customer service manager. So who should be working on your social media sites?

I asked a couple of companies how they decided who should be on the social media team. One company said, ‘The people need to be online already and understand how it all works; they need to be on brand so they live and breathe our business; and lastly they need to be on resource. The latter refers to a good knowledge about where they can find great content in our market that is useful to share out again’.

Another company said, ‘We simply sent an invitation out to the whole company to see who wanted to be involved in the first place. Who are our knowledgeable team players that know and understand our business and the online space? From there, we made our selection’.

Both of these ideas are great ways to find the correct person or people for your social media plan, but if you are a very small company, it may just be you in the first instance. Don’t despair that you are already trying to balance more plates in the air than you would care to admit; if you stick to your plan, you won’t go far wrong and your efforts will be rewarded.

Get a media team in place

Don’t feel that you have to do it all yourself, and certainly don’t simply get the most junior team member to do it just because they spend so much time on Facebook. Looking after the online marketing for your brand is quite different from chatting with friends on Facebook. Ask your staff who would like to be involved, create a small team and call them the ‘media team’. If you don’t have such a team, consider who else from outside your business might want to be involved. As long as you or a designated person who knows exactly what is going on and is accountable has the final say, you should be fine.

Getting a content plan

Content, or what information you choose to share from around the web or your own work, is what will make your efforts succeed: no-one wants to read uninteresting articles. Brainstorm with your colleagues and anyone else you wish to get involved, and make a list of the useful websites that always have great content on your chosen topic. You can add those sites to your content plan template later. Those sites may not even be local to you — they may be on the other side of the world — but that doesn’t matter. If you have a bridal business and your chosen resource sites are in New York, who cares? You are adding value back to your followers, fans and connections with your expertise and knowledge about what is happening on a larger scale, or, in the case of fashion, what trends are developing.

When you have found the best resource sites, subscribe to their databases and follow their page accounts so that the best and most interesting articles come straight to your inbox for you to read and action. That way you don’t need to revisit their sites each day to see if there is anything new.

Keep a list of the resources you are going to be using so that regardless of who is looking after your social media, anyone in the team can update it should the need arise. It also means you don’t have too much to think about each day as you know where your content is coming from.

Don’t make it all link back to other people’s sites; you want to balance it out with great information from your own team including photos, video clips and stories.

What is content marketing?

You may have heard the term ‘content marketing’ and have probably been subjected to it — hopefully, if it’s been done well, without you even realising. It’s a term that is now commonplace but became ‘famous’ only in recent years.

Back in 1895, John Deere published a magazine called The Furrow, which provided information to farmers on how to become more profitable. It’s still around today, with readers in 40 countries. But it’s not a magazine with ad after ad for tractors and machinery; it’s useful content on farming and how to be more profitable. There just happen to be pictures and information on John Deere’s products in the magazine, just in case the reader might be interested.

The same goes for the original Michelin Guide, a guide on motor maintenance, accommodation and other travel topics. The more people travelled, the more their tyres would wear out and need replacing, and hopefully they’d think of Michelin tyres.

That’s content marketing: adding value to someone’s world and making your product or service secondary in the message, but keeping your brand on their radar for just when they need it. Everyone in your company should have the opportunity to contribute, so don’t miss the opportunity by not asking — you may have a budding writer among your team. There are many ways you can create your own content; for example:

• articles for your news or blog page on your website
• images of your product or business
• videos
• audio such as podcasts.

You don’t need to be a designer or a wordsmith to create your own great content; you just have to have ideas that will interest people. A good place to start when writing is to answer frequently asked questions about your product or service in the form of a short article. Chances are, if it’s a common question, others will find the answer useful too. You can then present that information in various ways: picture, video or audio.

What is it not?

Content marketing is not banner ads, direct sales messages or telling your audience how good you are with buy, buy, buy! They will be saying bye, bye, bye if you post this type of content on your online pages.

Set up content themes

Now that you know what content marketing actually is, setting themes will keep it easy for you. Depending on what your business is, you might want to theme your content to match your overall marketing plan. This is easy if you are, for example, a florist or gift shop: make a list of all the Hallmark events that happen throughout the year — in other words, events that you buy a card for such as Father’s day, Easter and so on — then theme your content accordingly.

On Valentine’s Day, the florist could have not only matching flowers, but also short articles on the history of St Valentine’s, as well as images. A great discussion topic for LinkedIn could be, ‘What are you doing for your partner this Valentine’s?’ — a question designed to get others networking and nothing else.

For a health professional, it may be ‘spine awareness week’, so focus your theme on that. Ask questions on LinkedIn about posture and how people deal with back pain: do they use a Swiss ball or a special chair?

If you are a mechanic, you might want to talk about the importance of good brakes during the winter months on your Facebook page and Twitter.

There are other areas on the content plan, such as:

• off-topic questions
• useful videos
• article ideas.

As you read through this book, you’ll see these areas are covered in various sections, so fill these in as you go. You can copy the template content plan in table 1.4 or download it from my website: www.bluebanana20.com/resources. See the appendix for a sample completed content plan.

Quick ideas for your content

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking in the right direction; they are covered in more detail in individual chapters of this book.

Facebook

News topics could include:

• how-to’s
• what has been happening in your industry
• product launches
• behind the scenes
• team announcements
• funny stories
• your company blog.

You could also upload videos of your products or services, and some photos.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business networking site, so your content should mirror this:

• Use some of those great links you found as a discussion point in the groups you are a member of.
• Write articles for your own website on a weekly or monthly basis and refer to those.

Twitter

The conversation here is a mixture of formal and informal:

• Tweet your own articles and blog posts.
• Tweet content from the LinkedIn groups if those groups allow it.
• Pass on or retweet other people’s interesting articles.

YouTube

Upload videos that:

• showcase your product
• introduce your team
• show your TV commercial behind the scenes
• show new product creation
• answer some how-to’s.

What makes people share?

There is a science behind what makes people share and, as social media success really does rely on people sharing your content, it’s important to create the right type of content. There is a great book on the subject called Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger, which is also published by Wiley. Berger is a Wharton professor and it’s a fabulous read that will totally blow your mind regarding what the vital ingredients are for writing content that people will want to share. Jonah has given me permission to briefly write about those secret ingredients here, but I still suggest you add his book to your reading list. Consider the following, and decide which elements you think would make the most sense to your audience and how you can create something worth sharing.

Social currency

People love to share things that make them look good. They like to look smart, funny and in the know. That might be by using gamification (making something game-like) or by being the first to have seen a video or to answer a question. It’s that feeling of a little smugness, I suppose, and we are probably all guilty of it at some time.

Triggers

We talk about things that are top of mind or topical, so using a reminder that keeps an idea about your brand in people’s heads really works. What is it that makes people think about your product or idea? Are you a pizza restaurant and Saturday night reminds people that it’s pizza night? Or how about when you have your morning coffee you think about having a KitKat? Saturday and coffee are both triggers in these cases.

Emotion

When we care, we share. Think of all the YouTube videos or images you have shared in the past and look at what it was that made you share them. No doubt there will have been an emotion involved — maybe something made you laugh heartily, feel angry or sad or feel totally in awe. Whatever it was, it altered your pulse rate, which in turn made you inevitably pass it on. What can fire people up about your product or service?

Public

Built to show, built to grow. Can others see when someone has consumed your product? For example, if you have an iPhone or iPad and you send emails from them, there will be a default message at the bottom of each one saying ‘sent from my iPhone/iPad’. This is public advertising and sharing without you even thinking about it, as well as a little bit of showing off that you own a smartphone or device. Each time you send an email, you are doing the advertising for Apple products. How can someone else do the same for you?

Practical value

News you can use. If you come across something really useful or helpful, you will more than likely share it with your friends. It might be advice on unruly teenagers, money-saving tips, healthy-eating recipes or how to make the perfect exploding volcano model. Whatever it is, useful gets shared. What problem does your product or service solve for others? That is what you need to focus your message on — and then find a medium to deliver it.

Stories

Stories are easy to remember and pass on. If you can dress your message up in a true story rather than a bunch of facts and figures, it will become more memorable. The trick here is also to find a way to incorporate your brand and make people remember it. Think of great series of ads such as the Oxo stockcube lady and her family — those 42 ads ran for 16 years and the family became a part of many British households.

The Countdown grocery chain ran similar ads with a fictitious family called the Colemans. This also ran for many years, keeping the Countdown brand in many homes, both on TV and online. What Trojan horse ideas could you use to get your product known?

Rules of engagement

It is important to set some guidelines for your writing team as to what can and can’t be said on the various sites, and it is up to you how detailed you want the guidelines to be. They can be simple and include the following:

• Never swear.
• Never bring the company into disrepute.
• Never badmouth the competition or another person.
• Never argue with another company.
• Deal with all complaints as if the complainants were standing in front of you.
• Don’t shout in capital letters.

There are plenty of social media policy examples available online and some for purchase, so take a look at what others have done and decide what you feel is appropriate for your business. While you want to make sure everything is covered, you don’t want to go over the top and gag your team.

Monitoring your social media profitability

We have looked at why we are using social media, who we want to talk to and what we want to achieve. We have a list of where the content is going to come from and who is going to manage it. The last thing to work out is how we are going to measure our return on investment (ROI).

There has been a lot of discussion about measuring the ROI of a company’s efforts because people realise it is in fact quite difficult to measure, but there are a few tools to help you.

A great free piece of software is Google Analytics. Your social media efforts are going to drive lots of traffic back to your website, so make sure you have monitoring tools installed to capture that information. By monitoring your traffic, you can see which sites are in fact referring traffic back to your website and chart them. Go to www.analytics.google.com and follow the easy steps. You will then be given a short piece of HTML code to put into your website. You may need your web person to do this bit for you, but it only takes a couple of minutes so it shouldn’t cost much, if anything.

Facebook Insights is another free tool available to you and accessed from your Facebook page. This will give you information on the mix of your fans and how active they are, which you can then use for marketing purposes. For instance, if the majority of your fans are female and aged 35 to 44, and you decide to try Facebook ads, you can target those people for a more focused ad.

LinkedIn is a little easier and more obvious because you know if you connected with someone on LinkedIn and they are a client. That is hard evidence. It is worth mentioning at this point that not everyone will become a client straight away, and some never will, but from a networking point of view, who knows where that connection might take you? A client last year admitted to taking six years to finally contact me to work with them because the time was now right. When you send a valuable newsletter-style message to all of your connections, watch what happens to your own inbox with positive comments coming back in to you. Remember that radar?

By registering for a bitly account at www.bitly.com you can monitor just how often a tweeted link has been opened — how many sets of eyeballs have now had exposure to your information — and therefore how useful or relevant the tweet you shared has been for your audience. You can also shorten URLs there and it’s free. (More on Twitter in chapter 4.)

Other areas that contribute to the ROI

Defining the ROI of social media is a bit like defining the ROI of your telephone — it’s not easy. But there are more questions you can ask that will contribute to your ROI:

• What have we learned from our customers that we didn’t know before?
• Did we manage to talk to more prospects and expose our brand even more?
• Did our clients find out anything new about us?
• Are our staff more engaged now?
• What shall we do for all of our cheerleaders?
• Would we now do without it? (No!)

How great would it be if you found out on your Facebook page that the new cheese-flavoured crackers you have just spent a fortune developing were in fact a little over-salted for most people’s taste, and you were wondering why repeat sales were not happening as much as you would like? What a goldmine of information you could have at your fingertips.

Why not reward your cheerleaders and get them to cheer about your product or service even more? Send them some free product for even more promotion.

What you don’t see

During a conversation with a company director, he told me about a prospect who had called him after doing his due diligence on the director’s company. If the prospect was going to part with a large amount of money, he wanted to see if the company practised what it preached. He looked at the team’s LinkedIn profiles to see if they were all of the same standard and displayed the same company message, checked that the company Facebook page followed suit and looked at some of the company’s other sites to see if everything was ‘on message’. It wasn’t. There wasn’t consistency all the way through.

Now if the prospect had not picked up the phone and called the director to tell him what he’d found, he might have simply decided not to become a client and no-one would be any the wiser. What it did do was make the director’s company sit up and take note that it needed to get its message consistent, and pronto. How many other prospects had it lost that it didn’t know about because its social media message was not consistent?

People are checking out your brand all over the internet, so if you have anything to tidy up, do it today.

Conclusion of chapter 1

Now you understand a little more about what social media is and how it can help your business. The most important thing to do next is create your social media plan, because without it your efforts could be seriously diluted and your success is at risk. We will refer back to your plan as we work through the book, so before you move on to the next chapter, do spend some time, perhaps with your team, and get at least the bones of it together. As this plan is a working document, keep it handy for the relevant people to work with and update.