The 4 Parts To Social Media Marketing

Today, we’re going to talk about the 4 key parts of social media: social listening, social influencing, social networking, and social selling. Oftentimes when you hear the term social media, you just think of all the major social networking sites and apps you check daily. But, social is a much larger animal than we realize and unfortunately many marketers are not taking full advantage of these digital powerhouses. In this episode, we are going to break down the 4 key parts of social media and teach you how to take advantage of each key for maximum return.

We discuss:

• Social Listening
  • Tuning into the needs and wants of our customers
  • Before social media, companies would hold focus groups and community polling
    • These tactics have since been proven mostly ineffective because people will only tell you what they think you want to hear
  • How to take advantage of listening:
    • Find where your customers are on social media (i.e. groups and hashtags)
  • Best tools for listening: Hootsuite, Mention, Agorapulse, and Brand Watch
• Social Influencing
  • While influencer marketing has become a hot trend within the last few years, many recent studies have shown that it doesn’t quite work for everyone and the ROI is generally small
  • Check out Noah Kagan’s podcast episode on influencer marketing
• Social Networking
  • FACT: likes do not matter
  • You can always accomplish more with a small, engaged audience of raving fans, than if you were to have a large following that doesn’t engage with your content
  • Priceline’s Facebook page is a great example of having a large audience with little engagement
  • Seeker VS. Engagement Networks
    • Seeker Networks are based on the idea of search (ex. YouTube)
      • Build content for search/SEO 
    • Engagement Networks are based on the idea of community building (ex. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn)
      • Build content that is attention grabbing, captivating, and gets people talking
  • Opened VS. Closed Networks
    • Opened Networks take you to other user’s content, like a search engine would (ex. YouTube)
    • Closed Networks prefer you to keep content with the network walls. If you don’t, you could be penalized for posting content that is hosted elsewhere (ex. Facebook)
• Social Selling
  • SECRET: it’s not really selling…it’s brand building
  • People only buy from those they like and trust
  • You have to get people familiar with you and position yourself as a thought leader in your space
  • The best way to “sell” is by putting out helpful content that bring your customers value
  • Trigger Events: major events happening for your prospective customers
    • New management, new services offerings, expansions, etc

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