Social Marketing is Maturing
Most people are amazed at how crazy the market is for social media experts right now. I have been using and perfecting social marketing for over a year now and the results are compelling. Many of my clients began asking for my help with their social media functions because they couldn't find the time to perform their own social media programs, didn't know where to begin, and/or didn't have a plan.
At this very early stage in its lifecycle, social marketing is producing measurable ROI with an outstanding proven 7% confidence rating. Finding experienced and proficient social media marketers and managers are proving to be the difficulty.
Social media has created an exciting and challenging world of new possibilities for business marketers. Until recently, a large majority of marketers were exploring this unfamiliar terrain without a compass; simply trial and error.
Seduced by all of the early hype and the ease of implementing social sites, many ignored proven marketing principles. They just launched their social initiatives by creating blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts without a plan or a purpose. Most everything put online stays there forever, so please devise your plan first.
Marketing Media Has Shifted
There are two main reasons for this shift. One is that traditional advertising methods just don't work nearly as well as they used to. Even traditional online marketing has changed greatly over the last few years.
Second, social media is new and DOES work. This combination is the reason why it shouldn't be any surprise that the highest ROIs are coming back from social media.
Traditional Media Is In The Toilet
Traditional media was becoming less and less effective for advertising even before social media began to take off. Business owners are freaking out because their Yellow Pages ads aren’t working anymore. Newspaper and magazine ads aren’t working; all of the traditional marketing methods just aren't working. Everyone searches online now!
By now, most businesses know that over 85% of all visitors find web-sites by using search engines. So they now have a website. Unfortunately, many have poorly optimized websites that no one can find. Before implementing any social media strategies, it's imperative that your website is optimized and is ranking well in the search engines.
A momentous change in the use of social media for marketing purposes is taking place. Social marketing is maturing to the point where the mainstream is now in transition from the trial‐and‐error phase of the learning curve to the strategic phase. Marketers are learning to begin their social initiatives by researching the medium and monitoring target audiences to determine realistic objectives.
Forrester has published statistics that indicate 99% of retailers are planning on developing an online presence specifically on Facebook by 2011, which is only about six months away. Those strategies are in development, and companies are looking for experts to help them out.
MarketingSherpa revealed some research on how tons of of big companies, big business, and a lot of small businesses are shifting a lot (if not most) of their advertising budgets and their marketing efforts away from the more traditional offline sources over to the new world of social media.
While a business may have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, that's all great. Some have even uploaded a video or two to YouTube before. But as a business owner, if you have a trained professional to do it 10 times faster, it is 10 times more cost efficient. Why hire a media manager for 40K a year, when you can easily outsource it to a professional for 1/3 that?
What many business owners quickly discover is that there is an entirely unspoken etiquette in social media. No doubt, you have played with it some and you realize that there are these weird symbols and letters and things. Its not unlike learning another language if you don't have any experience with it.
Why not just have someone who knows all of the important stuff and knows exactly what to do and how to do it?
What Does a Social Media Manager Do?
A social media manager has several responsibilities, and these can vary slightly from one client to another. One of the first things that consistently comes up is dealing with "the overwhelm."
Many companies on Twitter often complain about overwhelm in handling social media responsibilities. Deleting spam direct messages (DMs) from Twitter is a huge part of a social media manager's job, and then forwarding the few messages that are important in one e-mail to the employer. The same can be important for Facebook, as spammers keep attempting to flood business accounts with unwanted messages, as well.
Many people have stopped reading their DMs completely because of the sheer volume of unwanted messages that come into the account. A social media manager can wade through, delete all the unwanted messages, and forward any that might actually be important.
The time and stress savings for this alone allows many social media managers to bring added value, not greatly additional cost to companies. In many ways a social media manager can be thought of as an executive assistant to a brand.
Social media is trending these days for a brand, a company, a business, an executive, or a CEO. Being a social media expert means being a personal assistant for your social media. We are your first line of defense.
Aside from handling DMs on Twitter, social media managers will also be asked to manage a businesses' wide variety of other social media outlets such as:
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Blog comment approval
Approving or declining comments on Facebook is another major function.
This is a huge timesaver for companies. Approving comments to individual blogs might also be added in, filtering out the spam that automatic spam catchers can't get a hold of, or even uploading YouTube videos and using them to get attention to the company.
Managing Social media enables us to form and engage our communities with common interests and challenges, thereby converting followers, fans, etc. into paying customers.
A large part of successful social media management is creating a compelling persona for interacting with members of these communities in a single, trustworthy voice.
As a result, your business will be recognized not only as industry leaders, but as innovators in your segment of your business market niche.
Stay Tuned Up,
Dale
