Chapter 6

Creating Connections

In This Chapter

Defining your short- and long-term goals

Pinpointing your audience and how they behave online

Giving your audience the floor

Motivating the exchange of ideas between you and your audience

In this chapter, we tackle the importance of making contacts and connections as part of your social media engagement (SME). With each new connection, you inch closer to reaching the place where you belong in this space. You want to be a part of the online community, not merely a company that people watch from afar, and you want your connections to produce truly positive outcomes.

The book you’re holding in your hands is one of many positive outcomes resulting from engaging in social media. Our own online connections and conversations on Twitter and Facebook led first to in-person meetings and then to our first joint book deal for Mom, Incorporated: A Guide to Business + Baby. If we weren’t active in social networks — cultivating real connections and building genuine relationships — this book deal (our second) would have never happened.

With every new engagement, you find not only what most interests and satisfies your audience but also how you can work with your audience for mutual benefit. Each time you engage online, you make your brand more accessible and available for something big to happen: real connections.

Starting with Your Connection Goals

Settle in and prepare to get your hands dirty. We know that we aren’t the first to preach that you should set goals and measure your progress. Establishing these goals determines not only where you’re going but also how to get there and who to take along for the ride. You’ve identified your audience and you know where they spend most of their time online. Now you need to draw more and more people into your conversations.

The more vibrant your conversation, the more opportunities you create for yourself and your brand. We want you to set your SME goals, both short-term and long-term, so that your efforts to connect are grounded in a cohesive strategy with measurable outcomes.

Goals inspire you to shoot for the moon, to push past the limits of what you imagine you can accomplish, and to set reasonable milestones to track your progress. Plan to create at least two lists: short-term goals (the ones that you feel you can achieve more easily) and long-term goals (the ones that may seem slightly out of reach but that, with perseverance, can be reached).

Social media engagement focuses not on one-hit wonders but rather on a longer plan for interacting and connecting in order to continue the conversations and conversions. Your short-term goals should be to build toward your long-term goals.

Setting short-term goals

Align your short-term goals in social media engagement with your short-term business goals, as in these examples:

Increase traffic to your website. You can achieve this goal within a few months of diligent engagement, and it can compel you to start leveraging your social media connections.

Accelerate word-of-mouth communication. Though this method is a little more difficult to measure than web traffic, mentions that appear in social media — especially by social media influencers or people with larger or more loyal followings — can increase your brand exposure.

Make specific actions happen. Whether you’re asking people to fill out a form or to sign up for a contest or attend an event, your connections should boost actions where you can see more immediate and tangible results.

Your goals, which are often reflected in your business plan and informed by your company’s mission statement, should infuse your presence online with purpose and define the way your company communicates and operates daily.

The mission of Little Pnuts (http://littlepnuts.com) — a subscription toy company with organic, ecofriendly, and natural toys designed for your "little pnuts" — is to entice kids to move off the couch to start playing and to provide families with the tools to create imaginative play. One way the company works to reach its mission is to interact with parents on its Facebook Fan Page, as shown in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1: Little Pnuts uses Facebook daily to engage with parents to achieve a short-term goal.

At the end of each day, Little Pnuts founder Melissa Bossola Beese asks herself, if she was able to provide children with skillful, play-filled experiences. She analyzes and measures the engagement on Facebook and Twitter to determine if she’s hitting at least one short-term goal.

Share your successes with your team to maintain morale and with your audience to highlight the milestones you’re achieving with their help. When you reach 1,000 likes on Facebook, tell your audience how excited you are, as Little Pnuts does in Figure 6-2. Honor your followers and connections by saying that you appreciate them and their interaction. Your community will enjoy celebrating with you.

Figure 6-2: An announcement and gift for the Little Pnuts community member whose Like is number 1,000 on Facebook.

Here are some examples of measurable and achievable short-term goals to attract, build, and strengthen connections:

Start an editorial calendar to produce more strategic content.

Add a subscription form to your website, and when you reach 50 subscribers, send a newsletter.

Share your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to attract more attention.

Create five new boards on Pinterest.

Generate one or two Likes on every Facebook post.

Produce a new video to upload to YouTube every week to attract attention and build your following.

Establishing longer-term goals

Start thinking about specific goals you want to set in order to push you, your brand, or your business into the next realm, as in these examples of longer-term goals for your connections within the next six months:

Increase traffic to your website by 50 percent.

Receive five glowing reviews of your company in online forums.

Double or triple the number of connections in your social media channel.

Increase engagement in your social media channels by 10 percent.

Increase revenue by 10 percent via direct referrals from Twitter and Facebook.

Set a specific time every quarter to assess your progress and (you hope) to celebrate wins.

If you’re reaching your long-term goals easily, head back to the drawing board and push harder. You should be working for your long-term goals, not merely resting on your haunches while watching the good ship of success sail into your harbor.

Saying thank you is powerful. As you reach goals, share your successes with your team. They deserve to know what they’ve done well — it motivates them to continue. The same is true for your audience: Let them celebrate your success with you. Knowing that they have contributed by liking, commenting on, or sharing your content brings them back for more.

Identifying Your Audience

After you determine that you want to create connections, labor over goal-setting, and specify how you want your brand to evolve, you now know that you need the people — the audience — to make it happen. You need to find people who not only want to hear from you but also interact with your brand and share your brand messages with others.

Let’s do it together.

Determining who you’re trying to reach

Understanding who your audience is helps you find them online and determine the best ways to reach out to them to engage. If you sell kids’ sporting equipment, for example, you likely need an audience of coaches or parents (or both) who have young children. If you’re a florist wanting to specialize in weddings, your targets are likely brides and wedding planners. Recent statistics say that the average age of a bride in the United States is 25. Clearly, these audiences are unique.

Figuring out who you want to reach via your social media channels is a process that you may have already tackled while determining the target customers for your business. Use a combination of these factors to identify them:

Demographics: Facts about individuals, including sex, age, education level, income level, and geographic location

Psychographics: Psychological profile of people such as activities, actions, interests, behavior, attitudes, and values

Online presence: Web locations where people have created platforms and are actively engaging with their own followings

Seek out the people who will be the most interested in your messages and content — the ones who are most likely to respond to you as you spend time engaging online.

Finding your audience online

Say that you sell kids’ sporting equipment, such as inline hockey skates and masks, sticks, aluminum bats, and catcher’s gear for baseball and also softball, football, and soccer cleats, goalie gloves — if a kid needs gear for sports, you sell it. You know you need to reach coaches and parents of young kids involved in sports. Here are some ways to find your audience, or (in marketing-speak) your market segment:

Search engines: Be specific about keywords and even geography. Search for kids sports in St. Louis, MO or coaches in St. Louis, MO or Parent, St. Louis. You’ll see sites and blogs to explore as well as forums, groups, and even people whose presence on social channels may be attracting your ideal audience. Coaches or even parents may have online presences that include their social media contact information listed right on their sites so that you can follow them on Twitter, for example, to establish an initial connection.

Social media channels: Take advantage of search options on these channels at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Pinterest. Use a variety of keywords and keyword combinations such as sports, kids sports, sporting equipment, coach, kid coaching, and the names of individual sports or locations, such as St. Louis.

The useful tool SocialBro (www.socialbro.com) can search the bios of people on Twitter and narrow them to specific locations. If someone is identified using the word coach in Missouri, for example, (and there are 278 of them), the results may be people to connect with and reach out to.

Online conversations: Seek out people who are talking about the topics that matter the most to you, such as kids and sports in St. Louis. Use a site such as Hashtags (www.hashtags.org) to search for people talking about St. Louis or individual sports or kids using particular hashtags.

Naturally, when you find all the “right” people, you still need to know more about them to determine whether a coach is the type you’re looking for and then see whether she is active online, and how she’s active, to identify your greatest opportunities for connecting.

Figuring out what your audience does online

Lace up your researching shoes. After you find your audience, you must determine what they’re doing with their time while they’re online, such as viewing images on Pinterest, quickly reading Facebook posts and clicking the Like button, or staying glued to job postings at LinkedIn. You need to know, for example, whether they would sit still to watch a 2-minute video or bolt after the first 15 seconds.

Research the activities of your audience

If your audience spends their time on Pinterest, check their Activity Feeds to see what topics catch their eye. If they’re active on Facebook but mostly skim posts and click the Like button a few times, assess the topics they’re liking versus the ones they take the time to share. If someone is more active on LinkedIn, a more business-oriented approach makes sense. If they watch and share videos online, YouTube may be a source of valuable connections for you.

We often mention the importance of listening, yet it bears repeating: The people you want to reach will tell you — directly in their SME channels — where they are and what they’re doing. Whether they’re heading to the pool, coaching a Little League game, or shopping for a birthday gift, people are using their social networks to announce their day-to-day activities — often, for the whole world to see. These announcements can give you greater insight into your target audience.

All the updating and sharing that people do online tells you something about your audience — what interests them and where you can find them. You certainly can’t be everywhere, every day, but you can begin to narrow down the number of spots where they update, the times of day that they’re online, and the topics that truly interest them. With this information, you can create better connections.

Connecting is about people, not about software or applications. Take the time to read people’s bios and profiles and approach them to connect with no expectations or demands. Your technique — kindness, attentiveness, and interest — matters more in terms of your SME than the tools you use.

Use a personal account to research social networks where brands and companies have more limited views. Perusing only your own, personal connections can give you insights into how people who may fit your target audience are using social networks. And your personal contacts can also be some of your first connections as you spread the word about your business.

Use analytics tools

Use the free tools provided by Google Analytics as your guide to identify where your audience was online immediately before visiting your website or blog. This is a decent indicator of what they do online and which sources or platforms they trust to guide them to new content.

An alternative would be a site like Sumall.com (www.sumall.com), where all the math is done for you. You can view your daily, weekly, or monthly stats with only a few clicks — allowing you to track sales, your social media activities, and any trends. You can also have this data sent right to you. Sumall offers a free plan as well as paid versions.

Knowing that people come to your site from Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest helps you to target your efforts to make connections. Track your analytics to see whether engaging on the appropriate networks drives even more traffic your way.

Ask questions — and listen to the answers

Ask your current followers to keep you updated on what they’re doing or to gauge their interest in your products and services. Then listen to their responses to find ways to increase your connections with them by engaging in more interesting and relevant ways.

Creating a Space for Engagement

Building and cultivating a space built specifically for the purpose of engagement establishes you as a leader in your field. Your audience will grow to know your platforms are the place to go for quality dialogue, as well as a diversity of opinions.

Nurturing this type of open conversation requires your presence and your willingness to monitor the chatter for quality. In some cases, you can just ask for what you want, to encourage the interactions to happen. At other times, you must nurture the environment for the conversations to take place. Either way, be proactive and make things happen — don’t build your social network profiles and expect people to connect simply because you’re there.

Setting ground rules for participation

When you start conversations in any of your social media channels, especially when asking for opinions, you should also moderate the responses — pay attention, keep the conversations on topic, and join in whenever relevant. You should also supervise the conversations and remove any inappropriate material.

Set ground rules for people who are participating in your online community, to maintain positive and appropriate conversation topics. (See more about managing online communities apart from social networks in Chapter 8.)

Offering a forum for opinions

Knowing what your audience thinks, how they feel, and what motivates their daily activity helps you better serve them as well as convert them into customers and evangelists for your brand. Your social media channels are forums where you can interact with your audience and glean insights into their behaviors as consumers. You see what they think of your brand and help them connect with other like-minded individuals.

The easiest way to dip your toes into community engagement is to ask people for their opinions. You can always get people talking if you give them the floor. People can be quite opinionated, so soliciting their thoughts can start the conversation.

Though you want people to give specific opinions about your business, you need to build both momentum and trust so that they feel comfortable telling you what they think and feel. Explore these opinion-based topics for starters:

Noncontroversial current events: If you own a jewelry store, ask people’s opinions on Valentine’s Day of the most romantic date for the occasion or the most romantic way to propose. Eventually, the conversation can turn to jewelry as a natural progression originating from the community rather than from you.

Charitable causes: If you sell baby clothing, share a positive news article about an organization that distributes donated baby clothes to families in need. Ask people for their thoughts on this cause and what they might have in their own attics collecting dust that they would be willing to give to a similar local cause. Then your whole community can rally behind some good news and dedicated efforts in your company’s name.

Ways to help others: If you offer math tutoring, ask your community for their best math tips, how to multiply or work with fractions. People love to show off what they know, and they can gain useful knowledge from their peers. Contribute to the conversation yourself and demonstrate your expertise, or compile the tips in a PDF file — giving everyone credit — to share for free with your community.

Look for ways that you can start and guide conversations to encourage participation and give and receive value from those interactions. Soliciting opinions is a helpful way to start.

A quick and easy way to solicit opinions is to ask questions in a poll. You can use various applications within social networks, such as polling apps in Facebook or LinkedIn Groups or polling apps from SurveyMonkey (http://surveymonkey.com), Polldaddy (http://polldaddy.com), Wufoo (http://wufoo.com), and Pollcode (http://pollcode.com). Post poll results to keep the conversations going.

Showcasing what others know and do

You know what’s amazing? Building a community where people can share ideas to make everyone better, smarter, and more informed. Doing this requires more than simply publishing your content, however.

We mention elsewhere that you need to talk about more than your company or the products and services that you’re trying to sell in social networks. Your SME efforts need to be about others, not just you.

You can showcase others as a meaningful part of your messaging and social media publishing and interactions in many ways:

Interview people for your website, blog, or social channels.

Solicit guest posts from your audience and partners.

Highlight other people’s work.

Praise and celebrate people’s achievements.

Promote other people’s products or services that are compatible with yours.

Share other people’s expertise with your following, giving those experts full credit.

Cultivate an online community where you give credit where credit is due, where you promote and recognize your community members, and where you generously devote part of your online messaging and content to showcase others.

When you behave generously and kindly in social networks, you’ll be rewarded with more likes, more follows, and more shares. People are more likely to gravitate toward brands that realize SME is more than a one-way street and that a person’s followers and connections have a treasure trove of stories worth sharing.

Getting the Engagement Ball Rolling

Let’s be honest: Engagement isn’t exactly happening unless you create the atmosphere and then actually get the ball rolling. Initially, you’re talking, tweeting, podcasting, posting on Facebook, or adding people to your circle of friends on Google+, and you may only see a whisper or an echo in response, but it is your job to encourage your audience to reply. In order to create the valuable connections that lead to opportunities and success, you need for your audience to truly respond.

And for that, you often need to begin by asking.

Asking for action

You’ve undoubtedly been told that you have to ask for what you want. The author and motivational speaker Shakti Gawain is quoted as saying, “You create your opportunities by asking for them.” She’s right.

You may think that you want more fans, more followers, more likes, more pins, more comments, or more shares. Yes, you want more engagement. But what you really want is to make connections and build relationships and then turn those relationships into mutually beneficial exchanges. You start by asking for connections.

Depending on the social network you’re using, you can boost connections by asking people to take various actions on your behalf:

Like your Facebook Page or follow your brand: Spell out what connecting with you provides, or offer an incentive.

Encourage their own connections to connect with you: Offer an incentive for people to invite their friends to connect, but also be valuable, useful, helpful, and interesting enough that people will want to spread the word.

Like a post: Craft likeable content, and every now and then, request a ‘like’ within your actual post. Don’t overdo it.

Share or retweet your content so that you can make more connections: Post content worth sharing, but also ask others to share specific content strategically when it matters most.

In Chapter 8, we talk about increasing your e-mail sign-ups and prompting your subscribers to become fans. This happens, in large part, because you’re asking and encouraging them to do so. Every social network and online marketing tool can be used to build your overall social media connections. Look for ways to cross-promote your social media channels.

On Facebook, you can ask your fans to follow you on Twitter to receive more frequent updates. On Twitter, you can ask followers to also like your Fan Page in order to receive more in-depth posts and special offers. On YouTube, you can add annotations to individual videos saying “Subscribe to my channel” or asking for a thumbs-up. Figure 6-3 shows how Danielle uses annotations regularly on her videos to encourage engagement. She asks for connections or actions, such as giving a thumbs-up at a specific point.

You risk alienating your current connections if you go overboard with requests. There’s a fine line between regularly asking people to follow you and asking so often that people become annoyed and start ignoring you.

Figure 6-3: Danielle adds annotations to her videos.

You may make a request for a connection and fail to follow through by responding when your audience reaches out. For example, if your Facebook fans follow you on Twitter and then you miss the opportunity to interact with them there, you’ve just blown it — you’ve asked them to do something without holding up your end of the deal. Don’t ask if you can’t follow through when people comply and connect.

Be clear about wanting people to connect with you. Show them, tell them, guide them, virtually hold their hands, walk them to your Like button and say “Click here.” Be direct, but also be creative, fun, and spontaneous. Create excitement.

Offering rewards for action

The photo-printing company Shutterfly wants more people to like its Facebook Fan Page, so it blatantly offers a surprise incentive to encourage people to connect, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Everyone who likes the Shutterfly page receives a special code for a free (not discount) product when they use the photo service — which may have contributed to the site gaining more than a million Likes.

In addition to engaging regularly on its page to demonstrate attention and interest, Shutterfly is increasing connections with its audience by overtly telling people what they want — a Like — then thanking them for doing so with a special gift. Incentives can do wonders to increase connections.

Figure 6-4: Shutterfly has a special gift for you, but first you have to like its Facebook Fan Page.

Handling negative feedback

When you give people a platform to express themselves and share their opinions, you may not always receive in return the positive feedback you want. Some people may be true fans, but others will see the platform as a place to air their grievances. Be prepared.

Providing a platform where everyone can express themselves comes with great responsibility. You must pay attention and be responsive. As we say repeatedly, any “bad” feedback is an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.

Someone who has had a horrible experience at your restaurant and wants to share their thoughts will do so with or without you, in social media channels that you can control (ideally), such as on Facebook or in a LinkedIn Group or in other places where you have no control, such as a Twitter feed or Pinterest stream. We encourage you to continue asking for people’s opinions, even if you risk hearing information that’s difficult to accept.

You can’t solve every problem, and you can’t make everyone happy. But you can try. Make your best effort to address concerns expressed in social networks.

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Whenever you’re confronted with negative feedback, follow these steps:

1. Review the context.

When you see a negative comment, dig a little deeper to make sure that you understand what’s being said and why. Read conversation threads, and conduct searches on search engines to see whether you can find additional, related conversations.

2. Acknowledge the feedback.

After you gain a sense of the emotion — and the facts — behind a complaint, address these issues in your response. Use acknowledgment statements such as “I understand your frustration” or “We realize that this situation is stressful.” Validate the other person’s feelings and perceptions whether or not they’re accurate or shared by you.

3. Address the issue promptly.

Timeliness is essential when you’re handling and defusing negativity online. Every day, hour, or minute that you spend agonizing over your next action is valuable time wasted.

4. Apologize.

When people are unhappy, a simple “I’m sorry” can do wonders to calm them. Even if you clarify the statement by saying, “I’m sorry that you feel that way — how can we help?” you’re showing that you care how they feel without admitting blame when it might not be your fault. Of course, if you’re at fault, admitting it is also important.

If you’re upset, nervous, worried, or shocked or you’re experiencing any natural human emotions, gather your courage and express it in your response. People don’t want to hear overproduced, formulaic, or canned replies to their concerns.

5. Share the feedback with your community.

Explain what you’re doing every step of the way so that people see progress. Keep in mind, that the person complaining or venting isn’t the only one who sees what you have to say. The rest of your online community does, too.

Some people complain simply because they want to be heard. Even using the phrase “We hear you” can diffuse anger when they realize that someone from your company is listening and responding.

When confronted with negativity about your brand online, you have the chance to respond in front of everyone who is listening. Your entire online community, and the public at large, potentially have a front-row seat to observe how you listen, clarify what happened, and apologize.