Using social media marketing

CORPUS CHRISTI —
Using social media marketing

Q: How can I use social media to market my products and services?

A: Social media is one choice to use in your marketing plan, not the plan itself. Your marketing plan should include market research, objectives, your competitive advantage, strategy and a system to track results.

Research tells you the demographic description of your customers. That includes things like age, sex, income, occupation, marital status, location, interests, opinions and values. You need to match your customer demographic to the best social media service like Facebook or MySpace to reach that demographic.

A good local social media consulting service can help you do that and teach you how to use the media. However, only you have the knowledge and credibility to communicate with your customers using social media. It’s not a technology that can be easily outsourced.

Only one in five small businesses use social media. Of those that do, about 73 percent use Facebook or another net working site, 28 percent use a blog and 23 percent use Twitter.

Your over all objectives for social media should be to first keep your existing repeat customers and second to have those existing customers use your social media space to endorse your product or service and recruit their friends to become new customers. Personal referral is a powerful tool to recruit new customers.

Social media can accomplish several marketing objectives. First, listen and gather feedback on which products or services to supply and how to market them. Using the right software tools you can measure how many times your message is viewed, how many times it is shared with the viewers friends and what the fan responses say.

You use that information to adjust your message to encourage more sharing. Second, do market research. Facebook now has the capability to allow you to target ads based on personal information, which users have disclosed about themselves. This allows you to do demographic market research by trying alternative messages with niche groups to see which ones get the highest response rates and the highest click-through rate to friends of the viewers.

Third, build your credibility as a reliable, knowledgeable supplier. Many businesses have official Twitter handles and Facebook pages for the business, however, it helps if the owner or manager personally participates in the conversation. That makes the message more authentic and encourages the conversation from viewers and their friends.

Lastly, social media can sell your product by offering promotions, discounts and contests with prizes. Consistency is essential to maintain the ongoing communication with customers that social media customers expect. Success depends on your customer demographics, type of product or service sold and your consistency and skill in communicating with your social media customers.

Share and Enjoy

Four Morals From MySpace’s Fall

What can we learn from the disintegration of MySpace – just five years ago a media darling and now in the tech industry’s dustbin?  It would be easy to blame the fall on inept management, except that the company’s leaders clearly were not dumb.  Rather, the seeds of demise were laid in the company’s using four traditional approaches to business in a new market where rapid change required different thinking:

1. Exploiting opportunity fast. When MySpace was founded in 2003, the social networking space was exploding.  The company believed that it needed to get big fast, and so it pulled whatever levers it could to grow.  Its parent company, eUniverse, had a list of 20 million e-mails which it used liberally to publicize the service.  The site attracted masses of teens, but their shared interests revolved around passions like favorite bands and movie stars.  Facebook moved in a more focused way, because it had to.  Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room lacked a corporate parent with deep pockets, so he focused tightly on a market he understood – college students.  Students on a campus had a lot more in common than a passion for Justin Timberlake, and so they had more to share on the network.  While Facebook had far fewer users than MySpace in its early days, those users were clustered in a way that gave the site a critical mass to make it compelling.  Counter-intuitively, in a new market the winners focus tightly on a foothold customer even if they constitute a small portion of the total pie up for grabs.  By starting small, they can move quickly to commercialize their idea.  They can also learn rapidly from this foothold and adjust accordingly.
2. Leveraging infrastructure. MySpace came to market quickly in part because it used a software development platform called ColdFusion.  Facebook, by contrast, used open source tools which took longer to deploy.  Unfortunately for MySpace, ColdFusion provided the company with an inflexible technical infrastructure.  When threats emerged like spam and phishing, MySpace was slow to respond.  The accountants love to leverage fixed costs in a company, and MySpace was not about to tear up its infrastructure to get more flexible.  Alas, adaptability is one of the biggest advantages a company can have in a new market, and that doesn’t show up on an accountant’s spreadsheet.  Facebook could move with the speed of the emerging industry, while MySpace could not.
3. Catering to lead customers. Some of the earliest users of MySpace felt comfortable with technology (no surprise there), and they wanted to configure their pages to reflect their individuality.  Bands wanted to appear distinct too.  But most people aren’t tech-heads or rock stars, and the jumble of page appearances was confusing to users just getting oriented to social media.  Facebook had a far more consistent look-and-feel.  Zuckerberg was designing for the masses, not for the most vocal and atypical early adopters.
4. Take the money on the table. If people were visiting MySpace, the company was going to be sure to claim all the advertising dollars their usage could support.  It was not going to make other start-ups rich.  This is often good practice in established markets, where there is a fixed pie of profit of fight over.  In new markets, the real battle is to generate consumption.  Facebook opened up its platform to application developers like Zynga, and it benefitted hugely even while these upstarts raked in huge revenues.  Established markets can be zero-sum games, whereas new markets are about positive sums.

Ultimately, MySpace fell victim to hubris.  Chasing after market leadership, it moved too fast, too confidently, and too traditionally.  Facebook was more focused, adaptable, and open to fresh thinking.  With a market value now roughly 2,000 times that of MySpace, Facebook has proven the value of using new rules in new markets.

 

Share and Enjoy