This week I’ll look into the ever popular social media channel as a way to get people viewing your website content. This channel is a really nice one for getting more eyes on your website as long as you treat it properly.
Before I begin there are two things to know with social media:
1. It’s not just for B2C companies
2. You have to treat people on social sites as if they were your friends
By the latter I mean that if you have a product that you’re selling, unless you thought it was perfect for your friend – you wouldn’t try and pushy sell it to them. If you had a chat about a related topic and it came up in the conversation, you would bring it up and recommend it. It’s the same with your conversations in social communities – hold conversations, get to know people and their requirements and if they bring up they need something, then and only then can you sell to them.
When I say that it’s not just for B2C companies I can speak from experience, my company is B2B and we’re using Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin – check out the links to see how we’re using each and you’ll see that we push educational content out and talk about new features (a bit) but we also post pictures of our people, events and even our last office move! As long as I’m realistic about my expectations and my objective is to expand our reach and awareness then it’s worthwhile activity.
I’ve seen some great brands interact with people on social sites – Asos recently launched a sale for two hours with lots of 50% off deals and to access the site before everyone else, you just ‘liked’ them on Facebook. That’s a pretty big incentive to drive up their likes and also drive traffic to their website, to a specific page, at a specific time – very clever and a hugely successful campaign; there was a lot of sell out items that day.
Yes initially social media activity is free but it’s worth investing in tools for measurement such as Brandwatch (£400 p/m) or Raven (approx £65 p/m) because you can really track what people are talking about you and what they’re saying, who are your fans and who are industry influencers. Like SEO you can use keywords as a good way to find people and topics across multiple social sites and spot trends that are relevant to your business.
A word of warning however, playing in the social sphere is time-consuming to do well so pick one to start with and get good at that before starting the next. You can look to agencies to help you get set up (look to spend £3k upwards for a campaign) but the best conversations are held by your staff and not someone pretending to be you.
