Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Facebook recently announced more than 750 million active users worldwide. That's ACTIVE users. Half use Facebook several times a day. Plus, 75% of marketers plan to increase their use of Facebook in 2011!
So let me ask you a question. Is your business leveraging the power of
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When Content Science sends their quarterly e-newsletter to their mailing list, their email open rate is 50%.
"Well, of course," I hear you saying. "Sending an e-newsletter to subscribers who have opted in would most certainly have a fairly high open rate."
Exactly.
So why would you want to broadcast your online message to millions of people who couldn't care less, and be happy with a 3% click-through rate? Why are you still marketing online the same way you marketed offline?
When Rick Short, director of marketing communications for Indium Corporation, began thinking about his social media strategy, he started with keyword research.
He identified 73 of the most important keywords his prospective customers would search for. Then he created 73 different blogs that focused on each keyword and assigned a dozen employees to write those blogs.
The results amazed him. Once the blogs took off, customer contacts increased 600% in a single quarter. And everyone who contacted a blog author, commented on
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When Michael Stelzner started Social Media Examiner in October 2009, he never dreamed it would become so successful so quickly.
As of March 2011, Social Media Examiner has 59,000 email subscribers, 33,000 Facebook fans, over 60 writers and half a million page views per month.
In addition, the site has generated almost $2 million in sales; ranks among the top 12 websites on two Technorati lists – business and small business; and ranks among the top 1,500 websites in the entire United States, according to Alexa.
"We didn't do anything
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When marketing consultant Scott Stratten worked with the owners of a new restaurant, he recommended inviting residents of a nearby condo complex to a free dinner. Over two nights, the owners could get 150 people to start the buzz about the new restaurant in town.
But the owners balked at giving away free food, which they estimated would cost them several thousand dollars. Yet they had spent $5,000 on a magazine ad!
“How many customers did it bring in?” Stratten asked. “We don’t know,” they replied.
Does this sound
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When little-known, first-term Illinois senator Barack Obama faced Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, he knew he couldn’t compete with her financially. He couldn’t afford telemarketing and direct mail campaigns or TV and radio advertising.
So instead of playing by the old rules, he made new rules. He started blogging and he created profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
He also hired the co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, to be his Internet strategist. And he won the Democratic
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If you heard about a marketing strategy that could substantially lower your marketing expenses and return 600% or more of your investment, would you be interested in learning more about it?
When Social Media Examiner surveyed 1,900 marketers in 2010, half said they wanted to learn more about this strategy.
Of those just starting out in social media marketing, 65% wanted to learn more about it. And 81% of all the marketers surveyed said they would definitely increase their use of this strategy.
No, it's not Facebook,
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Canadian grocery store chain Loblaws knew they had a great BBQ sauce based on customer comments. But they didn’t understand why sales were so dismal.
Until they invited customers to post product reviews on their website. Only then did they discover the problem was the bottle – it was too tall to fit in refrigerator doors! They redesigned the bottle and their sales immediately increased.
That’s user-generated content directly leading to an increase in sales. That’s the power of social media marketing.
Are you
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“But whether it be dream or truth, to do well is what matters. If it be truth, for truth’s sake. If not, then to gain friends for the time when we awaken.”
Sounds like something from one of Shakespeare’s plays, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s a quote from Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a 17th-century Spanish playwright.
You may wonder where I found such an obscure quote. It was a comment by someone named Vigrx on my blog post titled “Using Social Media to Market Your Business.” He or she was promoting the site vigrxdeals.org. The fact
Do you remember the spoon-bending scene from the 1999 movie The Matrix?
It occurs the first time Neo goes to see the Oracle after he was rescued from the Matrix. In the Oracle’s waiting room, he sees two girls floating blocks above their heads and a young boy bending a spoon.
Young boy: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead … only try to realize the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Young boy: “It is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”
When fifth-grader Kane Swift had to do a science project, he decided to help raise funds for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure campaign.
So he set up a Facebook fan page with the help of his parents. In just one week, he got more than 1,200 fans and raised $400!
“I can understand using Facebook for a fifth-grade science project,” I hear you saying. “But how do I use Facebook to market my business? I keep hearing that I should include social media in my marketing campaigns, but I don’t have a clue how to do that.”
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When Michael Stelzner started using social media to market his business, he focused exclusively on Twitter. “My first attempt at using Facebook for business was a big flop. I was pretty convinced I could just use Twitter for business.”
Stelzner is a well-known white paper writer, author of the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and founder of Social Media Examiner.
But he literally had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook.
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When Intuit wanted to analyze market sentiment about TurboTax, they used Radian6 to collect approximately 40,000 blog posts about Intuit and its competitors between January 1st and April 15th of 2008.
“None of [the team working on this project] felt artificial intelligence was going to come to their aid any day soon,” says Jim Sterne in his book, Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.
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