Simply put, people respond to stories and story telling is one of the best secret weapons you can have when it comes to social media marketing. This story telling technique is what creates a buzz and brings followers and fans to your business.
When you start telling a story it shows that you are coming out and reaching to people. It makes you and your business more human. Social media users don’t want to interact with a business that is anonymous and has no face. However, if you start telling stories of your business in the form of images, videos and written commentary, you actually start showing the human side of your business and brand which makes it more attractive to your target audience.
Measure Your Success
One of the great benefits of social media marketing is that you can measure its success by leads and customers, rather than the more traditional web metrics, such as page views, time spent on a page and bounce rates etc.
Each of the social networks have their own analytics to help you assess the impact of your efforts. For example, in Facebook you can instantly see how many times a post has been shared. On Twitter you can see how many times your most recent Tweet has been re-tweeted.
However you can you also get a much more direct feel for how successful social media marketing has been by how many sales or leads you get. The results should be instantly apparent.
A major advantage of social marketing is that there are no charges to post on social media networks, and provided your posts are interesting and they are being viewed and shared, your message is getting out there without you having to pay for it.
Of course doesn’t come without some cost because while the medium is free, your time isn’t. You will need to invest a significant amount of time in your social marketing efforts if you want to get it right. An important part of social marketing is managing the conversation you have with your customers and there’s no more direct, or public way of doing this than via social media.
You might have noticed that social networks are placing a lot of emphasis on displaying adverts or charging companies to promote some of their messages. Your initial reaction might be that it doesn’t make sense to pay for a promotion if you can get your message out for free with good content. However, we do recommend that you consider social media adverts as an option. Facebook advertising and promoted tweets can be very cost effective in the right circumstances. We can advise you or give you some assistance if this is an avenue you want to take.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
While there are many advantages to social media marketing, lets not forget that the power of social media can be used for bad as well as good.
There are many cases where businesses have reacted badly to some feedback or comments made on Facebook or their other social media sites and have been embroiled in public heated debates with their customers and potential customers. Perhaps you have witnessed something like this yourself or know of some examples of your own.
Even large companies are not immune to social media slip-ups. Early in 2014, Mastercard’s PR company recently made a hashtag of things by asking that all journalists seeking to attend the 2014 Brit Awards make at least one tweet with mention of Mastercard and that they include a specific hashtag that they wanted the journalists to promote.
The request instantly backfired and journalists started to use the hashtag to criticise the request. The PR company defended its action but you can imagine how hard it is to try and shake off negative publicity like that. It was a huge social media faux pas.
It emphasises the importance of thinking very carefully about every Tweet, Facebook post or Instagram picture you post. Never act on impulse. Every piece of content needs to be carefully thought out and planned.