Why is it important to hire a social media & advertising consultant?

 

In today’s society social media strategy cannot be treated separately. To achieve its full potential, it must be connected, end to end as part of the media strategy, website strategy, and back end viral strategy. Doing so will increase the (ROI) of your marketing investment. Make no mistake about it! Social media cannot be an afterthought. Integration, or lack thereof, is the key to its success or failure. When approached holistically, social media is an accelerant to your other media channels.

My social media team is comprised of experts in creative, strategy, and social seeding. We craft compelling content that guarantees engagement, and we know which platforms to leverage. Using a combination of premium analytics tools for deeper listening, we’re able to use these stats to create a rich social presence. Through influencers, amplification techniques, and seeding strategy, we can expand brand awareness, enhance brand perception, and build brand affinity. Using online listening, we gain insight into an audience’s behaviors, needs and wants and how they perceive a brand and its competitors. From that, we develop a personalized social media approach for the brand, including voice and tonality; hone in on which platforms to leverage, and craft compelling content that guarantees engagement.

Our first step is to do a full download on your social media presence, including your current engagement metrics, our team uses this to create a content calendar of curated original, relatable, informative, inspirational, and engaging content to ensure a seamless seasonal transition.

 

 

Why is Community Management is the future of Digital Strategy?

 

1 – Voice of Customers, Voice of Brand

Community managers are the advocates of the brand as well as the advocates of the customer. They build customer relationships, ensuring existing customers are satisfied and engaged. To those unfamiliar with the role, they may first guess a community manager is involved with HR.  It may get confused with a social media managers as well. Customer feedback is one of the separation points between a social media manager and a community manager. While social media manager champions the brand on those platforms, a community manager needs to do that in addition to communicating the customer’s needs to the product group. Having an open rapport with the in-house product team is essential to the role. While social media managers  work exclusively with social media channels, community managers channels can be online or offline. Naturally, the community manager comes to be the face of the brand, representing the communication of the brand to the users. and vice versa.

 

2 -Ease of search–>User experience–>Retention

User experience is more important than ever. Smartphones and widespread internet allow people an easier ability to search for alternatives. Yelp is the ultimate example of community user experience leading to new decision making. Because of this, retention should be a stronger focus for new companies. A study by Bain and Company shows profits can increase 95% when increasing retention rates by 5%. Feeling engaged in a particular network can endear more brand loyalty.

 

3 – Word of mouth

‘Word of mouth’ is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. The #1 influencer for purchases is referrals. Naturally, this is impossible to completely control. Even if consumers like a product, the referral will be minimal if the people in the Facebook group, twitter followers et al are not engaged. A good community manager can instill the activity through events, campaigns, contests or more (see next point) that can lead to referrals. Many startups, naturally, have a limited budget. With limited resources, having an active and passionate following is a major advantage.

 

4 – Variety of ways to outreach

The type of community outreach can vary. Loyal, a New York based community development studio, was hired by General Electric to create awareness and educate customers to 3D printing. Loyal developed a ‘3D Printing Day’ Holiday by leveraging GE’s existing partnerships and existing agencies. The campaign had 4 million twitter impressions, 360 K+ total engagements and 18 media pieces in AdAge, Fast company and more.

 

5 – Strengthening Internal Culture

Culture always begins with founders. The tone from the top. However, community managers can be responsible to nurture and develop it.  The same way community managers can be the voice of customers, they can echo the thoughts and concerns of the employees upwards. Having an open forum for complaints or innovation can be less intimidating than approaching top management directly.

 

6- A Developed community can add value to the product

A community can serve as added value for customers. Adobe created a forum page for their design tools where customers helped other customers maximize the use of all the products. Consumers had previously created forum pages on different sites but making an available page on their to ask and answer those questions improves the product. Plus, they gained more control over the conversation and are able to easily address any new issues.

 

 

How does buying followers/likes hurt my business?

 

1. Purchased fans don’t increase business. Buying fans spikes your numbers, but it does nothing for engagement. What you are essentially paying for is to look good to other people who see your profile. These fans will like or follow you, but the spike in fan count will not be balanced with a spike in mentions, page views or interactions.

Consider social media profiles to be the equivalent of a business’ paperwork. You wouldn’t inflate the amount of money you made that month or the business’ customer conversion rate. You could lie about the amount of money you made that month, but without that money you can’t do anything to benefit the business. Similarly, you can lie about the amount of followers you’ve rightfully gained, but you wouldn’t be able to back up those followers with tangible business. Fake followers don’t lead to real money.

 

2. Reviews are more important than followers. Always read the reviews on any company you plan to do business with. On LikesAndFollowers.com, you can buy 5,000 targeted fans for $349. The site claims that these are not fake people, and they have real profiles.

However, a buying customer had a different take: “Likes And Followers delivers likes, but they’renot from real people, as they claim,” she said. “I wouldn’t be so mad about this if they didn’t claim they got you real people, but all of their marketing suggests a great result and their prices are much more than some other companies that get you fake likes. We don’t even ship out of state and they got me people from outside of the country.”

 

3. Think about where the fans are coming from. With most companies offering as much as 10,000 targeted fans, you might wonder where they all come from. While all companies will claim they don’t spam to deliver likes and followers, the large number is certainly questionable.

Here’s one website’s vague explanation of how it pull its lists together to target fans for a specific business: “We send out invites that are related to the keywords that you provide to us helping you gain the highest quality results for your page. We use our large network of contacts, Twitter lists, and other custom marketing techniques we’ve developed in-house to deliver followers to your Twitter page.”

Considering that the same company offers a delivery of up to 50,000 targeted fans to a business, that list of contacts must be extremely long.

 

4. You could be scamming your own business. People who purchase likes, followers and Web traffic are essentially scamming themselves and their customers. It’s like studying for a test; you put in long hours so that you can get a good grade, and when you pass the test, you gain genuine knowledge about the material. If you cheat, you’ll get a good grade, but you’ll have no idea what you’re doing.

People who buy fans take the easy way out, and as a result, may continually believe that there is an easy way out in other areas of the business. People who work hard for their fans naturally acquire motivation and a sincere work ethic that will drive them and their business further.

 

5. If the truth is revealed, it doesn’t look good. Recently, presidential candidate Mitt Romney was believed to have bought Twitter followers due to two random large spikes in follower count. One man was startled to discover that his picture was being used for five different Twitter accounts, all created recently and all following Mitt Romney. None of them changed his profile picture when requested.

Politician Newt Gingrich had more than 1 million followers. After an investigation on the highly questionable number, which he proudly touted, it was discovered that 92 percent were fake.

Not only does this give an unhealthy example of what type of people will be following you if you buy them, but it also reflects poorly on your character. Overly high follower counts and likes naturally seem fishy to people, unless you are a celebrity. People who are interested will skim through your fans and be able to tell the real from the fake.

 

How Will Web Analytics Help Your Business?

 

1. You’ll understand your audience

• How many people visited your website? Where they come from?
• Did they find you on search engines? If yes, what keywords did they use?
• Were they referred through links on other sites? Which ones?
• How often do they come back to your site? What brings them back?
• On your website, what are they doing? What are they missing out on?
• Which specific pages do they visit? How deep do they explore your site?
• How much time are they spending on your website?

 

2. You’ll realize how your website is performing

• Which pages on your website are being viewed most often?
• Which pages are not getting many visitors?
• What is the reason for this?
• Are your web pages being indexed correctly?
• Is there a broken link which needs fixing?
• What is your top entry page? (Surprise, it is not always your home page)

 

3. You’ll be able to put things into the right context

• How many visitors are just looking around? How many are serious prospects?
• Who refers you the best traffic, and not just the most traffic?
• What is your site’s conversion rate?
• Which components of your website are not working as expected?

 

How Influencers Will Help Your Business?

 

1. Wide and Loyal Audience

Social media influencers generally have a large Twitter following, long Facebook friends list or heavy blog traffic which means that through them you can reach a wide audience. If they mention your brand name, talk about it or retweet or share your posts, they are amplifying your brand communication.

 

2. Good Networks

Influencers build good networks. Their contacts engage in conversations or discussions on the various subjects the influencers post about, which can lead to more brand building. Not just that, they share or retweet these posts which means that your audience multiplies, increasing your visibility. Also, through them you can identify other influential people as well, who are a part of their audience. They can in turn influence their own audience’s opinion of your brand.

 

3. Content

In a survey conducted by Vocus and Brian Solis, 62% of the respondents said that they follow an influencer because of the content they create. Quality content is crucial to any marketing campaign. And Influencers can create great content that would easily strike a chord with the audience, and reduce the work for you. They might even come up with creative ideas for content marketing that your brand itself did not think of. Some post reviews of your products and services, its features, quality etc., some write stories related to your brand, so on and so forth.

 

4. Credibility

Another important factor that contributes to their large following is credibility. In the same survey, 51% of the respondents said that they follow an influencer because they consider them as opinion leaders and 40% follow them because of their relationship with the influencer.

The expertise these individuals hold in a particular field combined with the good relations they maintain with their audience makes them reliable to people. Their opinion of your brand will most likely become the general opinion among their audience. A word from an influencer can make or break your brand.

 

5. New Trends & Insights

Influencers are usually aware of the latest trends of the evolving social media platforms. They tend to be among the first to try these new trends, to discover new platforms to reach and engage with their audience. Through them, you too can get acquainted with such new ideas and employ them to interest prospective customers. And seeing as they are experts in the field, you could gain deeper insights about your industry from them.