Nielsen and Roper report that 92% of all consumers say that a word-of-mouth recommendation is the “leading reason they buy a product or service”. Our most successful marketing is historically via word of mouth recommendation. Social media is word-of-mouth recommendation. Therefore, we need a social media strategy.
So, which social media platform(s)? It is commonly suggested that to increase brand presence, a company needs to be active on all forms of social media. While that may be true, unless we have a team of dedicated social media coordinators, finding the time to maintain every platform out there will be extremely time consuming and lead to the diminution of content quality.
As we are just starting out with social media and need to pick a select few platforms to utilise, below is a guide to choosing the best platforms for our business, and how to make the most out of them.
- Twitter (very content hungry but great for researching competition and customer trends)
Who should use it: Everyone – from individuals to the largest multinational corporations
What to share: Start, join, and lead conversations; interact directly with brands and customers
Post frequency: Multiple times per day
Twitter is the dominant democracy of the social-sharing economy. Relevancy, personality and brevity are the keys to making your voice heard.
Useful tools: Buffer lets you stockpile and schedule content in advance. Tools like this allow for posting around-the-clock, increasing the likelihood of snagging followers beyond your country or time zone without working 24/7.
It’s a guarantee by this point that a conversation relevant to your industry or business is occurring on Twitter. The only question: are you part of it?
- Instagram (Not for B2B)
Who should use it: Lifestyle, food, fashion, personalities and luxury brands
- LinkedIn (Better than Facebook for B2B)
Who should use it: Businesses (especially B2B service providers), Recruiters and Job-Seekers
What to share: Job-postings, company descriptions, employer/employee research
Post frequency: Two to four times a week
LinkedIn is the online analog to old fashioned networking. People – and connections to people – are everything
Keep a company description and profile page mindful of keyword SEO, but your network of employees and contacts is your most valuable (and potentially damaging) content on LinkedIn. Make sure people in your organization are appropriate, professional and on-brand. There’s nowhere online where employers and employees are more intimately linked.
Company seeking clients and individuals seeking employment should grow their LinkedIn networks by adding as many real connections as possible. Use your second and third-degree connections to request personal introductions (when reasonable), and weed out the Internet’s infinity of companies and applications, focusing on opportunities where you have some real connection.
Top tip: LinkedIn shares more about your own electronic creeping than any other network. Paid users can see who’s viewing their profiles.
If you’re researching a competitor or doing some preliminary job-seeking you’d rather your boss didn’t know about, try a Google search specifically for the LinkedIn page you want to see.
- Facebook (Use LinkedIn instead)
Who should use it: Everyone and their grandmas (literally)
- Google+ (Googles answer to facebook, hasn’t really taken off, not a top platform for now at least)
Who should use it: Brands already on the other major social networks, B2B networking, bloggers
- YouTube (Need this!)
Who should use it: Brands with video content and ads, anyone giving explanations or sharing expertise
What to share: Short (less than 1.5 minutes) video content
Post frequency: Once or twice a week
Google treats its own well, and YouTube is the prime example of this fact. YouTube videos feature prominently in Google search results.
Keep this in mind when naming and describing videos, and direct people looking for insight or explanations within your industry topics to your brand’s page.
Useful tools: A subscription widget or link to your website can help convert single views into long-term influence.
- Pinterest (Not for our B2B)
Who should use it: Fashion, food, design, travel and anything DIY; audience skews female by 4:1
- Yelp and/or Foursquare (Not for our B2B)
Who should use it: B2C companies, brick-and-mortar outlets (especially stores, restaurants, and travel/tourism related), reviewers and bloggers
Conclusions:
Required platforms for Tecknic
- Tecknic’s own blog (call to action on social media will bring people here)
- YouTube
Proposed Actions:
- Blog page on Tecknic website.
- Blog should be of the highest quality, written with the customer as a hero (customer perspective), using google keywords in title
- Blog should take about 4 hrs to write.
- Target 4 blog posts per month
- Set Up Twitter account
- Proper cover picture
- Google keywords profile text
- Target 4 tweets per day
- Set up Tweetdeck to run twitter
- Set Up LinkedIn Company Page
- Proper cover picture
- Google keywords profile text
- Use Blog posts content
- Set up Youtube Tecknic account
- Proper cover picture
- Google keywords profile text
- Build video content library (How to, Case Study, Common customer issues, etc.)
- Add social media icons to website (twitter, LinkedIn & Youtube)
