Social Media Marketing is a strategy to raise your company's
visibility online by participating in various social media
networks. StoneHenge Partners can help you increase the activity
around these goals:
- Website traffic
- Sales conversion
- Page views
- Brand awareness
- Brand reputation management
- Business development
But Social Media isn't simply "Search Engine Optimization on
Facebook." It presents a variety of new challenges to business of
all sizes, because of the cultural adoption of message, brand, and
image within the arena.
To optimize your online presence in the social arena, we
recommend following guidelines first proposed by Rohit
Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in 2006 and added, amended
and edited (in classic social media style) by a gang of influential
thinkers:
- Increase your linkability. Think blogs,
content, aggregation and link baiting.
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy. Include
tagging calls to action.
- Reward inbound links. List your
trackbacks.
- Help your content travel. When you have
content that can be portable (such as PDFs), submitting them to
relevant sites will help your content travel further, and
ultimately drive links back to your site.
- Encourage the mashup. Let others use your
content, even if they produce something a bit different.
- Be a user resource, even if it doesn't help
you. Add value and outbound links.
- Reward helpful and valuable users. Give your
contributors the recognition they deserve.
- Participate. Join the conversation, and do it
organically.
- Know how to target your audience. Understand
what your appeal is, and who you are appealing to.
- Create content. Write sometthing people want
to read.
- Be real. Transparency pays off, and no one
likes a fake.
- Be humble. Don't forget your roots.
- Stay fresh. Don't be afraid to try new
things.
- Develop a SMO strategy. Define your
objectives, and be fully aware of what your desired outcome
is.
- Choose your tactics wisely. Of those involved
with social media, 1% create content and 10% enrich it. Your stuff
will be reused; you can influence by who and how.
- Make SMO part of your process. Find ways to
incorporate SMO tactics at the template level of document
creation.
- Don't be afraid to let go of an idea. Let
others own it.
Sound daunting? StoneHenge Partners can advise you how to set up
a good SMO, then we can supply resources to operate it. Our
services include:
- Audit your site. We will analyze your metrics
to understand the trends of users on your site -- where they came
from, how they make decisions, and what they are looking for. Then
we apply those insights to the social media arena.
- Plan a campaign. We advise you how to define a
social media campaign from concept to execution. Then we work with
you every step of the way.
- Build internal networks. We help you build
company-specific social media platforms, such as blogs, wikis, and
online communities. We also help you establish policies to manage
participation in employee media.
- Build your expertise. We educate your staff on
effective uses of social media, create social media assets that
appreciate and grow, and plan effective search engine marketing
campaigns leveraging social media conversations.