Tamara Brooks: Partner and CEO, October 17 Media
Three key things to consider:
1) Demographics. Facebook users generally fall between 25 and 44 years old; Twitter pretty much works for any age group. Pinterest is mostly for females 24 years and up, while Google+ is the opposite, made up mostly of high school to university males (usually techies). LinkedIn favours business professionals 35 years or older, but lots of young people have started to get on it, too.
2) Online behaviour. Once you’ve zeroed in on your target market’s demographics, think about what they do online. Home buyers/sellers spend hours browsing property photos and videos, so if you’re a real estate agent then it might be good to invest in a Flickr or YouTube account. Shoppers tend to look for inspiration in the form of blog posts or images online, so Pinterest would be a great investment for retailers and shopping centres. For municipalities (a huge chunk of our client list), Twitter and Facebook are a pretty powerful combo. Why? Citizens get real-time announcements or alerts through Twitter while establishing a sense of community with their neighbours on Facebook.
3) Quality versus reach. You don’t need to restrict yourself to the bigger social media networks like Pinterest or Facebook. There are niche communities out there, which may be a better fit for your audience.
Remind yourself: quality beats quantity when it comes to social media. A strong online presence doesn’t mean being on every channel. One of the most common mistakes we’ve seen businesses make is to create a Facebook or Twitter account simply for the sake of having one. You should start an account only if it has a role to play and stick to one to three social networks that best fit your brand strategy and resources. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an inactive page and frustrated fans.
Nikki Hellyer: Director of marketing, Future Shop
For us, social media has become an effective real-time marketing vehicle – one with significant reach – and it’s become where consumers can engage with our brand.
We’re focused on maturing our presence on Facebook and Twitter and have championed the use of these both internally with our staff (e.g., customer service, merchants) and externally with our vendor partners. We use them to communicate product launches, offers, sales events, etc. – in real time, ahead of traditional media. They also help us engage customers directly on issues around their shopping experience. We are constantly testing new things like Facebook ad units (e.g., sponsored stories), Twitter ad units (promoted Tweets) and establishing our footprint on new social networks like Pinterest. Social media is changing daily, and so we’re always adjusting to see what fits our business best.
The most important lesson we have learned has been figuring out the organizational structure to make social media sing for our company. Additionally, figuring out the intent for each social network because not all businesses need to be active in all social spaces.
The secret to social media is that there is no secret: focus on serving and delighting your audience, earning their attention and trust along the way. Don’t chase arbitrary fan counts or the next shiny thing. If your staff isn’t going to take part in whatever initiative, don’t expect customers to.
We expect our tech-enthused, informed and approachable persona to stay – but our tactics will evolve depending on the feedback our customers provide daily. We foresee our use of social media to cascade to a wider user-base internally and real-time advertising becoming a more significant part of our mix.
Chris Breikks: President, 6S Marketing
First, you need a social media strategy or a clearly stated plan that identifies what you hope to achieve.
With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, you might interact with people to develop relationships with them and your brand, not necessarily to drive them to your website. If all of your interactions are focused on driving people to your website and trying to sell them stuff, you will quickly alienate your followers. You can still gain customers and use direct response on social media, but in the form of advertising. Facebook has a fantastic ad program that allows you to target specific demographics, including age, sex, geographic location and interests. Twitter’s promoted tweets also allow you to expand your reach on Twitter beyond the audience that follows you. LinkedIn also has terrific advertising options that focus on business-to-business advertising and, of course, Google and YouTube have very advanced advertising opportunities that can help deliver customers to your door.
Content creation should be a major part of your social media strategy, and you will need to have resources producing some or all of the following: blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos, photo galleries. But most people get stuck on publishing content, you will also need to have a concise listening strategy to monitor who is talking about your business and/or industry and identify who you should be engaging and interacting with on social media. Beyond Google Analytics, you will want to use a social media-monitoring tool like Radian6.
You need to have a presence on all social media channels, but how much time and resources to each you need to allocate is the real question. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn are key. Pinterest might also be in that category.
