Social Marketing Results?

[Snippa]

I've delved into the social marketing game a bit... I use Twitter and Facebook some, and I've seen minimal results as far as marketing goes, but nothing like everyone else seems to rave about. What about others?

Are you using the social marketing sites?

What kind of results are you seeing?

And if they're good, what are you doing to make them good?

I'd really like to crack the code on this one, if there is a code. :)

[Be Known PR]

Hi Dee,

To be honest, I think the first thing you need to crack is your website.

The biggest barrier you are going to have at the moment is that when people get to your homepage there is nothing there to tell them who you are, what you do etc. You ask people to sign up with their email address but you give them no reason to do this. Therefore any money or effort you put in to marketing and driving people to your site is going to be wasted.

I would suggest that before you start trying to communicate with potential clients/customers you need to get your website sorted out.

Since you don't say what you do, it is hard to know what marketing channels might work for you. However I can say that social marketing websites are not right for big results for the vast majority of businesses.

Hope this starts to help.

David

[mattsaw]

What kind of results are you seeing?

Very good ones, but it has to be on stories that are genuninely newsworthy.

We get so many PR companies coming to us with what is in effect a dressed up press release asking us to syndicate it for them.

Sometimes it's difficult to explain to people the 'so what' factor is massive on social sites, trying to push rubbish articles and releases is only going to damage the brand.

To give a couple of examples for you,

Traffic spikes from one of our clients on Twitter

http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/940/twitterav.jpg

Over the course of 2009 they had around 4,000 direct visitors from Twitter, but more importantly from an SEO point of view, this led to coverage in national and international newspapers - Guardian, Telegrah, News.com etc - Direct SEO rankings benefits as well as contacts achieved from direct and referred traffic.

This is taken from a client story we created and promoted on Digg.com

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/2774/digg.jpg

As well as thousands of visitors to the site, the main benefit was 8,000 links to the site. Putting a commercial value on those links from a SEO point of view would have been between £80,000 and £240,000

[Snippa]

David, thank you for your comments! I agree. :) And we're working on it as we speak.

mattsaw... very impressive results! As far as Twitter, for instance... do you feel it's important to tweet about general topics - not what I had for breakfast, but other generic, non-business things. Or is it best to stay STRICTLY on your business topic? That's something I've wondered about.

[Call Tracker]

You need to give people something to read rather than just tweet about your latest offer. A mix of informative tweets and offers works best and be selective and targeted when getting followers.

First poster was right about your website so thats the first job, second job is to find some interesting news stories, survey announcements and other interesting facts and share them with your followers.

Put a blog on your site and use social networking to communicate your posts. Work your social media in with your other marketing activity as it won't work on its own.

[mattsaw]

o you feel it's important to tweet about general topics - not what I had for breakfast, but other generic, non-business things. Or is it best to stay STRICTLY on your business topic?

I think you have to be VERY clear what your objectives are and who your target market are - and even if they reguarly use a site like Twitter.

For example if your objectives are to use Twitter to conatct bloggers and journalists in your industry, then be clear who they are and the kind of content that they want to read/republish.

If you want to contact potential clients/buyers, then they'll be more interested in how-tos, information and product offers.

Either way keep it interesting, converse, and avoid borking people with the mundane.

This is my Twitter account for example - http://twitter.com/mattuk

I'm conversing with marketers, SEOs, media contacts and bloggers - so most of my tweets are SEO, marketing and social media related.

[virtuallysorted]

You also have to be very clear about what your social networking goals are - is it to relate solely via that medium in order to build a relationship with that client? Or is it to drive traffic to your site and convert them into customers?

Some of the SN are better than others at letting you convert those followers/fans/friends into actual converts. That's something you need to think about when you consider how much effort you are going to put into creating a social brand. After all, if you find it difficult to convert from MySpace, why would you disseminate your traffic to there using links from the website, from email newsletters or from other links or promotional avenues?

Just some food for thought!

[Mass Appeal Designs]

I have just started using Tweetdeck which enables me to update my Twitter, Facebook & Linkedin at the same time, handy little tool if you have not used it

[nuwav]

I use Facebook and Twitter, I am getting better results with Twitter in terms of traffic coming to my site..so far I have over 11,000 followers and will grow it in the future @Nuwav (http://www.twitter.com/nuwav)

alot of people are using Twitter the wrong way or misunderstanding what Twitter can do..twitter is used as a marketing tool, normally you have followers that are within the same niche as you, what it is you market your services or business by tweeting your websites links, or sharing information that they will be interested in, like resources, events, free offers etc... that your followers will be interested in ,by doing this you are sending lots of traffic to that site.

You should also build relationships with people on twitter, by starting conversations or by answering a question.

[Snippa]

Thank you ALL for your input! Lots to think about and work on. Caroline, which site(s) do you think do the best job of converting visitors to customers or clients? What are your thoughts on that?

[brain]

Getting results on social media depends upon the strategy that you opt for. Your promotional campaign and relation ship building counts a lot. My clients use both twitter and face book and so far it has served their business very well. Some prefer face book and some twitter. It depends upon your selection. But one thing is for sure that it does gets you results if you apply proper strategy.

[Snippa]

I guess what I'm really look for is - what IS the proper strategy? :)