to “like” you and therefore join your fan page.
Although Facebook pages are slower to grow and may not give you the direct, measurable impact of LinkedIn, Twitter and a blog, it is still highly recommended to get started now. By 2013, 62% of web users and almost half (47.6%) of the overall U.S. population will be on Facebook (eMarketer 2011). And Facebook users are an active group with 50% logging in every day. In March 2011, Google changed its algorithm to give even more weight to social authority and online reputation. Now the number of “likes” a company has on Facebook directly impacts its overall Google ranking. Read more about Facebook group and fan pages in Chapter 3.
When Daryl H. Bryant released his new book MS Living Symptom Free, he turned to Facebook as a primary tool for building awareness and ultimately generating book sales.
“Social media was always a crucial part of the book’s promotional and marketing plan”, said Rania Eldekki of Hudson Horizons, (hudsonhorizons.com) an integrated web agency responsible for helping Bryant launch his Facebook page. “A Facebook campaign was initially developed to increase fan base and interaction within the MS community. As the campaign progressed, tactics were eventually directed towards increasing book sales,” explained Eldekki.
Bryant himself was responsible for posting and interacting with participants on his MS Facebook community, helping to give it a more authentic voice than an outside marketing agency could alone. The passionate fan base of the Facebook page continues to grow, which has helped MS Living Symptom Free become a top ranked book on Multiple Sclerosis on Amazon.
How does this story help your business? By realizing that the use of social media, especially Facebook, is about building authentic relationships before you can close a sale. It takes a bit more time than a simple pay-per-click search ad, but the benefits are longer lasting and ultimately will decrease your client acquisition costs.
The value of a Facebook “Like” of your business or product is ultimately the value of that person’s network. According to Facebook, the average user has 130 connections. Also, 29.6% of shoppers say they have discovered a new product after a friend has “liked” it on Facebook.
Getting To Know Generation Y (Your Future Employees/Clients/Vendors)
We believe that as older executives retire and the current college generation, which grew up with the Internet, moves into influential and decision-making roles in business, social media use will only expand. It’s important to understand this generation and plan accordingly.
Generation Y, or the Millennials, succeed Generation X and include 60 million people born in the mid 1970s to early 2000s. Many of these are the children of baby boomers, so they are sometimes also referred to as the “echo boomers.” This generation spans from young professionals to soon-to-graduate high school students, and most have been exposed to the Internet at an early age. On the whole, they are more computer savvy than any other generation. They are less trusting of corporate media, more likely to ask questions, more likely to share opinions online and they find word-of-mouth an essential part of gathering information. This generation is more likely to Google your company name and see what type of comments come up than to actually visit your company website. Ensuring that the right comments appear during this Google search, to ensure it reflects your brand, mission and goals, is very important.
Why Blog?
The best thing about social media is that it is highly flexible. Because you don’t need to know any HTML, have graphic skills or know programming languages, it is easier and faster for most people to test, track and monitor the impact of different messaging, and to make changes in strategies and content development because of that feedback than a traditional website. This makes blogs an important tool for marketers, CEOs, client service representatives and anyone else facing the public in your company to get their messages out fast and efficiently.
Position your blog as the hub of your social media activity. By posting your ideas and company news to a blog, it not only gives you more space to develop your ideas (compared to a 140 character tweet or Facebook post), but also provides added search value and longevity of your information. (More on this in Chapter 3)
Like any communications vehicle, the best blogs write for a specific audience and purpose. Your blog can serve as the origin of the content for all other social outlets.
Christine Morris of Construction Specialties, Inc. explained how the company’s vice president of construction, Howard Williams uses his blog (“People Centered Environmentalism,” people-centered-environmentalism.tumblr.com) as a primary way to reach people interested in green building, chemical policy reform, or sustainability. “A blog is a perfect avenue for developing thought leadership in a specific area of expertise. Subscribing to a variety of blogs allows us to stay updated with the latest industry and market information, participate in discussions and voice opinions. Reading blogs written by well-informed “experts” in any given arena enable us to identify thought leaders that we may want to develop relationships with,” explained Morris.
Blogs don’t always have to be written by experts to be effective. In the case of the free, weekly publication, the San Diego Reader, blogging was used as a tool to build more loyal, local readers. However, instead of using staff experts or community leaders, they opened it up to any San Diego local who wanted to share stories, photos and thoughts happening in their own neighborhoods. The tactic helped get more localized content on the social web as the individual writers often shared their own stories with their social networks, in turn giving the Reader more exposure online. The additional contributions also helped the Reader generate more search engine friendly content, without putting extra burden on staff writers. Plus, the idea of allowing public blogging on a high traffic local web site lends itself to fun, sometimes-controversial conversations among locals which naturally increases the social influence and traffic of the San Diego Reader’s primary web site. Read more about how the San Diego Reader set up their community blogs in the side bar testimonial:
Building community through blogs
“When the San Diego Reader (www.sandiegoreader.com), an alternative newsweekly, launched a new website a few years ago, it also launched a public blog section. Until that point, blogs were only authored by Reader staffers who had a weekly column in the print edition of the Reader. The staff-authored blog entries were carefully managed and went through an editorial process, just like any other editorial content.
“Given the nature of blogging, we were concerned that offering the public an open forum in which to blog would bring with it a monitoring nightmare. After all, profanity, libel, spam, racial epithets, and the harassment and abuse of others go hand in hand with giving people a space to freely speak their mind. For legal liability protection, and for our site monitors’ sanity, we needed to contain the blog content, without hindering freedom of speech.
“Around the same time, the Reader’s annual “Neighborhood Essay Contest” was getting underway. Therein was the solution. Giving the bloggers a topic to discuss would help contain the subject matter of the blogs. It would also provide a showcase for new writing talent to get noticed by the editors. Thus, the Reader’s “Neighborhood Blogs” section was born.
“The public was encouraged to write about their neighborhood: the people, the places, the pets, how they ended up living there, how it’s changed over the years, etcetera. The only limitation to the blog section was that the blog had to be about a San Diego neighborhood. As an incentive, three winning blogs were chosen each month. Winners received cash, and the winning entries were also printed in the weekly magazine.
“That was over five years ago, and the Neighborhood Blogs
