JitterJam® Social CRM

The Idea Spark discussion about Facebook Marketing was very lively last Friday during our Creativity Coffee Tweetup in celebration of the 5-year anniversary of @TechCrunch. The discussion surrounded how consumer-facing brands and businesses can gain more than just “fans” or “likes” from their presence on Facebook. Here are some ideas to spark your marketing creativity.

1. Facebook is a “game changer” that is appealing to a broad demographic of users that is mapping to the general population’s demographic make-up.
• Embrace Facebook for more than the youth market. In fact, the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is women 55+.
• Facebook is a great way to reach your target customers and draw them into deeper engagement with your brand. Try using Facebook Ads to begin finding new fans for specific target markets.
2. Post sharable content.
• Post videos, photos, links and other content that your fans will want to share with others—content that's interesting, entertaining or fun.
• Sharable content enables your brand to grow beyond your fan base and to be redistributed throughout (and beyond) Facebook.
3. Let your "fan" or "like" count be a goal—but not your only goal.
• DO drive people from your other marketing efforts (print, TV, direct mail, online ads, website, SEM, events, etc.) to engage on Facebook and through other social channels
• Getting people to "like" your brand is not that difficult. Getting people engaged with your brand and getting them to recommend and purchase—that is your ultimate goal. Use content, open conversation and conversion tools like promotions to engage them further.
4. Reward your fans for engaging with you.
• While fun content will keep your Facebook fans entertained and engaged, providing unique offers will drive measurable return of your social marketing efforts.
• Unique offers reward your Facebook fans for their loyalty and participation. Make sure that your offers are also sharable so your fans can invite others to participate as well.
• If your business has different locations, enable offers to drive revenue and participation at specific locations.
5. Let your fans be your guide.
• Even though your Facebook fans are engaged with you on one channel, make sure that you enable each individual to drive the channels, the frequency of communication and the content they'd like to receive from you. JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system does just that.

Would you like to join in our live discussions? We hold a Creativity Coffee hour every Friday morning at JitterJam's Bedford, NH office. Come by and join us! There's no charge, and no "sales" going on!

Many businesses looking to engage customers and prospects via social media channels have a limited amount of time and resources to devote to that task on a daily basis. But a lot can be accomplished in just thirty minutes a day. Here is a three-step plan for managing your company’s social media to-do list.

Build a list of manageable, actionable items. At minimum, this list should include replying to Twitter @ replies and direct messages; to wall posts left on your business’s Facebook Fan Page; and to mentions of your company, brand, and products made across the Web on both social networks and blogs.

Populate your list automatically. Set your social marketing platform to push all of the interactions listed above directly to your to-do list. If possible, have it flag high risk items (based on the inclusion of a specified word or phrase in a search result) and do whatever it else it can to create priority levels for you.

Review your process regularly and revise it accordingly. Identify tasks you are spending a lot of time on, as well as which efforts are paying off and which are not. If you only have thirty minutes a day to work on social media, you need to spend that time wisely. Don’t get caught up in a routine that isn’t working. Always be on the lookout for ways to improve and streamline your process.

Earlier today, we posted a new video to our homepage that illustrates how JitterJam can help you with managing your social media to-do list, and much more. I hope you’ll give it a look, and then consider signing up a free trial or a personalized demo.

With services like Ping.fm, it’s easy enough to blast all of your digital marketing channels with the same message. But is that the best idea? Each channel has its own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to the dissemination of content. So, why not tailor your messages accordingly?

Facebook: Facebook has a lot in common with the dry erase boards my classmates hung on their dorm room doors back in college. As long as you had access to the walled community of our campus—and as long as the dry-erase marker hadn’t run out of ink—you could write on the wall of anyone you chose. Conversations were focused and easy to follow. And because these things were so ubiquitous, you could communicate with almost anyone in the community.

If you extend that metaphor to include the notice boards that dotted campus hallways, it was also theoretically possible to communicate with organizations you were a part of (groups) or a fan of (fan pages).

Facebook, like those dorm room doors of old and their bulletin board counterparts, also has the advantage of being able to hold additional content alongside text. So, in addition to near ubiquity, the service offers the opportunity to communicate through a variety of media. The same can’t be said for Twitter and mobile marketing, and can barely be said for email.

The service’s major disadvantage is the wall that surrounds it. On Facebook, you have to be invited to join a conversation, or you have to start one yourself (and recruit others to join in). This may change in the future, but, for now, it’s much harder to serendipitously stumble across a relevant discussion than it is on Twitter.

Key Takeaways: Posting your Twitter feed to your Facebook Fan Page and doing nothing more with it is not taking advantage of all that the platform can do. Try including photos, audio, and video. And take advantage of Facebook’s ability to handle multiple links if it makes sense. Also, remember that your audience is limited to those who have already signed up to receive your updates. So, target accordingly.

Twitter: Twitter is like an enormous open-invite party where you can join a conversation about just about any topic, so long as you listen carefully enough to find it.  And, because conversations on Twitter can be shared and discovered much easier than they can be on Facebook, there is a potential for wide, fast dissemination of content.  Quantity of followers on Twitter counts for far less than quality. A select group of influencers can help spread your message much further than you could by yourself within the walled garden of your Facebook Fan Page or group.

Of course, the upside of Twitter is also its downside. Because everyone in the room is talking, all at once, it’s much harder for one voice to be heard. Your efforts on Twitter need to begin with a small conversation over in the most relevant and receptive corner of that overcrowded party hall. You should never begin by pulling out your megaphone and trying to get everyone’s attention all at once. On Twitter, anyone can turn your personal volume knob down to zero. And once one person’s done it, it’s likely that more will follow. Remember that.

Key Takeaways: Content posted to Twitter should be short, relevant (and/or entertaining), and easy to pass on. Yes, you technically have 140 characters to play with. But, if you use all 140 characters, you’re making it that much harder for your followers to pass your message on via retweet. And the viral nature of Twitter is one of its key strengths.

And, while you should certainly take advantage of Twitter’s ability to include links, you should make sure those links aren’t always sales pitches. Don’t be that guy (or gal). Be helpful, be educational, and, most of all, be cordial—eventually, someone will ask you what you do, and then you’ll have your chance to pounce.

In 140 characters or less, of course.

Tomorrow: Part 2: Email and Mobile

Many of the products we use (or are advised to use) in social media are free to access. But no product, regardless of the price tag or lack thereof, is free to use. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, or the latest and greatest service that bloggers, Twitterers, and Facebookers are raving about — there are always costs involved, particularly in staff time.

Here are four particular cost areas to consider:

Resources. You need people to make these things look good, and you need people to keep them running. WordPress blogs come out of the box looking very much like thousands of other WordPress blogs. They also end up looking like very lonely places if they’re not updated on a regular basis. It’s blatantly obvious to even the most casual Web user — whether they’re 100% conscious of this or not — when the blog or Website they’re looking at has a cookie-cutter design. And users are also well aware of the virtual tumbleweeds rolling by on sites where there’s less life than they’d find in a ghost town.

Setting up a Twitter account provides similar hurdles. And while it is theoretically easy to change your background, to fill out your full profile, and to tweet on a regular basis, theoretical ease isn’t quite the same as actual ease. You need to get it done, or you need someone to get it done for you. And it takes time!

Dedication. We live in the age of the Next Big Thing, in a world where it’s ridiculously easy to find something new to obsess over, something new to occupy our precious free time. If you’re not delivering constant content through your marketing channels, people will forget about you and move on. Regardless of your market, it is crucial to keep customers engaged in the product and the message year round, on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

The flip side of that, of course, is not to overdo it. But I’m a believer in going all-out, then listening to your audience, seeing if they’re feeling oversaturated, and only reigning things in as necessary.

Messaging. Just as press releases, white papers, and other more traditional marketing efforts require serious thought, so too do social media campaigns. It’s harder to create a meaningful message in 140 characters than you would think. And then there’s the issue of how well the information coming through these new channels is tying in with the rest of your marketing message. It’s easy enough to hand responsibility for your Twitter profile and your Facebook fan page off to an Intern. But if that Intern isn’t clued into the master plan, you could be sending out messages that are erroneous, poorly executed, or, in the worst-case scenario, flat-out false. Once something’s out there on the Internet, it’s out there to stay. And that means that, even if you do farm this work out to someone else, a portion of your workday is going to have to be devoted to making sure that the messages which come out from your brand, regardless of which channel they are distributed through, are on point.

Monitoring. You also need to track how effective these free messages you’re sending really are. Ask yourself: which posts, tweets, and status updates are driving the most traffic? Which are generating conversation in the comments section? And which are being shared on Facebook, or retweeted on Twitter? If you can’t answer these questions now, you need to find a way to answer them. Because, while these products might be free to access, there are always going to be costs associated with actually using them. And you need to be able to justify those costs, whether to yourself, or to your boss, or to your shareholders. Or else you may be out of a job. Or out of business.

Does this mean that you need a full-time staffer whose sole purpose is to execute your social media masterplan? Well, no. It would be nice, but it’s not 100% necessary. What you need, at minimum, is someone who is thinking constantly about how to put these free tools to good use, and how to get the most bang for your staff-time buck.

Photo Credit: free-sign by koka_sexton. CC BY.