Social Media

What follows is no major piece of market research – just genuine feedback from some businesses we’ve spoken to over the last few months. We’ve picked up recurring themes (or fears?) that are troubling small business owners about making the social media leap. 

Thought we’d share them with you. Ring any bells?

1. “Twitter? I don’t care what people are having for breakfast!”

Some small business owners still believe that social media (and especially Twitter) is a waste of time that only appeals to inane, juvenile slackers. Why? They’ve seen their teenage sons and daughters using Facebook, Twitter, Formspring, Bebo and the like to follow celebrities and exchange meaningful messages like “LOOOOOOL!!!”, “FAIL!!!!”, “WTF?????!!”, “FML!!!” with their mates. They just don’t see the value.

It’s no coincidence that these same business owners are normally not social media users themselves. That’s a big barrier to overcome without proper guidance.

Yes, it’s true that social media becomes most effective when it reflects ‘personality’, but that shouldn’t be confused with ‘personal information’. Nobody wants to know what YOU had for breakfast (unless you ARE a celebrity). But they might want to know an expert view on the state of the market a business represents. Small businesses can offer that.

It’s not about breakfast. Many business owners would be amazed at the percentage of their customers using social media effectively everyday to connect, influence, exchange information, comment, recommend and complain. The sooner their business gets involved in the, the better.

2. “I can’t afford the time to Tweet”

Reality is, you can’t afford not to. Small businesses are concerned that getting involved with social media will rob them of precious time they already don’t have. This may be because subconsciously they still regard Facebook and Twitter as a past time rather than an important part of their marketing communications.

This obstacle is fairly easy to overcome through awareness, organisation and planning. Once the business owner realises the benefits of social media as part of their overall marketing mix; it’s then just a simple process to schedule their involvement.

Agree the tone of voice, language and subject matter and the content can be drawn up and published to a schedule! A month in advance if necessary. Amazing! That’s not to say it doesn’t need 24/7 monitoring and ongoing interaction, but there are automatic monitoring tools that will prompt and shape responses and conversations.

3. “There might be negative comments posted about our business on Facebook or Twitter and if we’re using social media people are more likely to do this.”

Calm down. A few facts (that some small business owners don’t appreciate):

• Although the social media universe is a democracy, you can often moderate damaging or abusive comments (on your Facebook page, your blog or YouTube channel for instance) before they do any damage. You can certainly be alerted to every time someone gives bad feedback – anywhere on the web. Doesn’t often happen unless you are a) Nestle or b) really bad at what you do.

• People can say negative things about your business via social media whether you are there or not. At least if you ARE there, you have the opportunity to be aware of the grievance and resolve matters – or at least be seen to be acting reasonably in an attempt to resolve matters. This wins your business much kudos among other social media users who could be potential customers.

• Your company’s presence on social media can often flush out a dissatisfied. THIS IS GOOD. It  gives you the opportunity to handle the problem and repair the damage. Everyone likes to read positive reviews about their business, but the NEGATIVE ones are far more useful! Unfortunately, you never get to hear 90% of most customer dissatisfaction. Social media can help redress that balance.

4. “I just don’t do things like Facebook – I’m not the type”

Be objective!  That’s no reason not to use it for your company. You may know your customers, but it’s unlikely you are exactly the same profile. Just because you don’t use social media, that’s not to say they don’t.

Alternatively, small business owners are simply overwhelmed with the amount of new information to learn about social media and it puts them off. Have no fear – it’s easier than you think, just ignore the smoke and mirrors. If you don’t, your competitors will. Well, they are already in fact…

Business networking is a really effective way of winning and keeping customers. Social media for business can be seen as an effective way to do this online – but with more of your potential customers at once. Who wouldn’t want that for their business?

If you’re really NOT the type and can’t change, at least try to recognise the value and hand responsibility for social media for your business to another member of staff who actually enjoys doing the stuff.

So, if you’ve read this and feel we’ve mentioned something close to home, don’t be surprised. Many people feel the same way.

BUT, with a little help and guidance, these fears are easily overcome and then small businesses (in many cases more than larger businesses) can really start to reap the rewards that social media offers.

So how does Wikipedia, one of the world’s most popular forms of social media actually define social media?

Exactly like this:

“Social media is/are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses web-based technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogues. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”

Businesses also refer to social media as consumer-generated media (CGM). Social media utilization is believed to be a driving force in defining the current time period as the Attention Age. A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.”

Got that? Good! Off you go then…

Alternatively, give us a call and we’ll translate for you!

Here at Terra Ferma Media, we’re all about trying to make social media easier to understand for businesses that haven’t yet taken the plunge.

But take the plunge you should – implemented correctly, the rewards of social media for your business can be great. We’d be happy to hand-hold and talk you through the confusing bits.

In the meantime, some random facts and information…

1. Facebook has more daily page views than Google http://ht.ly/3apVB
2. Twitter has over 190 million users  http://ht.ly/3aq5M updating 65 million times a day
3. Facebook has over 800 million users each with an average of 130 ‘friends’  http://ht.ly/3aq0K
4. LinkedIn has over 70 million users http://ht.ly/3aqlm
5. The New Twitter interface allows you to view video and images without leaving the page http://ht.ly/3apXe
6. You can add video to your LinkedIn profile (er…but this doesn’t mean you should!) http://ht.ly/3apY2
7. Some media outlets ban the use of the word “Tweet” http://ht.ly/3aq3b
8. Coldplay are the most followed UK act via social media – but three times less than Lady Gaga (22 million on Facebook alone)http://ht.ly/3aqpT
9. Many smaller businesses are keen to start working with social media http://ht.ly/3aqt3 but the vast majority don’t know where to start. They need social media management help.
10. As someone we hold in high esteem said recently, “Thousands of your potential customers, people who live in your area are on Twitter and Facebook today. You’d have to be incredibly arrogant or a complete idiot to not even try to connect with them” (Nigel Botterill)

Question is, are you in danger of appearing “incredibly arrogant” or “a complete idiot” ?

Hopefully neither – and thankfully, we can stop you becoming either!

Many business owners are concerned that are missing the social media boat  but remain unconvinced the benefits. They often get side tracked by personal opinions about Facebook (“My daughter wastes her life on that thing!”) or Twitter (“Who cares what so-and-so had for breakfast?!”).

Let’s not talk about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc and just concentrate on what business owners usually mean when they ask the question.

Social media is a way that people communicate, share and engage with each other through new media technology applications. It is immediate, interactive, responsive and highly powerful. It allows businesses to strike up conversations with existing and potential customers.

Social media is not ‘broadcast’ media (like print advertising, direct mail, radio, outdoor, etc) which are all one way communication. Social media allows the two-way dialogues that you would like to have with your customers.

But be warned, social media is not right for every business. If your customers are not, and are never likely to be, engaging with social media themselves, then it’s probably not a priority for you today. That said, your customers of tomorrow could well be using it, so ignore it at your peril.

So, how can social media help your business?

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and in no particular order, but it’s a good place to start…

1. If your business relies on lasting customer relationships and repeat business, social media is the best thing available for building and maintaining strong and relevant relationships with people/customers. Bar none.

2. Your customers are almost certain to be using it already. You should try to connect with them in a way that’s convenient and easy for them to connect back. Social media allows you to make one-to-one contact with your clients. Simple as that.

3. In terms of ongoing investment, getting started on social media is very low cost compared to more traditional forms of marketing and promotion. Most of the basic applications are free to use and even buying a few bits of software (apps) to make things work better is fairly inexpensive. Consequently, your ROI should be quicker and greater.

4. Social media can tell you what is right and what is wrong about everything from your company and products to your competitors or industry as a whole. Using social media to listen and monitor what the public are saying about things relevant to you can provide highly valuable market knowledge.

5. Social media is a great way to instantly share anything you want to with your existing or potential customers. News, info, offers, coupons, pictures, the lot.

6. By engaging with your customers via social media, it’s likely that they will enthuse among their social media contacts and so your reputation will grow. It’s digital word-of-mouth.

7. Social media can be an effective way to manage your own PR and reputation. It allows you to deliver your success stories more effectively and even react to crises before they escalate.

8. Many people expect a business to have a social media presence these days. Failure to be involved can make your enterprise look behind the times, old fashioned and out of date.

9. Social media can enhance your brand awareness. If your branding is consistent across different media, you will create something more recognisable and dynamic. Plus, by using social media, your brand can become more rounded and develop a personality.

10. Social media can help your business with new areas of collaboration as other related businesses in your sector connect and work with you.

11. Social media can help your business website grow traffic. Major search engines now include social media updates and posts in their results. If your business is involved; you will have more chance of being found on the web.

12. Finally – social media is NOT just for young people with no money and too much time. Recent stats show that the average age of a Facebook user is 38 and that the average age on Twitter is 39.

When it comes to developing and implementing social media for your business, the biggest cost can be time. But if your social media strategy is reaping dividends, then it’s time well spent.

And if you really don’t have time, then ask a social media management company (like us) to do things for you.

Whether you like it or not, existing or potentially new customers are talking about your business behind your back. Wouldn’t you like to know what they are saying?

When I say behind your back, I don’t mean in a slightly devious, underhand manner. I just mean that you’re not there to listen and they wouldn’t necessarily want you to hear what they’re saying anyway. It’s true that we rarely discuss a mediocre experience with friends – it normally has to be terrible or exceptional before we think it is worth mentioning.

Whilst it would be very useful to hear the GOOD things people say about your business, hearing the BAD stuff too can be even more valuable.

It’s easy to find out what people are saying about your business right now by creating a series of simple Google Alerts or using other free monitoring tools such as Socialmention.

Social media is open and democratic by its very nature and places a huge emphasis on the sharing of information. It’s digital word of mouth. News of bad experiences about a business will be quickly shared with hundreds of followers, friends and contacts.

If your business is using social media properly, you may be able do something about this by interacting with, and responding to, disgruntled punters and sorting out their grievances. It’s called
Reputation Management and offers your business the chance to put its point of view. Not in the heavy handed way that Nestle disastrously attempted earlier this year, but in a measured, positive and conciliatory way (see Pepsi example in this article).

After all, you can’t control EVERYTHING that is being said about your company and you certainly can’t please all your customers all the time.

But intelligent use of social media to try to do so will work wonders for your brand.

We all know that social media is a) the best way today to build your brand and drive sales or b) a sure fire way to be distracted from your core business with no discernible benefit [DELETE AS APPROPRIATE].

Truth is, engaging with social media for your business could easily be either of the above. It’s all about how valid your social media strategy is (apologies – strategy is a word we try to use in small amounts on this site, not always regarded as Plain English).

You can spend all day using social media and actually achieve very little by following these five easy steps:

1. Check your various social media accounts every five minutes for new followers, mentions, direct messages, comments, view stats and re-Tweets. Come on, get over it. Yes, you may well get some feedback from other people and new fans or followers. Whoo-hoo. That’s the idea.

But you really need to manage your time carefully to respond to things or it will completely disrupt your working schedule. In fact, you should schedule a specific time to deal with social media and stick to it. Even with the instant dialogue opportunity of Twitter, don’t always be sucked into a real time response. In all honesty, there’s very little that can’t wait at least two hours – (even if you are using social media as a customer communications channel).

Clearly there are loads of ways to set up auto-alerts for the absolutely vital stuff and most people check for interactions that may require an urgent response from a range of mobile devices. But relax a bit and get to it when you can.

2. Read far too many blogs. It’s wonderful to be able to tap into such a wealth of knowledge simply by setting up automatic feeds to deliver information to your desktop. But how much do you REALLY need? It should all be about quality not quantity. Do a quick audit on all the info you regularly read and ask yourself what actions you have taken as a result of each thing you subscribe to. There’s often more chaff than wheat.

3. Spread yourself too thin by appearing on far too many social media platforms. There are over 100 well frequented social media/networking/bookmarking platforms. How many will your business benefit from being connected with? My guess is probably no more than four or five.

Even if it could be relevant to appear on more, you need to bring some focus to what you’re doing here. Otherwise you’ll be running from pillar to post simply to keep your contributions up – which you won’t manage to do.

4. Focus on building followers or fans no matter how irrelevant they are to your business. A high number of followers does not indicate high quality of content. You’ll find yourself involved in curious conversations with people who are never likely to be customers of yours. Yes, it’s nice to chat and social media is all about being personal – but you need to be ruthless with the energy you spend interacting.

Moreover, too many irrelevant fans or followers will degrade your overall appeal to more relevant followers. Why would you do this?

5. Use social media as a advertising channel rather than a way to talk with people. Try this – don’t engage in any meaningful dialogue, simply post, publish and update details about your latest discounts, special offer or new products.

Oh, and then set this ‘news’ up as an automated feed to pump the stuff out every hour. Repeat it a lot too, you know – just like those annoying but catchy insurance ads on the radio. That works, right? Go for it!

You’ll lose followers and potential customers by the droves, but hey, you’ll look like you’ve got a lot to offer! [Resists from naming many local culprits].

So there you have it. A fool proof way to spend too much time and energy engaged with social media in a way that will bring very little benefit to your business at all.

Now stop reading this and go get some new customers.

We meet a lot of local businesses who are suddenly keen to use various elements of social media to win new customers. Many of them are already well followed on Twitter or have hundreds of friends on Facebook – on a personal level.

But thinking up a social media strategy for your business is a totally different ball game.

This brief and easy to read article by Social Media Examiner looks at three basic steps for you to consider first.

However these steps are just the very tip of the iceberg. The article doesn’t cover what we consider to be the three most vital first steps:

1. Research –  what are your competitors currently doing social media wise? How do you find out? What’s good and bad about their efforts?
2. Tone of voice and communication – how do you want your business to come across? Who do you really want to talk with? What conversations should you have? What shouldn’t you talk about?
3. Ownership – who will be your social media voice? One person? Several? How do you reflect that? What are the benefits/pitfalls of either approach?

We’re currently discussing exactly these things with two very different businesses in South West London and hope to publish the outcomes as two case studies in the New Year.

We’ll keep you posted.

Businesses often set a target for X number of followers on Twitter or Y number of Fans/Likes on Facebook to be achieved in a set period of time. These targets can be unrealistic to hit and so the business can be quickly disappointed that a clear cut goal has not been realised.

Why such an emphasis on a large number of followers? Well, three main reasons:

1. Celebrities on Twitter have a high number of followers and they are successful, well known people, ergo high follower numbers = status
2. Businesses with a high number of followers have a larger audience to broadcast to, ergo high follower numbers = reach and sales
3. A higher number of followers makes your business appear more popular than your competitors, ergo high follower numbers = success

Eh? Wrong on all three counts. 1) Businesses are rarely celebrities 2) Social media is neither a broadcast media nor a direct sales channel 3) Businesses will have a better ROI with fewer, more relevant followers with whom they can engage more effectively.

Building a high number of followers indiscriminately is a relatively easy thing to do (as we are told incessantly on Twitter). There are endless automated systems on the market that add the masses like some over the counter social media steroid.  Businesses can grow a substantial number of followers in a few weeks – but often at little value for the business concerned.

Here’s a great tool - Klout . Hootsuite users will be familiar with this way of measuring the real influence of a person or business among their social media followers or fans. Klout measures a range of indicators and awards a Klout score out of 100 that ranks genuine interaction and influence.

Businesses with over 10,000 faceless followers can rank lower than others with just 10% of that number   who are relevant and receptive. And rightly so.

So the next time someone brags to you about their number of followers, run their Twitter ID through Klout to get a more accurate representation of their likely impact and effect in this smoke and mirror filled world of social media.

1. Don’t ignore the benefits of mapping out a content strategy before you start. Many businesses clearly have no direction, objectives, style and purpose on Twitter. If you really want to make it work for your company, you need to stop and think about all the above plus how Twitter integrates with your existing channels of communication.
2. Don’t get going on Twitter until you have done your research. It’s simple to set up a Twitter account and start tweeting about your business. But this approach will be the longer road to success. Instead, follow a few leading brands and competitors in your sector first. You can observe and learn a lot from them about what works and what doesn’t before you enter the fray yourself. Once you’re out there, retreat is rarely an effective option. Think before you tweet.
3. Don’t feel you always have to answer Twitter’s question “What’s happening?” A minute by minute commentary of what IS actually happening in your business would be deathly. Vary your Twitter updates (tweets) by including repeats of other people’s tweets (re-tweets or RTs) and links to stuff you’ve seen or heard about that you believe will interest your followers. Which leads us on to…
4. Don’t forget to make almost every Tweet valuable to others. Your business tweets should offer value and information in some shape or form. This could be some news particular to your company or sector, a link to an article, or simply an update about what you’re doing business-wise today. You should be allowed to include several simply personal Tweets too, as this way your followers will get to know (and hopefully respond to) the real person behind your company updates.So, don’t tweet about stuff that is not at all interesting to anyone but you. Twitter is not about me, me, me. Your customers really won’t care about what you had for breakfast (er…unless you’re a restaurant I suppose.) Also, those “Good morning Tweeps!” updates every day have to stop.
5. Don’t Tweet too often (this divides opinion actually). It’s OK being enthusiastic (and let’s assume that all your tweets are reasonably interesting) but don’t overdo it. Whilst there’s no set rule for how often a normal business should tweet each day, my view is that anymore than 25 straight tweets is probably too many (that’s not including any replies to customers or comments on mentions by others). People might start to think you don’t actually run the business if you spend all day tweeting. Plus you can come across as hogging the conversation.
6. Don’t continually sell yourself or your company. Twitter should not be used solely as a direct sales channel. It is NOT direct mail online. It’s astonishing how many businesses only ever use the medium for this purpose. It’s OK to drop in the odd sales push every now and then, but only after you’ve built a good following by using genuinely interesting content and developing some meaningful relationships with others. No hard sell all the time please!
7. Don’t auto-respond. There are applications you can use that automatically send a corporate message of greeting to any Twitter user who follows you. Apparently, many business owners think this is a good idea, but I’ve yet to meet one. People know these auto-responses are exactly that – automatic. They can make your business look insincere and impersonal. And I don’t accept that the quality of the message can make auto-responding OK. Don’t do it – try having a genuinely personal dialogue instead.
8. Don’t forget your manners. Twitter is a series of conversations. You might to try and start a few that nobody listens to, but that’s OK. But always be polite, respectful and kind. Try hard to involve others in your conversations (by using the @ sign followed by their Twitter name). Also – try to listen to what others are saying and join in constructively. Call me old fashioned, but there’s a lot to be said for showing humility, kindness and respect on Twitter – it normally gets a very warm reception. Never be needlessly rude on Twitter about anyone or anything and keep religion and politics off the agenda (er…unless you’re a church or a political party I guess…)
9. Don’t Re-Tweet and not credit the original poster. Twitter is all about sharing information freely with others. Many times you’ll see a great tweet and think “I wish we’d said that!”, but don’t be tempted to pass anything off as your own. Bad form and flies in the face of what Twitter is supposed to be all about.
10. Don’t use Twitter to deal with the sort of customer feedback you should deal with in person. For instance, if you run a hotel business, don’t tweet stuff like “”@unhappy_guest – that smell in your room wasn’t there b4 you checked in. Could it be your shoes?” Need I say more?
11. And finally – please DON’T forget to follow me on Twitter!