Social Media Marketing has been embraced by companies of all sizes. CNN has begun marketing their Twitter accounts, Oracle opened up their own social networking site, and Zappos has epitomized Twitter usage for public relations. So what are the social media strategies being employed for businesses?
Social media has three goals: building a community, creating interactions, and controlling public relations. The idea is to keep your customers happy before they become angry, and to build trust with prospects to finalize the sale.
Community
As a business it’s important to keep in touch with your customers. Pushing secondary sales can create huge profits, based on the idea that customers are already predisposed to buy your products.
Social Media sites have made it easy to bring all your customers, and potential customers into one room. By using Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Ning, creating a social network similar to Oracle’s is possible for anyone.
Interactions
Once the community is built, fostering conversation is the next step. Social Media Marketing hinges on relationships and trust. Businesses use sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Plurk to keep their fans engaged.
Businesses work to become conversation leaders. They ask questions, build debates, and foster replies.
The more engaged your followers, the more trustworthy you become. Prospects want to ask questions about your products, your personality, and who you are. By being able to answer their questions and being knowledgeable, you convince them that you’re products and services are worth their money.
Public Relations
Sometimes things don’t always go your way. Being able to get a story or apology out fast is important. Comcast has shown that with the power of Twitter, they can turn around the public relations disasters of their past.
If you’re sincere and tell the truth you can save the relationships you’ve built. Your followers will find you more trustworthy than the person calling you out, especially if you tell the truth and admit guilt.
You can also use micro-blogging to let your followers know about new products and updates. Consider your community, and the interactions you’ve built, before you send out too many updates, or bother your followers too much. You have to walk a fine line between spamming and public relations, be careful not to overstep your bounds.
By keeping these three things in mind, Community, Interactions, and Public Relations, you’ve got the basics of Social Media Strategies. Do you know anyone else that has used social media successfully?
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