How to Measure and Grow your Social Media Reach

Social Reach is the total number of individuals across all social platforms you engage who actively follow (fans, followers, subscribers) your company. For example, a company with 10,000 Facebook fans, 5,000 Twitter followers and 1,000 YouTube subscribers has a total Social Reach of 16,000.

A company’s Social Reach drives the level of benefit for all social media efforts. Most companies are engaged on multiple social channels, but how many social channels are enough? There are no hard and fast rules, but the experts agree that companies should participate in as many social channels as possible - as long as their target customers can be found there and sufficient resources can be dedicated to ensure high-quality execution in all chosen channels.

Jason Falls, principal at Social Media Explorer, explains, “Companies need to prioritize social media channels by how extensively these channels are being used by a company’s target audience. Every company needs to grow their reach - this is the foundation on which to share content over time.”

Andrew Patterson, manager of new media at MLB Advanced Media, says that “the decision on number of social media channels for a company is contextual. What is important is how consistent you are with engaging in a social media channel. You can’t be there one day and gone the next. If you have the resources to be consistent across multiple channels, then by all means do it. But if you spread yourself too thin, you will end up disappointing your fans and followers and jeopardizing your social marketing initiative.”

Social Platforms of Choice

Facebook, Twitter, and the use of landing pages and company blogs are the leading platform choices for brands of all sizes, with a growing number of companies reporting planned integration of YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr and Foursquare in 2011.

Best-in-class companies use three to four social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) vs. the average company, which is using less than two social media platforms. Best-in-class companies also have multiple channels within each social media platform as shown in the next two graphs.

Measuring Social Reach

To measure your company’s Social Reach, you need to measure the number of total social profiles you have accumulated across all of your social media platforms.

Use that initial Social Reach to measure your Social Reach Velocity – your Social Reach Velocity is your ability to grow your Social Reach with social marketing over time.

How are you measuring your social efforts?  What platforms prove most effective for you?  Have you ever considered Social Velocity?


PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
www.phantompower.co

10 Keys to More Effective Social Media Marketing

A recent Econsultancy report revealed that 86% of more than 800 companies surveyed plan social media budget bumps in the coming year.  Clearly, social media marketing (SMM) is working its way into company marketing plans more than ever.  SMM is just as important to the smaller company looking rto market more on a shoestring as it is to a large one.  SMM gives businesses of any size an equal voice (or at least the chance to compete equally), which is something that traditional marketing doesn’t offer.

Studies have shown that even more so than television, today’s consumers are turning to blogs and social networking sites for the latest news, reviews, and opinions.  Your customers want to have a relationship with you.  They’re blogging about their favorite products and live-tweeting customer service experiences, for better or worse.

10 Keys to More Effective Social Media Marketing:

1.  Find out where your customers (and competitors) are and set up shop.

Odds are, your customers are already discussing your brand on social networks, whether you’re aware of it or not.  Just do a few simple Google, Facebook, or Twitter searches on your brand or product names to find out who’s talking about it and where.  Prioritize your social media efforts by giving the most attention to the places where buzz about your brand is the heaviest.

2.  Build one-on-one relationships.

It’s a simple concept, but one many companies fail to grasp.  By its very nature, social media marketing is about communicating and connecting with individual users, not one-way messaging to the masses.  Marketing your brand takes the form of meaningful conversations, answering questions, sharing information, giving honest feedback, and reaching out to potential advocates.

3.  Put a human face on it.

Social media is not about communicating behind a nameless, faceless logo.  People want to know who they’re interacting with; that there’s a real person behind the wheel, flaws and all.

4.  Engage through content.

If you plan to get serious about social media marketing, know that it requires constant care and feeding, and that feeding comes most often in the form of content: industry news, how-to videos, new product previews or reviews, unique offers, podcasts, tweets from conferences, and other brand-centric content that keeps followers interested.

5.  Keep it current.

Though blog posts, videos, and other forms of content can have a long shelf life, social media marketing is very much about the here and now.  What’s current?  What are the issues facing your industry?  What’s making news?  Can you influence the news?  What can we comment upon and answer questions about?  The more in-the-moment you can engage, the higher your visibility is likely to be, and visibility is the flashy lure that attracts more fish.

6.  Be realistic about resources.

Know that all of this content, care and feeding will require a lot of time and commitment.  Don’t bit off more than you can chew.  An untended social media effort feels half-baked to users and is almost worse than having none at all.

7.  Set actionable goals and have a plan.

Regardless of who within your organization handles the day-to-day social media, their efforts should be led by specific goals.  How much time will they commit to social media marketing?  How often will they interact within each community or channel?  What will it take to generate new content?  Set objectives, develop action plans, and track milestones for measuring progress.  We recently announced the launch of our new Social Media Strategy service, which helps brands do exactly that.

8.  Proactively monitor reactions to your brand.

This kind of “reputation management” gives you a window into what people are saying about your company, your industry, your products, and even competitors.  Monitoring can be as simple as setting up Google Alerts, and there are many free or low-cost social media monitoring tools.  There’s no shortage of paid, more robust solutions, either, which are a must for big brands and large organizations.

9.  Measure your efforts.

Yes, social media marketing can be measured!  Start by looking at your web analytics and focusing on things like traffic from social media sources and engagement metrics.  Once you have established goals, (see #7) you’ll know better what tools will help you measure those outcomes.

10.  Learn from your experiences.

Social media marketing requires a lot of changing on the fly.  Be prepared to adapt your action plan to the results you’re getting (or not getting).  Don’t think of poor results as failure because with social media marketing, you need to be learning all the time—even when things don’t turn out exactly as you’d have liked them to.

PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
www.phantompower.co

Source: Web Ad.vantage

RIP Cold CallingSurvived by Social Networking

Cold calling has been served notice, a new era beckons and with it an altogether different way of working. Social networking has arrived and will soon replace cold calling as the predominant method of prospecting in business.

I know many people will think that there is no replacement for activity, specifically picking up the phone. Yet, no matter how intelligent you are about cold calling, it is what it is – speculative, scatter gun selling, not to mention costly and increasingly ineffective.

Consider the following data I found online...

In a test which spent an equal amount of time cold calling and using social media (9 AM - 5:30 PM; M - F).

Cold Calling Results

• Outbound calls made 325
• Meaningful conversations (pitches) and brand touches 80
• Meetings made 4
• Sales made (as a direct result of cold calling) 0

These are average conversion ratios for time spent but it comes with much overhead.

Social Media Results

• Inbound calls generated 8
• Meetings as result of inbound calls 3
• Sales as a result of inbound calls 2
• Brand touches (from site statistics unique views of content) 422
• Visitors to sales associate's blog Subscribers (RSS) to sales associate's content 27
• People following sales associate's Twitter 12
• New contacts 71 (on LinkedIn, Facebook, WeCanDo.BIZ, etc)
• Listeners to sales associate's Podcast 83
• Opportunities to sell found 21
• Online conversations had 39
• Warm call list (names generated expecting a call) 11

The cost of the social networking blitz to find new business opportunities, other than time and internet connection are small, if anything at all. Most importantly 2 sales were closed, covering any cost associated with the activity and generating a very healthy return.

The central question, however, is do modern-day sales people have the level of skill required to conduct a social media campaign individually? The simple answer is no. Not all salespeople will have the necessary skills, but having a skills gap is nothing new on the sales floor otherwise we wouldn’t have the multi-million pound training industry!

Can the skills be taught quickly and cost effectively? Yes. I have always taught people that sales is a process: follow steps one through five to achieve your aims. Social media networking can be processed as well, giving salespeople clear guidelines on the ‘how to’ and ‘how not to’. We spend millions every year teaching salespeople to cold call better, use the latest CRM (customer relationship management) system, be better team players and so on; and so it must come to pass that companies will need to train all staff to be ‘social media savvy’ as it extends far beyond just sales – marketing and service need to be in on the picture as well. 

Naysayers?... Agreed, updating your Facebook page with pictures of the weekend, playing silly games, nudging or poking other people is not the best use of your company’s time. But creating engaging, thought-provoking, discussion-opening content, centred around your products or services is. 

Social media networking will reduce dependence on cold calling. I am not saying it will eradicate the need for the telephone – that perhaps is to bold an idea. But I am certain it will become the first step in prospecting for new business.

What kind of results are you seeing when you pin Cold Calling vs. Social Networking?

PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
www.phantompower.co

What is The Social Funnel?...

And Why You Need to Build One.

Social media channels increasing the venues of choice for consumers to collect information and connect with brands, presents a strategic opportunity for companies to create a “Social Funnel” above the traditional marketing and sales funnel – where consumers take the lead in finding information and content that ultimately drives brand preference and sales.
 
In Winning the Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey & Company’s David Court shares that, in the new social and digital age, “the path to purchase and loyalty is now complex, iterative, and dynamic.” In this new environment, creating a Social Funnel allows brands to identify and have access to buyers long before the buying process begins.

The Social Funnel Defined

The Social Funnel is a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel. Developing a Social Funnel requires a systematic process of identifying and capturing consumer interactions across a variety of social media channels, aggregating this activity in a social customer relationship management (SCRM) infrastructure, and continually mining this insight to deliver relevant content to the right social profile at the right time. The chart below describes the Social Funnel and its tie to the traditional marketing and sales funnel:

To be effective, Social Funnels need to be tightly integrated with traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems to create a 360-degree view of a prospect to allow marketers to nurture this relationship over time using a combination of social and traditional, experts agree that this integration holds a lot of potential. “Integrating social deeper into existing CRMs is going to be very popular in 2011 – we expect to see a growing number of brands tying customer records to public social profiles and bread crumbs”, says Nathaniel Perez, head of social experience at SapientNitro.

The integration of social media with the traditional funnel is one of the key priorities for brands in 2011. Although only 6% of companies today report that they fully integrate social with traditional marketing funnels

David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for digital marketing agency 360i, agrees but tempers things by saying that “we are still early in the process but tying social profiles to CRM systems will be big.”

We see a growing number of companies starting to tie social profiles to their CRM systems. As this process continues to evolve, we expect to see social media becoming more of a critical component throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Systems that support the integration of social with CRM will increase in adoption over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, giving organizations the ability to seamlessly combine data from multiple systems easily and efficiently.

 

PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
http://www.phantompower.co/


Source: MarketingSherpa Benchmark Report: 2011 Social Media Marketing