Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #9 Engage your Audience

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Once you’ve created your presence on social media sites, you are ready to start syndicating your content and building your followers.

When you post content to the various social media sites you’ve created, it’s a good idea to customize it whenever you can.  If you are posting to Twitter, you need to limit your post to 140 characters, but you’ll have more room on LinkedIn or Facebook, so use it if you have something important to say.

You can also take advantage of tools that allow you to post content once, and then have it automatically flow to other sites. For example, you may want to set up your LinkedIn account to automatically take of your Twitter posts and display them there.  This will save you time and make it easier to leverage the work you are doing to build content on various sites at the same time.

Most of your content will be appropriate for you own properties, but don’t forget to post content to groups or blogs where it’s appropriate.  This can often give you much broader reach than posting to your own properties, especially at first when you don’t have many followers and fans. As you get more engaged with groups, you may want to alter your content creation calendar to create more content that’s appropriate for groups, since it often needs to be less self-promotional. These groups can be wonderful places to build your reputation with your target audience and encourage them to follow you.

Interaction on social media sites is much more than a one way conversation. In many ways, you should think of this as two-way conversation in a live group setting.  If you walk into a network event and only talk about yourself, you’ll be soon considered boring and self-centered. The result will be that you’ll have few friends and you’ll spend most of your time talking to yourself.

In a social situation, you’ll do much better if you listen as much as you talk, and if you’re as interested in commenting on others success, as you are interested in your own.

These same principles apply to social media.  The more interactive and interested you can be with others, the more engaged people will be with you.

All users, of course, are not equally influential, so play special attention to people with large groups of fans and followers. It will make a much bigger impact if you can engage a person with 25,000 followers as opposed to a person with just 500 followers.  Focus on the most important people, but engage with everyone you can, and you’ll be seen as a friendly, easy person to connect with.

As you interact with people, it’s also important to notice and respond to what others are saying with personal comments. These types of posts can make you seem real and approachable. It may feel like you are using social media site as you would email to say “thanks” or “nice work”, but remember that others will see this and it will enhance your reputation as being approachable, positive and easy to work with.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #8 Create Editorial Calendar

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Once you have your social media sites set up, it’s time to create a plan to create and distribute the content. For some companies that means creating all new content, while others have a great deal of content that can be repurposed for the social media campaign.

Some organizations take a casual approach to creating content, while others are much more deliberate.  In the casual approach, you may look at your accounts every day and decide what content to write and post. This approach allows you to be very dynamic and responsive to content you see across the Internet. Your content will be very fresh, but it can also be stressful to think of new ideas for content and posts each day.

A more deliberate approach would be to create an editorial calendar which will become your guide to the themes for each day or each week. You can organize your editorial calendar around content like white papers or webinars, or around events such as conferences or trade shows. By knowing what your core content or themes are each week, you’ll be able to be more thorough in covering your subjects. It’s also easier to include others in the content creation process since you can schedule specific contributors into your schedule.

It’s helpful to manage the editorial calendar in monthly and quarterly views.  By planning one to three months ahead, you can take into account new product launches, events and other activities that will drive new content for you.

Just because you have an editorial calendar doesn’t mean that you won’t be dynamic or responsive to the market.  It gives you a framework to guide all of your content creation activities.

When you build your content plan remember that you won’t need to develop all of your own content.  It’s perfectly acceptable to repurpose other people’s content within your campaign. This serves two purposes. First, by posting links to other good content you’ll position your company as the thought leader and expert in the industry.  Second, the organization you like to will recognize the traffic you are sending to them and be more likely to repost your content.  This is a very important way to get broader distribution for your content.

Before you launch your social media properties make sure you set up tracking so that you can see the impact of your work.  Two tools that are very helpful here are URL shortening tools, and website analytics tools.  URL shorteners allow you to track the number of people that click on the links in your tweet and post.  The also shorten the URLs you use to make the fit in sites like Twitter that impose character constrains on the content you post.

Website analytics programs like Google analytics enable you to see the impact of your work on website traffic and your goals.  Once you set it up properly, you’ll be able to see how much traffic comes back your website from each social media site, what those visitors did once the got to your site, and how many goal conversions resulted from you social media activities.

Another key step before you launch is to make sure that your website and landing pages are integrated with your social media program.  It’s easy to put social media sharing tags on your landing pages, emails and home page to allow people to share your content with their network.  You should also give people the ability to follow you from your website.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #7 Creating Social Media Platforms

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Once you are prepared for your social media launch, you are ready for the next step of creating the actual social media site. Many people think this is the fun part since it’s when your ideas turn into designs, graphics, content and web pages on the social media site.

The first step is to decide which sites you are going to use. The most popular sites are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Even though these are the top sites, you don’t need to use all of these, and you can add others if you feel that there is a site that’s more appropriate in your industry. Often we see B2C firms skip using LinkedIn, and B2B firms skip using Facebook. I believe that both of these sites can be used for any industry, but if you have limited resources, this is a good guideline.

With each of these sites you’ll need to register and secure a page with the name of your company.  If your preferred name is already taken, then choose something close that is short, make sense and is easy for your readers to remember.

Most of the channels allow you to create custom design and graphics to improve your branding on other otherwise bland pages.  You should definitely take advantage of this option by creating a strong design that engages the user.

Each of the social media sites needs to be thought of as a unique “micro site” with special design and content needs.

Twitter and YouTube both offer the opportunity to create a custom design background to reinforce your brand and give the user additional information about you.  Facebook lets you create banners and other graphics that tell your story.  LinkedIn let’s you create custom product pages that give more detail on your company, products and services.  In all of these sites, make sure you provide the user with all of the information you can. Writing the content for these sites is a little like writing a small website, so plan time to create the content you need.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #6 Develop Policies and Workflow

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The final step of preparation for a successful Social Media campaign is to develop the internal policies and workflow you’ll need to manage the program. For some companies, this is a simple as using the popular motto, “do no harm”, and setting them free to connect as they thing best. Other organizations, especially large organizations, will need to create a social media policy document which defines what can and cannot be shared on social media. If you have multiple people involved in the program or if you are working with an outside vendor, you’ll also need to create an approval workflow to make sure that the right people approve content that is posted on social media site.

In a simple example, your Director of Marketing may be empowered to create and post content as he or she feels is appropriate, knowing that they are fully accountable for results.  In a more complex example, you may have a copywriter or outside agency create content, send it to the Director of Marketing for content approval then to your in-house council for legal approval before it’s sent back to the agency to be posted.  Obviously, the second approach won’t be as spontaneous and responsive as the first, but if legal approval is important in your industry, then you’ll need to live with it.

Whatever your policies or process, it’s important to document them so that employees are protected and everyone is on the same page.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #5 Identify Content and People

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Social Media programs require a lot of content, so instead of planning to create everything from scratch, take an inventory of what already exists that you can use for this program.

Do you have video, white papers, presentations, case studies, web pages, articles or even press releases that can be repurposed for your social media campaign?  You may not want to take a two year old case study and pass it off as new content, but there is no reason you can’t repackage key facts in the case study for a series of tweets, or even promote it again on Twitter.  You should build as comprehensive an inventory of content as possible so that you can avoid recreating the wheel and hit the ground running with a stream of strong content.

Social media is very personal.  Your readers will want to know who they are talking to, and learn as much about them as possible.  It’s important, therefore, to recruit a group of internal leaders who can act as spokespeople for the campaign.  It’s wonderful if your CEO is a gifted writer and can invest time for the social media campaign, but it’s also fine to have a group of executives who will participate in the program over time.

To get leverage in a social media program, you’ll want to get other industry influencers to talk about you and pass along your content to their audience.  You can find these people by searching for twitter users who are talking about your or your keywords with the most followers.  You can also search for people in your industry using a service which ranks their overall influence.  Since you have limited time to get build relationships with influencers, spend your time getting the most influential people in your industry to like and promote your content.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #4 Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking

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Since most of the Internet is public, you can get a good understanding of what your competitors are doing with social media and learn from them before you launch.  To get started, look at their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube Accounts.  Look at what they are saying, how many fans and followers they have and who is following them.

When you are doing your research, remember to write down the key metrics so that you compare your growth to their growth over the coming months and years. As I mentioned above, you can also subscribe to their brand on Google Reader and keep track of what they are saying and what people are saying about them.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #3 Active Listening

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A critical step in preparing to launch a social media campaign is listening to your market. What are they saying about your company, your competitors and the issues you care about? To get a pulse of the market, you can subscribe to groups on LinkedIn or Facebook, and set up Google reader to get a constant stream of what the market is talking about.

I’ve been a Google Reader fan and advocate for quite some time now here at Nowspeed. Google Reader is more than just an information aggregator – it’s a great way to keep tabs on my company, competitors, clients in the news, the blogosphere, and on Twitter and helps me stay up-to-date on marketing news.  Here’s how I use my Google Reader account:

First I subscribe to important keywords in Google News, Blogs, and Twitter.  I can monitor my favorite branded keywords across key sites to see if people are talking about them and what they’re saying. This information helps me to better understand the market and how people feel about my company and my competitors.

Another way to use Google reader is to subscribe to industry leading blogs and Twitter accounts. To stay on top of my clients’ industry and the marketing industry, I follow industry leader’s blogs and Twitter accounts. It’s a quick and easy way to find out any new trends or interesting findings, without requiring much research.

Setting up Google Reader can take some time, so I follow my coworkers and friends Google Reader accounts and read their subscriptions. I’ll often find new topics of interest and new industry leaders this way.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #2 Understand the Audience – Personas

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Once you understand your goals, you can begin to prepare to create your social media campaign. Before you create the first site graphic or tweet, however, it’s critical to understand your audience. Will you be speaking to a B2B audience or B2C?  Which industry, demographic, locations do they represent?

Since social media communication can be personal and informal, it’s helpful to create several profiles or personas that represent the different segments you’ll be communicating with. Several of my clients do this by actually giving names to the people in the segment and thinking of them as a person.

For example, if you are selling to the IT market, you might invent “Susan”, the 45 year old CIO of a medium sized company, and “Terry”, the Database Consultant. When you start to think about the content that your market needs, it’s easier if you can personalize it by thinking of what Susan and Terry might need.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Social Media Success in 14 Steps: #1 Understand Your Investment

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Since many of the tools used in social media marketing are free, the majority of your investment will come from time invested in creating content, syndicating it across the appropriate social media sites and then measuring and optimizing the program. When planning how much time you will invest in your program consider mapping out your investment per activities such as developing goals, listening and engagement, creating and syndicating content and tracking, reporting and team training. Remember that your level of effort and the cost of that time become the denominator in the ROI formula – ROI = Return/Investment.

In order to calculate the ROI of your social media marketing program, you also need to quantify the “return” part of the ROI formula. Again, ROI = Return/Investment. Since most of your social media activity will result in more web traffic, you can easily measure this traffic and the business value of the traffic. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, you can set up a segment report that shows the visits from specific social media sites. You can also see how many people “converted” on one of your landing pages.

You can measure brand impact through the number of positive and negative mentions you get on blogs or sites such as Twitter. Another measure is the number of times your content gets passed along or retweeted. Also, look at the conversion rate of the offers on your website. If more people are buying or requesting information as a percentage of the total visits, you can attribute this uplift to more effective branding.

Once you start tracking your program keep the key performance indicators organized in a marketing dashboard and be sure to track key metrics such as retweets, comments, clicks, followers/fans and conversions.

If you’d like to read my white paper on Social Media Success in 14 Steps, please click here.

Preparing for the Google AdWords Exam

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When I was asked to write a blog on how to prepare for the Google AdWords exam my first thought was “that’s simple. Just study”. However, I do realize there are people out there who are just starting out in PPC or have never needed to take the Google AdWords exam. So I’ll start from scratch.

The first thing you want to do when preparing for the exam is visit the Google AdWords Certification Learning Center. 

There you will find everything you need to prepare yourself for the Google AdWords Certification Exam. The nice thing is that if you click on one of the exams on the page Google shows you everything you need to study. For example, if you click on the Google advertising fundamentals exam link, Google makes the things you do not need to study non-clickable.

Now for those of you who learn through action as opposed to reading (like myself). I recommend while you are studying, you go through the steps in your PPC account. For example, one of the sections for the fundamentals exam is Account Management Basics. When you click on the link it takes you to an informational page that talks about the 6 main tabs in your account. While you are reading, I suggest you go through the tabs in your account. This at least lets you see what Google is talking about. I also suggest writing notes. Sometimes it’s a little easier to retain information if you write it out.

The exam itself has two parts. The first part is the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam. This part of the certification is mandatory for everyone looking to become certified. The second part of the exam lets you pick between three options:

  1. Search Advertising Advanced Exam
  2. Display Advertising Advanced Exam
  3. Reporting & Analysis Advanced Exam

When studying for the second exam you should use the same model as studying for the first. However, pay close attention to any hypothetical situations Google might use. The second exam tends to be a little more detailed than the first exam. This is probably why they call them “advanced” exams.

A very important part to remember is that you do not have to take both exams back-to-back. Google allows you to take the fundamentals exam, and then take your second exam when you’re ready.

All four exams require that the test taker reach a certain mark to be considered as passing. They are as follows:

  1. Google Advertising Fundamentals – 85% or higher
  2. Search Advertising Advanced Exam – 80% or higher
  3. Display Advertising Advanced Exam – 70% or higher
  4. Reporting & Analysis Advanced Exam – 75% or higher

Lastly, remember that it is just a test and that if you don’t pass the first time you can always take it again. 5 years ago it happened to me, but I’m still here both happy and certified.