One way we can reach our customers is through social media marketing.

We are inherently social creatures. We work, live, talk, and play together. Social media is a blending of technology and talking to each other…anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Today we can reach our customers by earning people’s interest and talking with them when, where, and how they want! Social media marketing includes using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Companies using social tools report more customers at the cash register and spending 60% less per lead than using traditional marketing. Using social media is proving to be good business.

Start earning more of your customers through social media marketing today.

Listen to the podcast of this here: How can social media help my business?

There are also unbelievable amounts of complexity, nuance, and unadulterated bull. What’s a person to do?

Instead of all that, let me give it to you plainly.

Your priorities for using social media successfully are:

1. Audience
2. Content
3. Brand

Simple, right? You can call it the ABC’s if it helps, just keep the C second.

First, keep your audience in mind–always. They are the folks you’re serving, your customers and potential customers, the reason you’re in business. They should be the ones constantly in mind as you go about creating content and positioning your brand. Ask yourself, “Who are they? What do they care about? How can I help them?”

Next is content. What is your audience going to get from whatever social media you’re putting out? Is it valuable to them? Does it entertain, answer questions, give an emotional high, save them time or money? Whatever it is, it has to be valuable to your audience. If it is, they’ll use it and spread it to others for you.

Branding is third. If you’ve kept your audience in mind and created valuable content you’re already quite a ways down the road toward a good brand. After checking that whatever you’re putting out fits your audience and is valuable to them, make sure it meets your brand standards. Does it sound like you? Does it look like you? Will your audience immediately recognize it as you?

And that’s it. Keep it simple.

Image via Wikipedia

If you’re reading this you know a couple of things:

1. It’s easy to start a Twitter page
2. It’s much harder to get people to follow you and spread the word

Here are a few ways to build your following (audience) on Twitter and to reach new people. I’ve broken it into the basic requirements, the more compelling and difficult, and promotions.

Bare minimum tweeting tips

• Use # hashtags – In the world of Twitter, hashtags (the # symbol) are used to indicate a subject or idea, like #tweeting or #happy or #awesomepost. They make it possible for anyone (if you have a public profile) to find and see your tweets as they search for subjects they’re interested in. The only rhyme or reason to what words you use immediately after the # is to be sure it will make sense and be helpful to others.
• Use @ at symbols -  @ symbols followed by a Twitter user name (like @WebMalama) is the best way to mention someone. Using the @ before their username automatically creates a link in your tweet to their Twitter page, thus passing on the aloha. It also makes it easier for the person you’re referencing to know that you mentioned them.
• Have a link to Twitter on your webpage/blog – This is basic, but sometimes overlooked. If I can’t find your Twitter page or name, I likely won’t tweet to you or about you. [Here's a great, brief social research piece on asking for people to take an action versus just dropping in a link to your Twitter page (thanks Dustin Curtis, @dcurtis). Bottom line? Directly asking for an action works best.] You should follow me on twitter here.
• Say thank you – If someone mentions you or retweets you, return the aloha by sending them a tweet mentioning them to say thanks.
• Be brief – You need to leave some room so people can retweet without having to edit your post. Editing a post means work, which means I’m a lot less likely to pass it on. Keep in mind you don’t want to go past about 140 characters.
• Use a url shortener – To help you be brief, several sites have created tools that replace a long link that you’d like to post with a post-friendly really short link. I prefer bit.ly or ping.fm, but there are a bunch out there.
• Ask for retweets – Sometimes we need some prompting to take action, like “Please RT”. The fact is, more people will do it if you ask.

The hard stuff

• Be interesting – Think of it as a great Discovery Channel special. Have a great title and catch people’s attention. Tweet things that are interesting to your followers: facts, news, events, stories, whatever. Don’t just post junk to have something there.
• Be entertaining – Think of it as a show. Tell about the funny things, dramatic things, shocking things, and encouraging things.
• Be relevant – Think of it as a one-on-one conversation with a friend. Only tweet things are relevant to your followers. This means you need to know about your followers, or at least about who you want your followers to be. Only post things out they’re going to care about. And only post as often as they’d like to hear–over-Tweeting causes people to ignore.
• Be helpful – Think of it as giving local insights to a friend visiting town. Give information that will help them have a better time than they would have otherwise.

Promos

• Give offers – Give offers, free stuff, coupons, and discounts that are valuable to your followers. You can even make them exclusive only to your Twitter followers. This can garner a lot of retweets as word spreads of a great deal.
• Host competitions – Run a posting competition of some sort. Let your imagination run wild, but make sure it gives your followers a reason to post about you or to you.
• Play games – Do an online scavenger hunt, quiz, or wordgame.

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Enter social media.

Social media gives companies a way to reach customers cost-effectively. Instead of designing a mailer and paying postage to 10,000 customers at a cost of about $6,000, or printing a newspaper insert at a typical cost of $1000′s, a business can open a free Facebook or Twitter account, type a message and press the send button.

All you need is to know your audience, have some creativity, and make good offers.

A recent look at the number of Twitter followers and Facebook Fans of grocery stores by Pace Communications is a fun example. (see the chart at the bottom of this post)

In the grocery store battles, Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods have the most fans and followers by a large margin. We’d expect that, right? They’re big stores with big budgets able to hire the best and pay for the goods.

But I wondered about the number of fans or followers by grocer size. What if a smaller grocer is gathering a huge fan base while a much larger chain is not. If so, maybe the smaller chain is the one to watch for innovate, effective use of social media.

So, I took the liberty of tabulating Facebook fans per store and Twitter followers per store to get a feel for who is building an audience well. (see the full table below)

Per store, Wegmans (75 stores, 1,066 Facebook fans per store, 119 Twitter followers) is beating Walmart (2,906 stores) almost 2 to 1 in Facebook fans and 10 to 1 in Twitter followers.

Meanwhile, Whole Foods (279 stores) beats out every other grocer measured by more than 50 to 1 in Twitter followers per store. This includes beating out Walmart (2,906 stores), Safeway (1,486 stores), Kroger (2,470), everybody.

Whole Foods is attracting, on average, nearly 6,500 customers per store. That has got to help save on ad costs and bring in new business. Maybe there’s something we should pay attention to there.

So take heart smaller companies, social media may level the playing field. The continuing question is, how to use it well.

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Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project just released a brief report on Older Adults and Social Media. One of the key findings was the huge uptick in the number of those 50 years or more using the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.”

A few questions that come to mind for me:

• Are our social media sources set up to accommodate the needs and desires of 50+ users?
• Are the social media needs and desires of older adults different from younger users?
• How does this compare with older adults use of the Internet in general?
• Does this further indicate opportunities that were previously considered a waste of time, like with baby boomers?

What comes to mind for you?

The report was authored by Mary Madden of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, was posted online 8/27/2010, and can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx.

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I read DMNews’ article on Billabong launching its “I surf because” social media campaign where Stirling Howland, the digital marketing manager for Billabong International was quoted as saying, “The challenge for any brand is creating intimacy with the consumer. It’s so easy to just be a ‘big brand’ and assume people all want to hear the same thing.”

That made me wonder if creating intimacy between a brand and the customer is the “default” goal we should be trying to achieve. Are there times when a company’s customers would prefer to have impersonal, professional, and anonymous interactions instead?

We assume that customers want to interact with a person at a company, not just a “nameless behemoth.” Maybe I just have a touch of 1950′s nostalgia, but I’m happy to work with companies who don’t put on a personal face.

Some products I buy I want the brand and the store to make just make the transaction and doing nothing else…in fact, sometimes I value that experience more and am willing to go the extra mile for it.

There can be a lot of value in a company coming off as a company and not as a person.
What do you think?

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