by Betsy Balgooyen, Senior Project Manager
10. September 2009 15:20
Social Media has become a topic at many marketing meetings. As an individual, you may be actively interacting with others online through blogs, discussion boards, or social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. But should your organization be actively participating in social media too?
There are many types of social media:
• Multimedia Social Media - Sharing photos and video on Flickr or YouTube
• Collaboration and Opinion Social Media - Adding content to Wikipedia or sharing your opinion on Yelp
• Communication Social Media – Blogs, Twitter (a.k.a. micro-blogging), and social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook
Organizations are most often utilizing Communication Social Media.
Determining if your target audiences are actively using any of these forms of social media is the first step. For example, an audience made up of business professionals is likely be using professional connection sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo rather than a more personal site like MySpace. Wherever you decide to focus, build connections and relationships first, and then use the features of the site (such as LinkedIn and FaceBook groups) to expand the value of each site. Start small; don’t try to cover too many sites at once.
Using social media to market your organization can create a positive buzz and help build awareness of your organization, but it does open your organization to negative messages as well. You risk losing control of the messages being posted about your organization, since anyone can add a positive or negative message, anonymously in some cases, to many social media sites. If you are concerned about the messages being posted, a blog is a good way to get started.
If you do decide to make social media part of your marketing efforts, make sure once you start to keep the effort going. While one of the benefits of this activity is attracting individuals to your organization, keeping their attention depends on the generation of new and up-to-date information. As the Harvard Business Review reported recently, most Twitter users send messages (or tweets) very rarely. The top 10 percent of those using the service represent 90 percent of the messages sent – so if you add Twitter to your social media plan, you want to be sure you are in the 10 percent that attracts followers. Looking across all your social media initiatives, it is important to create a schedule to ensure you keep posting information. You will lose opportunities to interact with potential visitors if you invest in a blog but post very rarely.
Another decision to be made is whether to advertise on a social media site. These sites generally have low click-through rates when compared to advertising on a search engine such as Google. You will have a better return on your resources by building awareness virally through social media, and investing in advertising via search engines and other proven channels.
By determining your social media goals, and focusing your effort and available resources, you can use these viral channels to increase your organization’s brand awareness and your ability to build new connections within target markets.
