The Ten Step Social Media Marketing Checklist | BTalk Australia

(Episode 377; 16 minutes 53) Social media looks like it’s here to stay. It provides great opportunities for business, particularly small business, to engage in low cost marketing. The problem is, of course, if everyone is doing it, how do you stop your voice getting lost in the noise?

On today’s BTalk I talk to Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING, a global network of thousands of graphic designers. He takes us through the 10 things you need to at least consider when embarking on a social media marketing program.

You’ll hear an explanation on how to get the best from:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Blogs
4. Linked In
5. Commenting
6. Mobile Social Networks
7. Monitoring
8. Multimedia
9. Brand management
10. Leveraging combinations of social media tools

Is this helpful? Got something else to add? Leave a comment in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

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• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, welcome to BTalk Australia. Phil Dobbie here again and today it’s the ABC of social media marketing. A checklist of things you should be doing or at least considering.

So do you actually get social media marketing? Social media sites seem to be awash with people advising you on how to use social media for marketing. But is anyone actually using it to sell anything other than social media marketing tips? Can you actually use social media to sell anything else like hair cuts or accountancy services or dog grooming, whatever your business provides? Well, Ross Kimbarovsky is a co-founder of crowdSPRING, which is a community of graphic designers. He has 10 ways that a small business, or any sized business really, can use social media to boost their marketing efforts. He’s on the line from Chicago right now. Now Ross, number one, a fan page on Facebook. Now we all know about Facebook, but what’s a fan page versus a normal Facebook account? And what’ll it do for us?

Ross Kimbarovsky: One of the problems with many businesses who have a normal account is you’re limited to 5000 fans. A fan page lets you get a bit more creative not only with the content that you will put on there, but also expands that limit. Now you can have more people who engage with you and your brand.

Dobbie: Right. OK, number two, is Twitter, now you’re not part of the general fabric of society these days if you don’t tweet it seems. But it is a phenomenon isn’t it really? You really do have to be part of Twitter these days.

Kimbarovsky: It’s interesting because at least for small businesses the studies have been mixed that are looking at the value small businesses have received from Twitter. Some small businesses depending on industry are getting some outstanding value while others are not really sure how to use it. Generally what’s great about Twitter is that you can experiment pretty quickly without investing much time to see if it makes sense for your business. But it gets tough for a lot of different businesses because if your business model is more local then a lot of what you might view on Twitter could be ways because you’re reaching a global audience, not necessarily a local audience.

Dobbie: And I guess the thing with Twitter, and it applies to a lot of social media, is that you’ve got to have a lot to say. You’ve got to have a constant flow of information haven’t you?

Kimbarovsky: And that’s very true. That’s one of the considerations that we as a company look at whenever we consider any social network. So when we looked at Twitter, that’s one of the questions we asked ourselves. Are we prepared to not only engage people on Twitter but continue to engage and provide information? So every business decides that question differently. We’re a community of graphic designers. We have 46,000 graphic designers from all over the world including many from Australia. So one of the ways we use Twitter is to help promote useful content that’s of interest to our small business audience and our designers. Many tutorials, resources, articles about small business. And we think this adds value to those businesses and to the designers who are finding new ways to do certain kinds of design or are learning new ways to save money. And this is one way that many small businesses like ours have effectively leveraged Twitter, which is to provide some value to their customers and potential customers.

Dobbie: Right, now number three is to have a blog. You do again have to have something to say here and you really have to develop your own special niche don’t you?

Kimbarovsky: Yes. So even though small businesses may have a particular niche, what we’ve always found and I’m a big reader of blogs, I read a lot of them, is there are way too many small business blogs that seem to be unfocused and don’t really pick a particular area to try to target. So one of the best things that any small business can do if they have a blog is to try to figure out what that blog does for them. Is it communicating with their existing customers? Is it trying to reach a new customer base? Is it just a fun place for people to hang out periodically and read? Because if you start a blog and don’t really have much strategy associated with it, it’ll be very difficult to leverage it and particularly if you try to leverage it on Twitter, on Facebook and in other networks.

Dobbie: Well another of those networks is number four, which is LinkedIn, which I mean LinkedIn is a bit like Facebook but for serious people, isn’t it really? So what should be your objective with LinkedIn?

Kimbarovsky: Ultimately, the important thing about LinkedIn for most businesses is really to try to understand how their competitors are using LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is a little bit more complicated. It’s a more professional network. And really geared towards individuals as opposed to companies. So the connections are made generally at an individual level. Until very recently, there wasn’t really a conversation on LinkedIn that took place. You left your profile, you talk a little about your business, there was a way to promote certain things and that was it.

Just last week LinkedIn started permitting integration with Twitter. So you actually connect your Twitter account and your LinkedIn account and post your updates to LinkedIn from Twitter. And this is interesting because this is the first step in what appears to be more of a social strategy for LinkedIn. So really the basic advice to small businesses is look at what your competitors are doing, start an account because there’s no harm in just registering an account and put in some basic information about your company. At the end of the day LinkedIn for most small businesses is not going to be particularly useful. If you’re a pizza restaurant, it’s probably not going to be the best place for you to invest your time in social media marketing.

Dobbie: I actually understand as well Microsoft in the next version of Outlook, Outlook 2010, the database is going to be integrated with your LinkedIn account as well, which will be interesting. Number five you’ve said is to leave comments on other people’s blogs. I guess this is an opportunity for you to establish yourself as an expert and leave comments and share how much you know.

Kimbarovsky: Right, this is one way that even a small business that doesn’t have a lot of exposure, particularly let’s say a new business, if you’re starting a new consulting business or a new retail business and you need to let people know you exist, this is a good way to try to meet other people virtually and get to know them. It has a long tail in the sense this doesn’t happen over night when you build these relationships, but this gives you a chance to reach out into the community. So for example if you’re a new accountant and you’re out on your own and you want to offer accounting services, you might participate in other blogs where other accountants are writing articles and engage in conversations with them. And as you build those relationships, you develop the possibility for referrals, where they might refer business to you. You developed an extended network where you might refer business to them. And so that helps you identify people who you might be able to help later and who might be able to help you. It’s an easy way for any small business to try to expand their network.

Dobbie: Now the next one is something which I think might be bigger in the US than it is here in Australia. It’s still emerging here really, but mobile social networks.

Kimbarovsky: Mobile is fairly popular in the US and of course the US is behind Asia in this area because if you look at Japan for example, Japan is far ahead of where the US is. But I think this is important for all small businesses and probably the lesson for Australian businesses —mobile is part of the future. There are, if I remember correctly, more mobile internet users in China than the population of the United States, which is an astounding figure. And so ultimately in the future, most people and we’re not talking about decades, we’re talking about years, most people will be engaging with businesses predominately via their mobile devices. In the US, it’s still very much an emerging market with the companies like Yelp and Four Square. But it’s important for businesses to as soon as they see some potential there, just register the name and then monitor it because even mobile isn’t appropriate for every business. It’s great for let’s say a restaurant chain but it might not be particularly helpful for an accountant.

Dobbie: Right. Yeah, so next one is monitoring. So hearing what’s said about you, but how are you doing that? What sort of tools can you use for this?

Kimbarovsky: There are a number of different tools. So the probably most significant thing that small businesses and really any kind of business must understand is that regardless of whether you participate in conversations or monitor them, people will talk about your business.

They’ll talk about it on Facebook, on Twitter and in other social networks. So the question is how do you engage in conversations? And the first step is really how do you find them? So there are a number of different ways that you can look for them if you want to find a conversation. Google offers alert services. So you can sign up to receive alerts any time a particular keyword is mentioned on a blog or in a forum or in the Google search engine. So that’s number one.

Number two you can listen to conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Facebook allows you to search. And this is a fairly new feature rolled out earlier this year where if you wanted to search for your company’s name, you can see what the people are talking about you. Twitter has a search feature. So if you go to Twitter’s home page and you’re not logged in, there’s a big search box that allows you to search for your company’s name or any keywords. There’s some more sophisticated tools too that get more expensive that are very good like Radian6 which aggregate a lot of information from a lot of different sources. So if you really are investing significant amounts of time in monitoring all of these conversations and people who are writing about you, you might invest a little bit of resources for a more sophisticated tool that will let you do it easily as opposed to using many different services.

Dobbie: Yes and if you get really good at it, I guess you could have a job at ASIO at the end of the day. Now the next one is multimedia. We love our video, of course, but video is expensive and I should imagine this is an area where you can really stuff it up isn’t it?

Kimbarovsky: You can and this one is more complicated because not every business can really leverage multimedia. It really depends on what you’re trying to do in reaching your customers or potential customers and what your capabilities are. So it’s not difficult to record a short video about something and release it on YouTube for example. But the question ultimately, how does it meet any of your goals? So if your goal is to generate potential customers for your business, are your potential customers on YouTube? And if they watch your video, are they going to visit your website?

And not just YouTube, but Flicker is another example where you might post pictures in the same way you would post videos on YouTube. So really important for a business to think about whether their potential customers live on these social networks. And if so, is this content that they’re maybe distributing interesting enough to generate sales or whatever it is, the metric for measuring success.

Dobbie: OK, number nine, and I think this is crucial when there are so many different social media sites and tools available now, brand consistency. I guess you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got the same sort of profile in all of these social networking sites.

Kimbarovsky: Right, so this is one of the mistakes a lot of companies make, whether you’re a small company or big company, when you hesitate about whether for example you might use Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn and don’t register your name, somebody else might do it ahead of you. And so even large companies who initially ignore some of these networks have been paying the price because they lost their brand name. So if you have a business and you’re considering using some of these social networks for your business, at a minimum, check to see if your name is available and register it.

There are two good services that you could use, they’re both free. I’ll name those. One is called namechk (namechk.com) and the other one is called KnowEm (knowem.com). And KnowEm gives you the added benefit of registering your name on multiple services for an added fee, but they’re both pretty good to check dozens and dozens of social networks for the availability of your brand name.

Dobbie: Right, OK. So you go and grab it so that you can use it even if you’re not going to use it, grab it before somebody else does. Now the final one, number 10, is leveraging the combination of these social media tools. So this would be a bit like, for example, when I write a blog entry I’ll go and tweet about it to try and point people to the blog. I guess you’re going to tell me there’s a bit more to it than just that though.

Kimbarovsky: There is. Fundamentally, the reason I think this is very important and remember crowdSPRING is a small business, so there are 10 people and we’re always stretched with our capacity. Whenever we create content and you create content if you’re on Twitter tweeting something or you write a blog post or create a video. We want to maximise how that content is used. So we want to maximise its use on as many social networks as we can or in as many ways as we can. And so you want to try to integrate the various networks you’re in. And just as an example, so you mentioned you can write a blog post and tweet about it.

You could also connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account. So when you are on Twitter, it’ll pass through as updates to Facebook. And you can also connect your blog to LinkedIn so that in your LinkedIn profile, you and people that visit your profile will see your most recent blog post and a short summary of each of those posts. It’s a way to expose your content to a broader audience so that you don’t have to keep creating it over and over, but can reuse it in many different networks.

Dobbie: Right, I’m using TweetDeck as a tool to help me do that. Have you got a favourite application?

Kimbarovsky: I actually use TweetDeck too. I will often also use a service called HootSuite, which is a free service that lets you manage your tweets. So if you want to schedule them in advance for example, some of the content that I might distribute on an ongoing basis, I’ll distribute throughout the day but I don’t have the time always to sit at the computer and periodically post. So I will as I find it, schedule it and then later on the system will automatically add this content into my Twitter stream.

So a business for example that has periodic specials, if you’re a restaurant and you have periodic specials that you want to share with clients, you can do that. You can set up automated tweets effectively on Twitter and you’re connected to Facebook, to Facebook that will promote these specials on a periodic basis. Or if you have menu changes or if you are another kind of business that has periodic sales and you want to promote those sales, you can do the same thing.

Dobbie: They’re all great examples aren’t they really of how you can do sort of low level marketing without spending any money, which is a great opportunity particularly for small business, opportunities that weren’t around before. Ross, do appreciate your time, thanks for talking to me today.

Kimbarovsky: You’re very welcome, I enjoyed talking to you today.

Dobbie: That’s alright, now the problem about using Twitter too much is of course that I now in real life can only hold conversations that are 140 characters long. See? It’s very constraining.