Feeding the Social Media Monster! Quantity, Quality or by Stealth?

One of the first articles I penned for this column was called “What’s stopping you from Blogging”.   In the article, the main opposition I highlighted was the time commitment it takes to produce good quality content for the Social Media networks plus your own Blog.  Nothing has changed; in fact there are even more potential networks to post your own articles.  Some business owners would say that they have created a monster that has become more time consuming than their own core business. Now is the time to take stock and re-visit the basics – especially if you run a local service based company.

How to Train Your Monster?

They key question here is:  Do you have the right strategy?  Has your strategy been built on Quantity, Quality or Stealth? Fortunately, all three approaches can work providing you know what you are doing and what type of company you run.

One way to generate leads using Social Media is to populate lots of Social Media accounts with lots of re-purposed content (re-written for the particular Social Media network’s style).  By casting your net wide, you can hope, by the law of averages to attract a good number of readers and ultimately convert them to Fans, then to Customers. This can work, if you have a branded product that is available at least nationally, and preferably globally.  And this is where the mainstream Social Media networks are at their strongest.  It is more akin to broadcast advertising and works well especially if you have an intrinsically “interesting” product.  Say, based around Entertainment.  Big brands can take this approach and often hire a full time Social Media Manager to do this.

Physically local businesses like Restaurants, Bakers and Bars can do very well on Facebook Places for example, but the pitch should be for quality of reader or subscriber- not necessarily quantity. You want really loyal Fans that are going to recommend you to their local peers.  More time spent on carefully preparing posts with very high quality photography to suit Pinterest might work. A more targeted approach using a freelance professional photographer and copywriter team would be a better approach for content generation. The quality approach also works for professional service companies too.

Most local service businesses will have noticed that it can be hard to build up a big following on Facebook or Twitter.  Posts on Facebook about their Service may not be reposted and stand little chance of going viral (unless they are hugely creative).  One option would be to hire a freelance team to help with quality, but this can be expensive.  To be fair, local service business is a tough nut for Social Media alone to crack. Nevertheless, Driving Schools, for example, do well by persuading their clients to create “user generated content”. 

And that is the key to Social Media success for a local business. Get your clients to take a picture and post a “good job” message on your site and/or, their own site and you have tamed the Social Media content monster by stealth!  Social Media is a tool that works by referral, so why not cut to the chase and ask for a referral on Social Media. Of course, nothing in life is free.  In this case, you need to make sure you do a good job for your customers- but you do that anyway – so consider what small incentive you could give to your satisfied customer in return for a referral.  I find clients are overly partial to wine- what works for you?

  thepaubates

Myspace was the original Social Media network of any size.  Before Facebook and Twitter really got going, it was the only place to be with 10s of Millions of Subscribers, right around the world. But a failure to invest and a subtle change in fashion around 2009/10 led to its demise.  Myspace never catered for business users- indeed the only  Social Media network that did back then was LinkedIn, but it did attract a high number of creative types (a bit like Vimeo is doing now for video) and was particularly good at publicising new and up and coming bands. This is possibly why Justine Timberlake decided to invest and this month, an all new Myspace has been launched. But is it any use for small business?

This news is literally hot of the press and the new Myspace still has some Beta release wrinkles. It is a cross between Pinterest and Tumblr, with a  constantly refreshing and scrolling photo style – that makes it very suitable for smart phones and the smart phone addicted, Generation Y.  But the most striking thing about it – is that rather than scrolling vertically – Like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and every other Social Media Network, it scrolls – sideways!   Sideways scrolling might seem odd, but think about its use on an iPad and how you swipe with your finger (and how we have read books for hundreds of years) and suddenly it makes sense. Don’t be surprised if you see other sites offering sideways swipe in the future.

In fact, the User Interface is beautiful and loading your Personal Profile is nice and easy. During the sign up process, Myspace asks what category you would like to use. As you would expect, there are clues here as to the intended audience with a host of creative type categories: Photographer, Writer, DJ, and Musician etc and if this is your small business type, then like Vimeo, it is well worth setting up an account.  For non creative type businesses, then the nearest available category is Brand.  So while Myspace will not be for every small business, it is the next new thing and for some brands, leading edge is where they need to be.

In some respects, it does complicate, still further, the already complex set of choices for a small business, but a Social Media site dedicated to music and audio (other than Apple’s iTunes Ping) would be a useful alternative to a generic site like Facebook.

Perversely, for a site aimed at music lovers, the first reports are that uploaded audio files are too compressed and the quality is not as high as it should be. It might be that Myspace will dedicate more server space to audio in a later release, but this could be a major flaw for the particular niche.  We like the sideways scrolling, but as they used to say, “The Jukebox Jury is out”, Mr Timberlake.

thepaulbates

So what does Facebook Graph Search mean for online marketers? There have been a few ideas thrown around and my favourites come from Smart Insights who keep it simple and say:

Here’s a simple checklist for marketers get ready for Graph Search:

• 1. Check your Page and business name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section of your Timeline. This helps people find your business and is what appears in Graph Search results.

• 2. If you have a location or a local Place Page, make sure you provide your full address so your Page appears when someone is searching for a specific location.

• 3. Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.

• 4. Join the Beta via the link at the top of this article – but you will need to be based in the US

• 5. Above all, keep posting timely, relevant and valuable content on your Page as this will continue to drive engagement and reach.

There will be plenty m ore blogs coming out about this new tools – some will say it’s evil and some will say it’s aiming to beat Google in the search front. I would say it is another attempt to monetise their offering and add value to their community by Facebook – we’ll see how it fairs!

Just under a year ago, I wrote a Blog on this site called “Infographics and Social Media”.  If you have not read it, do go back and take a look. It is a good Blog, (although I say it myself!), explaining why a small business might consider publishing an Infographic and how. At the end, my recommendation is to use a friendly graphic designer. Since then companies have been busy trying to design a tool that would allow even the most cack-handed businessman the chance to create something of a professional quality – and to make it easy to share that Infographic using Social Media.  I am happy to say that Piktochart seems to be that tool.

Piktochart presents the user with starting Infographic Themes or templates that can be easily customised with your “Big Data”. The best bit is that the entry cost is free. By combining Themes with relatively easy to use text boxes, vector shapes and pictures it is possible to create your first professional looking Infographic in just 15-30 minutes. Of course, with the right package,  you can add your logo, change things like font style and even whole colour palette selection to mimic your brand colours and design style.

One you have done this, you can export your Infographic direct to your web site or share by Facebook or Twitter etc. But where this very interesting is that, Piktochart are working on making their Infographics SEO friendly.  In other words, somehow allowing Google to search and index the content of an Infographic. Whether this is done with additional Tags or otherwise automatically by parsing the actual text in your chart is not clear. But however it is achieved, it is a nice trick and could be very useful for your SEO natural listing effort. Beyond this, Piktochart are looking at making certain elements “Interactive”. That is, allowing usually static Infographic design elements to move when a cursor is rolled over etc.  Now interestingly, animation has been available on PowerPoint slides for many years. It has not really caught on, and can be a major distraction in the middle of an important client presentation say.  But it does seem like a little interaction would go a long way in making a complex Infographic shine- providing it is used with care.

For the free package, Piktochart will insert what they call a “water mark” in the final exported Infographic, but this is discreet and kept out of the picture (excuse the pun!).  The limitations are really around the number of starting Themes you can choose from (3 on the free package) and the related, limited colour and image selection available.

Obviously, Piktochart would like users to trial the system and then upgrade to the $29/month package where these restrictions are lifted – but you have to hand it to Pictochart, you could upgrade for a month to produce a single fully customised chart and then down grade.

For the small business user with some “big data” to communicate it makes a lot of sense to use an Infographic and the pricing model of Piktochart would certainly encourage take up. But some small business owners might say they simply do have any “big data” of their own to present. In this case, I would recommend that “big data” from the relevant Trade Association is obtained and used to create a Press Release with the Piktochart Infographic at its heart. If well thought through, the chart will capture broad attention and the rest of the Press Release (with distribution through Social Media) will capture specific attention for your local business. Not only is this a fun and interesting way to present “big data”.  In carrying out the Trade Association research, you might just learn new and useful something yourself.  Give it a try!

thepaulbates

If you have searched for video content recently, the chances are that you were directed to a YouTube site. But sometimes you will have come across Vimeo. Vimeo is video hosting site that has a free to use option with Social Media community features- just like YouTube which make it an interesting choice – for some types of business.

YouTube has many, many more subscribers and users than Vimeo and there perhaps is the main difference and reason to consider Vimeo. Vimeo has become a site that attracts a “certain kind of customer” and it is suggested that customers of Vimeo are likely to be more creative types; designers, graphic artists, musicians and those who just fancy themselves as a bit different from the crowd.

To understand what this means, it is perhaps best to think of the way that Apple Computers successfully differentiated their brand by targeting “creative types” both in their branding, but also in their functionality. Apple Computers were highly specified with large hard drives and fast bespoke processors to handle what used to be intensive video and graphic processing tasks. Consequently, it was not uncommon to visits a design agency and to find all staff using Apple machines (even the Accountants!).

Well Vimeo has successfully attained this position with creative types, none more so than with Bands and Musicians.

So should your average small business use Vimeo?   If your business is selling services or technology to creative types, then yes, definitely. But bear in mind that the typical video production standard is a little higher than would be seen on YouTube and to really make a splash, you will probably need to hire a professional video production agent.

Vimeo has another couple of advantages over YouTube. The first is that your Vimeo hosted video will not be surrounded by other advertiser’s clutter and distraction.  This might be important to your business, especially if on YouTube, your nearest competitor might be featured right next to you.

The second is that Vimeo does not seem to attract the “Trolls”.  That is, those anonymous people who deliberately leave rude and spiteful comment about your company or product, often without even having first hand knowledge of your business. The problem is that some of your potential customers might see this on YouTube and assume it is real.

So if Vimeo is so good, why don’t more companies use it?  Well Vimeo is growing, but the fact is that to get the best out of Vimeo you need to buy the Pro version at $200 per year.  In addition, some would also say that Vimeo doesn’t bring the SEO advantages that YouTube brings through its linkages with Google.

So on balance, for most small business, Vimeo is an add-on to a YouTube campaign. If you have a video made for YouTube, by all means open a free account with Vimeo and load it up there too. (There are some usage limit and subject restrictions to keep an eye on).  The exception being if you target the creative businesses – or you are a creative business yourself. Then pay the $200 and get on Vimeo. Who knows, you could be the only big fish in the small Vimeo video pond.

thepaulbates

This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, you can do it internally and with very low cost tools – in fact if you’re savvy you may be able to do it purely on free 30 day trials of software!

What to look for



Always start with your homepage – this is where most of your traffic will come in and also most of it will leave. You can use your Google Analytics account to see what your bounce rate is and if it’s high then people are probably not getting what they’re after, quick enough, when they reach it.

Something that people often talk about is how it’s important to have high converting content above the fold. This is less so now with people happily swiping down a tablet or mobile, but your greatest real estate is the top around the navigation. Even the bottom navigation is popular as it’s where visitors will look for signposts.

Next you want to look at your main product pages as these should be your highest convertors. If by some miracle they’re not then they should be, it’s what you’re selling!

There are some great heatmap tools out there that show you where people are clicking on your website. Google Analytics does provide their own for free but it rolls up results across the site into one figure so you don’t know which page it’s from just that a certain button is doing well. We’re currently testing out Crazy Egg which gives you plenty of functionality within the trial and make it clear where our users are looking.

Another thing to look at is what people are searching for within your site. Most sites have a form of internal search and this is commonly used when visitors are struggling to find their desired content. If there is something coming up quite frequently then it’s worth looking at how you can make that content more prominent on your site.

A lot of marketers (myself included) will make assumptions about what we think our visitors want to see and where it is best placed, often however we are proven wrong by using tools like GA and heatmaps. A final thing to bear in mind is to give your test long enough to give results ( a month at least) and if you’re comparing over times make sure they are fair and cover the same weekdays/weekends.

1. It’s never too early to plan!



It’s usually with best intentions that we say that this year we’ll make our lives easier and start planning well in advance. This rarely actually happens though and you’ll find yourself having to get your head down in the last couple of weeks or even worse you won’t plan at all and will just start to spend the budget when it becomes available. If you want to get the best results from your activity then plan it in and make it early, your ideas will have time to improve in your mind and you’ll be able to research more thoroughly and get better cost efficiencies.

2. Start with the outcome



Instead of starting with the actual activity – start with the outcome, the results you want. It helps to be focused on what you’re trying to achieve instead of just allocating a few thousand to PPC because it’s easy to switch up and down or getting an SEO agency in because you want good rankings. Why do you want the rankings? Is it revenue from the site you’re after? Is there a better way to achieve it or are there other things you need to do to help you get it? Once you know what your end goal is, it’s also easier to put measures in place to indicate whether you’re successful or not. If you’re using a new supplier then make it clear in their contract what targets they need to hit.

3. Review previous activity



Decisions are a lot easier to make when they are based on previous data and trends. If you want to know how much to spend in an area, or even if to spend in it at all, check what returns it gave last year. This is why it’s so important throughout the year to measure as much as possible – I keep a spreadsheet with at least 5 different measures per activity that I keep track on each month. At the end of the year I can then find trends and weak spots or even nicer, I can spot which are the best areas. Once you’ve identified your strengths, look to see if they are scalable – can you spend more and get more?

Keep track of ideas in the back of your notepad throughout the year so you have more inspiration and also talk to other departments to see what ideas can come from their requirements.

This week we have three more delightful areas for you to discover…

4. Get the experts in for a feature/article

You hopefully have a wealth of in-house knowledge that you can tap up for great website content, but even if you do there are benefits to bringing in an external expert to write for you. Firstly they will (should) have their own popularity and following, this will add to the credibility of your website through theirs. Secondly they will have ideas and angles that you hadn’t thought of so you’ll get an injection of fresh opinions and knowledge to liven up your content. Some people are happy to do a series for you which works well because you can get a guide/larger article and then in future break it down into smaller blogs and tips.

5. Make your site mobile

You can’t ignore the fact that most people have at least one mobile phone and usually also have a tablet in their household aswell. Purchasing via a mobile device is growing at a huge rate and people use their mobile not only at times when they can’t access a desktop (think commuting/travelling) but they also use them at the same time as consuming other media (in front of the television). Only yesterday I was watching a film with my hubby whilst he was surfing on his phone to find out more about the history behind the crusades (Robin Hood). When I’m ill it’s straight onto the tablet for me to relieve my boredom with shopping – you need your site to have a mobile presence and a good one at that!

6. User generated content

This was big a few of years ago when MMS and picture messaging first came out. Larger brands got their users to text in their pictures for competitions and campaigns. It was great because it got the users involved and engaged with them and usually these things easily went viral. It’s not to be forgotten today because people like to be advised by their peers so travel companies are clued into reviews and travellers photos (Trip Advisor is now huge) and shoppers will always look for reviews of their purchase items before making a decision. Blogs and comments are a form of user generated content, it’s a great way to get fresh and new content without having to write it all yourself. My main tip here would be to make sure you have a good way to moderate or you’ll end up with all sorts of undesirable items appearing on your site.

Hmm tricky, smaller business marketers are left with a dilemma: How is it possible to raise that vital brand awareness on an increasingly smaller budget?

Enter email marketing on its white horse. It provides a much cheaper alternative to other marketing channels and continues to deliver the highest return on investment – an average email returns around £20 for each £1 spent.

Email marketing is less time consuming than direct mail campaigns and provides a higher level of reporting than direct mail, telephone calls and advertising combined.

Basically the enforced budget cuts of this recession are actually helping marketers realise the full merits of email marketing. Great!

Online clothing retailer Kew Online increased sales through the use of promotional codes in an email marketing campaign that was adapted to customer demands throughout the year. Their online customer service manager said…

“We find that special deals such as offering customers free delivery the following week are really effective in boosting sales.

“The technology we use is fantastic as it enables us to track precisely how many ‘click throughs’ each individual item is receiving, helping us to gauge popularity and trends.”

Although it is now relatively simple to put together an email marketing campaign, access to a decent database of potential customers is absolutely critical to get it off the ground. You can of course buy prospects’ details from list brokers, although check out the supplier thoroughly first. These campaigns work best in conjunction with another marketing channel – for example, if an email is sent prior to a telemarketing call, the success rate can increase by up to 70% (according to the DMA).

You can also take simple steps to develop your own database by capturing email addresses at your various ‘touch points’ (I’d rate this method but bear in mind it’s a longer term solution). You’ll have to think about providing incentives for signing up to marketing material such as newsletters (offering free whitepapers or guides is a nice touch), but you won’t have to break the bank to generate lots of email addresses through these channels.

Small businesses should be taking advantage of email marketing as it provides a cost-effective and time-efficient way to communicate with existing and prospective customers; it can also result in high returns of investment, not to mention the environmental benefits it has over direct mailings, which are heavy on resources such as paper.

1. Get a decent blog

If your website is new and you don’t already have a blog set up then now is the time to do one. It doesn’t have to be fancy but it does have to be part of your main website (Google loves good content, get up those ranking) and you do have to keep it updated (once a week is great, once a month is a minimum.

If you do have a blog then now is the time to review it – how is doing? What are the popular articles and topics? Make sure you have a plan to include popular items more frequently and look into adding a guest blogger to the site (one who will write well firstly and also promote the blog themselves to a hopefully large audience).

2. Try out some infographics

In my most recent issue of Cosmo I saw they had headlined with an infographic which I was quite impressed with. They’re not the easiest to get right but can be a popular way to get across interesting facts and statistics. And if there is one thing that influences buying habits – it’s facts and statistics.

Before you delve into the world of infographics make sure you have a good set of stats to work from, you don’t want to be in the position where you spend money and time on a great looking infographic that doesn’t say much. Also don’t let your designer treat it like a normal graphic, there needs to be inventive ways to display information not just a nice background and icons. Finally make sure you have a copyright and logo within the design otherwise you may find you see your information being used by someone else with no credit.

3. Dabble in a video or two

Videos are becoming one of the most popular types of ways to consume content, especially with the rise of smart phones and tablets. It’s not just music videos and films that are being watched but how to videos and helpful advice. Depending on your brand you can have a dabble with a more homemade look and use your iphone – I went to a video training session with some industry experts and they rated the iphone as long as you have a decent mic attached for sound. Invest in some good software or contact a freelancer who can add effects that look less amateurish and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. If you have deeper pockets then get the experts in to come up with ideas and graphics then it’s up to you to promote your latest content. We’ve added to newsletters before by showing the initial image in a player with a play symbol on the front – when people click it they open the video where hosted.

That’s part one for you – in part two I’ll be covering getting the experts in, mobile optimisation and user generated content…