haydn buffoon: 3 Social Media Tips To Help Your Business Grow

3 Social Media Tips To Help Your Business Grow

Ready to get social? Great!? The latest big hype in the online business arena revolves around something called Social Commerce which is basically using Social Media to grow your brand. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the Internet is less an island and more a social party. So how can your business make the most of the Social Sphere and use it correctly. That?s a little tricky because the metrics are hard to measure. Don?t worry though, we?ll try and make sense of it for you!

The educated marketer is all about numbers and calculating return on investment (ROI). There?s nothing a business owner should love more than a high percentage of gain on top of a large sum of capital. Marketing is pretty easy and measurable, it?s all about A/B testing, conversion percentages and making profits. Well, take a step back for a moment because measuring the success of Social Media marketing is not that concrete.

The main issue with Social Media as a business or marketing strategy is that it doesn?t quite fit in with traditional marketing techniques. It?s not about hard metrics, because hard metrics don?t quite work. Rather than that, it can be beneficial to think about investment in Social Media as investment that can only be measured through soft metrics. No, not soft serve ice cream, soft metrics!

A good Internet Marketing Campaign has both soft and hard metrics.

Where hard metrics are all about comparing numbers, soft metrics are what you do when you compare subjective opinions. Things like brand recognition and personal identification with your company are examples of soft metrics. Social Media is king when it comes to soft metrics.

Here?s the bad news about investing your time into social media ? it will not immediately convert. It?s not like pumping money into your Google PPC budget and being able to easily calculate ROI by playing CPC against conversions and profitability. That is why regular, old-fashioned hard metrics can?t possibly be applied to it. However, Social Media is terribly powerful. It?s like the Incredible Hulk if he was on steroids. It can make or break companies. So, here are a few ideas of how to put it to good use, while avoiding the pitfalls.

1 Second-hand marketing

Second Hand Marketing

One thing social media does great is it gets people talking. It facilitates the percolation of word-of-mouth advertising. Social media essentially re-ignited this old school advertising method. Remember when a few years back if you were looking for a contractor, you?d ask your peers who they?ve used? This is one of the oldest ways in which people find things: through other people.

There are two ?current? venues to support word-of-mouth advertising. One is regular word-of-mouth ? whether face to face, over text, phone, or on a Social Networking Site (SNS) like Facebook or Twitter ? where a sale happens because a friend pointed you straight to what you wanted to buy. This is the old way and traditionally capitalized through excellent service and encouraging your customers to sing your praises via reward systems or incentive programs.

The second big way in which SNSs help you with second-hand marketing is via Google results. What I?m talking about is Google?s ability to learn and give you relevant results in accordance with your browsing & click thru history. If this is a new concept to you, don?t feel bad. Outside of SEM professionals, most laymen don?t realize that Google results can shift person to person. Personalization (among about a billion other factors) is what makes Google the search leader!

Don?t believe me? Put some words on your computer and then try typing the exact same search on a co-worker?s computer just next to you. Compare the results.

Chances are you will get very different results displayed. Why is this happening? Google?s ?brain? will try to find the best ranking of search results depending on many factors.

Big important point: your connections in Social Networking Sites are a considerable part of that result window. Here is what I?m talking about. If your friend ? whom you follow on your public Twitter account and on Google Plus ? has tweeted a couple of links leading to a website about the WordPress Content Management System, that website gets higher ranks for your personalized Google search!

How can you use this to your benefit? Easy! If you haven?t already, you should start thinking about having easily accessible tweet and share buttons on your website. Another interesting point is that you?ll want to have material that people will want to share and tweet about. Some Internet Marketers refer to this as ?Linkbait? ? I refer to this as just great & useful content!

The most relevant SNS for Google results is Google?s own Plus network. You want to sign up for it and create a page for your business as soon as humanly possible, like yesterday. Also, try to maintain a healthy level of activity throughout the day or week to give your subscribers some value for their subscription?which leads us to the next item.

2 Engage with possible clients

A huge feature of SNS is that they are a very direct means of communication. The old web was like being alone in a building. That?s how clients feel when faced with a static website: there?s no one else around. They can?t see the faces of the other people who are engaged with the company.

Social Media Sharing What happens with Social Media is that each visitor can instantly see the connections the company has. Examples are Facebook ?like? buttons and the ?circle? feature for Google+. Each prospect can read comments from satisfied customers and even see if their friends (people in their circle) are using the same company. It?s like ?if everyone was jumping off a bridge? philosophy. Each new customer can leave testimonials or talk with other customers and will help grow your brand. This can be likened to a very large and permanent reception room where all your announcements will be heard and all your contacts can be recognized by each other. Talk about a captive audience! It?s like a party that keeps growing and growing.

What this means for businesses is that you will want to treat good customers well and reap the benefits in the form of business growth so it behooves you to keep your social party bumping till the ?break o? dawn?.

Translation: Get people talking about how much they love your company and encourage engagement.

Companies that do everything to make their customers happy will thrive while others will have a harder and harder time hiding their ?inappropriate? behavior. It?s pretty obvious that good service equals business growth. What?s cool about the social world is good feedback can accelerate growth. What stinks is that bad feedback can destroy a company overnight.

I almost forgot about the benefit of real time feedback! You can now engage with your clients and figure out what they are talking about. You can understand their real needs and put in the work to give them an amazing experience. You can get instant feedback from unsatisfied clients, and find ways it never happens again.

Soft power through online presence

Although soft power can?t quite be measured by usual numbers, it is where the real juice of Social Media kicks in. This can be accomplished through free content, through amazing customer service, or through the authority effect.

The first and most widely used angle, so to speak, is the free content angle. This is a straightforward strategy: create amazing and free content, and then allow it to spread like a digital weed. If it doesn?t gain traction, your content needs more work. This might mean focusing on a niche audience, enhancing its quality, working with its aesthetics, or just ?shopping it around? by letting other established websites or bloggers know about the content you just posted.

Keep in mind that free content is not just creating some blog post about how to turn Twizzlers into strands of gold. Free content can be anything from business insight to software.

The second aspect of soft power is customer service. Fairly simple in appearances, creating and maintaining a remarkable system of customer support is tough. Google is the largest business that fully takes advantage of this and they don?t even have a phone number. Ever try to call Google? Chances are no but they have an amazing self-help system of FAQ?s, an open community, videos, and rich content that keeps their customers using their products and very satisfied.

The third aspect has been thoroughly explored all around the web: the authority effect. In the age where starting a business can be as easy as getting your niece to design a logo and a website, people are constantly coming into contact with new offers and new brands. The authority effect resides on the fact that online personas are reasonably easy to invent. Real authority has to rely on great delivery which includes a killer product backed by amazing customer service. In other words, fly by night businesses will only last so long if they are not backed up by social trust.

If you have any other ideas I didn?t touch on about how Social Media can be used for business growth, please post some comments!

*This is a Guest post, guest posts do not represent Rainbow SEO and are contributions from other bloggers we work with.