sites for organizing meet-ups
Community-building services: Many comment- and content-sharing sites have been around for a long time, such as forums, message boards, and Yahoo! and Google groups.Other examples areCommunity-building sites with multiple sharing features, such as NingWikis, such as Wikipedia, for group-sourced contentReview sites, such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Trustpilot to solicit consumer views
As you surf the web, you can find dozens, if not hundreds, of social tools, apps (freestanding online applications), and widgets (small applications placed on other sites, services, or desktops). These features monitor, distribute, search, analyze, and rank content. Many are specific to a particular social network, especially Twitter. Others are designed to aggregate information across the social media landscape, including such monitoring tools as Google Alerts, Mention.net, or Social Mention, or such distribution tools as RSS (really simple syndication), which allows frequently updated data to be posted automatically to locations requested by subscribers.
Book 2 offers a survey of many more of these tools; specific social media services are covered in their respective books.
Understanding the Benefits of Social Media
Social media marketing carries many benefits. One of the most important is that you don’t have to front any cash for most social media services. Of course, there’s a downside: Most services require a significant time investment to initiate and maintain a social media marketing campaign, and many limit distribution of unpaid posts, charging for advertising and distributing posts to your desired markets.
As you read the following sections, think about whether each benefit applies to your needs. How important is it to your business? How much time are you willing to allocate to it? What kind of payoff would you expect? Figure 1-6 shows how the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of social media can be as low as $2.50, which translates to at least four times less than what the same attention costs using traditional marketing methods.
Created with data compiled from Lyfe Marketing
FIGURE 1-6: The cost of social media compared to other marketing tactics.
Casting a wide net to catch your target market
The audience for social media is huge. By the first quarter of 2020, Facebook claimed 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide, and a whopping 96 percent of active users accessed the network via their mobile devices. Furthermore, 90 percent of Facebook’s traffic comes from outside the U.S. and Canada.
When compared to Google, this social media behemoth is in tight competition for the U.S. audience. In the first quarter of 2020, Facebook tallied about 253 million unique monthly U.S. visitors/viewers, whereas Google Sites barely squeaked by it with almost 260 million visitors. Keep in mind, of course, that visitors are conducting different activities on the two sites.
Twitter tallied more than 33 million U.S. visitors/viewers in the first quarter of 2020 and toted up about 500 million tweets (short messages) daily worldwide. A relatively small number of power users are responsible for the majority of tweets posted daily. More people read tweets than are accounted for, however, because tweets can be read on other websites.
Even narrowly focused networking sites claim hundreds of thousands of visitors. Surely, some of the people using these sites must be your customers or prospects. In fact, one popular use of social media is to cast a wide net to capture more potential visitors to your website. Figure 1-7 shows a classic conversion funnel, which demonstrates the value of bringing new traffic to the top of the funnel to produce more conversions (actions taken) at the bottom.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 1-7: The classic conversion funnel shows that only 2 to 4 percent of funnel entries yield desired results.
The conversion funnel works like this: If more people arrive at the top of the funnel, theoretically more will progress through the steps of prospect and qualified lead to become a customer. Only 2 to 4 percent, on average, make it through a funnel regardless of what action the funnel conversion depicts.
Branding
Basic marketing focuses on the need for branding, name recognition, visibility, presence, or top-of-mind awareness. Call it what you will — you want people to remember your company name when they’re in need of your product or service. Social media services, of almost every type, are excellent ways to build your brand.
Building relationships
If you’re focused on only short-term benefits, you’d better shake that thought loose and get your head into the long-term game that’s played in the social media world. To build effective relationships in social media, you’re expected to
Establish your expertise.
Participate regularly as a good citizen of whichever social media world you inhabit; follow site rules and abide by whatever conventions have been established.
Avoid overt self-promotion.
Resist hard-sell techniques except in paid advertising.
Provide value with links, resources, and unbiased information.
Watch for steady growth in the number of your followers on a particular service or the number of people who recommend your site to others; increased downloads of articles or other tools that provide detailed information on a topic; or repeat visits to your site. All these signs indicate you’re building relationships that may later lead to, if not a direct sale, then a word-of-web recommendation to someone who does buy.
In the world of social media, the term
