Choosing a Channel for Your Social Strategy
You’ve chosen to begin using social media as a solution to solve your marketing gaps, or to build your personal brand online. Now, how do you decide which channels to begin sharing content on?
Whatever you do, do not just sync up the same content in 5 different areas. Just because you have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account and a HootSuite account that can publish to them all in one swift click doesn’t mean you actually should use that power for every single message. People follow or friend you in different channels for a reason. Understanding how your audience (or potential) audience uses their social channels is critical to being successful in the digital world.
With that said, each channel may be an appropriate home for the exact same story, yet, just told differently based on capabilities of the technology and the allowance of the type of media considered acceptable on that channel.
Will Spammers Lower Your Klout Score?
There are various ways to measure your influence online. Notably, the most popular: Klout and another favorite of mine: FollowerWonk. While I don’t find the actual scores of these tools all that critical, I think it’s good to understand and use as an option for bench marking. But what does it really mean? To understand your impact online, you must understand what influence actually means. Among various other pieces in the algorithm, these tools use the value of your followers to help determine your overall score.
Now, bringing me to my original question: Will spammers lower your Klout score?
Yes.
Maybe not. But think about this: I’ve never blocked spammers that followed me, only those who mentioned me. I also have something in the neighborhood of 1000 followers and I was pretty excited to get to that number, but what does that number mean if an unknown number of them aren’t even decent Twitter members.
On the flip side, I’m going to go ahead and guess that the number of followers you have is somewhat related to your score as well.
Is it safe to say that you’re damned if you do block your spammy followers and damned if you don’t block them?
In the end, the people that follow you are very important, whether or not you look at any influence score. They’re the people that are seeing most of your content and committed to seeing your ideas on a regular basis. You need to know who they are, what they want from you, and what they’re sharing as well. Here is how:
- Use FollowerWonk to do a general analysis
- Find out their time zone/when they tweet. Mirror it.
- Use SocialBro and/or ReFollow to see who follows you back.
- Use all 3 of these tools to understand who follows you is most influential. Make a Twitter List to easily keep an eye on them all the time. Respond to their stuff. Retweet it. Comment on their blog. Get known.
First Steps to Creating a Digital Presence
I’m going to first assume that you’ve identified a need to be online discussing a particular topic to an identified audience. It could be very targeted and well thought through like, “I’m using Twitter to host Twitter chats with educators about the advancement of STEM education.” It could also sound like, “I’m going to review and share my favorite local places, events and restaurants online.”
If you haven’t identified a reason for existing on various channels, you’re going to find your self feeling like you don’t have anything to talk about and struggling with growing an audience.
We’re also assuming that we’ve identified Twitter to be the social network of choice when reaching out to your audience. This isn’t always true but since I think it’s probably the best social network that connects with broad audiences at this time, it’s not a bad place to start.
There’s probably also a need for longer content creation. This really depends on what you’re doing and how you want to do it. For example, are you demonstrating something via video? YouTube might be your channel of content creation and Twitter is your channel of content curation. Or if you’re a writer, Tumblr or WordPress might be your source of content creation. If you’re reviewing local venues, perhaps Yelp is the answer. You get the idea.
1. Who are you going to talk to?
Make an “engagement wishlist” – probably on Twitter – of people you aspire to be or to interact with. One of your top goals for participating should be to engage with these people. Expand this list to include people they follow, people they’ve recently engaged with, and blogs they use. You’re identifying their social graph and you will soon make this your primary network.
2. What need or gap are you filling for your followers?
You’re going to need to know this in order to properly craft your content. If your goal is to be the go-to resource for the best things to do in Chicago, you need to position yourself to people who are looking for something to do and then give them something to do that they didn’t already hear somewhere else. You’d be the new event calendar for people in your area.
3. Who else is talking about this?
This could be a group of business competitors or some of the people on your “engagement wishlist.” Either way – the user should be something in relation to your content and share similar social graphs. You’ll use this to look for content opportunities and other users to engage with.
4. Compare accounts
Use a tool like Followerwonk.com to assess your followers and compare them against your competitors or others who are talking about your topic. Look for progress in the amount of followers your share with those on your “engagement wishlist”
Light a Fire
Let me tell you how the fire started… Today while I was scanning my social feeds I saw a post by @Garyvee with a video from one of his speaking engagements.
Truthfully it was nothing overly special or new to me, but I really enjoy his raw honesty and it lightened the day a little for me. I took a moment to like it and share it with some of my friends on Twitter and not long later.. I get a response!
Considering Gary is the author of one of my all time favorite social media books and one of my favorite spokespeople on the topic (and.. I love wine) I was completely starstruck!!
This isn’t the first time I’ve been mentioned by an influential profile/person/brand but I’d have to say it lit a fire for me for some reason. Plus, I realize I wasn’t the only person he responded to. I realize he probably spent a couple of hours that day just responding to people that shared his link or mentioned it. Maybe he lit a fire under every other person he responded to?
Regardless, it was completely unexpected and my pure excitement got me thinking… What if brands did this more frequently? How can this be replicated on places other than Twitter? What if I spent 20 minutes each day responding to 5-10 people that my brand follows and respond to their posts to light a couple of small fires to create a more passionate fan base?
I’m going to sleep on it. Maybe even build it into my 2012 goals… But who else does this? Not just brands.. but celebs? reporters?
Doing it right
When I was just a freshman in my first advertising class in college, I learned things about mass marketing and advertising and how my favorite thing since sliced bread – DVR – was going to take away our jobs forever. This hit something in me, and not because I thought we should take away DVRs or something ridiculous like that. I decided that I wanted to be a marketer that reached people how they wanted to be reached.
I started reading books about Google and their conscious effort to “not be evil” and understood that to the core. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com and another hero of mine said,
“Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”
My calling was easily what we now call social media and what we could one day call inbound marketing or something depending on the next platform of where this will exist.
Since then, I’ve read books such as The Thank You Economy. Gary Vaynerchuk instills this concept of customer service and a great product. It wasn’t until today’s “aha” moment when I realized that people don’t actually think this way by default!
This is understandable, though, for some. You could come up with dozens of excuses, and that’s good, because at least you’ve just created a list of places to start! Mine?
Excuse: My company is too large and segmented, I’m public relations and have no clear communication paths to sales or customer service.
Solution: I will start with the personal connections I have in each area as well as reaching out to a digital manager in each business to see if there are other connections to bridge.
Excuse: My company makes tons of weird things and I don’t know what people will be looking for and talking about online aside from the exact business name.
Solution: I will start with the businesses with the most potential for growth by reaching out to digital marketers and sales departments to try to bridge online and offline departments and will focus on energy, sustainability and innovation topics
How will you address your excuses for not properly engaging?
How Does Your Brand Look on Social Media?
I read this article in a blog post by Social Media Today and it is full of useful links, tools, and information for personal branding as well as commercial branding. View the whole article by Janet Fouts:
“It’s a given these days that before at least 50% of the first-time meetings you’re about to have you and the person you’re meeting will have Googled each other to learn a bit more about the person. It used to be this would return a list of scholarly papers, some nasty pictures of you at a bachelor party, a random smattering of form posts about cupcakes or software and possibly your connections on some social networks.
These days however, it can mean a whole lot more. Looking for a job in marketing? A potential employer can use a variety of tools to see how well you manage your personal brand online. After all, if you can’t make your own brand stand out how are you going to help them with theirs?
If any part of your job relates to social engagement you’d best have a good look at your numbers on some of the ranking sites and see how you’re doing before you stick your foot in your mouth and say you’re fantastic at creating an online presence.
I suggest you do it now–before you need it–so you can make amends and improve your results if necessary, and that may take some time and hard work.
Here’s a game plan.
Step 1
Run some of the evaluation tools below to determine what somebody sees when they look you up. Run it on more than one site so you get a good feel of what’s out there.
Momentus Media Community Health Score
This is a brand new tool to see how engaged your Facebook page is with your fans. I ran quite a few pages and it’s interesting to see how some of the big brands like Snickers and Red Bull stacked up against smaller brands like Thirsty Girl (yes they’re a client) and some un-expected successes like AARP (who says us over 50′s don’t use Facebook??)
What I like about this one is that it ranks not on how many users are on a page but how engaged they are, and it gives you, the page owner, real insight into how your page is doing. Does it give you more info than Facebook’s insights reports? Yep. Because it shows you the rankings of other pages too so you can see your page in perspective.
My WebCareer
Want to look at your performance across multiple platforms? My Web Career scores you based on your Facebook and/or Linkedin profiles. It supposedly also rates your search engine visibility but that’s a paid service that’s not available yet, so I haven’t evaluated it. My web Career also plans to share advice to improve your score, which could be very useful in getting your brand better visibility.
Postrank Analytics
Is one of the best blog metrics tools out there, and now they’re reaching deeper into your traffic incorporating Google Analytics and Feedburner. a look at your engagement on your blogs based on actions taken by your users.They call them “engagement points” and it’s basically a tally of page views, clicks, Tweets and shares on other networks, comments as well as how many are reading your RSS stream. Literally when someone actually engages with your content.
Peer Index
Looks at your blo, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter presences and rates you by your apparent influence, activity level and authority on topics you frequently discuss.. It also shows your most frequent sources and allows you to browse the same information on your social connections. Like Momentus Media’s application it can be quite revealing to see how it scores your friends and competitors and even compare them through a nifty drag-and-drop interface.
Klout
Klout is all about identifying influencers on particular topics through their social media presence.Want to know the most influential colleges on Twitter? or the top 10 food trucks? Klout has used their knowledge of influencers to leverage their Klout with programs like the much lauded Virgin America campaign. (disclosure: I’m listed as a Klout influencer and have received Klout perks.) Klout scores now show up in the Twitter streams of those who use Seesmic and some other apps.
Step 2
Think objectively about all of the date you just saw. Are you as much of an influence on your network as you think you are? What topics are you showing up about? Is that what you want to be known for? Who ranks higher than you do for the areas you’re interested in? What do they do differently and can you learn from their example? Do you need to share more, re-tweet or mention more? Is the overall impression you get of your brand what you want it to be?
If yes, congratulations! If no, start thinking about how you can improve.
Of course all of these services will differ because the algorithms they use differ. None of this is really the gold standard but people do use them to make business decisions, hiring decisions and even decisions on who they want to talk to more. Please don’t take increasing your influence score as the holy grail of community. Use it as a tool to gauge how effective you are at delivering the message you think you’re delivering.”
