Is Your Business Social Enough?

From Flexpoint Digital Marketing Consulting

Today, social media platforms have invaded and taken over public consciousness. It has become a big part of day to day routines and an indispensable communication tool for people to connect and stay in touch. Consumers have used social media presence as one of the integral basis of a company’s legitimacy, reliability and viability. Businesses today are judged based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, and consumers expect companies to respond to the concerns and queries they have tweeted within the day or within the hour.



Suffice it to say, social media has managed to steal the thunder away from traditional marketing methods. Modern marketing strategies today have a mix of social media tactics as its integral component for reaching business goals.

Discover the Social 5-Pack  

Highly competitive companies have taken the aggressive path and actively pursued the “Social 5-Pack”, made up of: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. This is in line with the aim to engage their target market and existing client base in order to fill the top of the sales funnel as well as understand the prevailing consumer preferences and behaviors to ensure brand loyalty.
However, signing up and maintaining multiple accounts on all social networking sites is not as easy as it seems. Jumping right in without any in-depth understanding of the social media process can prove to be potentially detrimental for a company, which can lead to exposing its online presence at serious risk and leading it towards an unproductive direction.  

Take the Reins of Your Online Presence  

Given the power of social media, it is critically important for businesses to work through their strategies and develop processes to lead to scalability, efficiency, and successful social engagement. This eBook provides you all the necessary information to understand the full potential of social media, as well as how your business can harness its latent power so you can make smarter decisions on how your organization can effectively incorporate it into your company’s marketing and communications mix.
If you want to drive your business forward, you need to make sure it stays social, current and relevant in consumers’ consciousness. Discover how social media can become your most effective and influential marketing workhorse. This eBook will equip you will all the important information on how to get started and how you can use social media to your full advantage and rake its long-term rewards.    

Understanding the Value of Social Media Buzz and What It Can Do For Your Business
These days, social media is the buzz word in marketing and a global trend that has gotten everyone of every age engrossed in one, two and possibly even several social media sites. Everyone is on it, in one form or another. But what is it exactly?

Social Media Explained in Plain English

The term social media has been carelessly tossed around and used too often in online marketing. But what is it really about? In essence, social media incorporates the use of online technologies and methods that allow people to share personal opinions, content as well as swap insights and perspectives with the rest of the world.  

Social media content can take different shapes and forms:
 Text – often used to write or put across personal opinions or posts  Images – photos are used to display anything of interest  Audio – podcasts can be created to other users to download  Video – video content can be shared to engage, entertain or educate
Among the most popular social media sites at the moment include:

 Social Networking: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+  Wikis: Wikipedia  Video Sharing: YouTube  Photo Sharing: Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr  News Aggregation: Digg, Reddit   Online Gaming: World of Warcraft

The New Approach to Branding and Communication – Moving Beyond Marketing


Social media has paved the way to a more powerful communication channel for companies to publish their marketing messages – all without the exorbitant cost. While we all know social networks is generally used by businesses to engage their target market and study consumer preferences and behaviors, the truth is, it has other equally powerful features that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy, with highly rewarding payoff at that.

Here are other areas in your business that you can apply social media to drive success:

 Customer Service – One ideal example of this is Best Buy. With their Twelpforce, employees are empowered to provide prompt assistance on issues and queries. The ability to respond and react quickly is very critical in today’s market, especially in influencing and changing perceptions. Even if a concern has not been resolved immediately, customers will feel their issues were acknowledged and given attention in a timely manner.
  Internal Communications and Collaboration – Small and large organizations can largely benefit from social media, in terms of file sharing, collaborative editing and knowledge sharing.
  Recruitment and Retention – A lot of employees today decide on whether they want to be a part of an organization or not based on information derived from social networks. It can also present a powerful tool in sourcing social channels that exists through professional networks.
Understanding the Social Media Ecosystem

To effectively use social media to your full advantage, it is important to take time and learn how the ecosystem works and the emerging habits of the “social consumers”.  Consider each social networking site as a town and the ecosystem basically pertains to the infrastructure of that town.
Your knowledge of the ecosystem will provide you a virtual map to navigate your way around the streets and how to find the path towards connecting with your target market. According to the latest study conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, consumers who are both Twitter followers and Facebook fans of a certain brand will not only recommend it products or services but also buy from those brands. In the same study, consumers reveal that brands that do not engage in social media are perceived as “out of touch” and outdated.

So the main idea here is to focus your social media efforts on the power users who command influence within their social networks. However, it is also important to note that connecting with medium and light users will also help your business earn social proof and trust.

Converting Leads to Sales: The ROI of Social Media

Like any business endeavor, you naturally want to have a fair idea on the return of your investment in social media and not simply jump right in just because it’s the popular thing. The ROI cycle of social media can be separated into 3 stages.

Stage 1: The Launch  
At this stage, 100% of your focus is on setting up accounts on the 5 Social Packs: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. While there are a number of other popular social networking sites, the 5 are considered to be the critically important ones. You simply can’t afford not to have presence on all 5 platforms.

The Launch stage is more of executional with the primary goal of getting started. Here are the details of this stage:

Approach: Executional Objectives:  Social Media Presence Focus:   Short-Term Results: Negligible
At this point, you won’t be able to expect any significant impact or derive results.

Stage 2: Management At this stage, about 60% of your company’s efforts will be focused on developing the 5 social media sites. About 10% of the focus is directed towards the creative and brand offer and 20% on setting up quantitative metrics like inbound links, traffic, Facebook “likes”, etc.   The remaining 10% will be focused on qualitative metrics such as survey results, pools and studying brand sentiment.

Approach: Tactical Objectives:  Customer Engagement Focus:   Mid-Term Results: Increase in Traffic

Stage 3: Optimization During the Optimization stage, 25% of the focus is on gaining more leverage on all 5 social media platforms, and 30% will be distributed to creative and brand offer development, as well as the quantitative and qualitative metrics. The other 25% of the focus will be directed to

Improving the conversion rate and the optimization of campaigns. The remaining 20% will be used to measure success of the campaign which will be the basis of your ROI.

Approach: Strategic Objectives:  Social Media ROI Focus:   Long-Term Results: Increase in Revenue

Despite what many social experts claim that ROI of social media cannot be measured, there is actually a way to measure it. This process will require a better understanding of your customer lifetime value (CLV) or the average revenue generated by a customer during their entire engagement period with your products and services. This figure will be used to compare the results that have been generated on your campaign in social media.

For example:   
If a typical customer spends about $10 every month on a particular product and has been a loyal patron of a certain brand for about 3 years, this equates to the average customer lifetime value of $360.00.

Most companies are willing to spend about 10% of their CLV for the acquisition of new customers. This means, they are willing to spend $36 to acquire a new customer who is expected to spend $360 all throughout her engagement with the brand.

So if your social media efforts will cost you $36, 000 for one full year, and your campaign will be able to generate 1, 000 new customers every year, then you definitely have a clear winner in your hands.