Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

Just have a look at that photo to the right. It is filled with the labels of just some of the organizations, business and web sites that are involved in the Social Media Marketing world. Just some! And then they all have interconnections. Seem impossible? It did to me when I first started doing Social Media Marketing. But I took the time, approached the project step-by-step, and am in the process of mastering the challenge.

You can do that, or you can make your life simpler, focus on your business and hire me to do all that work for you. (Yup, that was a plug for me, it is my blog after all and this is what I do for a living, so I had to throw one of those in somewhere).

But whether you use my services or take the do it yourself route, you are going to have to break your Social Media Marketing campaign down into small, doable steps.

The first step may seem ridiculously simple, but taking the time to think about it now will save you grief later. That step is choosing your name.

The choice of your name is critical because what you choose to use as your name is going to represent your brand. It is going to be used on all of your Social Media Marketing platforms to tell the world who you are, what you are about and where you want to go with your viewer.

It is said that the first impression in business is made during your handshake and that you have only 5 seconds to make that impression good. The same applies to your brand name. In this day of information overload, your efforts are going to often be judged by your brand name. Does it reflect what the viewer wants to find? If it doesn't, they are moving on fast.

Sometimes your name is the best brand name. For my art and photography site, I use just www.bradrickerby.blogspot.com.  You might wish to use your name and a professional accreditation. My mother would love it if my brand were, say, www.drbradrickerby.com (alas for her, that brand does not exist). Or you might want a brand name that is memorable, perhaps silly or whimsical and talks a little about what your brand is about. I just opened http://muttsmuttsmutts.blogspot.com.  I'll bet you know what that one is about!

Your brand name should also be short (a rule I violate frequently) because a short brand name will be more memorable and easier to type. And you should be sure that your brand name is available across all the platforms you will be using (typically a blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter).

It really is not as complicated as it sounds and you should be able to come up with a brand quickly. But is is important to give it just a little thought.

Next, you need to define the goal of your Social Media Marketing Campaign. I will go into that next.

9 Business Leaders in Social Media Marketing

The 9 top business Tweeters and Social Media Marketing users are all Fortune 500 companies. The following is a list of those companies (ranked in order of Twitter followers). This list was created by Fortune magazine and reported by www.cnnmoney.com with further research by me.

One of the main things to be taken from what follows is the level of use of Social Media Marketing platforms by corporate giants. If they are so committed to their use, these platforms should also be useful for much smaller businesses, professionals, artists and so on.

#1, not surprisingly, is Google. Google is #102 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 3,012,238 Twitter followers and 2,925,995 Facebook Fans.

#2 is Wholefoods. Wholefoods is 284 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,916,179 Twitter followers. They also have over 300 Twitters accounts and over 250 local stores with their own Twitter accounts. Wholefoods also has 575,020 Facebook fans on their main page and scores of local store and specialty pages on Facebook.

#3 a tip of the hat to Dell. They are the 38th largest company in the USA according to the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,584,837 Twitter followers, track over 25,000 conversations per day in 11 different languages and created the Social Media and Community University. Dell also has 549,525 Facebook fans.

#4 Southwest Airlines. SW air is #229 on the Fortune 500 list and have 1,107,156 followers on Twitter. This goes along with 1,390,581 Facebook fans. That is a lot of Social Media!

#5 Coca Cola  The 72 largest USA company according to the Fortune 500 list, Coca Cola has 254,618 followers and a whopping 26,466,498 fans on Facebook.

Coming in at #6 is another airline, Delta. They are the 84th largest USA corporation and have 180,000 followers on Twitter.

Number 7 is one of my favorite places to shop, Target. Target is #30 on the Fortune 500 list and has 126,563 Twitter followers. Target also has 4,321,438 Facebook fans.

#8 is American Express. At 88 on the Fortune 500 list they have 120,343 Twitter followers. On their main Facebook page they have 590,725 Fans. American Express also has a Facebook page called "Small Business Saturday" with 1,484,696 fans. Actually, that should be 1,484,697 as I just joined!

And finally, #9, we come to at last. McDonalds, the home of the Golden Arches and the Big Mac is ranked number 108 by Fortune and has 120,277 Twitter followers. McDonalds also has 8,155,792 Facebook fans.

All in all that is a lot of fans and following. Keeping in mind that there are over 100 million Twitter accounts and over 500 million Facebook accounts, there are a lot, literally hundreds of millions of reasons that both these corporate megaliths and you should be using Social Media Marketing.

By the way, the Fortune 500 listing is a list of the top 500 companies in America. It is put out annually by Fortune magazine and ranks the companies by revenues and profits. The total revenue for these 9 companies, in millions of $'s is $238,742. That number is too large for me to contemplate. The dollars in profit for these 9 companies, again in millions of $'s is $27,068. All I can say is that that is a lot of profit.

Social Media Marketing Basics 1

While the number of people participating in the world of Social Media is staggering (about 500 million for Facebook, 300 million for YouTube and say 100 million for Twitter) there seem to be just as many choices to be made, platforms to be considered and tools to be mastered. It is a lot to take in, and learn and try.

Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin all acting as funnels to pass
people through to your blog.

But it really is not as daunting as all that (yes, I just set up my own straw man so I could knock it down). Really, to start, there are only four platforms to consider. These are your blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

Your blog is your main site. It is where you tell people about you, who you are, what services and/or products you offer, how to find you and your store (either on the web or brick and mortar or both). The blog is the cornerstone of your virtual empire. It is your location on the internet.

There is a lot more to come on your blog and blogging in general.

The other three platforms, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all conduits. From each platform you are looking to gain Contacts (Linkedin), Followers (Twitter) and Friends (Facebook) or to be Liked (Facebook again).  Once you have made the connection on these platforms you try to move them to your blog. Once there they can discover the complete you and, hopefully, sooner or later, make a purchase of a product and/or service or add value in some way to your business.

This is not as cynical as it sounds at first read through. Business in general is about developing relationships. Twitter. Linkedin and Facebook are simply means to develop a relationship. Moving that relationship to your blog is simply further developing that relationship. You can make a sale at any point in the relationship and there are some relationships that will never lead to a sale.

The first step, therefore, on the road to Social Media Marketing is setting up your blog and accounts with Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. In order to set up your accounts in the most efficient manner possible, you are going to need to define what you hope to gain through your Social Media Marketing efforts (making millions, while an understandable end, is not a great goal to start with). You are also going to need to determine what I will call your voice. Your voice is a coherent, systematic and consistent appearance across all Social Media platforms. Another term for Voice is Brand. I just find the term Brand a little more intimidating.

I will be going through specifics on your blog, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and your Branding or Voice in upcoming posts.

More Startling Statistics - Facebook

More startling statistics on Social Media. This time just on Facebook (check back for Twitter tomorrow). The numbers are staggering, sometimes so large that they verge on incomprehensible. By the way, these numbers came, in one for or another, from www.kunocreative.com (I tip my hat to you!) who got many of them from www.mashable.com (another tip of the hat!).

We know already that Facebook has 500 million users. But did you know that 50%, that is 250 million, of them log on every day.  WOW!

Further, that 500 million users of Facebook translates to about one person out of every 14!!!

40% of the Facebook user base is age 35 and up.

One out of every eight minutes on line is spent on Facebook.

34% of Facebook users are from North America, 32% from Europe, 20% from Asia, 9% from South America, 3% from Africa and 2% from Australia.

US Internet users spend 3 times more minutes on blogs and social media than they do on emails (okay, that wasn't about Facebook, but I thought I would slip it in anyway).

Think about the potential for reaching and engaging with people based on these numbers. The potential is amazing.

The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution

Last week I attended SMACC2011 (#smacc2011). It was a conference at the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University on the blending of Social Media and A Cappella singing. There was a lot of singing, but I spent my time in Social Media Marketing seminars. One seminar started on the phenomenal growth of Social Media. Some of the statistics and thoughts they revealed were, I thought, astonishing. Here are some of those revelations (the source of most of them are a book titled, Socialnomics dated May 5, 2010 - also found at www.socialnomics.com).

First, Social Media is called "The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution".

More:

Over 50% of the world's population is under 30.  96% of them have joined some form of Social Media

Facebook now tops Google for weekly traffic in the US

Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users

Television took 13 years to reach 50 million users

The internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

The iPod took 3 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

China would be first, India second, Facebook third and the USA fourth

Facebook has more users than there are people living in the United States

80% of companies in the US use Social Media for recruitment

95% of these use Linkedin

The fastest growing Facebook segment is 55 - 65 year old women

Generation Y and Z consider email to be passe

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

There are over 200,000,000 blogs

34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

(34% of 200,000,000 is a very large number)

Only 18% of traditional TV ad campaigns generate a positive ROI (return on investment)

90% of viewers skip TV ads completely by means of Tivo/DVR

where as, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

(such as they get on social media)

and only 14% trust advertisements

On Facebook, there are over 60 million updates a day.

And, a couple of quotes:

"Social Media is not a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate".

and

"The ROI of Social Media is that your business will exist in 5 years".

(These are powerful words - and the emphasis is added).

These numbers are compelling evidence that if your business is not involved in Social Media, at the very least, it is missing a huge opportunity to be more profitable.  Further, this opportunity exists for every type of business, be it professional or store front or creative.