Photo credit: Flickr. Sean MacEntee

2012 is the year that you need to create a social media strategy for your business if you don’t have one yet. Just make this your goal and I promise you it will pay off.

Radian6 report recently released states: “Strategic users are almost three times more likely to execute activities for engaging prospects than informal users (53% vs. 19%)” — and they were likely to see increased revenues.”

A few critical items to include in your social media strategy are:

1. Company Goals and Objectives – Why are you on social media and how does it align with your business goals. You can’t look at social media alone. You need to consider how it complements your existing marketing efforts and how it contributes to your overall business objectives. Starting off with your goals is the best way to make sure you are actually getting involved on social media in the right places and for the right reasons. Measuring your success down the road will also depend on the type of goals you are setting up for your company.
2. Listening – what are people saying about you, your brand, your competitors and your industry. Is it positive or negative. What can you learn from this information and how can you use it to improve your business, your marketing and your social media efforts. An absolutely critical part to every social media effort, listening is what will make you successful on social media. I see way too many companies skipping over this part and not spending enough time and resources to actively listen. Yes, it takes time but thankfully there are plenty of free and paid software options to streamline this process for you.
3. Content Strategy – a very important part to your overall social strategy is the content that you are going to send out to your community. Identify who is it that you are speaking to, what interest them, what makes them share your content, how often they would like to receive it and in what form – video, podcast, text, photos. Create an editorial calendar with your topics and leave some space for breaking news and stories that will come up. Think of the Call to Action you want to include with each piece of content and identify how your content relates to your business objectives.
4. Engagement Strategy – now that you have a clear picture of the type of content you are going to create, think of how you are going to distribute it on the social web. What are your internal or external resources for engagement? How much time can you dedicate daily/weekly to engage and be present? If you don’t have sufficient internal resources what can you outsource to a qualified person or an agency. I don’t recommend outsourcing everything you do as you lose your voice and your authenticity but done properly you can outsource certain tasks.
5. Tactical Strategy – only after you have considered all of these steps, you can dig deeper into the tactical area of your social media. What platforms are best to use to reach your customers. Obviously, we have the BIG FOUR: Facebook, YouTube, LInkedIn and blogging but there are niche social networks that may be more applicable to your business. For example, Pinterest is driving more traffic than Facebook to retailers. So even if Facebook has a huge population base, a social network like Pinterest may be your winner for increasing sales. Having a centralized social media hub from where you can distribute your content will help tremendously with saving time. A good social media platform will also help with your engagement and measurements. We work with a few and can make a specific recommendation for your business if you need assistance in this area.
6. Measurements and Benchmarks – a big conversation topic these days is the return on investment from your social media marketing. Although, there are no industry established measurements yet, there are so many ways to measure your efforts that unless you link them to your objectives (see 1) you will get flooded with data. Starting with your reach (fans and followers), engagement rate, leads, sales, share of voice and customer service just to mention a few, there are indeed ways to measure your efforts. If you are not sure where to start, give us a call and don’t be too alarmed. Only 13% of marketers today are saying that they are very effective at measuring their social media marketing.

7.  Review and Adjustments - a very important part of every social media strategy is the periodic review and adjustment. Once a month, take a look at what’s really going on, compare it to your plan and make the necessary adjustments to improve your social media effort. Drop the things that are not working and do more of the stuff that’s working. Only after applying your strategy in real life you will know what’s really sticking with your audience and what makes them engage with your brand.

If you need help with your social media strategy, give us a call. We’ll be glad to help out. And if you need more ideas for your social media plan, take a look at Radian6 30 ideas for your 2012 social media plan. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting nuggets of information that you can apply to your business today. Your turn – do you currently have a social media strategy and if not are you planning on creating one soon? Let us know in the comments below.

Do we need any more social networks in our daily lives? We are stretched so thin trying to stay connected 24/7 on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs that adding one more social network to our lives seems like a crazy idea. But I really like this one. And I think it has a big potential for travel destinations and companies. Meet Pinterest.

What is Pinterest?

It’s an online pinboard where you can pin things of interest to you. You can have different boards based on your interests. For example, I have a board called Places I want to visit where I have pinned various destinations, cities and natural landmarks I want to visit one day. It’s a visual board with beautiful images. Do you see how travel destinations can benefit from this?

Who’s using Pinterest? 

Pinterest has been around for 2 years but only recently it gained a lot of traction to where it’s now ranking in the top 10 social networks. “Time magazine called Pinterest — a website where users post collections of images of their favorite food, clothes, places and everything else — one of the five best social media sites of 2011, along with Google-Plus and Klout. The company has raised $27 million in venture capital led by the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which several tech news outlets have reported as valuing Pinterest at $200 million” states this story in the USA Today on Pinterest standing out in a crowded social media space.

At this time, you still need to receive an invite to join Pinterest but if you submit a request, you will receive your invite within a day or so.

Retailers, like Real Simple, Land’s End, Nordstrom and Etsy are using Pinterest and for some of them Pinterest is driving more traffic than Facebook.

Demographics

80% of Pinterest’s users are women making it a very appealing place to showcase your destination, ski resort, city, hotel accommodation.  Below are the detailed demographics from HotelMarketing.com.

- Largely women (a 80% to 20% ratio). So there’s some truth to Matt Buchanan’s post on Gizmodo yesterday that proclaims Pinterest as “a Tumblr for ladies”.
- Aged mainly between 25 and 44 (accounting for 55% of the group, 30% are 25-34, 25% are 35 – 44)
- Just 25% of users have a bachelors degree or higher
- The majority live off a household income of $25-75k

An attractive demographics group if you are in the travel&tourism industry.

To take advantage of Pinterest start compiling good photography that shows your spa, your destination, your ski resort, your town. People can pin photos from your website as well so having good photography on your website as always helps travelers make a decision faster.

Do you use Pinterest personally or for business? Let me know in the comments below. If you need a beginner guide to start using Pinterest, Mashable put one together. It’s very easy to use. Go on and try it.

Jan 2012 – Tahoe Mountain Sports

I’ve been thinking about starting this series for a while as there are certain local Tahoe companies and businesses that are doing a really good job with their online and social media marketing efforts. There’s no better time to start this series than in the month of January. Once a month, I will feature a local Lake Tahoe business who’s doing an extremely good job with their website, digital, mobile or social media. If you have any suggestions, feel free to send them my way at milena@outandaboutmarketing.com.

Our first selection goes out to Tahoe Mountain Sports and below are some of the reasons for it. In the spirit of Full Disclosure I have to say that this blog post is in no way paid or sponsored by Tahoe Mountain Sports. They didn’t give me any discounts or goodies to write it.

1. Website

Tahoe Mountain Sports website is organized and build with user experience in mind. It is my understanding they are doing all the work in-house. I wish they were using an outside agency as I would hire them right away. Kudos to the entire team at TMS! It’s great to see local talent producing high quality work like this. The website has clear call to actions, it’s easy to navigate, it’s professional looking and has integrated social networks and features really well. I love the fact that you can shop online. So many local Tahoe businesses are completely missing out on the entire ecommerce opportunity. It’s 2012 people! Start selling your products and services online. The site is well organized with items for men, women and kids, plus you can shop by brand, activity and gear. In addition, MTS provides a very detailed information on Tahoe with anything you need for your complete Tahoe adventure from weather and web cams to general information about the area. I like their gift cards availability as well so you can gift someone with an email delivered right to their inbox. I love their Deal of the Day. It’s a great way to bring people back to your website daily. Kudos to TMS for keeping this active. I’m sure it pays well in sales for them.

I decided to test their Live Chat function which integrated with my Facebook account. I asked them a question and received an immediate response. A few pleasant exchanges later, I went on to continue writing this blog post. I can keep going about their website features, like free shipping, secure check out, Amazon payments, etc. In summary, this is an excellent website and I’m sure they are seeing the returns from their efforts in real dollar signs.

2. Blog 

TMS maintains a very active blog which shows they understand the power of search and social. The blog also shows their passion and enthusiasm for the outdoors, sports, Tahoe and their business. Their love for the outdoors is captivating. It’s an engaging blog with interesting articles, product reviews and tons of photos. One of my favorite posts was their recent Yosemite trip with the Tahoe bikini chicks. Now, this is a great way to sell some bikinis in winter and even get the guys interested. Right?

Photo courtesy of the TMS blog

3. Social Media

In addition to the blog, TMS is active on Facebook (2,267 likes), Twitter (324 followers), YouTube (70,959 views to their videos so far) and Google+ (68 people). They are active on their social networks and responding to people not just blasting out messages like some other companies (won’t mention any names) are continuing to do.

milena@outandaboutmarketing.com

If this happens to you, most likely your account has been hacked. It happened to me yesterday and it’s not pleasant. I ended up spending hours apologizing and fixing the issue. It looks like this hack is spreading as I’m seeing more and more direct messages from people that are being hacked.

The following steps will help you take care of the hack.

1. Go to Twitter.com, click on your profile page, go over to settings and change your password immediately.

2. Disconnect any suspicious third party applications that are using your Twitter account. For this, you need to click on the Applications tab showing below and click on Revoke. This is a tricky one as you never know which application was hacked. To be sure, I disconnected all of them. You will need to reconnect the ones you want and still use.

3. Delete any tweets that contain the malicious link. To do so, go over to Twitter.com and hover your mouse over your tweet. Once you see the delete button, click on it.

4. Send out an apology to people and advise them not to open any suspicious links that came from you.

5. To read more about how to protect your account in the future or deal with other safety related issues, you can visit the Twitter Safety Center. To prevent your account from future hacking, ensure safe tweeting.

I hope this article helps you with cleaning your Twitter account or preventing it from being hacked in the future.

And finally, if you google twitter hack, you will find plenty of tutorials on how to do it. Please, don’t go there.

Ashton Kucher‘s, the Huffington Post‘s and other Twitter accounts with large followings were also hacked lately. Be cautious as to what links you click on and make sure you are only giving your password to trusted sources. In the meantime, Twitter is working on making their environment safer.

]]> http://www.outandaboutmarketing.com/2012/01/has-your-twitter-account-being-hacked-heres-how-to-stop-the-spam/feed/ 2 http://www.outandaboutmarketing.com/2012/01/social-media-statistics/ http://www.outandaboutmarketing.com/2012/01/social-media-statistics/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:17:23 +0000 Milena Regos http://www.outandaboutmarketing.com/?p=1630 Happy New Year! I wish you a healthy and prosperous new year filled with joy and excitement!

We look forward to making 2012 a great year and continue to provide you with valuable content, tips, tools and social media advice in assisting you with your digital and social media marketing. Thank you for being our loyal reader! If you haven’t come up with a New Year’s Resolution yet, the cartoon below may assist you in at least coming up with a few things to do:

New years resolutions

This is our first blog post of 2012. Today’s topic is social media statistics.

Do you ever wonder how many people are actually using social networks? Who has all that time to spend on social media and what are the reasons time spent on social media and blogs continue to increase?

I found a very useful info graphic that will answer all these questions and more.

The highlights for me are:

- The population on Facebook is now over 800 mil. You probably already have a business Facebook page and have accumulated some followers. But are you using it to its full potential? Have you implemented custom tabs (custom landing pages), are you doing Facebook contests to keep your followers engaged and do you measure your engagement and ROI? Instead of trying to get more likes, try to keep the ones you already have active and new likes will follow. In other words, do you have an actionable social media strategy that shows you how your efforts are connected to your overall marketing and business objectives and do you measure the impact from social media to the bottom line?

- 95% of Facebook wall posts are not answered by brands. This is extremely surprising to me as most businesses at the moment are trying to figure out how to become more social. Instead of directing your money and efforts to creating the next TV spot or offer, how about you simply spend more time on answering the questions your existing customers have for you and post to your Facebook page. It’s called being social and engaging with your customers. Isn’t that what you wanted when you started your Facebook business page?

- You want more likes on Facebook? Have you considered why people will want to “like” you on Facebook? How about the simple fact that customers become Facebook fans if they are already your customer and simply want to hear from you or they want to receive discounts and promotions. As a customer, if you keep me up to date on your latest developments and give me a special discount for following you on Facebook, as well as answer my questions I’ll be a happy Facebook follower.

- When it comes to Twitter, the fact I found most useful and something I have always believed in has do to with creating good content and sharing valuable information. The answer to the question: What makes people retweet? is of course content. Interesting content rises to the top and that’s the one thing I always try to do on Twitter. Instead of sharing what I had for breakfast, I try to put useful information from articles I read or other tweets that are worth sharing. Once again, content is king and this rule applies not only to Twitter but to all social media – photos, videos, blog posts, Facebook updates. If you have something worthy of telling and showing, please, do so. If not, keep your update for another time.

- B2B marketers are spending billions of dollars on social media marketing yet 30% of them are not tracking the return on investment from their efforts. I believe 2012 will be the year social media goes mainstream and marketers who figure out a way to measure their efforts will truly be able to capitalize on the power of social media. If you are currently not tracking your efforts, make this your New Year’s resolution!

All other interesting and valuable social media statistics are in the info graphic below  from Dream Systems Media. Enjoy!

You can measure ROI of your social media by using the right traditional and digital metrics. Two good tips for beginning to track how you do with social media is staggering your activities and using unique URLs.

1. Stagger your marketing activities will help you find out what’s working and what’s not working for your social media marketing.

A very important metric every business needs to know is the value of their customer. Without lifetime customer value, it will be hard to determine the ROI from social media.

To calculate Lifetime Value of a Customer=(Longevity*Revenue)*Margin

To calculate the value of a visitor:

Now, how this relates to your social media activities?  To calculate the value of your blog, use the value of a visitor that you already calculated and the amount of traffic your blog receives.

This is a fairly easy way to measure the return-on-investment for your social media.

2. Use a unique url to track all of your online activities. An easy and excellent way to see the type of traffic you are getting from each activity. Use unique URL for your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, video, and every digital action you take. This way, you will know very well what is working for you online.

Another way to see what the value of your Facebook page is will be to take an old email marketing approach to it. To calculate the value of your Facebook social media efforts based on your email marketing, you can use Jay Baer’s valuation worksheet below.

In addition to marketing applications from social media, we also have customer service return on investment from social media and sales return on investment from social media.

ROI on customer service. Studies show that by implementing social into your business, you can improve your customer service score, thus generating more word of mouth and referrals. To measure your customer service score you can use Net Promoter Score as a baseline before your social media and then measure it after making your business social.

 ROI on sales. Lowe’s sold $1 mil more in paint by implementing social in their business process and allowing employees to share ideas internally. For a good bog post on how to calculate the ROI for sales, check out this Social Media Examiner’s post.

Below is a good presentation from Social Media Today on return on investment on social media for both B2C and B2B. The screen shots and insights above were extracted from the Social Media Today’s presentation.

Thank you to everyone who came to listen to me. You are absolutely wonderful people and a great audience. As promised, below are my 3 presentations from the event.

What does the future hold? Quora, the people questions and answers forum may replace Google as we count on our friends recommendations a lot more than on robot suggestions. There probably won’t be any more PCs and laptops, just smartphones and iPads/tablets.

I created this short video on social media history, trying to fit the last 40 years in less than 4 minutes to put into perspective where we came from. Let me know what you think.