Kimberly McCormick - Bayshore Solutions Director of Corporate Marketing
By: Kimberly McCormick – Bayshore Solutions Corporate Marketing Team
Social Media Career Killers
In this session, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content for Marketing Sherpa/MecLabs moderated a panel of B2B Social media experts including: Eddie Smith, Chief Revenue Officer of Topsy Labs; Chris Baggott, Chairman of Compendium; and Nicole Kelly, President of SME Digital, in clarifying five things NOT to do if you want to develop a successful Social Media program.
While this may seem to be an obvious list for native digital marketers, it is a good back-to basics checklist (And the panel tagged on a few interesting tips and ideas for social media marketing)
5 Social Media Career Killers to Avoid:
1. Thinking your CFO is your nemesis when you are justifying the cost of Social Media:
- Understand what CEO & CFO want/care about –
- Show metrics of Social Media that impact leads & sales
- Social media should be 1 line item, with metrics that are Cost and savings based to the company, i.e.:
- Cost per impression,
- Cost per engagement (Site visit),
- Cost per lead
- How-to’s for getting traffic and lead gen from social media efforts:
- A smart marketer embeds links in tweets
- Yet only approx 10% of tweets have links
- Have Calls to Action on your Blog –
- Curate a collection of blog entries into e-books
- Place a form on your blog page with content item as fulfillment
2. Thinking you need to produce Single Use Content
- A Most effective tactic is re-purposing and reusing content
- Use a content calendar
- Need to produce the right volume of content – onion – use a layered content approach
- Create short form content item (Blog post)
- Expand it to an article
- Make a webinar around the topic
- Produce a quick podcast on the topic
3. Creating Content that is Not Authentic
- Make sure what we retweet or post os is real – not a faked persona people can see through this , and it destroys your trust and credibility in social media
- So much content is still in marketing-speak – this is not interesting
- Use a human and conversational tone in SM
- Think about how to help others versus selling all the time
- Though at some point we need to post some kind of an offer
- To mix it up tie in with a funny picture, some human interest item (Share-potential – make it fun for the end user)
- Idea for authentic content: use customer service email answers, or sales emailed answers to questions as blog posts
- Start gathering these golden nuggets by asking your company Subject Matter Experts /sales people etc., to copy Marketing on these answer-emails
- Embedding photos and things that people find interesting
4. Treating Social media like it is something ”Special”:
- All Marketing channels need to integrate:
- Email, social media etc., need to align together,
- Can’t treat social media as a separate fiefdom
- Leads that first encounter a brand in Social Media tend to convert in other tactics. Marketers and companies need to need to understand the influence
- Don’t present SM metrics by themselves – show how they influence other channels
- Absolutely embed links to posts, driving traffic to your site, encouraging further engagement
5. Not soliciting outside content:
- Customer reviews are most effective in influencing conversions
- Use customer stories to power your content marketing and social media presence
- People will share their own content
- Consider a 80/20 approach: 80% sharing 3rd party content – 20% your own content
- Positions credibility & trust in prospects (you arehelping your customers
- Consider letting customers blog for you
More recaps and insights–gleaned to come soon…
Kimberly McCormick is a Director of Corporate Marketing at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.