HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION
R. Scott Corbett
The steep growth of online social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn marks the biggest shift in Internet use and popular culture since Google. This tidal wave of behavioral change brought about by Facebook and other social media channels has created new ways to connect with each other as friends and colleagues, but it has also fundamentally shifted how businesses relate to their customers. It’s a wave that could possibly sink your business if you ignore it, but if you do it right, it could also lift your enterprise to the next level of success.
SMO: A Little Background
If you have some experience with online marketing, you may have heard about SEO (search engine optimization), or SEM (pay-per-click advertising). Both SEO and SEM are crucial to getting the best performance out of your website, but the new kid on the block is SMO, or social media optimization.
By “SMO,” I mean the strategic use of social media engagement by a business in order to build one’s brand, extend one’s reach via social media channels, and influence the conversations taking place there.
Additionally, when I talk about “SMO campaigns,” I mean the purposeful creation and management of your business’ social media presence, an approach that often views these efforts through the lens of ROI (return on investment). While it’s no easy task to measure ROI for social media campaigns (see Turner and Shah’s How to Make Money with Social Media for a full discussion), it’s vital to remember that, to paraphrase social media guru Don Crowther, our mission is not to make friends, it’s to make money.
With that ultimate aim in mind, let’s start our discussion today with a vision of what your overall online presence might look like in a few months, after you implement several effective SMO campaigns...
First Page Domination: SMO and Circular Marketing
Dominating the first page of Google with your SMO campaigns (i.e. Facebook pages, LinkedIn profile, Twitter profile, YouTube videos, Yelp reviews...) involves “circular marketing.” When people search for you, your company, or your main keywords online and all they see in Google is one lonely listing for your website, it’s a hit-or-miss proposition as to whether or not they’ll take your word for it and choose to trust you enough to do business with you.
(Without SMO, they might see your website, but that search results page is also filled up with 10-20 or more distracting and probably contradictory listings, too. A lot of these listings are for your competitors, some of them might be unflattering reviews, and some will be results that just aren’t relevant and are a dead-end for your customer.)
Now, think about how powerful it could be if you were to fill up that first page of Google not only with your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, blog posts, posts on other people’s blogs, YouTube videos, content in article directories and social content sharing sites like Squidoo and Hubpages (just Google them if you aren’t familiar with those), and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Reddit.
When you own the first page of Google, you’re positioned as the authority in your niche, and you also make it easier for people to trust you. When they see you participating all over the web, sharing your knowledge and being helpful, they are more likely to form that crucial bond of trust with you.
People often wonder what SMO can do for their SEO efforts. While it’s true that some social media sites can give your website a boost in the search engines (just make sure you use your full URL in your profile links, such as http://www.google.com), the real benefit of SMO comes from this circular marketing effect.
When people can visit your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, your Facebook page, as well as your website, they are more likely to get engaged with you. When they’re engaged, they start to know you, trust you, and like you. That’s probably part of the reason why, when Marketing Sherpa surveyed their readers about their SMO efforts, they found that businesses who engaged in social media had a 59% better conversion rate on their websites than businesses who did not.
Sharing and Social Bookmarking
What do you do when you see a great movie or discover a wonderful recipe for gluten-free brownies?
You immediately start telling your friends.
In fact, part of the overall pleasure and significance of our daily life experiences is in the re-telling and sharing of them.
In order to tap into this basic human tendency, simply make it easy for people to share your online content.
To help your readers follow you on all your social profiles, install a social plugin on your blog. My favorite right now is called Sharebar. This makes it easy for your readers to find and follow all your SMO profiles, and it makes it easy for them give you a vote on social bookmarking sites.
What is social bookmarking? If you’re a blog reader, you’ve probably seen those colorful little logos next to posts that say something like “Share this” next to them. Those icons will take you to sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and others where you can share and vote on content that you find valuable. If you get enough votes from one of these sites, it can mean a huge boost of traffic and readers, not to mention back-links that will help your SEO efforts.
While you’re at it, make sure to put links to your profiles in your email signature, on your business cards, as well as your website, especially the “contact” and “about us” pages.
Who Do You Trust?
We naturally trust what our friends say more than we trust what businesses say about themselves. For example, think about the last time you needed an attorney or wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing or not.
Did you ask your friends and personal network for referrals? Did you pay attention when your best friend said they loved or hated the movie? Did you trust what they said about their attorney more than you might trust what you found when you searched on Google landed on the law firm’s website?
If you did use online search, did you read the reviews of that business as part of your vetting process? Did you read the reviews on Amazon before buying that new digital camera?
We trust our friends because we believe they are like us, and we trust reviews because we believe them to be authentic and unbiased.
Now imagine that you could influence that conversation...
Exercise 1: Reputation Management or, When was the last time you Googled yourself?
Before you leap into creating your social media profiles, do a survey of what people are already saying about you or your company online. Just Google your company name or your own name if you are your business. Anything embarrassing or possibly damaging pop up? Anything flattering that could help you with your social proof efforts?
Try not to take anything personally. Just put on your researcher hat and dive into this sea of opinion for a little while. Tip: Set a timer and perhaps a 20 minute limit when you first do this exercise because it’s easy to flounder around, get emotional, and lose your focus in this kind of feedback.
Where is it that people are talking about you? Are they on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Foursquare, MySpace, or LinkedIn? Maybe they’re on discussion forums or writing on their own blogs. (Facebook comments won’t show up in Google because only people, not search engines, get to see what’s being said on Facebook.)
Of course you might not find much of anything being said about you. If not, don’t worry! Now that you know how to use SMO, you can light a fire under your online marketing and get a buzz going about your company.
Protecting Your Brand
If do find negative opinions out there, consider whether or not to respond to them when you find them. Remember: Be civil and remember your customer is always right, especially when they’re posting online!
Of course sometimes it’s best to recognize that some people are just not going to be satisfied no matter what you do. If that’s the case, you have a powerful tool in social media.
You see, whenever you create a new profile on a social media site, it’s going to show up in the search engines when people look for your business online. If you have a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, and a website with a blog, those are all going to rank highly on Google (and Yahoo and Bing).
You can use your social profiles, as well as articles and guest blog posts that you distribute elsewhere online, to crowd out of the first page of Google any negative stories that you’d rather people not see when they’re forming a first impression of you.
The Golden Rule of Social Media
When you are ready to start that first campaign, remember that the quickest way to sabotage your business here is too do too much selling to people too soon. This might be counter-intuitive to those of us who are used to traditional direct marketing, but think about how you actually interact with people when you meet them for the first time in person.
When you meet someone at a Christmas party, do you say, “Hi, my name’s Steve. Would you like to hire me to remodel your kitchen?” If you did treat people that way in social settings, you’d quickly find yourself having a conversation all by yourself, because no one wants to be sold to in a social setting, at least not right away.
The Golden Rule in social media is that you need to think first about how you can help people, not how they can help you. You need to think about how to connect with and listen to people, not just about how to sell them something.
Ready to Get Started?
Let’s Cut Through Analysis-Paralysis and Start with the “Big Three”
Most of my consulting clients really aren’t sure where they should start with social media campaigns, but the fact is that even though there are dozens of competitors in this space, there really are only a handful of major social media sites right now that you need to be active on.
The Big Three for businesses are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
So What Are the Different Sites Best for?
• Facebook: Best for getting in front of the biggest, most easily engaged audience online. Works great for B2C companies, but still worthwhile for B2B companies.
• Twitter: Best for connecting with, having conversations, sharing updates and news with colleagues and customers. Great place to connect for free to a large number of followers in a short amount of time.
• LinkedIn: Best for professionals and B2B companies. Perfect for professional networking, consultants, vendors, and other business to business companies. Great for reaching very specific industries and senior management.
By the end of this short book, you will have a roadmap for where to go with each of the Big Three and you’ll know exactly how to get started with your first social media campaign.
The Genius of Facebook
Facebook was not the first social networking site, but it is the biggest, and it’s probably the most important for your business. Around 2003, as a student at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg realized that one of our most basic drives as human beings – the incredible power of social connection between friends – could be translated into an online experience. His multi-billion dollar insight was that we are social creatures, and if you can help people to express that part of their basic nature in an easy, entertaining way online, then they will jump at the chance.
Facebook is now open to anyone with a name or a business, and it has over 500 million active users, half of which log into their accounts at least once a day.
Not only has Facebook gotten so big that it gets more traffic than Google, but people also spend more of their time there than they do on Google. Why is that?
Facebook is popular because people love connecting with old and new friends, sharing pictures and comments, getting involved in discussions, and asking for advice.
But What Does This Mean for You and Your Business?
One of the key things to keep in mind about Facebook and social media is the concept of social proof.
Google is great if you’re searching for a Caribbean resort to spend your honeymoon on, but your Facebook friends can tell you which one they think is the best—and share the stories and pictures from their actual trips with you at the same time.
In fact, you might have even gotten the idea for your Caribbean trip after a friend posted some gorgeous pictures from her own vacation.
How powerful do you think it might be if you owned that Caribbean resort, and had a page on Facebook where your guests could “Like” you, share their stories, ask questions and tell their friends about you? A page that you could use to stay in touch with past and future guests, letting them know about special promotions and sales, fun things to do in the area, and advice about travelling there...
Using your business page you could, for example, hold a contest on Facebook to give away a free week’s stay during the high season. Holding a contest is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to get the word out about your business and really grow your “Fan” base exponentially.
Since Facebook is the place to be for your customers, it’s also the place to be for your business because people buy from people (and businesses) they know, trust, and like.
It follows that your potential customers are more likely to know you, trust you, and like you if they can find you on Facebook and other social media sites. And once they do find you, they’re more likely to remember you and feel comfortable about spending money with you the next time they need the product or service you offer. What to say to your “Fans”
According to the Social Media Golden Rule, you must share your advice and expertise freely, just the way you would with a good friend. If you are Steve, the home remodeling contractor, that might mean sharing tips with people on how they can best maintain their homes, like how to choose a termite protection service, how to fix a leaky sink, how to tell if they need a new roof or not, and what they need to know about construction financing if they’re thinking about adding onto their house.
When you do this, your fans are going to file you away in their “mental Rolodex” as Steve, the contractor, and there’s a good chance they’ll be calling you when they are ready to do that addition.
Case Study: Liveclick
If you run, let’s say, a travel agency specializing in trips to San Francisco, maybe you’ll decide to do something like what the coupon company Liveclick did with one of their Facebook pages. They created a page called “Having Fun in San Francisco,” which currently has over 20,000 fans.
In the course of posting fun content about San Francisco, Liveclick will also naturally point them to their website occasionally.
The result? People can find them (even people who had no idea who they were before), and eventually they know, like, and trust them enough to do business with them—which in this case means using their coupon deals.
Have Conversations, Don’t Just “Market” to People on Facebook
When you listen first, and share your knowledge (or just fun content) freely in social media, people naturally want to know more about you. They want to listen to you, they perceive you as the expert in your field, they recommend you to their friends, and they think of you first when they are ready to buy whatever it is you sell.
In a nutshell, this means that you need to start having a generous two-way conversation with your customers. And you also need to show them that their friends trust you. (Or at least “Like’” you on Facebook.)
Traditional marketing, where we talk at people, stands no chance compared to the power of talking with people and helping them see that they can trust us and our businesses.
You can think of Facebook and the other social networking sites as being the new home for word-of-mouth marketing. The information that people used to just share with each other in person is now being shared online in a big way through social media.
“Everything You Say...”
Here are a few tips for conducting yourself on Facebook and other social media. (In the following, I use “you” as a proxy for “your business.”)
• This isn’t your personal Facebook account. Keep the conversation focused on providing information, not on your personal life.
• Keep your personal opinions about controversial topics to yourself.
• Give freely, and trust that more will come back to you in return.
• Be open, honest, transparent, and authentic.
• Think of your fans as high powered reviewers at an exclusive restaurant, and treat them well. What they say about you does matter, and could be seen by hundreds if not thousands of people online.
Creating Your Business Fan Page on Facebook
1. Find comparable businesses with active Facebook business pages and borrow the best aspects of their structure, style, and approach.
2. Go to the Facebook.com homepage and click on “Create a Page”. Fill out the information for your business under the “Official Page” section.
3. Complete the rest of your profile and post a little bit of content to get started.
4. Invite your personal network to “Like” your page, and also ask (ask nicely!) all of your colleagues and employees to promote your page as well.
5. Keep on posting cool content. Think helpful, think funny, think news-related, think valuable, think specials and discounts. Ask your fans to share your posts. The better your content, the more likely they are to pass it along to their friends.
6. Next steps: Hold a contest to really create some buzz for your page.
7. Experiment with Facebook ads to get more fans, get people to sign up for your email list and drive them to your website. Budget funds for this in order to get this right, and make sure to do research and learn from the experts (or hire an expert) before you start. Be careful, but know that when you start connecting with prospects and customers through Facebook ads, your Fan growth (and your sales) can explode.
Let’s Talk About Tweeps, Tweeting, and Twitter
If you don’t know exactly what Twitter is yet, here’s a quick summary: On Twitter, you share short messages or “tweets”, which are no more than 140 characters long. The tweets are then broadcast to all the people who “follow” you. The people who follow you (your “tweeps”) see your posts mixed into an always updating stream of posts from all the other people they follow.
It can be like having a conversation with hundreds or thousands of people at the same time, and it’s easy to waste a lot of time here. If you’re going to be active on Twitter, you need to have a good plan in place to make a valuable contribution to your followers without wasting your time in the process.
The best thing about Twitter, besides being able to get your message out to a large audience, is in the power of the conversations going on there. If you want to know what your followers think about something, you can just ask them. You’ll instantly get real feedback, in their own words.
This is incredibly powerful, being able to get in the minds of your own customers like this, hearing them talk about their passions and problems, using their own language. When it’s time to think about marketing to them, mirror their own words back to them and watch your response rates shoot through the roof.
Twitter Networking
Also, don’t underestimate the power of the professional networking you can do through Twitter. If you want to connect with an important figure in your industry or a new colleague, just reach out to them with a tweet:
“@HomeRepairBob Heard good things about you. Sent you a DM – Have time for a question re Anderson custom windows?”
Once you’ve experimented for a little while with a personal account, you’ll want to create your business Twitter profile. Visit business.twitter.com and also check out the quick guide below for a good way to get your business tweeting fast.
Getting Your Business on Twitter in 2 Hours or Less
• Decide on a name for your profile. Try to be personal. Consider using your own name if you’re a professional or your business already is your name. People prefer to follow people on Twitter more than they like to follow faceless businesses. Think @JoeThePlumber (oops that one’s taken!) or @AgentDoug (real estate agent).
• It’s also ok to use your business name in your profile. Consider shortening it in a catchy way that appeals to a wider audience. Think along the lines of @DogsOnMain if your business is Main St. Hot Dogs, or @AspenHVACGuru if you’re Aspen HVAC Contracting LLC.
• Change the default profile picture. People are better than logos here.
• Customize your background picture. For now just do a search online for Twitter backgrounds to find plenty of free options. You’ll want to hire this out to a designer eventually.
• Fill out your profile description and put a link to your website with the full url of your site, like this: http://www.google.com. Say who you are and what you’ll be tweeting about.
• Post a few friendly, helpful tweets.
• Invite friends and colleagues to follow your new profile.
• Post a few more tweets. When you have 10 or more, start following a few people you don’t yet know. Tip: Don’t follow more than 50 new people a day.
• Use the Twitter search function to find people who are already talking about your area of expertise.
• Within 24 hours or so, the people you’ve followed will start following you back. Congratulations, you’re on Twitter! And you’ve done more there than probably 90% of your competitors ever will.
Now, you just need to continue tweeting, following and joining in on the conversation. Expect maybe 50-75% of the people you follow to follow you back. If you get a much lower response rate, consider shifting the type of people you follow.
Twitter Is All About Conversations
You already know a lot about what your market and your colleagues are saying and what’s on their minds. So, just think about the words they might be using, be creative and see what sorts of people you can discover and follow using the Twitter search tool.
So keep tweeting. 10 times a day is a good number. And remember, the conversation shouldn’t be all about you. Re-tweet good tweets from other people you follow and reply to people’s tweets to join in on the conversation occasionally.
Productivity Software to the Rescue
To keep you from being on Twitter all day long, I highly recommend you use a Twitter software tool. This can help you schedule all your tweets for the day in just the few minutes it takes you (or one of your employees) to write them. It can help you manage your followers and help you efficiently find new people to follow, and it can help keep track of who’s mentioning you on Twitter and elsewhere.
Here’s one way to leverage your time and maximize your exposure when posting all your social media updates:
1. Open a Ping.fm account and link it to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
2. Open a Hootsuite account and use it to schedule your posts to Ping.fm.
3. When your content is sent out from Hootsuite to Ping.fm, it’s then posted to all your networks simultaneously.
So What About LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the third most popular social network right now, and it’s a great way to network and grow your business contacts. I recommend you focus your efforts here at first, if you are a b2b company. This is the business social network and you need to be here if your business is doing business with business (that’s a mouthful!).
LinkedIn has over 50 million members right now, which may not seem like a lot compared to Facebook or even Twitter, but the difference is that most of those 50 million are business professionals. If you sell to consumers, you need to be on Facebook, but if you sell to business, you need to be on LinkedIn.
So what’s the best strategy for getting a lot of exposure there, without coming across as someone who just wants to sell their stuff? As always, keep in mind the Golden Rule of social media: Think of how you can help others, not how others can help you. Listen to what people are saying, join in on discussions, and try to be helpful.
When people see you taking part in the conversation in an intelligent way, they’ll naturally want to find out more about you, and eventually some of them will want to do business with you.
It’s basic human nature that when you meet someone new, ask them about themselves and show genuine interest in them, that they’re going to eventually ask you what you do. Here’s where your elevator speech comes in handy: “I help loan officers close more loans by connecting them with the real estate agents and home buyers who need their help.”
You never know who it is you meet that might someday become a big client. Just be helpful, be interesting and connect!
Grow Your Connections and Land More Business with LinkedIn
• Complete your profile. The closer you get to 100% the better.
• Connect with everyone you already know. Send invitations to your contact list.
• Start posting status updates. Think along these lines if you need ideas: Content (blog posts, videos, news stories, etc.), events, contests, and short thoughts on issues relevant to your network.
• Request reviews from former and current clients (the best ones of course). Go to profile <recommendations> request recommendations to do that. This is enormously powerful. Tip: post these reviews on your website as testimonials. (Just make sure your reviewers don’t mind you using these elsewhere.)
• Search for and join groups that are relevant to your industry. Start new discussions in your groups a couple of times a week. Remember, you aren’t going to sell here. You’re just trying to be helpful and interesting. The goal is to get exposed to people who don’t already know who you are.
• Start answering a few questions a week in the Q&A section of LinkedIn. This can really help you establish yourself as an expert in your field and expand your reach at the same time.
• Reach out and make new connections. Start out with a goal of maybe 5 a week. Experiment with the advance search feature and find people by geographic area, interests, industry and seniority level.
• Before you ask someone new to join your network, take some time to read their profile and learn a little bit about them, then say something helpful in your connection request: “Hi, I’m Meghan—we’re both connected to Bob at Crutchfield. Saw your posts and it looks like we’re facing a lot of the same vendor issues. Looking forward to connecting!”
• Start your own group. Promote it to your network and elsewhere on LinkedIn, on your blog and in your other social media profiles. Once you start getting members and discussions going, you’ll find that the group takes on a life of its own and grows naturally.
Come on in, the Water’s Warm
Creating an effective social media presence designed for optimal engagement with prospects and customers is really just a matter of facilitating their natural impulse to share your content and by meeting them where they are, both in terms of online locations and by showing up as a trusted source of information when they’re just seeking answers, not your products or services. Remember the Golden Rule?
Once people start to connect with your business “socially,” the natural next step will be to do business with you when they are ready.
(A final tip: right now, while it’s fresh, plan out what you will do to establish your social media presence over the next month, including daily and weekly goals. Don’t forget to build in consequences, both positive and negative.)
The social media wave is rising. Make sure that your business catches it.