This is a guest post by online marketer and writer Mitch O’Conner.
A social media campaign is a powerful way to promote your website or blog, reach out to an untapped user base, and ultimately make more money through direct sales and/or advertising dollars. Handled incorrectly, a social media campaign can just as quickly alienate potential traffic, damage your brand’s image and have your advertising partners running for greener and more profitable pastures.
Via: The Steel Method
The key, then, is to understand why a social media campaign is so important, know how to implement it correctly based on your niche, and avoid making rookie mistakes in the process.
Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube
have the potential to turn your site into an empire –
or a pile of dust, depending on how they’re utilized.
Making Your Presence Known in Social Media
By embarking on a social media campaign, you can accomplish a lot of things for your site:
- You enlarge your overall presence on the internet.
- You give you audience additional channels of interaction, both with you and with one another.
- You reach out to potential traffic that might rarely stray from social networking sites.
- You indicate to your users that you’re taking your site seriously.
- You’ll enhance your link building efforts by establishing a more natural link profile.
You can start simple by creating a basic business page on Facebook, tweeting announcements and new articles on Twitter, and maybe even recording some niche-appropriate videos for YouTube. How you branch out from here will depend upon your niche, your target audience and your overall goals for your blog or site.
Hire a Real Customer Service Person
You may be the most amazing content writer or web developer on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that your interpersonal communications skills are up to snuff. Even if they are, it may be difficult to run a full-fledged social media campaign by yourself depending on the size of your operation.
The solution is to hire an experienced, dedicated customer service professional whose primary (and perhaps only) task will be interacting with your users on social media sites. This may seem like overkill until you realize just how damaging unresolved questions and complaints can be to your site’s image.
Let’s say that your wireless internet service maintains an active presence on Facebook. One of your users posts on your wall, saying that his internet speeds are far lower than promised. If this comment is allowed to stew for more than a couple of days without a friendly, helpful, “we will make this right” response, it will serve as a glaring negative advertisement to anyone who happens upon your page and sees it, scaring away potential customers and damaging your brand in the process. Meanwhile, you’re too busy developing your primary site to check each site involved in your social media campaign on a regular basis. This is a where a dedicated customer interaction worker with knowledge of your policies and the authorization necessary to “fix” a problem can truly come in handy.
Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep
Rachel Brown, owner of Need a Cake bakery, learned this the hard way when she offered a 75% discount on orders of one dozen cupcakes through Groupon, bringing the price of each order from roughly $40 to $10. A total of 8,500 people opted into the coupon offer, forcing Brown and her staff of eight to work around the clock in an attempt to fill the orders. Brown was so pressed for time and help that she had to hire temporary workers to assist with baking.
The result? Brown lost nearly $20,000, eliminating most of the year’s profits. There’s also little doubt that the cupcakes were below their normal standard, given that most were made by agency workers as opposed to her trained, experienced staff. Any new customers that Brown did attract through her Groupon-based social media campaign may have been turned off by the questionable quality of the products.
Although the headline reads “Small bakery burned by Groupon,” it’s pretty obvious that Brown burned herself. She overextended herself, offering an unnecessarily amazing promotion on a nationwide scale, killing her profits and adding more work to the queue than even a much-larger bakery could handle.
Social media sites like Groupon (which is in the business of selling coupons, if you haven’t already surmised) are powerful tools that can yield big benefits when used wisely. The trick is to plan ahead and assess a potential promotion by asking yourself some questions:
- What do I stand to gain from this promotion? (traffic, sales, awareness of a new product/service, etc.)
- Does the promotion strike a good balance between incentivizing my customers and maintaining profit margins?
- Will a successful promotion also mean a lot more work for me and my team?
- Should I offer this promotion to everyone, or just a select group? (e.g. existing customers, new customers, customers currently loyal to a competitor, certain geographical locations, etc.)
About the Author: Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy writing content or marketing websites, he enjoys honing his design and coding skills, and spending time with family.
mitchoconner
Latest posts by mitchoconner (see all)
- Using Social Media: How Not to Burn Bridges in Your Social Media Campaigns - December 20, 2011
Social media is today’s most popular sector on which people love to spend their time even big companies also. You have shown a best use of social media using infographic media. At last, all material people posted online go viral via social media.
I like the infographic you got there. It explains things better. I agree, social media is one of the best ways to promote your blog. Just be sure to do everything in moderation.
for me social media theories involves a lot of trial and error..u make mistakes along the way and learn from it
Salsa would love you to read ..A Simple Quesadilla Recipe
at the end of the day..i try to be thankful to the ones who check out our site,our facebook,tweet us etc…it is all worth it
I am still learning on how to use social media “properly”. I sometimes overuse it to the point of like spamming already which is not good.
Social media can be a very powerful marketing tool if used properly, but as in the examples above it needs to be planned out properly
Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep is a golden rule to any business,online or not.this is such a great post Growmap and that diagram is awesome and just fun
fresh salsa would love you to read ..A Simple Quesadilla Recipe
Damn I only thought that Facebook can improve just social life and that it can be a good way to promote your company.
Butt if you can loose so much only with making 1 mistake we’d better be carefull 😀
Linda would love you to read ..parkeren schiphol
Great infographic information. Social media is today’s best resource for online promotion. Great topic here to discuss and increase knowledge.
Nice infographic! The cupcake story is pretty frightening. Hopefully the press she’s gotten from the mistake has turned out to be helpful advertising for her.
That is quite crazy, it reminds me of some other blunders.
Social media has become a very powerful tool to promote online, but the only problem for me is to find a really experieced expert who can work with social media. I have tried several times and I have to choose the stuff in order to get more results. Any advice?
Hi Anna,
The problem with social media is the same problem that exists for everything else: many THINK they know what they’re doing, but they’re focused on the wrong things so they’re not getting results.
Sometimes a business just needs someone to optimize their accounts and teach them the most effective ways to use them and other times they need to hire someone to manage social media so that they can focus on their core business. Often a mix of both works best.
If you can tell me more specifically what your goals are I would be happy to advise you. I do offer free initial consultations as I explain on a new page about my Small Business Mentoring Program.
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Internet Marketing: Where to Start
Great info graphic. Some people do go to far.
Nice information… Thank you very much for this blog…
Today social media is gaining huge popularity. In social media building a strong network is most important. This info graphic is having great information what to do and what not to do in social media. Thanks for sharing such awesome information with us.
Great post! You are so true about the facts to be an effective marketer. You should always talk the truth about your product.
Social media has great effect to our website. Specially to our website’s traffic. Also, search results is now socially transformed, so meaning having higher social media signals will help to boost a websites rankings.
Great post, Mitch. I’m new to social media marketing so the Do’s and Don’ts are really intersting for me, especially the one about don’t forget to thank people. I love this site, so many good tips!
Thanks for your contirbution.
Geoff would love you to read ..Anniversary Gifts for Her
Of course over using the power of social media is not good. As they say too much of something is bad enough. Businesses should also use social to connect with their network and not just for marketing purposes only. Businesses who are engaged in social media should read your post and learn something. Seriously, it’s really annoying when a certain company is spamming your facebook or twitter accounts right?
It’s cool how a single info graphic can tell an article-worth of information. One important feature a business could have is having feedback and survey section.
Very interesting topic for discussion,
I like to read your blog for knowing latest stuff about internet market, like this post.
Social media is great platform for business because through this platform it is quite easy to create good brand image by connecting different countries people. According to me the most important thing in social media marketing is marketing person need to engaged with their profile page and also need to add content for increasing interaction with the followers.
Agree completely with everything you mentioned. And I can also add that you should not only keep all your promises, but also should react on your readers’ or followers’ or fans’ wishes, it will bring you many effective results
One thing that I really hate is when people keep spamming the same thing over and over again on social media. Its like, ok I saw it the first time now give it a rest. Just my opinion though, I hate high pressure sales.
Oh that’s a good point! What could be worse than having many people willing to visit your site, but the server can’t handle them. Got to keep that in mind!
One thing that really annoys me is people advertising their products constantly in their Twitter feed. I was following one person, an author, who kept promoting his latest book at least three times a day. It got really overbearing and I just had to stop following them as I couldn’t take any more!
Really cool infographic. It really helps explain it all and brings the article together.
Hi,
Can any blogger imagination that thing what is the blogger’s life without social media sites. We all know very well what is the importance of social media sites in online marketing or in online business and we can’t ignore it because these sites are the source where we can make much money in our business by the help of social media promotion campaign.
goa carnival would love you to read ..Goa Carnival 2012
all the information written on the pictures are true, also we need to think first before we click the add button because everything after that click will be included to the public and stays for a long time.
This is really a good article about social media. I really never give any attention to it before and now that you have this article here, it open my mind to what social media can really do for my website. The important thing is to do it the right way so it will have a good impact.
The key remains, if the social media is used to create an awareness of the product it helps, but the moment you start dreaming about a huge traffic and sales from it, the things start going wrong!
Thankfully the facebook is built on a robust platform and unlike Twitter and linkedin it cannot be misused.. otherwise it wouldn’t have been so popular!
John Armstrong would love you to read ..UPVC windows
Social media is fantastic for promoting a brand. However, whenever a company uses social media they should make sure they monitor it carefully. No much damages a brand more than unanswered complaints on the company facebook or twitter page.
Very good tips! I’d like to add another one – don’t make random friends in social media: find those who are interested in what you’re writing. How? Check their profile and updates, see what are they talking about.
Amazingly good infographics. 🙂 It’s important in social media to act like a real person, treating people like they need to be treated, with respect. I know how cliche this might sound but relationships does take a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. I’ve learned that lesson, and I’m glad I did. And trust is the best foundation for any relationship.
It’s hard to mess up and burn bridges. Once you do that, you are on your way to destroying your online reputation. This article is quite helpful in teaching us how to avoid those pitfalls.
That is a great info-graphic. I misread it at first. Lololol. It is definitely useful quite likely, and I might just download it for later personal reference, if that is alright.
Great post, very, very good. I’m one of those who very seldomly go to their Twitter or Facebook account. I don’t have so much time and there you risk to lose an enormous amount of it. But given that my only business is writing articles on my blog that’s not such a big problem. I prefer to use commenting on other blogs to establish social relationships and it works pretty well. But I definitely see your point and it’s very well made. Also these thoughts apply to many businesses, not just the online ones.
Great! I had to tweet it. 🙂
Merry Christmas!