Social media imperatives for small businesses
Jul 1st
My friend Nathan Egan recently gave an interview to Business Week describing the imperatives for small business to engage in social media marketing. Here are some of the highlights:
1) Social media is new but it’s not going away. It’s a valuable new extension of traditional business communication. Jump aboard!
2) Your competition is going to be doing it, if they aren’t already. You need to make a start and take the time to learn it, now!
3) For many small business owners, social media is an excellent way for virtual networking, providing a highly-efficient method for finding new customers and business contacts.
4) Social media is highly-customizable to fit your business needs. It’s not just about getting a Facebook page. There is no cut-and-paste blanket strategy. Tailor to your existing communication strategy and customer needs.
5) Take a slow, strategic, approach. Before you begin, take some time to learn. See what’s out there. Monitor activity. Listen before you start engaging. Set aside at least 10 minutes a day to read and become familiar with your options.
6) Set up RSS news feeds to help you define your strategy and learn about what’s going on.
7) Setting up social media initiatives takes time, but keep an eye on the long-term costs-savings. A highly cost-effective way to go to market compared to traditional media.
Take advantage of short-cuts and automated systems. There are many free applications to help you work more efficiently once you get started.More from Nathan Egan:
Lessons from a marketing strategy gone wrong (mine!)
Jun 29th
The theme for the blog this week is “strategy” and the first thing I needed to do is turn the microscope on myself.
It’s ugly. I have not been following my own rules … but let’s see what you might learn from my mistakes.
Something I have preached relentlessly: When you start a social media strategy, it needs to be integrated into your overall business objectives … which hopefully are aligned with customer wants and needs. Remember, social marketing is still MARKETING. Same fundamental rules apply.
My traditional core business is providing low-cost marketing services to businesses in the Southeast U.S. When I started this blog a few months ago, I had that objective and those customers firmly in mind. But then it all went wrong.
Here’s what’s happened:
- Over time I have been writing less about small business marketing fundamentals, and more about B2B and social media. It’s what’s interesting to me right now, so I went with it!
- The people who read my blog and follow my tweets now come from all over the world — relatively few from my core market.
- Based on my social media presence, including the blog, Twitter, and my web page, I am getting new customers from California, Switzerland and Australia — not what I originally had in mind.
In a matter of weeks, my core business competency and customer base changed dramatically, because my message and audience changed dramatically. Isn’t that interesting? I wasn’t consistent and now I’m challenged to match my STRATEGY to my inconsistent MESSAGE!!
How did this happen? I lost sight of my core mission because writing the blog became so much fun. I wasn’t “marketing.” I was being me. And it worked out fine. I didn’t choose my audience. My audience chose me.
What did I learn? Perhaps in social media, “being me” IS the strategy.
How do you handle a crowd of followers?
Jun 25th
My article on “Why do I need 10,000 followers” seemed to tap into the frustration and anxiety of many people who are struggling with the meaning of our new Twitter relationships. One Twitter friend, who I have never met, called me and discussed the issue for an hour!
If you haven’t read some of the blog reader comments, please do — they’re great! The article also enabled a lively debate on Linked-In. I wanted to cross-pollinate the conversations and those folks allowed me to re-print just a small selection of their insights:
“If I happened to accumulate 10,000 followers through organic growth, I would consider that to be a good thing. There’s no way you can have “an effective, reasonable connection” with everyone … Like a famous musician, actor, or even writer, you’re not going to be able (or want) to spend all of your time connecting with your fans.
“To be quite blunt, I’m only going to spend a certain amount of time with them, collectively and individually. So my engagement with Twitter isn’t going to scale proportionally to the volume of my followers … I’m very happy to have this asymmetric relationship …”
“Once I was following 400+ I found that it was just too much to keep up the same quality level of interaction. That web page just seemed like a huge wave of noise coming at me. One approach I’ve found helpful is to segment and to create individual Twitter ID’s for different sectors with which I work … I also use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to review the multiple accounts independently or collectively at a glance.”
Nancy Scott
“Before I follow, I read somebody’s blog carefully to see if I can connect with their knowledge and their perspective. I started out primarily following marketing bloggers, but have expanded to following all manner of folks who interest me.”
“Before I follow, I read somebody’s blog carefully to see if I can connect with their knowledge and their perspective. I started out primarily following marketing bloggers, but have expanded to following all manner of folks who interest me.”
Mark Ruvelson
“I’m not sure what the magic number is as far as how many followers you should have, or how many people you can actually keep up with following … I have a friend who’s tweeting on behalf of his business, and his approach is to follow as many people he can and grow his community through follow backs. OK, so he has close to 2,000 followers, I have just around 300. Is his group more valuable than mine? Larger yes, but maybe not better, as I’m not so sure how relevant some of his followers are. I’ve chosen not to follow his approach; I feel like the right thing for me anyway is to keep on posting clever, interesting tweets, and let the community grow at its own pace.”
“I’m not sure what the magic number is as far as how many followers you should have, or how many people you can actually keep up with following … I have a friend who’s tweeting on behalf of his business, and his approach is to follow as many people he can and grow his community through follow backs. OK, so he has close to 2,000 followers, I have just around 300. Is his group more valuable than mine? Larger yes, but maybe not better, as I’m not so sure how relevant some of his followers are. I’ve chosen not to follow his approach; I feel like the right thing for me anyway is to keep on posting clever, interesting tweets, and let the community grow at its own pace.”
Why do I need 10,000 followers?
Jun 23rd
Photo credit: I don’t know. Probably some porn site. This is an actual Twitter follower of the guy mentioned in the article. If this is a picture of you and you’re not in the porn industry, I apologize. I was just trying to make a point. Now go put on a tee shirt.
The other day I received a direct message on my Twitter account that gave me pause:
Mark – why so few followers when it seems you have great content? Is that part of your strategy? Just looked-thought it would be more …
At first I felt defensive. Well — I LIKE my 400 followers. I’ve only been doing this a few weeks. That seems pretty good. Right??
So I decided to check out the guy who sent me the message. He has over 12,000 followers and 700 connections on Linked-in. I felt Twitter Envy swelling in my chest. Is it possible to exhibit alpha male behavior on Twitter?
I looked over his list of followers and what I found astounded me. Many of them had names like “HelpYouMakeCash” or “Psychic123.” Tons of them had names like “pS5bo1g6″ with no photos. And a very high number featured icon photos with women baring their chest, or nearly so. Who would brag about a community filled with this stuff?
When I get followers bearing (baring?) those attributes I knock ‘em out. First, I’m not in the same game that they are. Second, I would not want any one in my Twitter community I would not proudly introduce to my kids.
What’s the point of all of this social media stuff anyway? I’m writing this blog and Twittering on a regular basis to contribute to the dialogue with a group of insanely cool people. I have learned SO MUCH from you guys out there. I like my new online peeps. I get excited when you respond to a blog post or RT one of my Tweets.
I genuinely want to CONNECT with my growing community but already have some concerns as the followers grow each week. At some point I think it will become too much and I haven’t thought of a next step. I want to be a good community member. Is that possible with a thousand followers? How do we build a sustainable, manageable community with a meaningful dialogue?
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