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.