Walk the Line: Balancing the Resources and Rewards of Social Media

For those charged with growing a business in today’s marketplace, social media can present a bit of a quagmire. With all of the hype around social media and the proliferation of social networks, it’s easy to get sucked in to the vortex, spending countless hours obsessing over follower counts, scouring the Web for interesting content to share and seeking out opportunities to cultivate relationships with key influencers. However, no business – no matter how large or small – has unlimited resources to dedicate to social media. You must find a healthy balance between the time and energy you invest and the rewards you stand to gain from your participation. As with any marketing endeavor, success starts with a plan. When determining how to direct your social media efforts, you take into account three key elements:

• Your target market
• Social media sites and the capabilities of each
• Your short- and long-term business growth goals

By carefully weighing each of these factors, you can create a robust social media plan that is specifically tailored to your business and your target audience.

Know your customers.

At the heart of the question of how much time to spend on social media marketing lies a fundamental understanding of your customer. Without an intimate understanding of who you're marketing to, you cannot determine the best methods of reaching them. This will also help you determine in which social media sites to invest the most time and energy. More than likely, many of your customers are spending time on at least one social media platform. Statistics favor of this theory: 30 percent of people across the globe are online, and these users spend 22 percent of the time they’re online on social media. But be careful not to make assumptions based solely on the age of your customers. After all, it's users over the age of 55 who are currently driving growth in social networking via the mobile Web. One of the best ways to learn exactly how and where to engage with your customers is to do some good old-fashioned research. Ask them to fill out a survey and provide them with a reward that’s desirable enough to motivate them to respond.

Where are your customers connecting?

This is another important piece of the puzzle that will help you fine-tune your social media investment. If your customers spend a lot of time on Twitter and LinkedIn but not as much on Facebook, then you can divide your time and efforts proportionately. The trick is knowing how to find out where your customers spend their time. Fortunately, each social media site provides some basic research tools that will help you make this determination:

• Twitter: Use the "Advanced Search" tool to search by keywords and by zip codes to find potential customers, and see how much activity you can identify from these users.
• Facebook: Facebook’s research tools are somewhat limited, but you can check your competitors’ Pages to see what types of posts are the most popular based on the number of “likes” and comments they receive.
• LinkedIn: Use the "People Search" feature to identify key individuals as well as relevant groups that may have a lot of traction with your market.
• Google+: Use Google Analytics to determine the amount of traffic or leads you are getting from your posts.
• Klout: Use this service to see how your followers are responding to your social media activity. Klout can track most major social sites, including YouTube, Flickr and Instagram.

Absolute minimum effort

At an absolute minimum, you should establish a page on each of the big four social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. This accomplishes a number of things. First, by listing your address and basic information on social media sites, you’ll help search engines like Google find your website and list your company’s information properly. Also, keep in mind that customers use all sorts of tools to find you, not just Google. If they happen to search for you on their favorite social site, you want to make sure they’ll find you there. The basic information you should have on your each of your profiles includes:

• Company name
• Company logo
• Website URL
• Customer service phone number
• Brief description of your company

This puts you on the social media map, as it were. You can certainly begin engaging potential and current customers after this stage, but even if you do nothing else, this will at least make you accessible. Then, based on the level of engagement of your target market on each site, you can determine how much more you want to do with each account.

Developing campaigns

Finally, once you've determined that you should do some level of effort of social media marketing, you know which sites are best for your market, and you've developed some basic profiles on each site, it's time to formulate a campaign. Just as with any marketing campaign, you must start by identifying specific, measurable goals you want to accomplish. By doing so, you can then determine how many resources can and should be invested in the process to achieve your desired outcome. For example, you may want to reach a goal of 1,000 “likes” on Facebook in the next three months. This is doable for a company on just about any budget, and you'll know pretty quickly if you need to put more effort into getting these “likes.” If you only have 50 after the first week, then you need to step it up. Some companies frame their desired return from their social media activity in terms of dollars and cents. This is not a bad strategy for the long term, but if you’re just starting out, it can actually be deceiving. Why? Because the work of establishing your brand on any social media network is a time-intensive process. It will take a concerted long-term effort to grow your following to the point where you can achieve significant levels of engagement and have a reasonable understanding of the relationship between your participation and the company’s sales performance. For that reason, in the beginning, it’s often more productive to focus on activity-based goals – such as achieving a specified number of followers on Twitter – rather than on more traditional ROI metrics. So take a step back, determine what sites your customers use to connect, focus your efforts on these sites and set some reasonable, time-based goals for yourself. Then, as you begin to gain traction on a particular social media site and establish a foundational understanding of how well it works for engaging customers and driving profitable traffic, then establish some ROI goals for your top engagement-level accounts.

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The "No Duhs" of Social Media

Ah social media. The latest golden goose to grace our world with promises of untold riches, a slimmer waistline and the perfect tan. The one every girl wants to go home with and every dude wants to be. The prom queen, the rock star and the cult leader all in one. Getting the picture yet? If you listen to the hype, social media is the answer to all that ails you and your company. It will increase your sales, touches and impressions by 800%...if only we could figure out how it all works. Truth be told, so much of what’s happening in social media is simply the infiltration of the same sheisty individuals who have previously occupied the world of infomercials and used car lots. If I had a dollar for every time that a “social media expert” followed me on Twitter, I wouldn’t have written this article, since I’d be chilling in Hawaii as the youngest retiree in the islands. But I’m not, so here we are. Given the omnipresence of social media these days, surely there’s something to it, right? The answer is yes, but it’s often light-years away from the hype and hyperbole. So how do you drill down to the real benefits of social media? You get back to basics. Hence the “no duhs.” There aren’t any quick fixes to make social media work for you. That’s why I don’t consider myself an expert in the field. I’m a social media grunt. I get in the trenches and get the work done, and that’s ultimately where you’ll find success. Without any further ado, the “no duhs” of your social media strategy:

Know your purpose

Before you ever set foot in the shared space of social media, you absolutely have to establish why you’re doing it:

• What’s brought you to this point?
• Do you have a specific product or line of products that you’re trying to sell?
• What’s your brand?
• What’s your mission statement?
• How have you presented yourself in other media up to this point?
• What do you expect to achieve?

Get the idea? Before you spin your wheels creating a Facebook page, setting up a Twitter account, broadcasting via a YouTube channel or utilizing whatever else pops up on the scene in the future, you need to have a good grasp of what you or your company hopes to accomplish. Define your expectations before you take the plunge.

Learn the platforms

Not all social media outlets are created equal. This may be the biggest “no duh” statement of all, but you can’t do the same things on Facebook that you can do on Twitter. You can’t run a YouTube channel the same way you create a music profile on MySpace. Do your homework. Each of these sites is like visiting a new country, or at least driving across the border to a new state. Each one does things just a little bit differently. Not all social media outlets are created equal.For example, I love good southern barbecue. For those of you who know BBQ, you know that I just made a sweeping generalization. What kind of southern BBQ? North Carolina or Kentucky? Western Carolina or Eastern Carolina? The same is true of social media. There are shades and variations of capabilities and opportunities, so you have to know what you’re dealing with before you can properly engage. Learn the culture of each of the various social media platforms. This will help you make good decisions about where to make your presence known and give you the understanding to make your efforts more effective. Facebook might be a great place for you to create a page about your products or services, while Twitter could be a waste of your time unless you have solid, regular bites of news and information to share.

Know your audience

This goes hand-in-hand with familiarizing yourself with the social media platforms and knowing your purpose. In the same way that you need to learn the culture, you also need to learn the language. When I moved to France as a teenager, it was one thing to pick up on the fact that there was a good bus system (culture) but quite another to figure out how to purchase tickets to ride across town (language). Learn who your audience is and how they communicate. Don’t assume that they’ll understand the jargon that you and your coworkers use to discuss your products or services. If you try using that lingo without some form of translation, you’ll end up alienating the very people you want to reach.

Be authentic

Of all the “no duhs,” this is probably the most self-explanatory. Just be real. Be real about your identity as a representative of a company; be real about the products and services that you provide. Don’t oversell or overhype who you are and what you offer. People can see through that, especially in the world of social media. It’s generally very easy to pick up on who’s legit and who’s not.

Be patient

This really gets back to the root of setting expectations. Unless you’re marketing the next iPhone or the next search engine (and good luck with that if you are), chances are you’re not going to have thousands or millions of people beating a path to become your fan on Facebook. It’ll take time for your company ad to get some traction on YouTube. Growing your Twitter following won’t happen overnight, unless you’re Ashton Kutcher. And honestly, does the world need another Ashton? Be realistic, and let your presence on these sites develop organically. Much like the language/country analogy, it takes time to get acclimated to a new culture and to become more effective at communicating according to the social norms of that culture.

Have fun

Admittedly, this final ”no duh” might seem a little goofy. But let’s be honest. Any time someone comes in with plans to formalize a previously underground environment (i.e. big business entering the world of Facebook), there can be a vibe of killing the party. Social media has taken over our lives for one very good reason: It’s fun! Take the time to invest in the lives of others.It’s fun to play silly games that measure your brain capacity versus your friends’. It’s fun to discover a new band or movie that your friends haven't heard about yet. It’s fun to retweet a good joke from a comedian you like. It’s fun (usually) to reconnect with old friends after years of being out of touch. Social media is, at heart, social. It’s meant to connect people. We form and build relationships (whether in person or online) because it brings joy and meaning to our lives, so don’t let the business of doing business via social networking sites rob you of that. Take the time to invest in the lives of others, and the riches that you reap will be far greater than can be measured in balance sheets and ROI calculations. By the way, if you’re just not a very social person, that’s all well and good. But maybe you shouldn’t be the one managing your company’s social media efforts. Seek out those who truly enjoy the medium, and allow them the time and space to explore the various “countries” of social media. Let them learn the languages and the cultures that go with each. Final word? A successful social media strategy depends on good old-fashioned hard work and common sense. Stay alert, and stay engaged.

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