Be useful. If there is any advice I can give a business leader regarding their social media effort, that's it. Help people. Provide them with information they can put to use. Solve their problems.
Do that, and you build your brand.
After all, strategic marketing, brand building, should be the primary focus of your social media effort. You should listen to what people are saying about your industry, your company and your products; then use social media tools to help shape and direct that conversation.
Strategic marketing...building a brand...as opposed to pushing a particular product is a key element of success that far too many enterprises simply ignore in their social media campaign. Instead they use a Facebook page, or their blog, to promote a particular product: as though that page was little more than a storefront window display. If you treat it as that, it will be viewed as that, and your potential customers will barely notice you as they walk on by to the store next door.
Of course, you expect to sell product via your website, and you will! But don't expect it to happen overnight; and don't expect to reap a crop until you till the soil. When thinking about this point I was reminded of a man I used to work with in radio. He sold radio advertising. I'll call him BB. BB knew how to till the soil. For example, his top customers were car dealerships. So, BB would peruse all the auto trade journals searching for articles he thought would be useful to his clients. He'd photocopy those articles and mail them out to the dealership managers/owners with a note: "thought you'd find this interesting. BB." He was, by far, the top selling radio guy I ever met.
Think how much easier it is for you to do that now, with the direct mass communication offered by social media! You don't even have to pay for a stamp! The experts in your company can respond to the problems your clients face in blog posts...and, as they let people know how to solve the problem, they might mention, in passing, 'by the way, we have a tool that can help with that.'
Every year companies like State Farm Insurance spend millions of dollars building brand in ways that can't be clearly said to "ring the register." They might sponsor a golf tournament, or, in the case of an agricultural product, a horse show. They get people thinking good thoughts about the things they make or the services they sell. That job, building goodwill, just got a whole lot easier, and a whole lot cheaper, thanks to social media.
Listen to your clients. They're chatting online. They're talking to each other about YOU. They're talking about where they go to eat dinner, or the book they just read and where they got it. They're talking about their new camera or asking their friends how they like that new car. You have a unique opportunity, through social media, to listen in to that conversation. You can help shape it by intervening, in the appropriate place, to answer common questions and deal with common problems. And you can sell.
Your blog, your Facebook page, is not a storefront window where you stack post-off "items for sale...half off." It's your face. It's your firm handshake. It's the client sitting across your desk and shooting the breeze about an issue they're facing; and asking how you can help them solve that problem. Through smart use of social media you can make huge gains in brand familiarity and in positive image. And you might even sell a thing or two. By the way, I have a few tools that can help with that!
