Social Media & You (Yes, You)

There were a lot of interesting tweets swirling the tubes of the internet today regarding SEO, SMO, and the use of social media; leading me to pen some thoughts in a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for some time.

I work with a lot of clients who don’t really know what social media is, and step one is forming a real understanding. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media ‘outlets’ are fairly simple in concept; massive user base, massive audience, but yet oh so challenging to keep your content out there and in demand. Many small businesses simply don’t see the need (or are too out of touch to care about putting in the effort), but at the end of the day practical use of social media can revolutionize the way you do business, forging new paths for collaboration with peers and opening a truly infinite number of doors for new customers. So, how do you get your message out there, how do you make it stand out, and how do you leverage (free) platforms to better your business and your service delivery?

Make me want to talk about you:
If you have a bad experience somewhere you statistically tell 7 people, whereas  if you have a good experience you only tell 3 people. Things may have been that simple in the past, but in the connected world we live in now, I can key in 140 characters right on my phone, creating a social object while still standing in line at that restaurant that ‘lost’ my reservation. Instantly I can share that experience with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. Bad news can spread like wildfire, but there’s a use to social media to help you improve your service delivery and customer experience. As Marc Anderson (@sympmarc) recently pointed out in a blog post, some companies monitor social media feeds to help rectify service issues and offer support.  I even had a marketing manager comment on a blog post of mine once, who then proceeded to handle my claim directly and sort out my issues; there’s something to be said for a company that takes customer service seriously and is willing to put themselves out there in the public domain at that level.

As Diana pointed out above, a social object really is anything that sparks a conversation. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first 140 characters of a press release, or a professionally produced video published to YouTube. Anything that draws attention to your business, your brand, your products, etc. can be considered a social object.

Help me find it:
So you’ve been putting all of these hours in, building your Twitter network, putting videos on YouTube, setting up your own little corner on Facebook, but it’s not helping. First things first, if you don’t have one you need a good statistical analysis tool for your website (take a look at Google Analytics as an option). If you’re not checking your stats at least monthly, looking at your bounce rates, conversions, etc. why do you even have a website? Your website is critical to integration with social media, it won’t run itself, and it’s only as good as the content that you feed into it. I always tell my customers that “out of date information is worse than no information”. If the only information I can find is 2 years old, you’re probably not a business I want to do business with.

Determine where your traffic is coming from, start there with your social media plan and expand the reach of your plan as it matures. Many people forget that social objects are a direct extension of your brand, and should be deployed accordingly (professionalism, professionalism, professionalism). I’ve never been a fan of “2b” instead of “to be” or “r” instead of “are”; sometimes you have to abbreviate to fit your message into 140 characters, but be smart about it and only do it when absolutely necessary. When in doubt publish only the first 100 characters and throw in a shrunken link right to the video, press release, etc., driving traffic directly to the asset itself. I always cringe when I see foul language or blatantly obvious mistakes in tweets. Remember the potential reach of that social object? If you wouldn’t want your company president, your mother, your priest or your shareholders to read it, you probably shouldn’t be publishing it. Did I cover the importance of professionalism?

If you’ve got a website and you really understand how it works then you’re surely familiar with SEO right? Wrong, most people don’t have a clue. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a bit of a science all on its own (and deserves its own post), but in a nutshell we’re talking about a mindset, a set of techniques, and a way of thinking that positions your content to be easily indexed by search engines. As Jim Bob pointed out above, step one is to get that content out there, step two is to make it searchable, and make it findable–this is where SEO comes in. When we start talking about social objects we also have to worry about SMO (Social Media Optimization), which like SEO is a bucket of techniques and a mindset which uses the different elements of social media (feeds, sharing buttons, polling, blogging, profiles, etc.) to keep things connected and feed your social network.

Dedicate some time to it:
It takes some time to build networks, build trust within the digital community (sometimes harder than walking up to a stranger and making friends at the side of the road), and find your feet in this ever-evolving world, but in the long run that time you invest in your social media plan will drive new opportunities and avenues for even the smallest of small businesses. Quite possibly the most important thing to note however is that the work never truly ends. Sure content will spread on its own (relatively), but without a pipeline of fresh content things will quickly dry up, followers will start to ‘unfollow’, friends will start to ‘de-friend’, visitors will stop visiting, and you’ll be back to where you were with your website and its two year old, out of date content.