Social Media is becoming one of the most talked about topics within the small / medium sized business. It’s become the next big must have piece of technology and in most cases businesses are becoming over whelmed by the numbers of marketing consultants offering to operate social media marketing campaigns.
The typical you must be on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN as well as creating blogs and videos to improve your social reach very often ends up being a long list of task and leaving the typical business owner lost and scared for the future and resulting in them buying a service that will not provide any additional benefits to the business.
Social Media is definitely a viable marketing channel all business can make good use of in order to reach new clients, however it shouldn’t be done on a ‘lets just jump in’ mentality as were so many websites in the 90s and the result was a large number of businesses being left disheartened and discouraged by the internet revolution because the conversion and visibility of said sites was pretty bad. In both cases the major failing point for any Internet activity tends to be that the business doesn’t understand the reasons they are engaging with Social Media.
Why?
Are we actually doing this…
Who?
Are we trying to target, who’s the user
What?
Both do we want them to do and exactly what are they wanting from us
I’ve spent the day at Internet World and listened to a number of good seminar sessions and in particular one focusing on gathering useful data from Social Media campaigns. The speaker focused in a number of ways to track and measure effectivenesss by carrying out analysis on the various social communications taking place over time. However he did stress that the first part of any social media strategy was to LISTEN and pay attention to what’s being said, how often and by who, as very often the WHO can be a key influencer for your brand and worth keeping happy.
There was no set way to analyse data and he presented a number of differing routes. The process involved capturing all the social chatter and then analysing for patterns and relevancy and then ranking. In his particular example it revolved around the iPhone 4 and it’s comparison to another major player in the mobile arena. By grouping the different types of conversation they we’re able to split the tweets in this case into distinct groups and then mark the tweet dependant on the users perception of the grouped feature. The end result highlighted that general social media traffic placed the iPhone behind the alternative based on screen resolution, features and other key aspects.
He did remind the audience that social media is only another channel and not to forget that users do not always interact via a computer and that businesses needed to do face to face and other typical marketing techniques.
