2010 June | Spiderworking.com's Social Networking blog

June 30, 2010

4 Tips to creating a social media strategy.

Often when we start out using Social Media to promote our businesses we are stabbing around in the dark, trying things out. There is nothing wrong with this to start with, many of us learn from our experiences but many others end up giving up on their campaign before they’ve had a chance to find their feet.

Whichever of the above categories you fit into having a social media strategy will save you time, energy and give you goals and measurable.

Here are our 4 top tips for creating a Social Media strategy.

1. Your Target Market

Who is your customer? Think about where they hangout online, which sites and blogs do they already follow? who do they listen to online – who are their influencers? what they are interested in and what sort of content you can provide that will draw them in?

Some markets are easy to identify online. Business to consumer businesses can almost be sure that their customer is on Facebook. Those selling predominantly to other businesses are more likely to find their target market on Linkedin.

2. Monitoring

To find out where your target market are hanging out, and to assess what is already being said about your brand and your business it is important to spend some time monitoring social media. There are a number of free tools available, some of which we have showcased here on this blog and in our podcast.

Our current favorite free tools are:

Google Alerts

Twitter Advanced Search

How Sociable

Who’s Talkin

Social Mention

and

Addictomatic (for a bit of fun!)

Monitoring will show you who is already in your space and how they are using social media. Your next step is to do something subtly different which will draw attention to your business. As with all marketing it is your USP that will appeal to your audience so it is important to know what it is.

3. Your Goals

What do you want to achieve from your campaign? Obviously brand awareness and sales but how are you going to achieve this?

You need to consider what you are going to measure in order to know if your campaign is successful. Some common measurable metrics are:

Traffic to website: How many unique visits are you getting when you embark on your campaign and how do these figures change throughout your campaign. For this it is important to keep a chart of your social media activities against the traffic you get to your site. (see basic chart below)

Engagement: Engagement is a crucial factor in a social media campaign. The more interaction you achieve on your Social Media pages the further the message spreads and the more your community will feel it has some ownership of your brand. Engagement is easily measured. How many comments do you get on your blog? on your Facebook page? how many @replies on twitter? All these can be charted in a similar way to your webstats above

The size of your community: How many followers do you have on twitter? How many ‘Likes’ on Facebook? How many people read your blog or subscribe to your newsletter. This is the easiest matrix to measure but I often feel these are vanity stats. It’s the quality of your community and how much they are willing to do for you that is important.

Reach: How far is your content being shared, how many RT’s do you get, how often is your content shared on Facebook? Harder to measure but how viral your campaign becomes can be an important sign post as to how well you are doing.

4. Measurement and Review

After a set period of time, we recommend 3 months as this is usually how long it takes for a campaign to start paying off, see how close you are to achieving your goals. If you aren’t quite there try and see what isn’t working and what is.

Spiderworking.com offers a 4 hour Strategy brainstorming session that will take you and your business through the process of creating a strategy leaving you with the tools to implement your campaign to it’s full potential. If you would like us to work with you on your strategy click here.

Tags: Strategy — Tags: marketing, matrics, measurement, montioring, reach, review, Social Media, Strategy —

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June 23, 2010

4 Social Media Tools for Running Events

You can use social media to both organise, promote and enhance an event. Over the next 2 weeks our podcast will be showing you how to create events using Facebook and Linkedin.

This week we will show you 4 applications that help you take bookings and help you display tweets at your events and sharing your events presentations.

1. Eventbrite

Eventbrite allows you to set up an event and take payment from attendees. Once you have created your event it is easy to embed a sign up form into your website or even just a booking button.

2. EventElephant

Similar to Eventbrite but with what seem to be far more customisable pages. EventElephant it’s an Irish company which means customer service will be easier to reach.

3.Twitterfall

The easy way to set up a tweet wall at your event we’ve talked about Twitterfall before but we can’t find an alternative that we like more so here it is again. Add your event #tag to the wall and watch the tweets scroll onto your screen. All you need to do is hook your computer up to a screen or a projector to share the tweets with conference goers. This encourages more interaction amongst your audience and more online buzz about your event.

4. Slideshare

Using Slideshare you can set up a group or an event where all the presentations from the day can easily be shared. Simply click ‘events’ at the top of the home screen once logged in. Again this not only makes it easier for attendees to catch up with the presentations it also creates a buzz around your event.

Tags: Events,Twitter — Tags: applications, Events, Facebook, Linkedin, podcast, promote, slideshare, Social Media, Twitter —

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June 16, 2010

June 9, 2010

Announcing KLCK Bloggers Network

KLCKsq

Are you a blogger? Do you live in the Kildare, Laois, Carlow, Kilkenny region (or nearby). Come and join us at the KLCK Bloggers Network.

I’m a big networker both online and offline. I love networking not just for the business that it can generate but also for the shared knowledge that it brings. For a while I have been wanting to connect with more local Bloggers, more people who were passionate about using social media and the Internet like me and for that reason I have set up KLCK Bloggers Network.

The first meeting will be very loose, just a chat and a bit of networking but members will be encouraged to suggest what form they would like further meeting to take.

If you’d like to come along here are the details:

Date: Monday 12th July 2010

Time: 6 for 6.30pm

Place: Bar of the Clanard Court Hotel in Athy.

Who can come: anyone who is blogging, thinking of blogging, would like to blog, Facebook users, Tweeters, and anyone else who is interested.

If you want to come along you can RSVP by leaving a comment on this post, on Facebook, or on Linkedin.

We also have a Facebook page and a Linkedin group and would love your input.

Many thanks to Lorna from Garrendenny Lane for helping us organise this.

Tags: Blogging —

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June 2, 2010

Social Media Success Stories – Garrendenny Lane Interiors

We talked to Lorna Sixsmith from Garrendenny Lane Interiors about how Social Media and Blogging has benefited her business:

Tell me a little bit about your business:

I started my interior design business in Nov 2007 and I started my blog in January 2008. Blogging was my sole use of social media during 2008. I found blogging helped my SEO greatly and amongst other subjects, I blogged about new arrivals to the shop, new fabric and wallpaper collections and the opening of my online shop. Approximately 40% of my fabric and wallpaper sales came directly from my blog and improved SEO that year and I gained clients as far away as Westmeath and Sligo.

I am concentrating more now on the online shop and will be developing a new and improved site over the summer. I am using the blog and Facebook to specifically bring attention to new products by hosting a ‘Freebie Friday’ each week as each comment provides the person with a free ‘ticket’ to win the new product.

During 2009, I increased my use of social media. I started using Twitter in March 2009 and developed a business FB page in September – both have helped to increase the number of unique visitors to my site. For example, in Feb 2009, I had 2,500 unique visitors – these increased by approx 1000 a month to 10,500 in Dec 2009. Having said that, they seem to have reached that level and it is hard to reach above 11,000 visits.

I have also made some online sales as a result of Twitter and Facebook.

Do you use any traditional marketing ?

Not as much. I place an occasional advertisement but although they often result in enquiries, the number of sales through them are low.

I started an offline and online PR campaign in January. RE the offline, I have been included in features or had articles written about my business in an Irish Times supplement, the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Independent Mothers and Babies supplement, the Country Living magazine of the Farmers Journal, House and Home magazine, Image Interiors and Munster Interiors. I have written features for Munster Interiors and House and Home magazine. I also write an article each month for the local free magazines My Waterford and Carlow Life and Entertainment. As I will be concentrating now on the online side of my business, the nature of my offline campaign will be changing.

What social media do you have in place?

My blog which also has a Freebie Friday offer each week now.

My twitter account is @GarrendennyLane. While I do tweet about new products, PR I have achieved, photographs of interior design and rooms etc, I also tweet about everything else I do from coming in from feeding calves to filling the boot with fabric books on the way to meet a client.

I also use Linked In to a limited extent. Limited because my business is mostly business to customer rather than business to business and I feel I spend enough time on social media as it is! I update my status once a fortnight or so (usually with news of a feature in a magazine or newspaper) and that is really about it. I see that many people now have their twitter updates going to their Linked in status update and this I would not recommend. Tweets tend to be too personal and glib for this. Much better to do it the other way around – ie have your Linked In updates going to Twitter (I have never done this but presume it is possible)

My Linked in profile.

My Facebook business page.

I update my business page about once a day – either with a new blog post or with something I think my ‘fans’ will enjoy. I also use it to bring attention to my ‘Product of the Month’ by asking fans which one out of 3 they would prefer to see as the Product of the Month. I haven’t paid for any advertising to bring people to the page and have approx 350 fans at the moment.

What I like about social media is that it gives businesses a personality and a personal voice behind the business.

Did you have a strategy before you embarked on your social media campaign?

I didn’t have any strategy to start with beyond that I had heard that blogging helped SEO and hence would help to increase visits to my website. I enjoy writing and I love writing and reading blog posts so blogging is definitely a most enjoyable part of my business.

Do you have a strategy now? How has it changed since you started?

My only strategy really at the start was to bring attention to my products and to improve my SEO in using those keywords. I used to do a ‘Friday Fix-it’ post in which I offered free interior design advice and solutions to anyone who emailed me a query. I would still do that if people wished to email me but as I am now concentrating on the online shop, I have changed this Friday post to a ‘Freebie Friday’!

I don’t have a strategy at the moment apart from what is in my head!! However, I am doing a course with the Carlow Enterprise board at the moment which is FETAC affiliated which means I have to write down my strategies in a marketing plan!! So that will be interesting!

What concrete results have you seen from your efforts in social media?

40% of fabric and wallpaper sales from my blog in 2008, the first year in business (I was interviewed for a white paper for an IIA article and hence I put some time into working this out – how did I know – I asked clients where they had heard of me and generally they had put in a search term which brought them to a blog post).

I have had about 30 online sales from Twitter/Facebook although there may be more from Twitter where I haven’t made the connection.

A little story from a couple of weeks ago, I was uploading new products and did a link from Facebook to a little silver bell that I had just uploaded. Within 20 minutes, one was sold along with another product to a Facebook fan. I went onto Twitter and tweeted that the bell had sold so quickly along with a link. Within ten minutes, another 2 were sold to 2 people who had read the tweet.

How do you measure your results?

I offer discount codes to my Facebook fans so I am able to tell how many times it has been used.

I have just put a reader’s offer into the House and Home magazine which provides H and H readers with a discount code so I will be able to measure the result of offline advertising on my online sales.

I use google analytics to determine how many visits to my site are from Twitter and facebook and how many pages each visitor visits as well as the average time they spend on the site.

How do the results compare to your other marketing efforts?

I enjoy using social media so I don’t consider it to be ‘work’. I would probably write blog posts even if I didn’t get any results from them but while offline PR and the occasional paid advertisement certainly keeps my profile alive and well and help brand awareness, I feel that the improved SEO, increased number of links, and general awareness online is much more effective than offline marketing. I would suggest that businesses should not concentrate on just offline or online but use both.

What one piece of advice would you give to our blog readers?

Ensure you enjoy social media or else get a member of the company who will because unless you can write well, have the time to read and enjoy other blogs and enjoy engaging with others on Twitter, Linked In and Facebook, your tweets, updates and posts will come across as sterile and unengaging.

What plans do you have for your social media campaign in the future?

Ask me in a month when I have written up my Media campaign!!

I will continue to blog, tweet and update facebook to the same extent. I have just been introduced to Weedle so intend to set up a profile there. I guess one plan I have is to spend more time measuring the success of each aspect of social media, so I know which is the most successful and which to spend time on. Having said that, I enjoy them all so I would probably continue!!