So what are all of these Social Media services anyway, and how can they help your business?
First off, Engagement; Everyone can define this differently but you have to ask yourself, how does what you are doing (or not doing) create a relationship between your brand and the user’? This is important. Social media and other outreach is not just about an end sale. Its about word of mouth, brand management and building momentum in the community that supports your business.
Can word of mouth be measured in dollar value? Probably not. But, positive and negative sentiment and its effect on sales can be. Without a way to listen and be part of the conversation taking place, both on and off line, you have no way to determine any changes were due to your efforts, or lack there of.
Engagement then becomes not only putting information out there in a way that is palatable to your audience, but also listening to what is being said. Social Media services have a wide variety of features that enable a business to accomplish these tasks and much more.
Lunchtime lesson: Creating a sense of a customer community around your business furthers your clientele’s engagement with you and your products or services. And connecting your customers with each other strengthens both their relationships with each other as well as with you.
Lets look at a few real world examples before we go into detail on each of the Social Media services we can provide and manage for you. There are some small businesses doing some amazing things with social media.
Suppose you own a restaurant and you want to increase your daily flow of traffic and you also want to improve customer loyalty.
Using Twitter for example, you can follow your customers if they have a twitter account. Crafting interesting tweets to your followers is one way to market your business. The real power of using twitter is the viral cascade effect of people thinking what you just posted is so interesting or by offering specials that they want to be sure their followers see the same thing, and that’s called re-tweeting.
Kogi BBQ
Kogi BBQ, a Korean BBQ restaurant uses Twitter to tweet out to their followers where there mobile Korean BBQ truck is going to be as it travels around Los Angeles selling Korean tacos.
They’ve built up an impressive 45,000 follower’s base on Twitter by tweeting where their truck is going to roll up next.
The story behind Kogi BBQ is decidedly home-grown, showing that with a personality and a good product you can build up a loyal community. The now-famous taco truck has basically reached cult status and is an excellent how-to for any business who wants to get involved with Twitter.
The Marsh Cafe
With a simple poster in their window, The Marsh Cafe in San Francisco, have seriously demonstrated that they’re ahead of the social media curve. This summer they put up a sign that promoted ‘Foursquare(
) mayor drinks for free!’ The cafe has received lots of coverage for their innovative marketing campaign, including on mainstream media outlets, such as CNN.
Cari Turley, the manager of The Marsh who runs their social media presence, explains that she is an active user of social media including Foursquare, which is how she came up with the idea for the promotion. She says, “Already, a dozen or so people have written to me about how ‘cool’ the offer is, and really, in the Mission District, cool is the best thing you can be.” As for the impact on business? Since starting the offer, The Marsh cafe has a seen a surge in demand and has hired extra staff and extended opening hours to meet it.
Hat tip to www.mashable.com the premier web site for everything social on the web.
Lets dig in a look at how we can help you in a new way, with your online marketing initiatives. Lets get started…
