Finals Week - Reflection on Social Media

As a social media coach and as a constant user of social media to promote my own business, I've taken the last two years of my life and studied trends and techniques of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although its a necessary evil to have a social media platform (and I don't enjoy it as much as I should) there are a few things that I would like to wrap up this semester with, leaving you with some very interesting thoughts of how to approach your social media with your business as you move along. 

What Does It Mean For Me?

The migration to Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and SnapChat show the maturity of the social media space. Use of an online profile to interact with others in a particular arena is now a widely acceptable form of interaction. Technology improves and makes it easier for us to use these platforms and keep tabs on them. For my business (which is evolving), this is a very good thing. The spread of information online is the fastest way to get word out about a new product or business. Its irrelevant as to which platform its on. My plan is to shift focus to where ever the audience is and adapt my business practices around those movements. Those who do not adapt will not survive. And I intend to keep track of where to put my efforts on social media platforms as things change. 

Shift In Social Media 

Since the semester started, major giants like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are starting to reach a maturity phase in their product. They are not growing as fast anymore because... Well frankly and literally the entire world is now on it. Their main priority is a focus on keeping users and not loosing them to other platforms. Therefore, the way in which a business interacts with others is going to change based on how they tailor the site for the individual user. This means that its going to be harder for a business to reach others, and businesses must constantly change their tactics in order to keep pace. 

Impact on My Business

Facebook recently changed their newsfeed to start filtering out promotions and product offerings from businesses that were liked by users. This has taken away a free form of advertising that startups (like me) used to reach an audience. They also made sure that if a company posts a particular amount of information a day to limit their reach to their own users. 

This means that in order for Facebook to be an effective form of advertisement and engagement with customers for business, they have to pay to play. This means that I am going to start focusing my efforts in areas other than Facebook in order to reach an audience. 

My Viewpoint on Social Media

My viewpoint has changed ever so slightly since the start of the semester. Tech companies or new technology like this has a very short life span. Although Facebook will never go away, I started to realize as the semester went on that Facebook is not immune to the product lifecycle and will soon loose its power. Although it will never go away, it will not have the prominence that it has had in the past few years. Thus, what I have learned is that social media giants that may seem invincible  will not always be, and that I need to be aware of what the next platform is in order to jump on in time and stay ahead of my competitors. 

Development and tactics in social media

As the platforms change to keep and bring in more users, businesses must adapt to these and keep their ear to the ground for not only what people listen to, but how. I now know that in the future I will need several people who will both keep their ear to the ground in social media and also constantly change how we interact with those customers across this space. This is a giant pain in the ass that will cost me a lot of money, however it will help keep things afloat and keep my business in the black. 

In Conclusion

All in told, I am not a big fan of social media (even though I teach it). More and more people are going online for their interaction and the space is evolving almost daily. The amount of effort required to keep pace with all of this is absolutely exhausting, but a necessary evil in order for a business to thrive. 

Thank you all for a wonderful class. 

Week 13 - Changes to Analytics

I've been using Google Analytics for a long time now with my business, and I've been able to monitor the long term trends over time. There are some very direct things I've learned about inbound traffic and what it means by using this system. Here is what I have observed. 

Social Media Works

When I post to social media, regardless if its a link to my own web page or not, it will bring more traffic. Getting your company on the news feed of others will make them wonder about you and give them the opportunity to go to your website. 

Photo paint a bad picture

I have a post with a photo of a vampire in it, clearly explaining why people need to stop using vampires in their novels. And lo and behold, traffic started to pour in. But I could see that it was not because of the in length article I wrote, but because of google searches for pictures of vampires. Therefore, you have to be careful about associating a photo with your post and it inflating the kind of traffic you get to your site. 

Flow

There are advance features in there that let you see what the flow is of where people go once they land on your site and how many drop offs you get. The drop off rate is the most important number you need to be looking at. If most people drop off after the first post, you need to figure out how to keep them engaged. 

Week 13 - Google Analytics

Oh the joys of looking at analytics. This is the equivalent to watching the stock market rise and fall with every click and change you make to your website: its rough, volatile, and changes mostly with out you really knowing why.

And now we are going to talk about all those lovely changes and the pain... I mean wonder', of what analytics can do for your mental health... and business.

Step 1 - Overwhelm yourself

When you first get analytics, you're going to find that there are a massive amount of tools, ways to organize information, and burry yourself with numbers and facts. Most of those tools will just make your head spin and it will take some time to settle before you can see straight. 

Step 2 - Look at Behavior

In the behavior section, the most important thing you need to find is what people are looking at and what people are engaged with. Look at "site content" and "all pages" and you will get a list of how many page views you are getting for particular pages. This is especially effective when you have a blog post and want to see how much traffic each blog post is getting you. 

Step 3 - Look at Landing Pages

In the same column under behavior and near "all pages" and find "landing pages". This is going to help you understand where your traffic is coming from and what they are landing on first. This is extremely important because you'll want to make sure those pages have calls to action or lead them to other pages on your site. Focus sprucing those things up. 

Step 4 - Acquisition

Look under the Acquisition tab and find "All Traffic". This is going to tell you exactly where all your traffic is coming from. Weather that be an inbound link for a website, blog, or social media site, its going to show it. When you do get that influx of people from that site, think about how many came in and how you can foster the relationship with that website to have them keep posting. 

Step 5 - Leave it along

If you start looking at anything else, your head is going to start spinning and possibly explode. Just worry about how much engagement you are getting per post and fostering relationships with those that help spread your site. 

Week 12 - Other Social Media Tools

Have enough social media yet? Let me place the fire hose right up to your face and turn it on full blast.

There are multiple different social media tools out there that are all trying to ride the coat tails of how powerful social media is. Some have been around for a while but are less used. Some just came about and have seen some success. Others go after a targeted market and smaller community. But the point is that there are an endless amount of social media tools that you can use for your small business. Here are a few that you can consider.

Google Plus 

Google plus (aka the ugly child of the big social media companies) is one of the most under utilized social media platforms out there that has mass similar to that of Facebook and Twitter. Powered by Google, anyone who has a gmail account automatically generates a Google plus page. Therefore, the site boasts to have over 500 million active users and accounts. 

Check out my personal Google Plus page, along with the business google plus page for my company, Social Publishing House. 

Google On Air

Also, since we are talking about Google Plus, this platform has an incredibly useful feature that will help increase your online platform and visibility on search engines. Its called "Google On Air", which is akin to Skype but functions more like an online webinar that will be filed under your YouTube channel. You can embed it into a blog post, promote it to have people attend and watch, and now have a steady stream of YouTube videos you can use to promote your business. 

Here's an example of a video I did with one of the contest winners for the writing contest that I held. 

HootSuite

Now that the fire hose is going, trying to keep tabs on all of those social media profiles can become a tremendous amount of work. HootSuite is one of the more useful tools for linking all your social media to one platform and managing it. You can also schedule posts in advance, keep tabs on key words and hashtags, and do all of your communication from one screen. If you use more than three social media platforms for your business, you need to try this out. 

Google Drive

As you can see, I'm a big proponent of using Google products. Google Drive is one of those things thats not necessarily social media specific, however the programs that you can use within it can make managing and plugging content into social media much easier than how it used to happen. 

Google Drive is whats called "Cloud Based Software", which stores all your documents on a server instead of on your actual computer. From there, you can access it from any device you have. Others can access those documents and work on them as well, saving their work every 15 seconds. Multiple people can work on them at the same time. 

Gone are the days when you have to email documents back and forth, worry about version control, or losing your work. If you use this for social media, you can create pictures, blog posts, plans, editorial calendars, and just about anything under the sun you would need to manage your social media and online platform. 

Give it a shot. 

Week 11 – Marketing with no budget

I got the itch one day.

Normally my want to play online video games or massive online multiplayer games is quelled by the mound of unfinished books on my bookshelf. But when my work load gets to heavy, I need that outlet. After being out of the gamer sphere for so long, I had no idea where to get my fix.

So instead of doing an Internet search for top games, I simply posted a Facebook status update asking what good games were out that my friends might be playing.

The response was immediate. A dozen friends chimed into the conversation, telling me about the new game Destiny or the new release of World of War craft. After seeing that most of my friends played Destiny and all recommended it above anything else, I was downloading the game.

Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising that you can’t buy. None of my friends were paid to tell me that Density is a good game (which its alright by the way. Not the best). What matters is that I trust them because I know them better than the banner ads flashing on the right side of my Facebook news feed.

Its in this realm that you can try and advertise using social media. And in fact, it has little to do with using social media at all.

Pour your advertising budget into your product

Make a good product or give good service. Plain and simple. Marketers spend billions of dollars on ads for products that people sometimes bash in the social media atmosphere. Put as much time and effort into making a product that works, that impresses your customers, and makes them happy after they experience your service.

What does that have to do with social media?

Everything.

When they get done using your service or buying your product, they talk about it. They will post it on Facebook, write a review, take a picture and upload it. The customers will advertise it for you rather than you having to do it yourself. And its more effective because people will trust their friends more than you as a company.

How to leverage it

All you need to do is have a presence on social media and stay somewhat current. Your pages for your product and website need to be easily accessible and sharable through social media. Have photos they can share and material they find interesting. And have a hashtag they can latch onto. Once you have those, focus on delivering a good product and service. The rest will speak for itself through your own customers.

Week 11 – Use of ads

Online social media sites are now the new battleground of advertisement’s. You can’t go more than two scrolls through your news feed without seeing and ad creepily tailored to your likes and profile information. Although creepy and invasive, ads through social media really work well. So well in fact, that we are learning about it in this class for use for our own (fictitious) business.

Designing an ad

Designing an ad takes a little more than Photoshop and a few hours. What you say, how you position it, even down to how you color it, all have factors in how people perceive it and if they want to interact with it. The book focuses on some principles of design, however I want to address some factors that are more on the ground level and from practical experience (to give you a break from rereading all the regurgitated language from the text book that most students copied for the assignment) Be Obvious – The message needs to be straightforward. When someone looks at the ad, they need to understand right away what you are trying to convey.

Be Simple – Anything that takes them longer than 2 seconds to decipher will confuse and keep people away. This is social media, where attention span lasts shorter than a four year old on Christmas morning.

Capture attention – There needs to be content in the add that appeals to your target market. For example, if you are a beer company, your target market is man between the ages of 21 and 30. 

Therefore, a beautiful woman drinking a beer is the stopping power you need. Selling baby food? Put a baby playing with a puppy and you’ll have women snap too for the ad. Cheating? Yes, but it works and people do it often.
 

Use of Banner Ads

Banner ads online and in social media are tricky. Facebook is the main area where banner ads are being utilize to gain attention of a target audience. The reason why banner ads are so useful on this platform is because of the information Facebook has about each of its users. Want to target men who like foot ball, drink beer, and sit around playing video games all day? No problem. Facebook knows when they drink, what teams they follow, and what their favorite weapon is in Call of Duty. That kind of detail offers marketers creating ads a very fine way to target someone. And you can do the same thing if you want to.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter is another way to get your message out to a large and attention deficit audience. However, the ads end up showing in the news feed rather than on the side like Facebook. This is also less of image advertising and more script (under 140 characters). The potential to reach a large audience quickly on this platform with ads is just as powerful. However, Facebook would be a more long term advertising route that Twitter. If you are going to advertise on Twitter, I would suggest you use this for a promotion or coupon that involves a quick call to action. This is a great way to boost traffic to a website or boost sales in the short run. Over a long period of time, it will not work based on how much information is pushed through Twitter.

 

Ads for my business 

During the course of this class, my business is taking a different direction. I will be rebranding the company a book publishing company to that of an eBook distributor. With that in mind, I am going to employ a different marketing strategy than most would when it comes to using social media.

 I know the assignment it to come up with an ad and post a screen shot, but I’m not going to do it. Unless you have a large budget with a team to develop an effective advertisement, the work and monetary allocation will not equal the amount of interaction and conversion that you might need, especially as a start up company with a limited budget.

 Go ahead instructors; hit me with a few points lost. I’m not going through the motions of creating an advertisement that I am not going to use.

 To counter the homework, instead of explaining why ads are effective, I am going to explain why they are no longer affective in the social media space. Keep your hands and arms inside the ride at all times kids; you’re about to learn something new.

 Ad space is incredible crowded – according to studies, people see around 5,000 advertisements a day. Everywhere you look, be that online or just walking down the street, you are bombarded by brands and commercials from every which way. People are becoming numb to it and seeking areas where they are not inundated by commercials. Marketers are fast to follow, but case in point there’s way to many that people just ignore.

Lack of trust – Consumers find banner ads online to be the least trusted form of advertising. Most of us grew up with false banner ads and pop ups that lead to sites that mostly likely have viruses, result in spam, or tricked the consumer into visiting the site that is not what they intended.

They’re incredibly expensive – I’ll bet after taking a look at what it might cost to run an ad to a large audience on Facebook, you’ll agree with me that its becoming rather expensive. With how these social media companies are growing in terms of users, the ad space will only become more and more expensive.
 

In conclusion

Go ahead and read my next post that will show you my tactics for getting the word out about your company over social media.

Week 10 - Email Marketing

Email marketing can be effective if done correctly. Businesses have a tendency to over to do sometimes, such as sending out emails daily. For a small business, learning how to have the right blend of content and consistence for each news letter or email you send it a delicate dance that could be the difference between a customer visiting the site again, or ending up in the spam folder.

I've done a little bit of emailing with news letters for my business. Lets go over some of the possible content that I have used in the past. These are both things that my customers enjoy and have proved to be effective.

Writing Contest

On my website, I have a tab specifically for holding a monthly writing contest to help find new writers. When the page it not active, it allows customers to input their email for updates on the contest. When it is active, they must enter their email address in order to participate. 

The news letter that I created has one of two types of messages

1. A call to action announcing that the contest is under way and that submissions are being accepted

2. An update as to who the winners are. 

These are sent out once every two weeks or when there is new information to share with the competitors for the contest. 

Blog Posts

I have a separate email list for people who signed up for the news letter and updates about new blog posts. Here, I created a special template that showcases the last three blog posts that were written. I only send this email out once every two weeks.

Press Releases

For any major updates, such as a new author, publication of an ebook, or advancement of the company, I put into a small press release in the form of a blog post. I sent the email out with a small synopsis for the article, then the link for the blog post. This one I push out to people when new things occur in the company, which comes out to an average of about once every month. I also integrate new blog posts into this one, so I am not sending more emails out than I need to. 

Conclusion

The idea is not to send an inordinate amount of email to your recipients. Once a week is more than enough. You also want to make sure that they sign up for the updates and that you do not input their email address into your mailing list without their permission. There is nothing that makes a customer more angry than getting email when they didn't ask for it.