In This Chapter

Disseminating your content on social media

Creating social media avenues of attraction

Understanding which social media channels may benefit you

With over two billion activated accounts worldwide, social media is the modern means by which people connect. Whether its Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, social media has revolutionized the way we communicate. Social media platforms make it easy for people to find a date, share restaurant recommendations, and collaborate to plan a vacation. For business-to-consumer companies, social media platforms enable businesses to connect with people on a deeper, more meaningful level. Participating in social media engages your company with people based on lifestyle, creating brand connections on an emotional level. But social media isn’t just for business-to-consumer companies. Business-to-business companies benefit from social media networking, too. This chapter examines social media as a contributing factor in your inbound attraction efforts

Learning the Benefits of Social Media

Now that you’ve produced your content, it’s time to share it with others and attract people to your company. Social media is a great place to share. The benefits of incorporating social media into your inbound marketing plan include:

• It increases your company’s prospects and offers customer engagement with two-way communications.
• It cements customer loyalty.
• It improves brand interaction at every point in the Lifestyle Loop customer purchase path.
• It increases your traffic and the number of leads, using content to attract.
• It improves customer service.
• It improves your organic search-engine rankings.
• It provides consumer trend insights.
• It grows business partnerships.

Knowing your target personas makes it easier to understand which social media platforms they are most likely to use. For example, Pinterest participation is flooded with younger females, and LinkedIn is an obvious platform for any business-to-business company.

By sharing links to your content on social media to create easily accessible avenues, you’ll attract more visitors. You’re helping people arrive at a relevant, comfortable place by building social media “homes” and stimulating conversations and content sharing with these social media platforms. That helps increase onsite conversions.

But social media can be a dangerous game of wasted time and energy if you’re not careful. To the corporate “suits” it may sometimes seem like social media is a game. Trust me, your customers don’t view it as a game. People may rant and rave about your company, and if you’re not listening and responding to conversations on social media, you’re not fully playing the game of business.

From a marketing standpoint, social media may be used for quite a few purposes, including:

• Content sharing
• Thought leadership
• Lead generation
• Meaningful brand interaction
• Surveys
• Customer reviews
• Customer service
• Reputation monitoring and enhancement

If you’re considering social media purely as a sales mechanism, however, you may want to reconsider. According to Experience: The Blog, fewer than 0.25 percent of the customers of “prestige” brands were acquired from Facebook and fewer than 0.01 percent from Twitter. Having said that, Social Media Examiner’s (www.socialmediaexaminer.com) 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report states that 51 percent of experienced social media marketers report improved sales from social media. That number jumps to 73 percent for companies who invest more than six hours per week. I suggest you manage your expectations accordingly. Although your company may want to use social media to sell directly, more often it is better for communicating at the education level, linking to engagement content or reengaging customers and Lifestylers.

In most cases, it’s hard to draw a direct correlation between your social media and the end customer action, especially if you’re not using marketing automation software. This problem compounds when marketers view social media purely as a reach medium rather than as an engagement mechanism. But social-media metrics and rewards are mostly based around sharing information and rewarding good content with Likes, shares, pins, and retweets. Bridging that gap requires direct links to content so you can accurately track sourcing and measure social media against your other attraction inputs.

Matching Your Message with the Medium

Matching your content message with social media platforms just makes sense. It’s contextual content marketing. With some content distribution channels, it’s easy to make this match because the medium is the message. For example, when you produce video, you’re probably going to post it on YouTube and Vimeo. But the distribution path isn’t always so clear. Video uploads on Facebook now surpass video uploads on YouTube. Be creative in the types of content you share and always build links to your content and make your content shareable.

Over time, measure sources of social media visitors, and where those leads, customers, and repeat customers enter your website. You use this data to make better decisions about where to promote your content on social media. If you discover that you generated 100 visits from Twitter and only three from LinkedIn, you can promote more on Twitter to increase visits. If, however, you learn that all three LinkedIn visitors became customers and 0/100 of your Twitter visitors became customers, you may reconsider. Creating source reporting is imperative for accurate inbound reporting. The best option for this is a comprehensive marketing automation software tool because it automates the reporting for you. Alternatively, you can cobble together your own reporting system by attaching tracking codes (ask your developer) and combining manual reports with any automated reporting to which you have access.

In this case, using a free service like Bitly (https://bitly.com), create short links for your content. Make sure you create different short links for each social medium, even if it’s for the same content, so you can track which platforms are driving the most engagement.

By attaching metrics to your messaging, you:

• Easily determine sources of your social media traffic
• Identify which traffic is most qualified
• Know which of your social media is best at attracting and converting
• Understand what types of content resonate with your target persona

Twitter is limited to 140 characters (120-125 if you want to leave room for effective retweets) so on that platform you’d better keep things short and simple. People on Facebook share everything from their kid’s graduation picture to the taco they had for lunch. In addition to being an online networking medium, LinkedIn is a wealth of business information shared through posts and industry-specific forums. Each social medium serves a purpose. Effective social media attraction means knowing which platform(s) your prospective customers and clients are using, participating in those media by sharing valuable content and creating meaningful messages adopted to the social media platform on which you’re sharing. (In other words, don’t share your taco on LinkedIn!)

Building a Following on Social Media

Social media is about engagement and sharing. It can be a tool for engagement, or it can be a deep distraction. Engaging on social media requires people on your end to have real conversations. Still, the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which included some enterprise-level marketers, shows that only five percent of companies spend more than 40 hours per week on social media. So even though social media is potentially a very powerful tool for sales and customer service, consider carefully the amount of time, energy, and money you’re willing to invest. Here’s a basic guide:

• Small companies: You’re the owner, so you’re responsible for everything, including marketing:
  • If you are a business-to-consumer company, use Facebook. Consider promoting your content that links to your Facebook page or blog posts.
  • If you’re a business-to-business company, use LinkedIn. Consider posting content that links to your website.
• Medium companies: You’re a small marketing team. Maybe you’re the sole marketing employee:
  • If you are business-to-consumer, use Facebook and Twitter or Pinterest. Consider using posts to link to your website from these sources and YouTube, if you feature video. Add in one additional social media platform only if you have time to dedicate to engagement.
  • If you are business-to-business, use LinkedIn and Twitter and Google+. Consider sharing information in industry forums and when permitted using those forums and other sources like SlideShare to link to your website content. Add in one additional social media platform only if you have time to dedicate to engagement.
• Enterprise-level companies: You have a large marketing team with at least one person devoted to social media:
  • If you are a business-to-consumer company, use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and interactive customer portals. Consider additional social media platforms based on your content strategy. Also, consider building your own branded interactive customer-centric online social media platform.
  • If you are a business-to-business company, use LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, SlideShare, and industry forums to drive website traffic. Consider building your own industry-specific forums. Leverage your expertise and assets by building partnerships within industry-vertical publications and websites.

Use these ideas for social media participation by size as rule-of-thumb. If your target customer base is more likely to consume video content, by all means, use YouTube and the other video platforms. Be aware that many marketers underestimate social media’s time commitment, resulting in little to no engagement. Social media is a marketing discipline, and lack of a social media plan is usually the culprit for anemic social media, regardless of size. After the novelty wears off, social media posts become fewer and further between. Although you can leverage multiple social media platforms by creating shareable content and simply providing links from each of these platforms, make sure you leave enough time to communicate with people.

Segmenting Followers Based on Customer Conversion Path

Are you using social media to educate, engage, or encourage? The easiest way to answer this question is to refer to your content strategy. Certain social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram are designed around immediacy. Others, like Facebook, provide direct image links to purchase product. Most of your content shared on social media is going to be middle-of-the-funnel engagement. Exceptions to this include posting on social media directly after purchase and discount/coupon offers from companies like Groupon.

Tracking social media conversion paths may be difficult for the average marketer. Measuring Likes and retweets is fine, but investing in marketing automation software that measures your social media sourcing is better. The former demonstrates influence and some rewards in terms of visibility, but the latter is closely connected to the Customer Conversion Chain.

Analyze your social media channel sources by looking for those that deliver quality visitors who convert into customers over time. You do this simply by creating content, sharing links to it on social media and tagging with unique tracking codes, and then measuring the flow down the purchase path.

Sharing Your Content on Social Media

In business, social media may be the most misused medium, and it may derive from a simple classification. Facebook and Twitter are each classified as social media in much the same way radio and TV are each considered broadcast media. It’s clear in each of these cases, however, that the user-bases, capabilities, and communication mechanisms for each type of medium are much different. Understanding user intent and behavior helps you create meaningful engaging content. When marketers lump all social media together, treating them as similar and equal platforms, they have failed at social media before they have made a single post. So, let’s look at each platform as a social channel instead:

• Facebook: Currently worldwide, there are nearly 1.4 billion Facebook monthly active users generating 4.5 billion Likes every day.

  Use Facebook for business-to-consumer prospect engagement and customer reengagement. Business-to-business companies may find more value in sticking to retargeting/remarketing efforts on Facebook. Begin by creating a company Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pages/create) as a hub so your fans have a place to go. The key to higher Facebook engagement is creating and sharing content that is new, clever, or unusual. Doing so stimulates content sharing that results in additional new visits.

  Facebook fans are your fans for a reason … they already like you. So, your primary engagement mechanism is to stimulate your fans to share with their friends, building your social network from trusted advocates. This may be particularly effective when your Lifestylers share content. Examine your Facebook fans to mine for potential brand Lifestylers. So whether you choose to feature product in your posts or to post content indirectly related to a sale, do so with the intent of creating amplification through sharing from your fan base. In other words, unless your product is so unique that people say, “Wow!” when they first view it, you probably want to post content that’s earlier in the Customer Conversion Chain.

• Twitter: Currently, Twitter has over 300 million active monthly users tweeting 500 million times every day. Around 100 million log in daily with 80 percent logging in via mobile devices. With a half a billion tweets disseminated among the “Twitterverse” every day, choosing the best method for your company to use Twitter can be daunting.

  First, create your account on Twitter (www.twitter.com/signup), using a Twitter “handle,” which is your chosen name preceded by the “@” symbol (so mine is @Tuxmiller).

  Twitter is an amplification medium designed for short messaging of 140 characters or less, so much of the Twitter activity is interpersonal communication. For a company to successfully use Twitter requires building followers. People tend to follow your Twitter account because they either liked the content you posted or because you followed them.

  Participating on Twitter for engagement purposes absolutely requires publishing quality content on a regular basis. That shouldn’t be a problem for you since content generation is at the heart of inbound marketing. Consider using Twitter for special promotions and new product launches. Twitter is also a good tool to monitor consumer sentiment about your brand, your competitors, and specific products. Larger companies may use Twitter as a customer-service mechanism. And just because you are a business-to-business company doesn’t mean you can’t participate on Twitter.

• Google+: Participating in Google+ makes sense for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. Currently, there over 365 million users, and the +1 button (Google’s equivalent of Facebook’s Like) is hit five billion times each day. So, though Google+ was late to the social-media game, it’s a serious platform for prospect engagement.

  Start by setting up your company Google+ page (www.google.com/+/brands) so you have a hub for your activity. Next, publish content on a regular basis (say, at least once per week) with links to your website content.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn has 364 million members, approximately one-third of which originate in the U.S. Creating a company page on LinkedIn provides a hub for linking your content. Creating a profile and a LinkedIn company page facilitates online business networking. By joining LinkedIn groups related to your industry, products, or customer base, you can create and share content to those people most likely to be interested. By posting thoughtful comments on other members’ posts, you may attract additional followers with whom you can communicate further. LinkedIn is the hub of B2B online connectivity and relationship building.

• YouTube: YouTube sees over three billion video views per day! So if you have video content to share, consider creating your own YouTube account/channel (https://www.youtube.com/create_channel). Video is one of the most shared forms of content, so if you have the capabilities to produce videos designed for engagement, consider YouTube participation as mandatory.

  Technically, your channel consists of the videos you choose to make public under your account name, but essentially the account and channel is the same thing for the inbound marketer. It’s best to create your account name as a branded name so that your video content can easily be searched and found. Embed a code when you want a particular video to be viewed on your website rather than redirecting people away from your website to YouTube. Provide links from other social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, making your videos easily accessible. Don’t forget to include social share buttons with your videos, too.

• Pinterest: Pinterest is a visual social medium in which nearly 73 million users (85 percent are women) post and share pictures. By creating a Pinterest business account, (www.pinterest.com/business/create) you may begin sharing interesting photos. Pinterest users scan different lifestyle categories and “pin” photos they like. Product photos are okay to share, but they’ll probably only be “pinned” if they’re interesting or unusual. Most of your social activity is going to occur offsite; however, it’s possible on Pinterest to create links to meaningful content on your website. When doing so, ensure you are linking to visual content that is based more on imagery than sales messaging. The goal is not necessarily to make an immediate sale, but to create enough awareness and interest that people want to share your pictures.

• Instagram: Instagram consists of over 300 million users sharing over 70 million photos and videos every day. Businesses engage by creating an account (http://business.instagram.com) and sharing visual images with fellow users. Consider Instagram when connecting with younger demographics. Over half of Instagram’s users are age 18-29.

  Creating interesting visual imagery is the key to Instagram engagement. This is a social medium platform geared toward the initial stages of a relationship, so appearing too sales-oriented will probably turn off users. Sharing cool product? Okay. Pushing a sales event? Not cool. Instagram may be challenging for small- and medium-sized businesses because its format facilitates a consumer branding message over direct response messaging. Many medium and small companies cannot afford to implement a pure branding message campaign. If, however, you have the skill and tools for visual brand storytelling … go for it!

Regardless of which social media you choose, always make sure your content is shareable on at least Facebook and Twitter (and LinkedIn for business-to-business). Use short links to connect people to your content and tracking codes to determine the source of the resulting visits. Provide social share buttons on your home page, inside your blog posts, and within your engagement content, enabling social “word of mouth” sharing that sometimes leads to an electronic grass roots movement around your products.

Automating Content Distribution

Creating content takes time. So does posting links to all that great content you have created. Automating your content distribution by planning social media content posting and linking around your content calendar creates scalable content distribution. Marketing automation software makes the inbound marketer’s content distribution job much easier. In addition, check out these content automation platforms (some paid, some free) to help you target, distribute, amplify, and track your content message:

• Bitly (https://bitly.com): Shortlinks and tracking
• Buffer (https://buffer.com): Automated content distribution
• Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/): Automated content distribution
• OnlyWire (https://onlywire.com): Social content distribution
• Outbrain (http://www.outbrain.com): Headline distribution
• SimpleReach (http://www.simplereach.com): Targeted content
• StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com): Social content distribution
• TubeMogul (http://www.tubemogul.com): Video distribution
• Zemanta (http://www.zemanta.com): Link distribution

Things You Can Do Now

• Document what social media you’re currently using, creating accounts and building page hubs for those you wish to add.
• Assess whether each of your social media platforms is reaching your target profile.
• Determine whether your social media outreach efforts are spamming or engaging.