As you may have noticed I’ve been looking forward to seeing Chris Brogan speak at Social Media World Forum for quite some time. When I arrived I sat (almost) right at the front so that I wouldn’t miss a word (see stalker style picture above). Here’s what I learnt.
Define your business goal
I guess people may be getting tired of hearing me banging on about Facebook Likes not being important, and it is true, you do need Likes in order to reach people, if you’re finding it hard to gather them here’s some of my tips. However the number of Likes or followers you have, or your Klout score should never be the goal of your social media campaign. Chris started his talk by revealling a conversation he overheard between two business people at breakfast. ‘Not once did they mention their Klout score or their Facebook Likes… social tools should be used in the service of doing business the same way that a telephone is.’ Apparently a bank manager won’t take your Klout score or Facebook Likes as payment for your mortage either! Using social media needs to be about achieving a measurable goal. This was the theme of Chris’s talk.
Your Website
Does your website have a strong call to action? When someone arrives there is it clear what they have to do next? or are there multiple calls to action? If it’s the latter the site is badly designed. You always need to be thinking about the sales process and guide visitors through it. In the age of mobile you need to make sure your site looks great on all devices, from a small screen phone to an iPad. It’s worth the investment as more and more consumers are accessing the web this way.
Your Email Marketing
91% of consumers over the age of 18 said they would prefer to interact with a brand via email. This is hugely more than any social media channel, email is not as you may of heard dead, it’s alive and well… bad email marketing is dead. Having a beautiful HTML designed email that fits in with your website is not what is important. Segmenting and segregating your email list so that you are sending the right message is. Make sure you are targetting customers, leads etc differently.
If you are putting more than one call to action in your newsletter then you are diluting your message make sure your emails don’t run to longer than 350 words. If it’s too long for you to read on a mobile device it’s also too long for the people you are sending it to. Encourage engagment and interaction by ensuring when someone clicks the reply button the email comes straight to you your email newsletter should be a ‘relationship experience’.
Video
Create interesting searchable content on YouTube. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, it’s important to embrace it. Again it’s not about views it’s about leads and conversions so define your goal, decide who you are trying to reach with your video and what information they will be searching for. Think about how you will turn them from leads into conversions.
Finding time for social media
‘I don’t have the time’ is a common complaint from social media sceptics so we need to look at where we do spend our time. At the moment how do we generate leads? Something like cold calling can reach up to 12 people an hour where as spending an hour on social media has the potential to reach 1,000.
These are the key points I picked up from Chris’s presentation, they may seem a little disjointed but there were so many in his talk I found it hard to keep up. At the end I asked him for examples of small business using Google+ well and I’ll be coming back to you on these. Were you at the talk? What tips have I missed? Remind me by posting them in the comments section below.
