Sherpas for a journey of best practices for social media marketing?
-
What are early-stage (0-6 months) best practices for social media marketing in a business to business market? Our customers are professional buyers of electronic components.
We are doing it backwards.
We registered Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a few more. +5 for initiative.
-5 for not having a social media marketing plan. -5 for not having someone helping us who really knows how to engage with our audience.
This is also a humble request to SMM gurus out there who have room for a new client. I'm looking for our sherpa.
Thanks!
-
Loren,
it's my pleasure. I love SEO and I try to learn from any professional and any problem I meet on my way.
Yesterday, just after our phone talk I signed up for Market Motive's Social Media Optimization course. This will definitely benefit our undertaking.
Thank you again Loren.
-Slava
-
Hiya! Saw this on SEOmoz’s twitter account. Your enthusiasm and desire to learn more about best practice is marvelous.
Here's my two cents:
My understanding is that you have signed up for Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and a few more. It's great that you want to be more social, but sometimes companies get too gung ho about social media and start everything all at once. As you've already realized this is a cart-before-the-horse type situation.So take a step back. Before everything else, you need to think about what you hope to achieve through your social media. Have defined goals: driving traffic, raising sales, gaining a reputation as an expert in your industry, all of the above.
Then you have to think about the online community you are joining. Who is your audience? What content or information do they want and need? What will attract their attention? Of that, what do you already have to offer?
When you're doing business to business social outreach, you would share content that other businesses find useful, clever, or fun. This includes not only content they'll enjoy personally or professionally, but also things that they can share with their own clients.
Only once you've gathered or brainstormed this information do you start thinking about which social media platforms best fit your needs. Each social media network is useful, but they each have unique strengths and weaknesses. Be cognizant of these as you decide how to disseminate which content to which audiences. What you do for Facebook is not what you do for Twitter is not what you do for LinkedIn. Make sure you do your research and that you are aware of the ebb and flow and flavor of your audience as you build a following.
And of course, none of your lovely social efforts matter if no one knows that you're making said lovely social efforts. Be sure to put your social media buttons on your site.
There's obviously a lot more that goes into this and a social media consultant/strategist can help you work it out. But these are the bones as we see it. They're really not that different than any other kind of marketing: Have goals. Know audience. Stay aware. Eat chocolate. Rinse. Repeat.
-
If you have any specific questions you can skype me at: SavvyLuke . Otherwise our Internet Marketing company has a great "Key Concepts to Internet Marketing and SEO" Free ebook for download here.
This ebook should give you a good understanding on how to integrate social media into your marketing strategy.
-
I just tweeted this from the SEOmoz account, so we'll see if you get some more responses
-
Hi Loren,
1. Social media is much more about the people in your organization rather than the tools, so yes, you are quite likely "doing it backwards."
2. You also want to integrate social with how people interact with your product. In this case your website. Right now you have some UX issues with respect to content and communications on your site.
3. A social media strategy and a SEO strategy are related but very different. That might account for some lack of response here.
There is an email link at the bottom of my about.me page. Feel free to drop me a line and set up a time to speak further. http://about.me/james.goldman
-
Hi Slava,
I want to warmly thank you for the productive phone call, the links to social media reading, and the plethora of excellent ideas towards USBid's 90-day Social Media Plan.
It is awesome to connect and gain traction on efforts to engage with our customers. It's this level of connection that makes SEOMoz community of great value to me.
Without taking away one iota of praise to you, I want to state that I hoped for more social media gurus to respond to this question.
So, I renew my call -- what could I have posted to better engage the interest of additional social media experts?
In closing, I am taking this task seriously. I set up a Basecamp project (37Signals rocks!) for study and coordinate tasks to reach my SMM goals. I know you'll be one of my collaborators on this journey.
Other takers to join in on this ride?
-
Hi Slava, I will definitely contact you. It's all about finding a good fit to help my company implement best practices. Thanks!
-
Give me a call after 6 pm PST today, I will help you for free. 619-757-7238 Slava or add me in Skype: slavarybalko
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
OkCupid's javascript social media button?
Hi i'm looking to do something similar like http://blog.okcupid.com/ does with their blog, in which they display a social media button once the person hits the bottom of the page. Can anyone recommend a wordpress plugin which can do this? Cheers, Matt
Social Media | | MBASydney0 -
What is the usual amount of sites to use sharing with social media
yes i am wanting to share my articles with social media sites, what is the amount of sites you should use and not over do it
Social Media | | equotes0 -
How to keep social sharing if we change the URL ?
Hi, We want to change the URL of the blogposts. We want to remove the date, so the URL ... websitename.ca/blog/2012/02/04/name-of-the-article/ would become websitename.ca/blog/name-of-the-article/ For SEO link juice it's OK because we will implement 301 redirect on all URL. But we have many Like, Google + and Tweet on our articles. Is there a way we can maintain our social share (Facebook, Twitter and G+) for each URL if we change them ? We are using Wordpress and we have around 1 500 blogpost. Thanks for your time
Social Media | | Adviso0 -
Images on Social Media - Can they be Optimized?
My company has been sharing images on its Facebook and twitter outlets which are getting a lot of shares. It seems to be the only thing really working for us. Is there a way to optimize this or use it to our advantage for our website? Or is this just something that will help me gain some edge rank in Facebook?
Social Media | | desmond.liang0 -
Looking for A Social media sentiment tracking solution
Greetings from OS grid reference SE404481 🙂 I really like the graph on slide 16 of this presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/stevelatham/social-media-strategy-spur-interactive I would like to replicate this but I would like to know if any SEOMOZ member could recommend a tool that can monistor sentiments eg positive & negative commments about a brand across different social media platforms. I also wonder how these packages measure negativity, do they just scan word negative words? Thanks in advance, David
Social Media | | Nightwing0 -
Why aren't social interactions showing any data? It was last week, but now displays nothing? Anyone know why this is?
Hi, As I look through the various accounts I work on I can no longer see any data from the social interaction on Facebook or Twitter. This now means that no data is displayed about growth rate etc. Does anyone know why this is? Thanks, Adam
Social Media | | adamgthorndike0 -
Social Media Approaches for a Pest Control Company
Hi Everyone, I am working with a pest control company that is looking to branch out into social media. Their primary goal is to connect with their existing customers to improve retention. The secondary goal is to potentially pick up new clients. With that said, I wanted to see if you all had some ideas on things that they could tweet/facebook about on a regular basis? Posting about bugs on a daily basis gets pretty boring. I know Rand has been talking a lot lately about not being so narrow, so maybe we should talk more about general home improvement? Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks! EDIT: I should clarify that this is a company that has maintenance plans. You don't call them only when you have a problem. You sign up with them, and they treat your property every 3 months, or whenever you call. Only about 2% of their customer base is one-off phone calls to fix 1 problem and never come back again. I don't think their existing customer base will have any issues with Liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter. The initial plan is to incentivize them to do so, but once we get the like/follow, we want to continually be in front of them with interesting content, contests as Jay suggested, etc.
Social Media | | brianspatterson2 -
Social Media effects SEO
Looking for Tips on how to improve our Social Media. How to get more people to LIKE US on Facebook and or Share. My understanding is that Facebook Likes are starting to play a big role in Organic Search Results. Any Ideas on how to to receive more LIkes and Shares. Anyone know of any Facebook Tools? If we run a contest, how can we set it up on Facebook for people to Like us prior to entering the contest. Can we track who Liked Us When?
Social Media | | hfranz0