Social Media Marketing

Is there actually a solid formula for this?

I really no longer think so. It’s not exactly hit and miss, but there is no exact forumla to say whether performing action ‘x’ will provide you ‘y’ amount of business.

I 100% support social media marketing – the audience and consumer of today is no longer a receptor – he is a selector. Unlike when advertising was mainly on TV and Radio – today online, you can chose what advertising you expose yourself to. I think marketeers were placing their bets on pop-up window advertising being effective and working. However, along with savvy computer users, came the ability to successfully filter out such minor annoyances.

Today, marketing and advertising is a different ball game altogether. Instead of having huge big budgets – people have to be clever and creative to be able to market and convert the customer.

Clever advertising on Dixons part

Marketing throught social media is technically free. But in order to make it best effective – a company needs to hire someone who is specialised in the area. Habitat learned from that mistake. They hired an intern to control their twitter account and the intern ended up inserting irrelevant, but trending, hashtags after each tweet.

Habitat UK Twitter Fail

The intern was quietly let go.

That’s the issue that regularly arises with social media – a company hires someone who has a facebook and twitter account, thinking they know exactly what they are doing. But delivering a companies brand through social media is a lot different then using personal social media accounts.

I find Halfords twitter account to be particularly great – I tweeted once about what bad build my bike was – and Halfords replied, saying I should take it into my local store and they would fix it for me for free! That’s the kind of service that is now expected through social media channels.

Then you have brands, smaller brands, who try and gain new customers and business through social media. The key part here is relevance. I say this ALL the time – you want targetted traffic, high conversions? Be relevant. If you end up putting hashtags at the end of your tweets which have nothing to do with your product – you won’t gain targetted traffic and high conversions. Simple as. Same as adding random people on Facebook. They won’t know who you are, chances of them being interested in what you have to offer is slim too.

So – social marketing for any brand is highly important.

1. Listen to your customers
2. Reply to all comments – negative or not
3. Have conversations
4. Above all – relevance, relevance, relevance