You're just a click away. Part 2

How to get started?

The key is to get organised in advance of starting anything. This is no different from any traditional marketing communications activity - it’s all in the planning. Let’s use the BADA experience as an example of how you could potentially plan a social media strategy.

It was decided that, as BADA’s communications efforts are done on behalf of its members, the overriding strategic objective was for the new BADA website to be designed as a portal through which consumers could easily reach their local retailer. To be successful at this, it was obvious that it would need to do well in Google searches and be a site that people thought of when contemplating hi-fi and home entertainment purchases.

The tactics were fairly simple:

1. to design the site to be naturally good with search engine searches (through careful consideration of the language used, numerous links, regular updates etc.)
2. to concentrate on maintaining the SEO (search engine optimisation) through the services of a specialist SEO company
3. to reach out to as many potential customers through Social Media with the aim of directing them to the website

We started by identifying who we wanted to communicate with. In a nutshell (and this will be the same for any business operating in our sector) we wanted to talk to existing hi-fi/ home cinema users, music lovers and movie enthusiasts. From this we determined which applications they were likely to use and which of those applications give the opportunity to segment and target by interests. In our case we came up with two lists. The primary one consisted of the main apps that we’ve all heard of: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr. It is these that we have implemented first and our secondary list, which includes things like gogoyoko (a music focused site) will be implemented later.

To start we setup a BADA Facebook fanpage and added some basic content to it, this was followed by a Linkedin company page and the creation of a Twitter account. Flickr was next and this was populated with a variety of photographs

One of our must-haves was to make the integration of our chosen applications as seamless as possible, to reduce the amount of time needed to keep them up to date by enabling them to talk to one another. The trouble is, they’re all written by different companies and getting them to interact isn’t as easy as it should be, as my experience with Flickr and Facebook demonstrated.

The BADA blog had already been running for a while and this was then joined by a Twitter account. What we did then was to start linking the accounts using 3rd party software. It is possible to use software such as Ping or Atomkeep, which enable you to enter information once and it is then automatically spread to all your other social networking applications. This is by far the easiest way in terms of management time, but it does limit your flexibility as everything you post will go everywhere. We opted not to go down this route, instead we set up individual links between some of our applications so we can have more control over what appears where. You may decide that the one stop shop option is best for your requirements.

The crucial thing is the targeting and how that is set up. There are numerous applications that let you specify the type of people your communiques are sent to. For example, we used something called Twollow, which automatically allows us to follow people on Twitter who are talking about specific subjects, and Twitter etiquette says they should follow us in return. As we have links between Twitter and the Blog and the website, it should drive traffic onto the BADA website and hence onto the members.

Social Media is a vast subject and one we can only scratch the surface of in this article. Hopefully we’ve whetted your appetite and you’re hungry to find out more. It can be a fantastically powerful communications tool, and talking to our customers and potential customers is possibly the most important thing we can do. In the meantime join us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Linkedin and read the BADA blog - all accessible from the new BADA website at www.bada.co.uk

You’re just a click away. Part 1

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the past couple of years, you can’t fail to have noticed that something called Social Media is all over the news and on everyone’s lips at the moment. Along with websites, email, apps, mms, texts, good old fashioned phone calls and, shock horror, face to face conversations, it’s one of the seemingly endless number of ways we now have to communicate with our customers.

Before we go any further, take a minute to consider the six main benefits of Social Media:
It gets people talking about your brand. It gives very quick results. It can be easily targeted. It improves your search engine rankings. It works alongside your traditional marketing. It can cost nothing.

But how well are we coping with this plethora of communication methods? I know from working on the new BADA website that it can be very time consuming. BADA has embraced the world of Social Media, on top of the regular website updates, newsletters, news releases and magazine columns. It could easily be a full time job just keeping on top of all the communication tools at my disposal, never mind anything else. It’s taken me a day to get the link from our Flickr page to the Facebook fanpage to work properly, and that’s just the mechanics, never mind actually making use of them for communications.

It’s difficult to get an accurate figure for the number of social media sites, but it’s well in excess of 200 and there are literally thousands of apps that work with them. And here are a couple of really mind-blowing statistics: Facebook has 200 million active users and there have been, as I write this, 21 billion tweets on Twitter.

So you would be forgiven for thinking it must be nigh on impossible to actually reach the people you want to talk to. It’s overwhelming; how do you sort out which applications to use, how to target effectively and what sort of time to allocate to maintaining them?

Next time in part 2, how to get started.