James SpillaneWhen you consider what social networks can become key marketing channels for your business, there isn’t one right answer. Take a quick look at the very different sharing patterns of the three sites below.
Mashable: Twitter is huge, LinkedIn isn’t even included.
Jay Baer’s Convince & Convert: Twitter leads today, LinkedIn is growing.
THECOOLIST: Facebook is completely dominate.
Each audience is different, and the question for your business is not what is best, but what is best for you. The general advice is to understand your audience and what sites they use. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.
Unless your audience cleanly matches a common research segment, there is likely limited information available about what social networks they are actively engaged with. Actually getting this information isn’t just a quick research run. Here are three quick practical ways you can tell what social networks may be right for your business and focus additional research.
- Competitors: where are your competitors seeing strong engagement?
- Influencers: hand-select 10 to 15 key influencers in your vertical and search them out on social networks. Identify where you have the opportunity to engage with these individuals. Consider not just where they are, but where you have the opportunity to interact. In targeted B2B marketing, this same approach will work for breaking into individual targeted accounts.
- Blogs and media companies: where is their content widely shared? If you are engaging at the category level, this is a good indication of where category information is shared or conversations are happening.
Listening is intentionally excluded from this list. Although incredibly valuable, it requires significantly more time and some prior experience using listening tools. What other ways can you quickly narrow, if not identify, the right social platforms for your business?
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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It’s no brainer to see that social media is here to stay for good. Given vast variety of the existing channels to choose and stick with, it’s time for such a hot space to enter into a new category. There is a need for a portal to provide a quick and intelligent decision for both the consumer and the enterprise about their online connections.
A Platform to Help us to Distinguish Our Quality vs. Quantity Friends, Fans, Followers, and Companies
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr and others have been doing a decent job of providing additional marketing exposure and even in some cases, additional revenue. However, as more and more social networking sites pop up, how do you manage your brand across all these channels? Maybe more importantly, which one of these sites should you select as the one that will help you best reach your target audience? The proliferation of the social media avenues is becoming overwhelming.
This glut of information reminds me of the early 90’s when WWW was adopted broadly by the general public. Every company rushed to have a presence, to the point it became literally impossible to find the right information on the Web. That’s when a better generation of search engines – at first the Yahoo! and then Google – entered the market and helped us find the most relevant information by just typing simple keywords in their search box. If you had asked before Google launched, if there was a need for another search engine – most would have said no, we already have those….
Then came Web 1.0 & 2.0 – Youtube, Flickr, myspace, Facebook, Twitter and countless others have turned everyday people into content producers, influencers and experts. We basically tripled down on the information overload How do you know which channels to select for deploying your social media strategy? How do you know which one is the right channel to let your fans and followers to find you, your products, and services? Most importantly, who is Joe Smith that is recommending that person, that company, that product?
I hope my awesomize.me can accomplish such a mission. The site is not another social networking platform. Yet the portal to all your existing social media channels. The platform helps you, your fans, your potential clients to make an intelligent decision as to which company to connect to or follow via which social media channels and why? It’s free!
Elias
CEO & Founder
http://awesomize.me