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Getting Serious About Social Media

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What criteria guide your approach to social media? With few exceptions, your marketing strategy can’t be called comprehensive unless at least one social media platform is in the mix. It’s a highly effective tool and not only that— using social media doesn’t cost money (it does require time) and it has the power to amplify your traditional marketing tactics by re-posting text, audio and image content onto your chosen platforms. But like all marketing initiatives, social media requires thought and planning. To make success possible you must develop a credible strategy, starting with choosing (maybe three or four?) objectives you’d like to achieve.

Along with your objectives, you’ll also want to be mindful that certain audiences have an affinity for certain platforms and certain platforms are more suitable for some types of products or services and not so much for others. Moreover, it makes sense to assess the amount of time you can reasonably expect to devote to your social media updates, because fresh and relevant content are key. It will be much more favorable to establish a presence on one or two platforms and make it all pop with engaging and timely content instead of wading into multiple platforms on which you post only sporadically.

Once you launch your campaign, it’s advisable to continually monitor your performance analytics and watch for feedback. Be certain to respond quickly to customer service needs or comments and second, you want to measure visitor response to your content. Both metrics can inform your content topics, plus encourage customer engagement and feelings of loyalty. Focus your efforts where they’ll reap the greatest return on investment (ROI).

Finally, social media audiences on every platform are viewing content creators with increasing skepticism. Content consumers now demand authenticity from the influencers and brands they follow. Be genuine in your approach to social media (and all) marketing so that you’ll earn the trust, respect, loyalty—and business!— of your target audience. Below are common drivers of B2B social media objectives:

  • Website traffic
  • Brand awareness
  • Lead generation
  • PR mentions

Strategy

Devise an overall strategy that keeps your social media presence on-message and active. Establish your brand on platforms whose audience demographics and content style best showcases the products or services you promote. Every few months, you might want to color outside the lines, maybe with a fun collaboration with a complementary (and never competing) brand, a contest, or a (non-controversial) social or health awareness initiative that can stimulate positive customer engagement and even expand your audience.

Brand identity

A strong brand identity provides a consistent, dependable and ultimately reassuring experience for your social media audience. By establishing a recognizable brand identity, (you and) your business will be positioned to cultivate a loyal following that remains engaged across your selected platforms. Your unique brand voice, image style and relatable, consistent messaging across all social media platforms will enhance your authenticity and build the respect and trust of your audience.

Relevant content

Focus on creating meaningful and high quality content that resonates with your target audience. Authentic and relevant content helps the audience feel connected to your brand, encouraging engagement and promoting brand loyalty. 

Personal communication

Facilitating direct communication between you/ the brand and your target audience is the great advantage of social media. The communication is personal and unfiltered, allowing you to learn a great deal about how those who do business with you feel about doing business with you. Social media helps you learn fast about what works and what doesn’t, giving you the luxury of responding personally and quickly and making a timely course correction if necessary.

Focus On Your Audience/ Build A Community

Social media isn’t just a method that lets you speak to your audience in a monologue that promotes your business. It’s about building a community. When you introduce practices that enable a community—meaningful content, regular updates, responding to questions, complaints and compliments and keeping it authentic (real) you will over time build and sustain an engaged audience that’s truly interested in your brand (and you).

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Jean Arthur in Easy Living, written by Preston Sturges. Paramount Pictures (1937)

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Optimize Social Media Campaigns

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When you’re on a mission to reach the target audience for your products and or services, develop and strengthen relationships with clients, make your case with prospects, or build and promote your brand, the most powerful tool at your disposal is, overall, social media. By using one (or more) of the several free platforms, Freelancers and others with a product or service to sell, or reputation to enhance, can easily broadcast relevant information and persuasive messages to those who might buy, or buy- in.

Utilizers of social media will also receive credible feedback from those who engage with your company (or you), delivered in unfiltered first-person comments (user-generated content) and the platform’s user activity metrics. That means you’ll get timely and accurate insights—-actionable intel—-that reveals what clients and prospects respond to or reject. That’s tremendously valuable information that can guides your marketing strategy and even the development of your product or service. Use social media to reach deep into your preferred client demographic to expand the reach and influence of a company, product or service launch or rebranding campaign, or support the pivot you’ve decided to execute.

However, for best results, you must consider the capabilities and user demographics of the platforms on which you post. To which platforms do your clients and prospects gravitate? Their age range is a reliable indicator.

Choose the platform

There are several options available and each has a particular style. The age range of your target market is a primary determinant of your chosen platform, as is the category of product or service that you’ll promote. Below is an overview of the most popular and how each might enable the marketing outreach that you need.

  • Facebook has 2+ billion active users and 79% of Americans age 18 – 49 are regular users. 58% of Americans age 50 – 64 are regular users. Ecommerce integretion allows you to sell your products and services directly from the platform which supports your do-it-now Call- to-Action. Moreover, the advertising feature is a reliable way to brings in more potential buyers.
  • Instagram has 1+ billion users and especially if your target audience skews younger and visuals are an important communication tool, this platform is where you want to be. 67% of young adults <30 years are regular users and nearly 50% of adults age 50 or younger are regular users. Tell your brand story, chock full of videos and photos, on this platform.
  • LinkedIn is B2B county. 37% of its 300+ million regular users are age 30-49 and 50% of those who earn $75,000/ year or more are regular users. Plus, 51% of regualr users have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. The platform provides your best opportunity to connect with business decision-makers who might green light the sale of your B2B products or services. Furthermore, LinkedIn features hundreds of industry-specific networking groups that members can join and trade information with colleagues based on their industry, job function or career interests.
  • Twitter is a real-time social media platform that functions like a global text messaging service. Come here to make big announcements on this platform—- your new venture, new service, the workshop you’ll teach, the panel you’ll moderate. Tweets can be maximum 280 characters, which will inspire you to craft a short, sharp , concise message that gets your point across. With about 330 million users worldwide, Twitter is much more about text than images. It’s biggest demographic consists of people between the ages of 18-29, with 38% of people in this cohort actively using the platform.
  • TikTok quickly became a social media juggernaut and its eye-candy 60 second videos became all the rage. Just walking down the street can cause you to witness a teen with a smartphone, recording a dance clip to upload to the platform. TikTok is a darling of B2C marketers, but B2B is figuring out the terrain. If your clients and prospects skew to age 35 or younger, TikTok videos are a useful way to run your brand awareness campaigns. The platform is also effective for building and solidifying a community of brand fans. The platform is too big to ignore. Globally, there are 1+ billion users monthly.
  • YouTube is arguably the best social media platform that exists. For one, 1.9 + billion people use YouTube on a regular basis and it is also the 2nd largest search engine, after Google. There is a downside, however— you’ll have to learn how to create videos and production can be costly if you want to make a video that stands out. You may want a more polished product than your point & shoot TikTok videos. So not only will you need good content, but you’ll also need an entire video setup with a camera, lighting, microphones and editing software. Option 2 is to hire a professional but, again, it will cost you. On the plus side, the video content can also be uploaded to your website and/or shared on other social media platforms and that will increase your reach. Whatever story you’d like to tell, podcast or webinar you host or guest on, or (recorded) online interview that you give should be posted here.

Brand is the focus

In your posts, write about your business and things that relate to it. Social media is a relatable and personal way to make you and your company visible to your target audience. Limit your posts, text and images, to your products and services and avoid personal and polite opinions (which can haunt you).

Original content

Every day, companies upload new content, trying to outdo their competitors and bring more attraction to their business. This can be anything from a picture to a (short) video to a podcast. There are countless ways to produce appealing content that’s relevant to your business. Making sure your page is filled with original writing and images will make you and your organization more recognizable and memorable.

Organic growth

It is far better to slowly gain an audience of visitors, followers and subscribers for your social media audience, instead of chasing hits and likes from those who have no interest whatsoever in doing business with you. Building a real community of loyal fans takes work and takes time (and I know from personal experience!). You will get discouraged when the numbers climb oh-so-slowly, but the more genuine your presence is online, the more attractive it is for real users to engage. With social media, slow and steady wins the race.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

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AI, Your Data and the Big Reveal

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Under no circumstances would you call me a technophile true believer. I still roll with an iPhone X and there’s no immediate plan to trade up. That said, I believe in keeping eyes and ears open to tech advancements that are potentially useful and also affordable, to figure out what I might want to integrate into my life or business at some point.

In February 2018, I wrote about how Machine Learning and AI could eventually be useful to Freelancers and small business owners, even though the technology was impractical for small operators to adopt at the time. In October 2018, I wrote about how Freelancers who win a complex, big money contract may want to suggest to the client that a Blockchain Smart Contract be created, to both guarantee transparency and ensure that all expectations will be satisfied.

As those and other tech developments have taken hold, I think we all might benefit from taking another look at how one can improve operational efficiencies in a business and consider what tools might be successfully incorporated into your organization to achieve those goal, even if you’re a one-person shop. Having the ability to interpret and use actionable data is worth money.

No need to code

No code (and low-code) platforms are replacing programming languages that you (honestly!) may not want to learn with simple drag and drop processes. In other words, where not long ago it required a team of engineers to build whatever software you needed, civilians with home computers and mid-level tech skills can now essentially create and customize software to support their cross-functional objectives—-sales, marketing, operations, finance, HR, administrative.

With off-the-rack widgets available on website building and hosting platforms such as WordPress, you can upload a chat bot to your site and thereby make it fast and easy for prospects to obtain basic info about your company that might lead to a sale. I call that worthwhile.

Experts recommend that Freelancers and other small businesses approach AI and other cutting edge tech resources as potential solutions for small, time-saving and data- analyzing tasks and projects such as, for example, intelligent lead scoring. Because leads can be generated from multiple channels—-website or social media, blog or newsletter, webinar or podcast, or business cards handed out. But when you’ve received numerous leads, the challenge is deciding which ones have the greatest potential to produce a sale?

The right tech capability will reveal behavioral patterns in your various lead sources and rank them according to their probability of turning into sales. A spreadsheet is created with your leads sorted, from the hottest to the coldest, revealing which prospects to focus on because they’re most likely to buy. Big businesses have used AI to do just that for several years and proved that AI can increase sales revenue.

Best platform — easy integration

First, find a platform that syncs with the Customer Relationship Management software you use, if you use it. Easy integration with popular spreadsheet software, such as Excel, is another important consideration. If leadgen data will be sourced from multiple places, your chosen platform should be able to merge it.

Second, your platform should have a search mechanism that will identify the best analytics model to use based on the data and the prediction required. You should not need to know their way around data science to run your model. The platform should just deliver what works best.

Finally, the platform should be able to monitor model performance over time and adapt as the business environment shifts and new data becomes available.

Not all no-code AI platforms are made the same, and the right tool depends on a company’s business needs. Solutions range from just a few dollars a month, affordable for many Freelancers and small business owners.

Finding the right one for a particular company may require some trial and error. The good news is that the best platforms are open, which means that anyone can try them to see how they work. In other words, users can take the platforms for test drives on relevant tasks and see how they perform.

Verify that the AI software is so simple to use that non-technical people will be able to adopt it into their workflows. Check the onboarding processes of various platforms. If working with AI software requires anything beyond basic tech skills, move on to another option.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Robots C-3PO (l) and R2D2 from the Star Wars movie franchise (created, produced and directed by George Lucas)

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Take Command of Your Online Brand

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“Reputation, reputation, reputation. Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!” (Cassio)  Othello Act II, Scene 3

According to WebpageFX, a digital marketing and SEO company headquartered in Harrisburg, PA, about 25% of a company’s market value is directly based on its reputation.  Along with word-of-mouth reviews, which are indisputably powerful but nevertheless comparatively limited, a company’s reputation is significantly impacted through online sources.  Management of your organization’s online reputation, which is part of your brand, is a must-do.

The online reputation starts with the look and content of the company website and also encompasses reviewing sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List and Trip Advisor and the array of social media platforms from Snapchat to Facebook.  If you throw in content marketing campaigns that are distributed through email marketing, I wonder if the 25% impact figure is generous enough?

WebpageFX also reports that organization leaders now take online reputation management very seriously and 15% of organizations have followed through on an online reputation management strategy and 87% agree that managing online reputation risks is even more important than managing strategic risks.  Think about it—strategic risks are potentially costly, but when paid and unpaid haters flood the comments section of an influential site, the hapless company that perhaps has done no real harm can be shoved into the abyss.

Online attackers spew a shocking amount of vitriol and their diatribes seem to have a million-year half-life.  Blackmail can be involved as well.  I’ve personally witnessed the strong-arming of the General Manager of a lovely B & B by –are you ready for this?– a retired police officer who faked a problem in his guest room, refused to be placated by what most would accept as fair settlement for the “inconvenience” and threatened to ruin the business with bad Trip Advisor and Yelp reviews if his request for a free two- night stay (worth $450) was not granted.  Rumor has it that he’s played the game to the detriment of several small guest houses across the country.  A shoot-out at the OK Corral might be easier to win.

WebpageFX data showed that 91% of consumers search businesses online.  When I’ve gone to meet new clients, in particular someone who has been referred to me and whom I’ve not met,  they frequently mention that they’ve read this blog and viewed my website.  80% of consumers (presumably B2B and B2C) changed their mind about doing business with a company and 67% will not buy from a company that has received from one to three negative reviews.

Regarding social media sites, participation on the various social media platforms is a given for most Freelance consultants, business owners and corporate and not-for-profit leaders. The extent of your B2B client’s social media engagement as regards their external labor force along with your time and inclination, will determine which social media platforms that you’ll use. Maybe you’ll use one or two platforms, plus publish long-form content sent out as an ongoing email marketing campaign.

Just because you don’t use every available social media platform doesn’t mean that you should ignore those that you don’t use. To the contrary, claim all business listings and social media platform addresses, so that a competitor or imposter cannot assume your identity.  Start with your website. Your business name should belong to you alone. Protect your business and buy when possible your business domain name in the .biz and .net formats.  if there is a name that is similar to your company name and it becomes available, buy it and save yourself the potential for headaches down the road. Ensure that an imposter cannot claim your name and make sport of you, bear false witness, or commit other devious acts.

On your preferred social media platforms, maintain a reasonably active and consistent presence as you bring value to your readers.  Post content that will benefit your organization’s reputation and sales revenues.  WordPress allows posting to LinkedIn and my 100 or so connections expect to hear from me every Tuesday.

Finally, if you should receive any negative feedback online, respond quickly and diplomatically. Demonstrate that you regret the mishap and you intend to make amends.  As you publicly clean up the mess, you may win a few customers who like the fact that you’re human and you care.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

IMG_0015    Tall Ships Parade in Boston Harbor June 16, 2017

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Social Media Platforms: Review and Reassess

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According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March – April 2016, 68% of all U.S. adults use FaceBook; 28% use Instagram; 25% are on LinkedIn; 26% use Pinterest; and 21% use Twitter.  I’d consider that a compelling reason to ramp up your social media game, that is, if your can expect your customers to respond.  Not only that, participating in social media makes your business more appealing to the all-powerful Google algorithm and your place on the list is guaranteed to rise.  You might even land on page one.  Visibility, coupled with a story that resonates, is what marketing is all about.

The secret sauce of social media for your business is first, work with platforms that allow you to reach your customers and second, supply the style of content that will effectively tell your brand story and hold the attention of your customers, while using media formats that you have the time and money to produce.

Theoretically, social media is free advertising that lets you promote your brand, but there are costs associated with its production.  Time is the largest cost and if you include videos now and again, there will be video production costs.  Also remember that when in business, your job is to find and maintain clients.  Social media have a greater or lesser place in business, depending on your products and services, but it’s not the center of the universe.  If social media play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy based on the ROI generated, consider outsourcing the function to a fellow Freelancer.

Pinterest

The Pinterest platform allows members to “pin, ” that is post, photos and videos to what is called a pinboard and the format has made Pinterest an excellent vehicle to tell a brand story in visuals.  If the products or services that your company provides can tell and promote your brand story in a series of lovely photographs or catchy short videos—florists, fashion designers, interior designers, restaurateurs, pastry chefs and special event planners —then this platform is ideal for you.

As of January 2017, there are 150 million Pinterest users and 80 million are outside of the U.S.  Just over 80% are female.  The practice of “re-pinning” favored postings helps content to go viral and pushes you to the top of Google searches that could result in your name appearing on “trending” lists on sites like Yahoo News.

Infographics, those pictures, charts and graphs that also include text and give you yet another way to utilize visuals that help readers to quickly understand your narrative. are a great fit for Pinterest (and also Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn).  If you have the ability and time, use Photoshop to create a customized infographic, but do investigate the several free templates available as you evaluate what could be suitable for your story.  Much depends on the information that you’d like to share.  Some data will look best in bar graphs or pie charts; other elements of your brand story could be more captivating if presented in storyboard format.

Snapchat

Here it is, the platform that millennials love.  As of January 2017, the typical Snapchat user is female and under 34 years old (70% for both parameters).  41% of the 18-24 age group in the U.S. check into Snapchat every day, mostly on their smartphones. The platform has 300 million users worldwide (November 2016).

Your content will self-destruct in 24 hours, so your text and images must be memorable because tomorrow they will be gone.  But that’s sort of the fun part.  Snapchat is meant to be fun and ephemeral, like champagne bubbles in a pretty flute.

Restaurant owners can post photos of the daily specials.  Art galleries can post a piece or two of an artist’s work and announce his/her exhibit that will happen that evening.  Retail stores can advertise one-day sales.  Florists can can use their smart phones to make a short video on of themselves and the flowers that they’ll bring into the shop from that morning’s flower market.  Food trucks can send a photo of where you can find them for the day.

Twitter

As of January 2017 there are nearly  320 million users tweeting around the globe and 82% of those users are on a mobile device when they do.  Users skew slightly more female and the demographic sweet spot is 18-50 years.  Twitter revolutionized social media and along the way, impacted how many of us communicate, thanks to the 140 character limit on tweets that caused us to pare down and condense our sentences.  Twitter has also taken part in social revolutions, most notably the Arab Spring of 2010-2012 that rocked from Tunisia to Persia.

Use Twitter to give real-time updates from an event you’re attending.  Send photos, videos, or links to articles and share your professional insights.  Invite readers to respond with their opinions and create the opportunity to engage with your audience.  Add Twitter to your PR campaign and send out news of your speaking engagements.  Include Twitter in your customer service protocol and invite customers to make suggestions that might improve service and help you better understand how to meet or exceed expectations.  A few might even thank you for a job well done and make you look good to many prospective customers !

YouTube

One billion global citizens post videos to powerhouse YouTube and 180 million of those aspiring videographers are in the U.S. (January 2017) and many of the posted videos are of high quality. Thousands of YouTube users have created their own successful channels that sometimes rival network and cable television shows.  The platform is overwhelmingly about entertainment, but if you conduct tutorials and workshops, you might be able to build for yourself a nice little paid speaking career by posting a few of your workshops and picking up subscribers to your channel.  Maybe 23 minutes of education and 5 or 6 minutes total of intro and recap would work?

If you don’t mind being on camera for extended periods, you can hire someone to film  a behind-the-scenes view of you at work, especially if you do something that has the potential to capture viewer interest, like planning a wedding—talking to the couple (anonymously, of course), speaking with vendors and doing whatever it takes to efficiently pull together a lovely and memorable day.

You may want a system to help you manage your content across platforms and for that I recommend Hootsuite, that is if you’re inclined to invest $20/month in a service that allows you to schedule and track your many forms of content from one dashboard.  Pulling all the threads together will allow you to see the big picture, make it easy to see where you can re-use content and can only improve your social media strategy, impact and ROI.

In closing, I’ll remind you of social media best practices and encourage you to create content that can be expected to have value for the followers.  Pace the delivery of your content and do not overwhelm.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

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Social Media Platform Review

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Unless you are an incredibly well-connected Freelance consultant who is out there making a killing and maybe even turning business away (yes, I know a half-dozen people who fit that description but it ain’t me!), social media plays some role in your branding and marketing strategies.  Each platform has its uses and will be a good fit for some businesses and maybe not so much for others.  The platforms are all free, but remember that time is a valuable and limited asset.  No matter how responsive to social media marketing your venture is, Freelancers and small business owners cannot maintain a presence on every platform,  unless you outsource the function (but if the dollars are there, then it could be worth the investment).

As carefully as you manage your money, likewise manage the time you apply to the social media portion of your marketing strategy (and I mean portion, because social media is not the alpha and omega of marketing).  Get started by first asking yourself what you would like your broader marketing strategy to achieve and then what each platform can do to support that aim.

Everything always starts with your clients, your target markets.  Who are they and what kinds of social marketing might they respond to? B2B clients will require a different approach and will have different expectations than B2C customers, for example.  Next, think about what you would like social media outreach to do for you?

Is your objective to promote products or services, or promote awareness of your brand story (that is, who you are, what motivated you to go into business, what your venture sells and something of your values and priorities as regards the business)? Might you like to build relationships and a community of customers who will also talk to each other and you? Does supporting customer service have a place in your social media objectives?

Finally, how do you want to express your story narrative? You will notice that my blog content is exclusively text (but I did include images in two posts and a video in another, a couple of years ago).  I’d like to include photos sometimes, but I don’t have time to hunt down freebies online, so I chose to research, write and present topics that you might want to read about in text format.

Facebook

The biggest of the platforms with about 1.86 billion users (February 2017) around the world, who represent an all-encompassing demographic spectrum.  There are somewhat more women users than men and the bulk of the age demographic is 25-60 years.  47% of Americans say that Facebook is their primary influencer when it comes to making purchases (Forbes Magazine).

Especially those who are in B2C and for some in B2B, Facebook will bring excellent ROI.  In-store events and promotions, speaking engagements, your workshops and other events can be announced to Facebook Friends.  Content provided in text, photos, or video can be uploaded.  You can create groups and build communities, or post a customer survey.  Share behind-the-scenes information about your business and what it takes to do what you do and in the process engage with customers, strengthen your brand and build relationships.

Does that sound like too much work and too much sharing? Then create a Fan Page and limit your presence to basic info.  Be aware that your presentation of text, photos and other content should be relaxed and welcoming, to create a personal feel (but remember that business is nevertheless the context).

Instagram

You’ll find 500 million users around the world here and 80% are outside of the U.S. On average, 95 million photos and videos are shared every day, with many accessed on a mobile device (present your content accordingly).  At least 42% of teens in the U.S. follow Instagram, with the demographic sweet spot 14-35 years and slightly skewed to female.  Instagram is about photo sharing, very short video trailers and concise text posting that includes a hashtag # that helps to spread your content.  Add a link to your profile bio.  Decide if you want a public or members-only account. Links cannot be shared.

Visual storytelling, behind-the-scenes photo montages, social selling, brand awareness, engaging with customers and creating relationships are good uses of this platform. If you are in public relations or special event/conference planning, then you will find worthwhile B2B use, otherwise it’s B2C as far as I can tell.

LinkedIn

As of January 2017, LinkedIn has 467 million users globally and it’s considered the gold standard B2B social media platform, very effective for communicating one’s personal brand.  I think most users place it at the junction of free website and online curriculum vitae. Business ventures large and small,  Freelance consultants, corporate and nonprofit leaders,  physicians and dentists, any employee who harbors professional aspirations and most college students  have a LinkedIn profile page. Recruiters use of the platform as well, to identify potential candidates for job openings and their success has motivated  thousands of companies to post job openings on the site.

LinkedIn is an excellent platform on which to build a community of professional colleagues through your connections and share with them your professional story, successes, highlights and other updates. This blog posts to my LinkedIn page and my connections receive notice of its arrival.  Your connections will also share their stories and there is great opportunity to be in touch and nurture relationships.

Professional portfolios, videos, white papers, newsletters, blogs, infographics and SlideShare presentations can be added to your profile page to add depth to your brand story.  Links to articles or studies that could interest your connections can be posted. Recommendations and endorsements let others verify your professional bona fides and you can return the favor.

In the Groups section, you’ll engage with colleagues within your industry, or with alumni of your school. Topics of interest are explored through posted questions and group members can respond and in the process get to know one another and possibly, forge  relationships that lead to doing business.

We’ll continue next week with overviews of more commonly used social media platforms.

Thanks for reading,

Kim