If you’re looking for social marketing strategies, you probably already understand some advantages of social networking. Ask social marketing experts where to start, and you’ll get dozens of answers. Most of those answers are probably good ones, but don’t take any of them lightly.

While it’s a huge business blunder not to incorporate social media in your marketing plan, it’s an even bigger blunder to do social marketing badly… and there are plenty of bad ways to do social marketing. Even if your budget allows for only the tiniest initiative, you can find effective social marketing strategies.

The Fundamental Strategy

Whatever anyone tells you about social marketing, the single most important strategy to employ is this: Join the conversation. What conversation? It’s almost certain that somewhere on the Internet, people are talking about what you sell. They may not know they’re talking about it, but they are… and your business will benefit when you find those people and join their conversation.

If you can’t find a conversation in progress, you can start one yourself and, if you make the conversation interesting enough, people will join in.

Three ways to join a Conversation

Forums – Before there was Web 2.0 there were on-line forums. Once you join a forum, you converse by answering questions of other participants and by asking questions to which you don’t know the answers. By answering questions accurately and politely, you establish yourself as an expert, and participants may ask you for more information—or even for specific attention to their problems. To help people connect with you, most forums let you publish a link to your own web site, or at least include contact information in the messages you post.

Blogs – Precursors to Web 2.0, blogs are directed conversations: the blog owner sets the topic, and followers chime in with comments. Very animated exchanges can ensue in which the blogger responds to reader comments, readers respond to the blogger’s comments, and readers respond to each others’ comments. Of course, a blog’s owner typically becomes established as an expert on the blog’s topic… which suggests one great reason for a company to sponsor its own blog, but we’ll talk more about that in upcoming posts. For this discussion, the simplest social marketing strategy related to blogs is to read blogs that talk about the types of products or services you sell, and participate by leaving constructive comments.

Social Networking Sites – Look especially at Facebook and Twitter. Twitter provided a simple interface that lets people converse smoothly with selected friends and with the general population of Twitter users. Facebook has features that also make conversation easy, but it’s a bit more daunting to get started and use effectively. Twitter has a search feature that lets you find everything anyone tweets using specific words or phrases. Facebook isn’t so smooth, but it lets people organize into groups or create pages dedicated to specific topics.

Yes, there are other ways to join conversations on social networks. Learn a few and represent your company through social media. Upcoming posts will explore these and other social marketing strategies in greater depth. Please join this conversation: Leave a comment to tell me whether you found this post useful or to suggest specific topics you’d like me to address in upcoming blog posts.

I hope to hear from you.

Technorati Tags: blogs, conversation, facebook, forums, twitter

“Social Twitter users?” Well… it’s a social network, not an I’m here so you can sell me stuff network. When you offend the social members of the network, they’ll take action. They may share annoyance about you with their followers, or they may report you as a spammer. What they won’t do is read your sales pitches and buy your products or services.

Six Don’ts for Marketers on Twitter

1. Don’t be obsessed with how many followers you have. Sure, having a lot of followers means you have a lot of marketing reach. However, having 700 followers who share your passion for your market space is better than having 12,000 who are followers just because.
2. Don’t let your obsession with your follower count lead you to tweet about it. It’s so distasteful to read “I’m only two followers away from 1,000! Who else will follow me?” Tweet something like that and you sound needy and whiny; that’s an awkward position from which to start a meaningful relationship. A corollary to this problem: don’t boast when you hit some target number of followers; that’s so high school.
3. Don’t use a “system.” Yes, Twitter offers a terrific opportunity for marketing… and I’d bet more Twitter users are in it to promote something than are in it for a pure social experience… but you don’t endear yourself to people by gaming them. If you or your company is already famous, followers will flock to you because they can. If you’re trying to become famous, do so by being interesting and interested… not by running a game.
4. Don’t follow someone back just because they followed you first. People may judge you by your followers, but they’ll judge you far more by who you follow. When you follow every random “person” who follows you first, you end up following the number-obsessed crowd, people who are tweeting purely to sell stuff, people who hope you want to look at naked people, and automated accounts that magically build up followers for their owners. If you run with that kind of crowd, that’s the kind of crowd you can hope to attract.
5. Don’t chum for followers. By this I mean don’t start following someone with the sole intent that it will get them to follow you back… and then dump them because they don’t follow you back. This is really crass behavior. There are at least 50 tweets I’d be following today had they simply continued to follow me after they first started. I generally review new followers and decide who I’ll follow back every two-to-three weeks. In that time, chummers who start following usually stop. When I see this, I assume the followers were never interested in me or my twitter stream; they started following only so I’d follow them back.

   I’ve seen “people” follow me four times in a three week period. This means they followed, dumped me, followed again, and so on. If it was so important to them for me to follow back, why didn’t they just tweet me about it?

6. Don’t expect anything from your followers. If you choose followers because they tweet about things that interest you, let that be enough until you get to know each other. If they really do interest you, you’ll follow them even when they don’t follow you back. If being followed back is so important to you, don’t chum. Rather, follow and engage: tweet a few replies to their tweets; re-tweet something they tweet; tweet an introduction that explains why you’re following… when they see how interesting you are—and how interested you are in them—they’ll probably follow you back.

Here are links to articles that explain my approach to engaging followers on Twitter. The first, Before I Follow You, reveals the work I do before deciding to follow anyone on Twitter. My goal is to meet people who will be interested in what I have to say… and those are most likely people who say things that interest me. The second article, Why I Didn’t Follow You Back, lists the things people do on Twitter that guarantee I won’t be following them.

Technorati Tags: followers, social marketing, social media, twitter

HR Recruiter;

You have advertised a marketing position for a continuing care community. You’re looking for someone who is personable, creative, and flexible and who can represent your organization well. You ask for candidates having computer skills so they can produce advertising materials such as brochures, newsletters, and press releases. Wouldn’t you like to do better than that?

While traditional marketing approaches are still important, particularly for reaching a local audience, companies that are not developing on-line social marketing strategies are losing to their competitors. With 418 people joining Facebook every minute, people are getting to know companies through social networking before doing business with them. We’re quickly reaching a time when a company will not be effective at attracting customers if it doesn’t have a strong presence in online social media.

But, you object, people looking for continuing care facilities aren’t so computer-savvy; they’re not shopping on-line for a business like ours. This objection reflects your bias, but it doesn’t reflect reality. According to a recent Pew survey, the fastest-growing segment of Twitter users over a nine-month period was people aged 55 to 64. As you’re already aware, many aging Americans involve their offspring in making major life decisions… and those offspring rely increasingly on the Internet and their social networks for guidance.

From your ad, it seems as though on-line social marketing strategies are not in your thinking. That’s a shame. The continuing care facilities that hire social marketing strategists and get started on-line are going to thrive. Continuing care facilities who do not adopt social marketing strategies will struggle to understand why they can’t compete.

Best of luck!

Daniel Gasteiger

Technorati Tags: facebook, social marketing, social network, twitter