Building legitimate social equity requires slowly shifting the perceptions of others. Building social equity, and understanding how to use it, is fundamental to maximizing revenue through social media.
Three phases to maximizing revenue through social media
These are not steps. When you've spent enough time focusing on awareness, your social equity will reach a level that will allow you to create engagement-type campaigns that will be successful. If you try launching engagement-type campaigns without building your social equity to a sufficient level, your campaigns will not be successful - and should be an indicator that you need to focus on awareness & build your social equity.
It's also important to note that having enough social equity to successfully move to the next phase doesn't mean that attention should be completely removed from the previous phase. (i.e. If you move from awareness to engagement; you should still continue awareness efforts. If you stop your awareness effort you risk decreasing your social equity.)
Awareness (Social Equity Required: Low)
The first phase of maximizing revenue using social media is establishing a presence and earning a reputation. Before you get started you'll need to define some goals, and define what groups of people you want to build a relationship with.
Once you've defined those things; you can decide what social media channels you'd like to participate in. Depending on your goals and your audience, you might end up choosing several channels. These posts can help you make your decision for companies or for individuals.
Many larger brands want to bypass this phase and jump into engagement; the reason usually is that they've built up substantial lists of users via other media. Often these brands blanket-invite anyone who's interacted with them in the past to join them in their new campaign. The biggest problem with doing this is that you're not qualifying your audience. Ideally, you'd target users who already participate in some social media channels & are informed about how to participate on the channels you're inviting them to. These active users have the best chance of becoming advocates for you. (Adversely, if you invite users who aren't interested in participating - you could end up with a bunch of 'dead' accounts following you. This can have negative repercussions for you and your community for several reasons. I'll cover this in more detail in an upcoming post called "Social Media Deadfall, Dangers of The Unfocused.")
So once you have goals & defined the channels you want to create a presence on; you can begin establishing your presence and earning the reputation you want. There are two reasons people join communities - for value or for fun. (Usually some combination of the two; but it's proven helpful if you plot where you'd like to be on the spectrum between value & fun.)
This might be helpful; here are some high-level social activities. They extend across value-providing users and fun-providing users because the actives are basically the same; it's the intention that sways toward one or the other.
Value
Provide helpful links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content
Fun
Provide entertaining links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content
Once you've established your presence and have developed your reputation; you can begin engaging your community in a different way. (There are benchmarks that indicate when it's time to begin engagement-type campaigns; but it's often different for every community. The best option is to ask your community if they're ready for an engagement campaign, and gauge the response.)
Engagement (Social Equity Required: Medium)
For engagement campaigns to be successful through social media, a social equity foundation is required. I realize 'success' is defined differently by different people; here's my definition: To have a successful social media engagement campaign the campaign needs to be directed at qualified users, achieve predefined goals, and increase encourage long term communication.
I've been describing engagement campaigns as marketing roller-coasters. Done right, they can create a spike in community participation but once the campaign is over the participation level will likely fall back down to levels prior the campaign. -- Of course, there are campaigns that show a spike in community participation which never go back to previous levels. There are also campaigns that cause community participation to fall well below pre-campaign levels after the campaign is done. -- The hope is that community participation will permanently increase incrementally with each engagement campaign run. To achieve this; post-campaign analysis should always be comprehensive.
There are many tools and techniques for moving from engagement to social commerce. Determining when it's appropriate to integrate social commerce into your community depends on the actions you want your community to do. If the cost of introducing social commerce to your community outweighs the potential revenue it can produce; you need to grow your community before investing.
Social Commerce (Social Equity Required: High)
Reviews: A great way to begin to integrate an aspect of social commerce into your community is to provide a product/ service review tool that can integrate with your e-commerce or catalog site. Not only would this give your users the ability to actively endorse you; it would also allow those participants to connect to users who are interested in similar products/ services. (i.e. If I submit a review via Facebook on my new Mac laptop, people reading that review might contact me through my Facebook profile asking follow-up questions. These connections are often the point of joining communities.)
Shopping: The obvious integration option is allowing your community to preview products/ services through the site they've been participating on. Systems like Payvment mash-up the social network and the e-commerce website. (video demo) However, you can integrate shopping behavior with your community by making compelling exclusive offers to either visit your e-commerce site, or visit your store.
Sharing: An inherent benefit of social mediums is that sharing functionalities are usually built-in. Getting a qualified, engaged community to share products/ services they're interested in is usually an easy task. The key to sharing is understanding how the user likes to share & how much control they like to have over sharing. Ensure they have the controls they need to share. (i.e. Many users like to select specific people to share with, rather than posting something to everyone. Many users like to include a personal message, rather than having a standard description included.)
Pricing: If you're asking members of your community to leave the site and shop, whether it be on a different site, or in-store, exclusive pricing is a fantastic way to achieve it. In addition to getting users to shop through the channel you want; a byproduct of offering exclusive pricing is that you'll get customers who aren't yet members joining to get the exclusive pricing. Tip: A great way to ensure quality members is to identify social KPI and make exclusive pricing available to members who help achieve those metrics. (i.e. If you want guest blog posts, make an exclusive available to those who offer them. You can even make offers cumulative or loyalty-based.)
Registration: If you're asking members to go to your e-commerce platform to do their shopping; offer an express registration to make things simpler for community members. Facebook Connect, and several OpenID methods are easy to integrate. Even if you don't use a social media platform that allows easy registration; there are always innovative ideas to create an express registration. For instance a social application called Hippopost allows users to send customized postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, etc, to friends. This requires personal information, which can be collected and automatically transfered to an e-commerce platform for express registration.
Tip: Amazon, PayPal, and Google offer checkout options that might help community members checkout faster.
There's been a lot of talk about social commerce taking over e-commerce. I don't think that'll happen; but I do think it represents a massive opportunity to increase revenue. This post represents a framework describing how to maximize revenue through social commerce.
I'm definitely open to elaborating on anything; and would appreciate any feedback or questions.
(Please comment here, or on Twitter & I'll respond.)