Your Social Media Questions Answered (#7mktgsins)

Posted By Hollis Thomases on Feb 18th, 2011

This is the last batch of audience Q&A from Hollis Thomases’ recent webinar, The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Marketing! (#7mktgsins ) Hollis has been taking the time to follow up on your post-webinar questions individually, and is posting the answers here in weekly batches, organized by topic. (What’s this all about?) If you have any additional questions, feel free to send Hollis a tweet: @hollisthomases.

Today’s Topic: Social Media

1. How do I get my company a Facebook page?

First, it should be noted that a Facebook Page (an “Official Page”) doesn’t function the same way as a personal Facebook Profile. A Facebook Page must be associated with, or in other words owned by, a Facebook Profile. For instance, if you create a Facebook Page for your company while logged into your Facebook account, your personal Facebook Profile will then “own” that Page.

It’s important to know this when you’re first setting things up so that you’re giving the proper person “ownership” of the Page. The proper person at a company, for example, should be someone of authority and likely to be with the company for the long-term. At a smaller company, you may even want this person to be the company owner. This way, all the company’s control over their Facebook Page is not in the hands of a departed employee.

Here are the basic steps to creating a Facebook page:

Go to Facebook.com
Click the “Create a Page” link near the bottom of the screen
Select the type of Page you want to create and fill out the necessary fields; check the box to agree to Facebook’s page creation terms, then click the “Get Started” button. (Note: You will be asked to log into Facebook if you already have an existing Facebook account – if not, you will need to create one first!)
You will be automatically taken to your new page. From here you can begin customizing it by adding photos, filling out your page fields, and posting Status updates. You can also assign Administrators to help you maintain your page. Administrators are simply other Facebook users to whom you grant Page access.
NOTE: A “Community Page” is a page ANYONE can create for any brand or group and it is treated differently by Facebook than an Official Page. The two are hard to distinguish to the uninformed eye. Community Pages say “Community Pages are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, anyone associated with the topic” in tiny gray text.

2. Do you think it’s good to have a much more casual tone in social media communication than you might have on your corporate site?

Yes! People visiting your social media sites expect your company’s “voice” to come through and to engage and be engaged by you. Casual exchanges are fine. Depending on your business it may not be appropriate to completely do away with formalities, but setting the right tone is important. There are no rules — it all depends on what feels right for your business. It’s considered a best practice to establish a social media policy internally for your company (both for all employees and for those who are directly involved with your social media activities) that defines how social media communications are handled, and should address specific things like do’s and don’ts, off-limit topics, etc. Here’s a really helpful link to examples of corporate social media policies you can model yours from.

3. Can you point to success with social media in B2B? I run an education software business and sell to schools. 70% of teachers are on Facebook but would they follow a curriculum company?

Here’s a curriculum software company that we think is doing social media well: CompassLearning. We like that they list all their social media links right on their homepage, maintain an engaging & informative Twitter and Facebook presence, and are sharing a lot of interesting photo and video content.

4. Are there specific suggestions to use SM for issue campaigns? Responding to inaccurate tales told on Fox News, for example?

One thing social media is extremely well suited for is staying on top of issues—whether good or bad—because it’s so timely and conversational. If there is a particular pain point you’re looking to respond to, I’d recommend using a social media monitoring service to zero in on what’s being discussed in the blogosphere, Twittersphere, and beyond as it relates to your issue. You can go the free & simple route with something like a saved Twitter Search or Social Mention, or if you need something more robust, intelligent social media solutions like Sysomos enable you to do searches for a particular topic and will then compile all the related discussions it finds in real-time, allowing you to respond (or not) from within the dashboard.

5. From a social networking novice - do I need a Twitter account to tweet you?

Yes, you need a Twitter account in order to send tweets. However, you can still view anyone’s tweets (provided their account is not set to “Private”) even without having a Twitter account yourself, or being logged in. For example, my tweets can be viewed here: @hollisthomases.

6. You mentioned that social media is very labor-intensive. Are there general benchmarks for cost and ROI of resources re: social media engagement? What’s the best way to do this analysis before making the commitment?

First let me clarify by saying that social media CAN BE very labor-intensive, particularly if you’re following best practices and not just using some blast software tool to send the same content across every single social media channel (I do not advise doing this because people do not want to read the same thing from you all over the place and different platforms have different tones and mores).

No, there really aren’t any benchmarks for cost and ROI because just like other marketing, it all depends on what you’re doing and how much of it you do. How labor-intensive social media can be really boils down to your goals. What do you hope to achieve by doing social media? For example, do you want to use social media for PR? Do you want to use it to generate leads? How much would you spend to achieve those goals without using social media? If you can answer these questions, you’ll begin to get a sense of how much time and budget you should be allotting to social media efforts.

Of course, there will be a learning curve and it may take a while to get the process down. But once you’ve established it and reached a certain comfort level, you can begin to understand what’s working (or what isn’t) and make adjustments.

7. My question relates to privacy and lack of security when one goes on these social media sites. As a health educator, Internet security and bullying of kids are among our top health education concerns; a huge and valid set of problems.

Not really sure what the question is here, but I can comment that it is wise to be concerned about privacy and security. Many social media sites do not offer an encrypted log-in option (and even if they do, the general public isn’t aware of this as an option), which means that if you use the same password for all your log-ins (social media or otherwise) and someone captures this information (very possible with all the unencrypted use of public wifi), they will be able to hack into all of the accounts you access with this password.

Also, many people post to the Web, seemingly oblivious to the fact that EVERYTHING you post on social media sites can basically become a matter of the public record, even if it’s behind a log-in (the government has already subpoenaed sites like Google, Twitter and Facebook for information as have lawyers when it comes to legal disputes). So my mantra is, if you don’t want someone to be able to access this information about you, DON’T POST IT!

8. I am a landscape architect. We have a website but not really any presence on social media. How to dive in is my question. And to what channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube? There’s a perception that LinkedIn is for prospective employees looking for work rather than firms being engaged in the marketplace. Can you describe the differences and give some guidance?

The four social media networks you mentioned happen to be the four most popular, and it’s not uncommon for businesses to maintain presences on all of them. If that seems overwhelming, my advice would be to do a little research first to find out where the biggest opportunities are, and to then prioritize your social media commitments accordingly.

For example, where are some of your current clients spending time? What kinds of activity are they conducting there? LinkedIn tends to be more B2B-focused, so if your goal is to seek out and engage with consumers, consider start with Facebook or Twitter. YouTube would also be a great place to showcase videos of landscape designs—home and garden video content is in great demand. Consider developing a video marketing strategy that you could use as a pipeline to feed video content into your other social networking endeavors.

1 Comment »

Great practical and helpful tips- thanks!

Comment by Betty — February 21, 2011 @ 6:59 pm

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