AN INTRO TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Sarah Willis

“The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn

communication into an interactive dialogue.”

How can Social Media work for you?

• Research networks / key competitors

• Target specific audiences and groups

• Viral propaganda

• Word of mouth/ Advocacy

• Compliments Marketing Strategy

• Continuous engagement pre/ during / post event

• Tailor your product / event to meet needs of customer

• Search engine visibility

• Market research / feedback on event

• Increase credibility within the industry & share knowledge

How can Social Media work for you?

• Two-way communication

• Ensure your product/ event is fit for purpose

• Allows you to create an extended online community

• Keep customers up to date and interested in your brand

• Increased attendance at events

• Create a buzz further afield about your event

• Extend internally – staff forums to increase staff morale & satisfaction and update staff on news

• Upload video and audio of your event

• Offer Exclusive offers for loyal customers

Sales & Marketing Research & insight Reputation

Management

Better understand what customers think of your brand, products and services and communications.

Provides your brand with the opportunity to convey its personality and connect with customers and prospects in a more informalmanner.

Provides the opportunity to manage a brand reputation programmeand improve consumer opinion of your brand.

React in in near real time to praise, questions orissues.

Proactively empower fans to advocate messaging further.

Engage with the ‘right’ target customer groups online with a passion for your brand/event and the industry as a whole.

Achieve high levels of awareness, interests and engagement in your products and services by informing, entertaining or being useful.

Suggested Approach

1. Decide your goals. 2. Determine what you want social media to do for

you.3. Set your Strategy to include the tools you will use

and how active you will be. 4. Pre plan what you are going to post, share, tweet,

like or bookmark.5. Decide what activities will you participate in to build

interaction.6. Monitor your Strategy. Measure your audiences and

results and be prepared to change it over time according to audience behavior /feedback.

Obama’s presidential campaign

Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign

• Over 3 million individual donors were mobilised through social media• Motivated over 2m social networking participants• Created and promoted more than 200,000 offline events across the

country• Total of 6.5million donations online• $500 million in donations online• More than 13m people provided email addresses to the campaign

website over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 types of messages

• Over 2 billion e-mails landed in inboxes• The campaign website helped create over 2 million user profiles• There were over 400,000 blog entries• People spent more than 14 million hours watching over 1,000 Obama

campaign-related videos on YouTube• There were over 50m views of Obama Campaign via YouTube• 1.2 billion minutes of YouTube view time

BMW launch of the X1 BMW have dedicated a whole Facebook page to the X1 to target younger audiences and only releasing partial or blurred images until the car was officially launched.

Getting started

• Listening – Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? Radian6, BuzzGain, Crimson Hexagon

• Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication

• Comment/Communicate – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on various channels, encouraging them to visit you

Some things to think about…

• Who will be in charge of your Social Media?

• Set Guidelines

• Set a risk management plan

• Have audience in mind

• Keep your content valid and interesting

• RT interesting news from others/ reply to comments

• Hootsuite allows you to update Twitter, facebook and linkedIn all at once if you want them all to promote the same message

• Your online presence will be about online branding, educating your customer and engaging the public

Top Tips

• Apply Google analytics to measure success of your facebook page

• Offer a custom welcome page / sell yourself

• Make it interactive

• ‘Tease’ your audience

• Give audience all the info

• Recognise fans / loyal followers (fan of the day/ VIP guest passes to events)

And lastly….

• You have to learn to use social media the right way for your own needs

• There is no one size fits all social media strategy

• What works for some may not work for you

• When promoting any event/brand/product always provide a link to your website/ brands website

• Measure your approach

• Ensure it is fit for purpose

• Change messages according to your annual strategy, business targets, aims and objectives

Any Questions?

Sarah Willis @ 2Communicate