Month: November 2009

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Social Networking Communities

Building Smart Communities Through Social Networking

Let’s first look at what is social networking? Social networking is where people develop networks of friends and associates. It forges and creates links between different people. A social network can form a key element of collaborating and networking.

In sequal to the previous posting on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts and what ROI categories to use, we will now look at what type of social networking communities to create to gain advantages from free social networking.

The common types of communities created are:

  1. Customer Community
  2. Employee Community
  3. Partner Community

The goals for creating these types of communities are:

Customer Community goals:

  • Better understand customer preferences and profile
  • Increase awareness of your brand
  • Facilitate sharing of best practices
  • Increase adoption of your products and services
  • Improve customer loyalty and retention
  • Receive real time feedback from customers regarding wants and needs
  • Increase persistent traffic to the website
  • Solicit customer-driven innovation
  • Empower power users and experts to find and fill job positions

Employee Community Goals:

  • Create a company culture of sharing and teamwork
  • Increase intra-company communication and collaboration
  • Improve employee retention and the bond between company and employee
  • Discover new ideas and accelerate innovation
  • Encourage cross-functional inputs to drive better decision making
  • Bolster minority and special interest group programs

Partner Community Goals:

  • Enable general communication with partners
  • Facilitate sharing of best practices & creation of a knowledge base
  • Encourage co-innovation to better serve joint customers and markets
  • Increase sales through real-time market intelligence
  • Provide a central repository for partner communication
  • Enable opinion sharing and recommendations

This is an extract from my Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.

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Measure Your Effectiveness With Social Media

How Do You Measure Effectiveness Of Social Media?

In order to get faster results from an investment in Social Media Marketing you need to measure your Social Networking efforts in terms of Return On Investment (ROI).

Five proven ways to increase your ROI are:

  1. Have a Business Strategy to increase exposure in support of your products and services and to create new business.
  2. Establish presence in your marketplace and reinforce your credibility.
  3. Expand your reach and create buzz for events you’re hosting.
  4. Nurture relationships and create strategic partnerships.
  5. Properly maintain your presence and be an industry leader.

What ROI categories do you use?

Once you have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place in support of your Business Strategy, the following ROI categories can be used to measure return on investment to create branded online community:

Customer Communities:

  • Increase in customer acquisition
  • Increase in customer retention
  • Reduction in customer service costs
  • Increase in page rank and general site traffic due to additional content on a community
  • Improved product and service allocation based on real time customer feedback and customer driven innovation

Internal Communities (Employees):

  • Increase in productivity due to
    • General knowledge sharing
    • Identification of subject matter experts to shorten ramp up
    • Virtual team environments for distributed teams
    • Increase in employee retention. People like meeting other employees, face to face and virtually. This produces a more enriching work environment.
    • Decreased hiring costs. It’s easier to hire from within. Finding good candidates through internal social networks can provide even more information (both profile based and content creation based) about internal candidates.

This is an extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.

If you’re interested in related social media articles, read here and please feel free to leave any comments.

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Why Should You Participate In Social Media Marketing?

Why Social Media Marketing?

This is another extract from my free Social Media Marketing Report.

Using Social Media for social networking is an effective marketing tool that became very popular in recent years. It compliments traditional media tools for marketing and should not be seen as the only way to market online businesses or the best answer to grow any business as this is not the Golden Compass to solve all your marketing challenges. But it certainly could be if used correctly.

Marketing through Social Networking is a long term activity where you are building your presence, your reputation and your credibility over time.  Use Social Networking sites to listen online to what people are saying about your company, about your products, about your brand.  One can refer here to a case study of Vodafone in Europe who has a team monitoring conversation in Social Media about Vodafone. To them it is all about customer retention.

Let’s look at the benefits to Entrepreneurs, Business Owners/Executives and Service Professionals of using Social Media as a marketing tool.

  • Generate exposure for your business
  • Help rise in search engine rankings and increase traffic
  • Reduce overall marketing expenses
  • Build new business partnerships
  • Bring in new qualified leads with increased subscribers from opt-in list
  • Help close new business

Taking into consideration that Social Media sites influence purchase decisions and change minds regarding purchasing products, these sites can be used to do product research and do consumer reviews.  Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool as consumers trust their friend’s recommendations more than any other form of advertising.

Your Virtualpm,

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11 Key Social Media Tools To Consider For Marketing

What Are The Key Social Media Tools?

Social Media Marketing takes place through various Social Media platforms when they are used as a marketing tool to market a company’s products and services.  Social Media tools can be divided into different categories, each category serving its own purpose.

The above diagram depicts some of the key Social Platforms in use today.  Many of the platforms can be targeted as marketing tools to increase exposure to your business and grow your business through more sales and strategic partnerships. Let’s look at each key platform in more detail.  For the purposes of this article only one example of each type will be discussed.

1) Blogs

From term “weblog” is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.  At beginning of 2008 blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs and this number is growing at a rapid pace.

Currently there are 12,9 million active blogs with more than 5 billion readers.

 

2) Micro-blogging: Twitter

Twitter

Micro-Blogging is a Social Media tool that answers to 1 question:

“What Are You Doing?”

  • Answers question in short sentences of 140 characters or less.
  • Most users on Twitter are already on Facebook .
  • Twitter is one of the fastest growing Social Media platforms.
  • It is referred to as ‘Instant messaging on steroids’.
  • Demographics shows that it is used by politicians, celebrities, news anchors and individuals.
  • Total visits in May 2009 were 134 million ; with 32 million unique visitors in April 2009.
  • The Twitter platform is used by 94% of marketers.

 

3) Really Simple Syndication: RSS

RSS “feeds” allow people to subscribe to the various websites, blogs or sections of websites that are of interest to them.

 

4) Social Networking: Facebook 

 

Facebook is a well-known Social Media platform to create, participate in groups, share photos, videos, audios online.

  • It has an Alexa ranking of 5 (fifth most trafficked website in the world).
  • Currently 300 million active members, growing with 250 000 new members per day and predicted to be 500 million by 2011.
  • Demographics: fastest growing age group is 30-35. Women aged 55 is also a big growth area

Facebook presents huge opportunities to set up a group discussing areas of interest relating to your business.

 

5) Niche Networks: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a Professional Networking Social Media platform and the largest network of its kind. Currently, it is used by more than 50 million professionals to exchange information, ideas, opportunities and business networking.

6) Chatrooms

Build your own network of contacts who share your interests.

7) Message Boards: Forums

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site were any topic of interest  is posted and discussed.

8)   Podcasts

A podcast is a series of digital computer files, usually either digital audio or video, that is released periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication.

9)   Video sharing: You Tube

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. You Tube is a video sharing Social Media platform that currently has 75 million videos and 150 000 more videos are added per day. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.  In 2006 YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. Video marketing is used significantly more by men than women.

 

10)    Photo sharing: Flicr

An online photo management and sharing application to show off your favourite photos and videos to the world.

 

11)   Social Bookmarking: Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages.

 

If you enjoyed this summary of social media marketing tools for business, go read my free Social Media Marketing Report which contains more useful information about your most pressing questions about social media as a marketing tool.

Related Social Media articles!