By : Robin Low

4 pillars of SOCIAL MEDIA

Tips to grow your influence

Create Networks

Blogs

Articles

Groups

Forums

Pages

Twitter

eHow

YouTube

Podcast

Existing Networks

Join Forums

Join Groups

Wikipedia

Twitter

Comment on

blogs

Build Relationships

Reply to forums

Post value

Twitter Follow

Twitter reply

RT

Start Events

Measure Success

# of reply

# of RT

# of clicks on links

Track influence

Sales ROI from links

Benchmark with competitors

create networks

Starting groups in existing social media platforms can get you noticed.

Writing articles, blogs can allow search engine to search for your articles.

Keep content interesting and varied.

Always have your audience in mind.

Give them a reason to come back.

add value

be consistent

Consistency is key. Allocate a few hours a week to monitor your social media progress.Give your audience a regular time that you put up more articles for them to come back.

market your blog & articles

Post your new article / blogs and news on your existing networks. Cross promote your pages.Add blog addresses and other account information on name cards and other marketing materials

existing networks

Join existing networks and try to gain influence.

Create detailed profile.

Add photo / logo

Post links and topics and perhaps links to your articles and blogs.

Understand interaction patterns and know influencers on forums.

build relationships

Network with influencers on the forums.

Give value on your posts.

Participate in conversations.

Let your presence be consistently felt.

Gain credibility, post achievements, and share knowledge.

Send greeting as friendly gesture. (like happy birthday!)

be helpful and approachable

Do not just broadcast your own messages.

RT (Re-tweet) interesting news and information to your audience.

Reply to comments.

Answer questions you know the answer to that appear in your feeds.

focus on quality rather than quantity

On Twitter and Facebook, focus on quality interactions, and build deep relationships.

Convert fans into Evangelists and hope they can promote your company through word of mouth.

Numbers may mean more chances of spreading message but DOES NOT GUARANTEE that.

cross promote and share messages

Post your new blog posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Share your Twitter addresses, Facebook Pages Widgets and LinkedIn profile information on your blogs and articles.

Use images and videos from external source to promote.

Share blog address on YouTube to promote.

be in for long haul

Building relationship and trust takes time.

Do not give up after trying out for one month. Relationships are not built overnight.

Social media can increase your profile and open many opportunities if you try, you may not even actively market yourself or your company.

don’t allow it to consume your time

If not managed properly, social media can be a distraction if you just have conversations in small groups.

Make you’re your efforts are not in the way of doing business.

“A direct result of not tying activity to an end game, the ability to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so, allows us to define a strategy and a tactical plan to support activity that helps us reach our

goals and objectives.”

-- Brian Solis, author and principal of the FurtureWorks agency

measuring ROI

Brian Solis’s ROAD

Popularity

Many companies engage in social media, and most like to use some form of popularity matrix to measure ROI. Words like engagement, participation, and involvement became key terms for defining online interactions with consumers.

Trust and affinity are used to measure the core group of followers. Of all these matrixes, you could measure the improvement in customer service. Both in terms of the increased ability for people to rate and review products, as well as the opportunity for customer service teams to engage and provide proactive response.

Measuring success

Inability to measure ROI, lack of budget funding, and management resistance are barriers to companies implementing social media campaigns, and it is a great way of getting budget slashed.

“I’ve seen multimillion-dollar print and

television advertising initiatives get the green light because CMOs understood the media — and I’ve seen $10,000 social-media efforts scratched because

execs didn’t get it.”

DISCOVER THE AVENTIS ADVANTAGE!

Tips

Know Your End Game: As Brian Solis said defining your end game is necessary in order to be able to quantify results.  Know what are you trying to accomplish and how you want to try keep track of it all.

Define Your Metrics: What metrics do you need to track to quantify results: Leads, Registration, Sales?

Check Your Tracking: I can’t tell you how often a new client doesn’t have the right pixel/cookie set on the right confirmation page. If your success metric is sales make sure you’re not just tracking leads. This requires testing.

Set Expectations: Benchmarking is great way for you and your CMO to have realistic expectations from a campaign. Fireclick and Coremetrics are two tools that can provide benchmarks based on industry averages related to conversion rates, cart abandonment, and other valuable data. They also allow you to pull data from a specific vertical.

Gather Intelligence

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the defacto analytics system in most companies. You can track visits, page views, bounce rates, etc. Be sure, if sales are a key metric, that the ecommerce portion is activated.

Gather Intelligence

Coremetrics: Coremetrics Analytics provides the website analytics features you need to successfully acquire, convert, and retain high-value visitors and customers.

* Marketing optimization: gain a 3D view of your marketing programs’ effectiveness across channels and over time, including which programs drive new visitors, trigger action, and influence visitor behavior. * Merchandising: increase initiation and decrease abandonment of key activities (shopping carts, booking travel, starting applications, completing registration, etc.) by automatically mapping product and promotional categories to website analytics reports * Content analysis: improve site navigation, content, and tools by knowing the value of page real estate and promotional effectiveness based on site goals

Gather Intelligence

Radian6: The Radian6 flexible dashboard enables monitoring all forms of social media with real-time, relevant results. Smoothly uncover influencers, track and measure engagement and determine which conversations are having an impact online. Radian6 provides Web Analytics and CRM Integration.

Gather Intelligence

Brantology: Brantology is an independent business and brand online intelligence service provider that combines technology, processes and trained staff to monitor your social media reach. (The main difference is they have a human vetting all your data)

Key Metrics

Understand Numbers

Spotting Trends: Sometimes business get excited about high sales numbers while completely ignoring the fact they overspent to get those numbers.

Trends are a great way to spot deltas which often provide indicators of the health of campaign. Sample key trends are:

•number of prospects •number of transactions •changes in repeat customers •number of customer referrals •uplift in other marketing channels

Look beyond your distributed sites

With the amount of distribution sources available in social media always take time to see if elements of your campaign have been distributed beyond the initial sites you targeted. It will allow you to spot new opportunities to expand your campaigns.

Conclusion

• Social media is about public engagement

• Building an non-marketing team online to build brand reputation and trust

• Using real time information and monthly reports to spot trends and new channels of sales

• Facilitate and guide conversations

Twitter: dmediaacademy

Blog: http://digitalmediaacademy.blogspot.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/digitalmediaacademy

social mediastart it today!