5 Magical Way of Gaining Exposure Via Social Media
New Post has been published on http://g16frameworkmedia.com/blog/2017/06/09/5-magical-way-of-gaining-exposure-via-social-media/
5 Magical Way of Gaining Exposure Via Social Media
Social tools can be applied to many areas of the business, ranging from product development to sales to customer support. We cover lead generation, the Holy Grail for business-to-business (B2B) companies
Social media has become a powerhouse of every business model and its application is diverse especially in the areas of business, ranges from product development, sales and to customer support.
In order to get the best out of social marketing and be on top of your game ( business wise), the following five steps must be religiously adopted.
STEP ONE: MAKRETING INTELLIGENCE
The only method best known by webmasters and marketers is Google where most of the searched keyword and phrase are sorted and tailored with respect to the algorithm. Google algorithm indexes almost none of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and very little of which goes on in the social network platform.
It (Google) does, however, have structurally limited ability to interpret images, audio, and video.
A variety of tools are available, ranging in price from free to thousands of dollars per month, that listen to, quantify, analyze, and even attempt to translate the vagaries of language into customer sentiment.
The bigger opportunity in market intelligence is developing a holistic picture of your competitive environment and your market.
The following sites are a good head start to track for resourceful information and gather inspiration for your intelligence.
Blogs
Twitter and other microblogs
Video and audio
Photo-sharing sites
Regulatory filings
Facebook, LinkedIn, and vertical social networks
Wikipedia
Discussion forums
Social bookmarking sites
A good practice is to set up a social media dashboard, which you can do with services like My Yahoo!, iGoogle (now defunct), Pageflakes, Netvibes, Startme, Protopage, AllMyFaves, ighome, and Startific!.
All these aforementioned resources are wonderful platform best to track information, great contents via RSS feeds, which can be monitored, shared, and stored indefinitely online through the service.
When you refresh the dashboard, the latest search results are displayed. This feature is particularly useful with Twitter, which indexes only a few days of conversations in its search engine. However, when saved as an RSS feed, messages are available until deleted.
Google reader, for instance, catch almost anything that moves online about your company, your competitors, and your business segment.
My Yahoo, an excellent start page for Yahoo users with exceptional features such as news, current weather e.t.c.
My Msn, you can set MSN as your homepage to get instant access to breaking news, videos and more. It’s a single page for great content and services from across the web
Netvibes is another great marketing intelligent tool that tracks clients, customers and competitors across media sources all in one place, analyze live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provide media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.
Startme a bookmark manager master that lets you easily save and organize all of your favorite web pages on a customizable dashboard.
Protopage is an RSS reader, virtual desktop, and Internet start page launched in London, United Kingdom, on May 15, 2005. You can monitor news headlines from almost any website.
Market intelligence dashboards have value across the company and can be a useful way to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media as a barometer of customer opinion, as well as an early warning of changes in the market or competitive activity. I recommend you always follow your competitors and your largest customers on Twitter. In both cases, you want to keep up with what’s on their minds
STEP TWO: IDENTIFY THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITIES
With the marketing intelligence being gathered, the next thing to do is identify the potential opportunities in order to help you expand your existing business. For instance, many business opportunities can now be found on Twitter using hashtags, a unique identifier is used to group some set of conversation.
You can also learn a lot about changes at current customers or companies you’re pitching to. For example, the website Listorious.com lists hundreds of chief financial officers who use Twitter.
Mine these lists for people to follow at companies that matter to you. If you can answer one of their questions, you can often get their attention in ways that would be difficult or impossible to do by more traditional means of communication.
LinkedIn, for instance, can be a fantastic resource for dishing out the most influential people in your target niche. This business networking site looks at companies from the bottom up by listing the people who work there.
Much of LinkedIn is public, so it can be a useful way to get past the traditional gatekeeper departments like sales, support, and public relations, who often try to restrict access to decision makers. You can use LinkedIn company profiles to fi nd people with connections to your own network or simply as a starting place for more detailed research. One of the more useful features of profiles is that they link to groups to which the member belongs.
You can use this information to scope out issues that are of interest to them, creating additional opportunities to connect.
Twitter is also a great place to go fishing because people often express needs or vent frustration to their followers. In this case, you’ll want to listen for keywords that indicate need. For example, if you sell accounting software, search for that term in the context of other words like does anyone know? or can anyone recommend?.
STEP THREE: BUILD THOUGHT LEADERSHIP THROUGH BLOGGING
The blog is a fantastic arsenal most people use to disseminate more information and discussion about the company, target niche and fastest way to build visibility and gain vast exposure through a social network. It is one of the fastest ways to gain insight into prospective and existing customers
For those who outshine at written communications, blogs quickly publish news and updates to the market and express thought leadership.
Choose a topic or target a niche which you are passionate about and with considerable interest and target a niche where there is little or less competition. Don’t be thwarted by a large number of blogs that may already exist. Many people experiment with blogs and then abandon them. Others tend them only lightly. A blog that hasn’t been updated in a year is as good as invisible, so you can gain ground quickly by simply maintaining an active posting schedule.
Blogging for thought leadership isn’t the same as blogging to update your customers. Take off your marketing hat and think like an editor or analyst. Concentrate on the issues that interest others in your field, such as developments in technology, new research, or interesting insights from others. You can even interview other thought leaders and include an audio or text transcript. Remember, your goal is to educate and inform, not to sell.
In today’s technology revolution, you can use a free tool like the dlvr feed to automatically convert your blog headlines into tweets and share RSS feeds to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more. The easiest way share great content to social media.
You can also use applications like Seesmic (is a suite of freeware web, mobile, and desktop applications which allow users to simultaneously manage user accounts for multiple social networks), TubeMogul (an enterprise software company for brand advertising now acquired by Adobe), blip.tv, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz to move messages from one social media network to another.
Reuse content whenever you can, angling it for different audiences or markets. “A white paper can become several blog posts that can each be promoted through Twitter,” says Deirdre Walsh, community and social media manager at National Instruments, a test and measurement firm.
You can also syndicate content through other industry blogs and publishing websites, often by doing little more than filling out a short form. Popular syndication sites like Alltop grab RSS feeds and organize them by topic.
This is a bonus visibility with zero additional work. The more outlets you use, the faster your online presence grows. If the content is original and useful, the calls from reporters and speaking invitations soon follow.
Be specific and unique in your own way. The more specific you are, the better you will perform on keywords that matter to you and the people you want to reach
STEP FOUR: RESEARCH THOROUGHLY THE MARKET
How in the world you want to hire or pay somebody to gain exposure when you can do it even perfect yourself.
The easiest way to use social media for market research is simply to start listening. Build a Google Reader dashboard like the one outlined above using most of the marketing intelligence technical-know-how.
Monitor positive and negative mentions of your company, as well as your competitors, and track changes over time. Pay particular attention to new products and to common customer gripes, for they yield the best opportunities.
You can gain even more insight by participating in conversations as a group leader or by asking questions of your Facebook friends or Twitter followers.
For regionally focused monitoring, Twitter advanced search or third-party apps like Twittervision allow you to specify a radius around a city or zip code. This feature lets you monitor broader, categorical B2B keywords
You can take research to the next level by signing on with a professional community management firm like Communispace or LiveWorld, which bring professional moderation and audience development to the process.
The costs are quite a bit steeper than running your own LinkedIn group, but these services add value in managing the community and delivering results that match your needs.
STEP FIVE: REQUEST FOR FEEDBACK
The process of soliciting feedback can range from simply listening to conversations to actively participating in online discussions to building branded communities around companies and products. One useful tactic is to set up surveys and invite members to fill them out.
Low-cost survey services like SurveyMonkey are quite flexible and cost just a few dollars a month. There are even free alternatives like FreeOnlineSurveys.com, and Kwik Surveys. Another good free option is Google Forms, which permits you to build quick, functional feedback forms at no cost.
No-cost services are limited in capability, so if you want to use advanced features like demographic segmentation or conditional branching, you’re better off paying a few dollars for a professional tool. If your budget permits it, consider creating your own branded community.
SAP Networks uses customer feedback on its e- commerce site to improve product performance. Low ratings provide the incentive for product managers to either improve product performance or encourage happy customers to share positive opinions.
If ratings are low across the board, it’s probably an indication that the product needs work. The public nature of the online store becomes an extra incentive to fix the problem.
There are literally hundreds of options for customizing a branded social network, ranging from enterprise software suites like Oracle Beehive and Telligent to open-source community platforms like Drupal to hosted communities offered by Jive, SocialText, Lithium, and Awareness Networks, among others.
