An intelligent social media program can increase product consideration and purchase intent in the middle of the purchase funnel, during the critical period when consumers are gathering peer opinions and listening to word of mouth recommendations. Additionally, social media endorsements greatly influence product trial. So, how do you create brand ambassadors and leverage social media to boost sales and elevate your brand? Here’s how:
Actively listen and observe before getting started
Establish clear objectives and success metrics
Evaluate opportunities through your unique strategic lens
Create a unifying concept or theme
Construct your social marketing architecture
Aggregate and/or build social media assets
Develop a plan for monitoring and responding to consumer discussions
Roll out an integrated earned and paid media promotional plan
Nurture your fans and community
Measure against objectives and optimize continuously
Our social media practitioners know this playbook back and forth and help our clients score big with consumers and influencers. We also work at the grassroots level to spark conversations and positively influence the online dialogue to meet your goals.
In order to make money with social media, you need to follow some critical rules of the road. RockYou shares some tricks of the trade.
Have you ever heard someone say, “Let’s socialize the idea” and nothing ever happens? RockYou’s Lisa Marino offered some suggestions at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, Tex., on how to socialize your brand. But in order to make money with social media, you need to follow some critical rules of the road.
First, recognize that the audience is there. People belong to social networks, so you have to embrace the action. Additionally, social networks are not just for kids anymore, adults and income decision-makers are there, too.
The average time spent/visits on the top social networking sites are:
Facebook: 19 times per month, with 10 minutes per visit
MySpace: 10 times per month, with 14 minutes per visit
Social networks are still commonly used for photos and updates, but people are also using them to communicate. Tone is critical, and one of the most important things you can do is go beyond traditional display methodologies by understanding key points of use.
Marino cited the example of BudLight’s fan page on Facebook. This particular page illustrates the type of engagement brands should be seeking with their audiences. The Budweiser page is similar to its website with an obvious significant investment in creative, but contained specific elements like viral gift components and videos engineered for the Facebook audience.
When going after this type of engagement, one has to decide how to engage by considering the audience and following the same principles of a web strategy: define and design for your audience and be willing to make an investment in the space.
Social cross platform is another important aspect of the social money-making schema. When selecting partners to help you along the way, consider what content works well. Among these tactics are delivering penetrations, offering viral features, and bringing custom content opportunities. Viral sharing features across platforms (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter) are a must.
Most of us know at this point that video content is highly viral. Marino reviewed case studies from Axe body sprays and Hanna Montana — both of which are targeted to teens.
It’s not just about video, though, Marino added. The Gap “Vote for Flair” campaign delivered more than 240,000 shared pieces of Gap Flair, and nine million people came to the custom Gap vote section. Engagement points and integration of key ideas are critical to successful social campaigns.
As video is integrated, so are applications. When considering using applications, it’s important to know how and when to use them. Microsoft Office 2007 used a branded poke initiative using the Facebook Slide application. Slide delivered 4 million branded pokes in the first 60 days, and months after the initiative ended, there were 250,000 branded pokes per month.
When selecting a partner, or thinking about monetizing social media, RockYou suggests paying close attention to the services offered by each provider and making your ads social, while keeping things simple.
RockYou offers six great suggestions for successful social executions:
Audience: You should be able to get access to audience data
Direct Customer Communication: Collect information on your audience
Engagement: How you choose to interact with the audience will determine success
Virality: Every campaign should have viral components
CTR: For social ads, clickthrough rates are two times that of regular display
Social Ads: They work especially well when driving traffic to fan pages, contests, or application downloads
