1.       Brand mentions

Brand mentions do two things: provide you with feedback about your social media efforts, and give you an opportunity to join in conversations about your brand.

To monitor brand mentions, set up Google Alerts to monitor your brand name. Alternative/additional tools you might want to consider using are Social Mention and (I have only recently discovered this but it looks pretty good so far): mention.

Screenshot of Mention

2.       Mentions of your competitors

Are more people talking about your competitors than you and if so, why? What are they doing differently to you? Is it that what they share is just a bit more awesome than what you share? Or have they got a more influential pool of followers?

Look at what it is that your competitors are doing better than you and learn from it.

However, just because people are talking about your competitors does not automatically mean that everything they’re saying is good.

It might seem a bit harsh, but there are great opportunities to be had from jumping on the back of a competitors’ mistake. Of course, if you have a good relationship with your competitors, monetising from their errors might not be a good move. However, in the spirit of true competition….

• When Starbucks refused to honour thousands of free drink coupons, rival Caribou Coffee saw an opportunity to win over Starbucks customers by honouring the vouchers themselves.
• SEO firm Blueglass recently went under, taking their upcoming conference, BlueglassX, with them. Distilled responded by offering free tickets to Searchlove to all BlueglassX ticket holders.
• Local butchers responded in force to the recent horsemeat scandal by emphasising the quality, and absence of, horse in their meat. Since the scandal broke, the Q Guild of Butchers reported a 30 per cent increase in sales of mince, and an overall sales increase of 20 per cent.

3. Referral traffic

Referral traffic will tell you how many people are being driven from your social pages to your website, as well as which social networks they are coming from, and where on your site they are going.

To get this data, go to Google Analytics, click on ‘Traffic Sources’, ‘Social’, and ‘Network Referrals’.

The page you will now be looking at will tell you which social networks are driving visitors to your site, and how many, as well as the average duration of a visitor from each network, and how many pages, on average, they visit.

You can delve deeper into this data by clicking on the name of a social network. You will then see which pages of your site people have landed on when following a link from that network. You’ll also see some very helpful data for each of those pages: the average amount of time spent on the site once they’ve landed on a specific page, and the average number of pages visited.

The knowledge you can gain from this is invaluable. Firstly you can establish which pieces of your content are gaining the most interest from social media. The average visit duration then tells you whether or not people are actually reading the content. If the average visit duration for a page is 10 or 20 seconds, and that page contained 1000 words, something has prevented people reading the full page.  If the average visit duration is 2 or 3 minutes, you can safely assume most people are sticking around the read the full piece.

4.       Conversions

The fact that this is at the bottom of this list does not make tracking conversions any less important. In fact, I think that if there was just one social media metric you were going to track, it should be this one.

Your social media led conversions tell you the most important metric of all: how many people come to your site via a social network, and wind up making you money.

To access your conversion data, again go to Google Analytics, click on ‘traffic sources’, ‘social’, and ‘conversions’.

From here you can see which social networks drove conversions, how many, and (depending on your settings), how much they were worth.

This data will tell you which social networks are proving most valuable in monetary terms, and therefore which networks are worthy of more (or less) of your time.

Unfortunately, the success of pay-per-click advertising has triggered a mind-set that all forms of marketing must be accurately measured. Yet the fact is that social media isn’t exactly setting a trend when it comes to marketing that can’t be measured. What about television ads? Billboards? Radio advertisements?

In fact, most ‘traditional’ forms of marketing and advertising are invested in based on faith. We know that television advertising is effective, so we pay to create an advert, and then we pay for it to be broadcast. While it’s feasible to attribute initial spikes in sales to the advert, this correlation quickly becomes less and less relevant.

The success of television advertising becomes even more difficult to measure when we’re talking about high-value, occasional-purchase items – like a car or a holiday. The advert may be responsible (at least in part) for a purchase made 6 or 12 months after it were initially aired – yet unless we ask the consumer, we will never know the part it played.

Which brings me nicely onto my first point:

Ask!

When a purchase is complete, ask the consumer how they first heard about you, or what it was that made them choose you. Of course, you can’t force them to answer, but if you get lots of responses saying ‘Facebook’, you know your efforts are worth the time and expense.

Use Google Analytics

Analytics is my favourite tool for tracking social media ROI. It can’t give you the whole picture, but it can tell you who went directly from one of your social pages to your site, and then converted. It can also tell you who visited one of your social networks at some point before they converted – so long as all their movements were carried out on the same device, and on the same browser.

I’ve delved a bit deeper into how to use Google Analytics to measure social media success in this post here.

Utilise Call Tracking

Firstly, you’ll need to get yourself signed up to a call tracking service. Then you simply need to assign a different phone number to each of your social networks. Of course, this can’t give a complete picture of your social ROI. Call tracking can only track people who use that precise number to make a purchase. If someone visits one of your social networks, and at some point down the line makes a purchase through your site, call tracking will not account for this.

Run Social-Exclusive Offers

Instead of running an offer on your website and advertising it on your social networks, run unique offers exclusively through your social pages – that way, you just need to track how many people take you up on each offer to gauge the ROI of each one.

Alternatively, you can run identical offers over multiple networks, but create a separate landing page for each site.

Measuring success in social media has always been a bit of a sore subject. Social media is a form of marketing built around relationships – but how do we measure the success of a relationship?

It’s difficult, especially when we consider this: we don’t all define success in the same way, nor are we all looking to measure the same things. For some of us, simply growing our following means we’ve succeeded in social media. For others it might be to have a super-active following. For another it could be to build virtual friendships with an industry-celebrity, or a journalist with valuable connections. Of course for many, it’s simply to drive sales.

Thankfully a growing desire to measure success in social media has spawned the creation of numerous tools designed to do just that. I’m going to take a look at some of the most prevalent, and of two of those, look at how to use some of their most important features.

Facebook Insights

Your first port of call should probably be Facebook Insights. It’s free and available to every Facebook page that has 30 or more likes. The page you’ll probably refer to most is your overview, which will look something like this:

What it means:

• Reach

This is the number of people who have ‘seen’ your post (in the last 28 days). I’ve put ‘seen’ in quote marks because this doesn’t mean someone has actually looked at your post. They may have scrolled past it in their timeline but this does not necessarily mean they paid any attention to it.

• Engaged Users

This is much more important; it means that someone has actually clicked on your post.

• Talking About This

This is the number of people who have actually interacted with this post; i.e. someone has ‘liked’, commented on, or shared a post, answered a question or responded to an event.

• Virality

This is the percentage of people who saw an update on your page and went on to interact with it.

You can get more in-depth data from the buttons at the top of your insights’ page:

Or by exporting the data:

Google Analytics

While data about how many people are liking you, talking about you, and engaging with you might be enough for some people, it doesn’t cut the mustard with everyone. If you want to know how many sales your social media efforts are driving, you need Google Analytics.

To access social data, click on ‘traffic sources’:

Then ‘social’:

You’ll now have a menu that looks like this:

For data that’s easiest to digest, just click on ‘overview’. What you’ll see will look something like this:

From here we can see the total visits to the site in the last month (of course you can change the dates to view data collated over a different time period), the total visits that were referred via social networks, the total number of conversions, and the number of conversions that were driven by social media.

We can also see a breakdown of how many visits each social network drove.

There are two different types of social conversions to pay attention to in Analytics: ‘Assisted Social Conversions’ and ‘Last Interaction Social Conversions’:

‘Last Interaction Social Conversions’ refers to anyone who went directly from one of your social networks to your site, and then converted.

‘Assisted Social Conversions’ refers to those who visited one of your social networks at some time in the process before converting. For example, they might have visited your site, looked at your Facebook page, and then gone elsewhere.  A week later they might go to your Facebook page again. Two days later they might go directly to your site and make a purchase. This is an assisted social conversion.

There is a fatal flaw in this however: Analytics is unable to account for anyone who might interact with your brand across different devices, or using different browsers. Unfortunately, due to the prevalence of smart devices, the number of people who might do this just keeps increasing.

For example, someone might visit your website on their laptop at home. They might then visit it again, followed by your Facebook page, on their computer at work. They might visit it a third time and finally make a purchase using their iPad. Analytics will track all of these interactions separately, and only the final visit to your site will be accounted as contributing to the final conversion.

This is unfortunate for social media marketers. While Analytics might show that no-one has converted via a social media channel, it is very possible they have visited a social media page using a different device to that on which they finally converted.

If you want to delve deeper, there’s a few pretty awesome things you can do with Google Analytics….

You can view the full path customers have taken before converting. To do this click on ‘Conversions’:

Then ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’:

Then ‘Top Conversion Paths’:

What you’ll get will look something like this:

You can also view which social networks have driven traffic that converted. Go back to ‘Social’ and click on ‘Network Referrals’.

Another cool bit of data we can get from analytics is the ‘Visitor Flow’ (also to be found under ‘traffic sources’ > ‘social’). Visitor Flow tells us which social networks visitors are being referred from, and what they’re doing once they’re on your site. It’ll look something like this:

And the Rest….

While there are tons of tools out there to help you track your success across the big social media channels, here’s my pick of the best:

Hootsuite:

A favourite in the online marketing world, Hootsuite lets you integrate a number of helpful analytics sources including Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Ow.ly Click Summary (the Hootsuite URL shortener) and detailed progress reports for Facebook and Twitter.

Raven:

Another favourite in online marketing, Raven is the tool for professional agencies. As well as countless tools to enhance your SEO campaign, Raven lets you manage and monitor your progress across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Twitonomy:

This free Twitter analysis tool instantly pulls data such as your total number of @ mentions, the users who have mentioned you the most, and who’s been retweeting you (along with how many followers they have). You can also instantly pull up data such as who you are following but is not following you back.

Sprout Social:

This is an all-in-one social management tool that lets you create stylish reports to send to your clients (or boss) and show them what an awesome job you’ve been doing.

It’s also used by McDonalds (according to their testimonials at least) so it must be pretty decent.

As I said however, there are countless similar sites across the web. If you don’t want to use any of the above, here are some great articles detailing some of your other options:

Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business

20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools You Should be Using

The Top 5 Tools for Monitoring Social Media Impact

So that’s it; we’ve finally reached the end of Boom’s Social Media Guide to Business. You should now have everything you need to get started on a super-successful social media campaign, but if you need to look back over any of the past posts, here they are again:

Social Media Objectives

Identifying Sites

Creating a Picture Perfect Social Media Profile

Identifying and Interacting With Influential People

Strategy

Engaging With Your Demographic

Brand Management

And if you still want more, the next project in the pipeline is Boom’s first eBook – in which we’ll be delving even deeper into the above topics to bring you the only guide you will (hopefully) need to start and execute a successful social media campaign.

Watch This Space!

It’s pretty much mandatory these days for businesses to have a social media presence, yet many companies fear taking their brand online and outside the safety-net of their website. They fear that if they launch a Facebook page, or start Tweeting as a brand, upset customers will use these platforms to air their grievances.

But the truth is if you’ve ever annoyed a customer or customer-to-be, chances are somewhere on the internet that customer is talking about you. And that’s the same whether or not you use social media as a business.

If they’re talking about you on a blog, in a forum, or some other obscure corner of the internet, you’re unlikely to know about it. And if you don’t know about it there’s nothing you can do.

On the other hand, if they use your Facebook page to tell you what an ’awful’ company you are, you’ll know about it very quickly. And that gives you the opportunity to do something about it.

So what do you do about it?

First of all, don’t ignore – or worse, delete – any complaints.

Ignore a complaint and not only might the annoyed customer start resembling the Hulk, but also other customers (and potential customers) may well read the complaint. They may note that you’ve not even bothered to address the problem, and decide to give their money to one of your competitors instead.

Delete that complaint and forget the Hulk, this could go nuclear (but more on that later).

So what do you say?

Address the complaint as soon as possible. The longer you leave it, the bigger and greener the customer will become, and the more people will see the comment and the fact it’s been ignored.

When you respond, you need to be polite, friendly, and personable.  Your response should:

1. Address the person by name.
2. Show that you’ve paid careful attention to their complaint.
3. Apologise for what’s gone wrong.
4. As far as possible, provide a solution.

Here’s an example of a brilliant response:

This response works so well because:

• It’s been delivered by a person rather than a brand.
• They’ve empathised with the individual’s situation.
• They have apologised for the miscommunication that may have led to the complaint.
• They have provided a solution: explained that upon receipt of a doctor’s note or hospitalisation letter, any fees associated with changing flights will be waived.

To illustrate the other side of the coin, here’s an example of a really bad response:

What makes this response so bad is:

• They haven’t addressed the person complaining by name.
• They haven’t mentioned the actual complaint.
• No solution has been offered.
• It’s completely impersonal and sounds like a generic ‘copy and paste’ reply.

In effect, a response like this says ‘we don’t care’. The fact is that you can’t claim to be listening to your customers if you don’t reiterate anything they’ve said.

When you get someone who just loves to complain:

Most brands will come across one of these people from time-to-time. They thrive on finding fault and will manage to turn the tiniest error into something worth shouting about.

Sadly, as much as we’d like to mock these people and hope they go away, if you want to stay safe you still need to treat them with respect. However don’t feel you have to pander to their whining and hand them the world on a plate.

Apologise for whatever they think the problem was, and if you think the complaint was unfair, feel free to share your side of the story. But try to do this as politely as possible.

In most cases, the complaint will be over something so minor that there won’t be any real solution you can offer. However it’s always a good idea to say something like “please feel free to contact me personally on xxxxxxxxxxx if you have any further queries”.

When the problem explodes:

If you’re really unlucky, when something goes wrong you won’t be dealing with one aggrieved customer on your Facebook page, you’ll be dealing with a viral case of bad publicity.

As with any complaint when things blow up in your face, the worst thing you can do is hide away. You need to be open, transparent, and honest.

In essence, dealing with a public scandal is very similar to dealing with an individual complaint. You’re just dealing with it on a much larger scale.

• You should admit fault. Trying to lay the blame elsewhere never reflects well on anyone. People will respect you much more if simply admit you messed up. We all do sometimes, and people are surprisingly forgiving if you just admit wrong.
• You need to demonstrate that the company is sincerely sorry.
• You should explain what action will be taken to ensure the issue doesn’t occur again.

In addition, you’ll probably want to cover all of these avenues:

• Choose one member of staff as your spokesperson; someone that’s comfortable with public speaking and knows the company inside out.
• Prepare and distribute a press release that carefully dictates your company’s side of the story.
• Do the same for a blog post on your site.
• Allocate a member of staff to manage Facebook and Twitter. Both sites will probably get very busy during a time of crisis, so ensure they are monitored constantly, and that the member of staff responsible is fully informed on when and how to respond to comments.

So we’re nearly at the end of our guide to social media for business. Watch this space for the final part in which we will look at tools and methods for measuring your success in social media.

So your social media profiles are up and running, you’ve got a strategy in place, and you’ve accumulated a small pool of likes and followers – but how can you promote yourself? What should you say if you want people to care?

Let’s talk about me…

Talking about your company is probably the first thing that comes to mind when most people think: what should I post on my business social profiles?

And to an extent, this is right. This is your company’s profile and you need to ensure it reflects that. When something good happens, let your following know. Is it your work Christmas party? Enjoying a cake for someone’s birthday? Something weird and wonderful going on outside the window? Get the camera out, take a picture, and share it.

Genuine fans will want to get a glimpse inside your company, and sharing photos of company-shindigs is the perfect way to do this.

Just take a look at this photo of the Boom team on their last birthday:

On the average day, our Facebook page isn’t overly active, but this photo of us seemed to hit some sort of positive nerve because it got 29 likes (about half of our total ‘likes’ at the time) and a few comments too.

The same goes for if you’ve won an award or something else super-exciting’s happened. Have you been featured in a newspaper? Moved offices? Taken on a new member of staff? Introduced a super-cool new product or service? Please tell us about that too!

However……

While I say all that – try not to dominate your social media channels with me, me, me. Fans want to get a glimpse behind-the-scenes of your company; there’s no doubt about that. But there’s a limit.

As the name suggests, ‘social media’ is all about being social. And it’s never very social to talk about yourself all the time.

How are you talking about yourself?

There are two key ways most people talk about themselves on social, and there’s a big difference between them.

The first is the one we’ve just discussed: sharing pictures and news about the goings-on in your firm. The second involves promoting your company and your products or services.

While one shows fans your human side, the other is a thinly veiled attempt at using social space to advertise.

I see this often across all social networks. Every new post is either about what they do, or one of their products. In fact, I’ve unfollowed a couple of businesses in the past because every single tweet was about what they do and why they’re so great, with a link to their website. Who cares?! Nobody. It’s really, really boring.

The odd update about a new product or service? Fine. Just launched a sale or decided to offer a discount code? Great – tell us about that. But please, please, don’t do this every single time you post an update.

Let’s talk about your customers…

The secret to being successful on social media is engaging your audience. If you can get people responding to what you post you will naturally increase your social reach, and an engaged fan is one that’s most likely to choose you when they need what you offer.

Rather than going through lots and lots of ideas for engaging your audience, I’d recommend you have a read of these posts:

14 Awesome Ideas for Super Awesome Business Facebook Posts

13 Ideas for Interesting, Engaging, and Just Plain Awesome Tweets for Business

However, most of the ideas can be adapted and used on other social networks.

To summarise the above posts, in most cases, asking questions:

Being funny:

Or hosting a mini-quiz:

Work very, very well!

The most important thing to remember is just to never, ever, forget that social media is all about being social! If, when you’re posting an update, you remind yourself that the goal of this update is to be social and to get people interacting with you, you should do okay.

Let’s talk industry…

The above rules apply to both B2B and B2C social media campaigns; however, in B2B you can usually get away with talking about yourself a little more, and you’ll probably want to make industry-talk a prominent feature on your pages too.

In B2B social campaigns you’ll probably want to try and gain some traction as a bit of an ‘authority’ figure; a ‘go-to’ in your industry.

Some of the best ways to do this are:

• Share industry news and articles of interest
• Write your own blog posts about industry related issues
• Interact with people in a way that demonstrates your knowledge – e.g. seek out questions to answer

However, B2B campaigns don’t have to be all ‘business’ – you can still have a little fun with them and show that you’ve got a personality.

Just remember that behind every customer is a real person, with interests than span beyond your industry and your company. If you really want to get (and keep) these people engaged, you need to find out what things make them tick, and try to incorporate these things into your posts.

If you’re in need of a little more inspiration, I’d recommend taking a look at these excellent B2B Facebook pages:

Salesforce

American Express OPEN

Either way……

My key point is that whether you’re B2B or B2C, you shouldn’t be using your social profiles as a sales pitch.

Sales are a natural knock-on effect of an effective social media campaign. Constantly shoving your products or services in your fan’s faces is not the best route to get people to buy.

One BIG Rule:

Don’t ignore your audience!

Take a look at the Facebook page for Yo Sushi. The stuff they post is overall, really, really good. However, if you look a bit more deeply, you’ll see that they rarely actually engage with their fans.

Take a look at this:

They ask a question, lots of people answer, and Yo Sushi respond to them with……. nothing. Not very social is it?

Because Yo are such a big brand, people will flock to their page and interact with them anyway. They can get away with it (not that I’m advocating what they do). But for small brands, you simply cannot afford to post updates, and not follow up when people respond.

Engage your audience. Talk to them. Make them smile. They’ll begin to think of you and your brand differently. They will feel they have an actual relationship with you, and what will happen? They will come to you, without hesitation, when they need what you offer.

However, even with the most engaging and original ideas in the world, social media for business isn’t always smooth sailing. In part seven we’ll be looking at what to do when customers use social media to air their grievances with you publicly.

Here in part five, we’re going to look at how to put together a strategy for your social media campaign.

It can be tempting to start playing around with social media without a plan, but don’t – you’ll always get far more out of your time if you plan properly.

Without a proper strategy, it’s easy to become lost under the noise. You’ll end up focusing your efforts in one area and will forget about the rest.

So, before you create your strategy……

Create a ‘stalk list’:

We explained how to do this in part 4.

And……

Confirm which sites you’re going to target:

In part two we spoke about identifying sites, so you should have a pretty good idea of the type of sites you want to target.

Now you just need to decide for certain which sites you want to use. If you can’t decide, refer back to part two and come back once you’re sure which social networks are right for you.

And finally……

Decide how much time you can afford to spend on social media:

You’re not going to be able to create an effective strategy without this information.

Aaaaand you’re ready…..

Step 1:

Create a list of every task you’d like to do each week, and how long you want to spend on each. The times in the example below are based on how long you will be spending on a task each time you carry it out – not the total spent in a week. Your list should look something like this:

Step 2: Create a precise strategy that outlines every task you want to do each day. This should look something like this:

Be sure to mix up the tasks so you don’t always have the same job at the top and the bottom of each day’s list.  There’s a good chance that some days you won’t make it to the bottom of the list, and if you always plan to complete the same task last, you might never get round to it.

Step 3:                                                                                     

Review your strategy regularly. At the end of each month, review your progress, analyse what’s been working and what hasn’t, and juggle your strategy based on your findings.

Remember however that the above is just an example of how you should organise your day-to-day social media activities; not a guide on how to execute a specific, targeted campaign – although the same principals could be applied to that too.

Make Life Easier for Yourself

And utilise some of the useful apps and tools available. Here are some of the best……

Hootsuite: Hootsuite allows you to manage a multitude of social networks from one platform including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  Other useful features include the ability to track links using the platform’s URL shortner Ow.ly, and to create handy streams to help you monitor conversations of particular interest such as Hashtags and Tweeters that you particularly admire.

The basic Hootsuite is free, but agencies may need to invest in the very reasonably priced paid version.

Tweetdeck: Very similar to Hootsuite, and free too. Hootsuite seems to be the preferred choice of online marketers, but it’s worth giving a few tools a try to see which one’s a better fit for you.

Buffer: Another great tool that lets you manage multiple accounts from one platform.

Now you’ve got a strategy in place, you should be ready to start engaging. In part six, we’ll be looking at what you should say, and how you should say it.

Here in part four we’re going to look at how to identify and start interacting with influential figures in your industry, using social media.

So why would you want to identify and interact with influential people?

Building relationships with your customers is often the first (and sometimes only) aspect of social media marketing companies think of. And yet, there’s a few pretty awesome advantages to trying to get noticed by the ‘superstars’ of your industry.

You can ‘make’ them share your stuff: or rather, you can ask them really nicely. Either way, one of the big advantages to securing a relationship with someone ‘bigger’ than you are in your industry is to feel the benefit of their popularity.  When you have some super-amazing content you want to put out there, you can give them a nudge and hope they share it.

Put it this way: say you have 300 followers on Twitter. You become friends with an influencer in your industry who has 10,000 followers. If you can get them to retweet your content for you, you’ve just increased your social reach from 300 to 10,300.

It can help to make you more influential too: and everyone would like to think of themselves as a ‘thought leader’ or a ‘guru’ in their industry. (Even if they’d never refer to themselves that way out loud – and if you do, then stop it – now.)

Of course, there’s a lot more to becoming a thought leader than just hanging with the right people – but there’s no doubt that it helps.

It’ll increase your brand awareness: it’s a knock on effect. Get on the radar of important people in your industry, and chances are, other cool/important/influential people will notice you and your brand too.

So how do we find these elusive thought-leaders?

Twitter:

Your first port-of-call should probably be Twitter. Just have a search for a few terms related to your industry, and see what you find.

You might find that by doing this, you come across more businesses than actual people. If you try adding terms such as ‘blogger’, ‘writer’, ‘journalist’, or even ‘expert’, you should start uncovering the sort of people you’re after.

At this point, you don’t want to think too much about these people. Just open a spread sheet and add the names and Twitter handles of everyone who looks marginally interesting. You can narrow the list down later.

Google:

Depending on your industry, you might find quite a few potential influencers just by searching Google. For instance, a search for ‘top social media influencers’ brings up loads of great stuff.                                          

Klout:

Klout’s a funny-old tool that most people seem to love or hate. It does have its uses though, and it’s very easy to get started (you just need to log in with Twitter).

Once you’re in, just enter some more relevant industry terms in the search bar, and Klout will reveal its own selection of people it deems to be influencers in that field.

Klout can also be useful in helping you to quickly establish who influences the influencers. For example, let’s say we want to get noticed by SEO super-celeb Rand Fishkin. Unfortunately for us, we’re not the only people who want to talk to him, and he’s very unlikely to want to talk to us.

However, maybe there’s someone that Rand does want to talk to, that isn’t quite as famous as him.

If we search on Klout for ‘Rand Fishkin’, we can take a look at his Klout profile. Down the left hand side, you’ll see a column called ‘Rand Fishkin’s influencers’. If we can trust in Klout’s algorithm, these must be the people that Rand interacts with on Twitter the most.

The idea here is that we look at who influences Rand, but isn’t as popular, meaning that we might have a chance of getting on their radar instead.

Followerwonk:

Followerwonk is probably the best tool out there for finding influencers on Twitter. Plus, it’s super-simple to use. Just click on ‘Search Twitter Bios’ and then enter your search term in the search bar.

The list gives you essentially all the information you could want at-a-glance, including Twitter bios, number of followers, and their influence score.

Followerwonk also offers some other useful features including the ability to compare Twitters users to each other, and the option to analyse and track your followers. (So you know for example which of your followers are inactive – and not worth your time – and precisely who has had the cheek to unfollow you).

However, to get full use out of the tool you will need to sign up for a Pro account with SeoMoz.

What’s next?

You’ve got a list of all the people that you might like to become internet buddies with. Now you need to narrow it down to the best few people to engage with for maximum impact. There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how many to choose – just consider how many you can build meaningful relationships with in the time you’ve got.

Take a closer look at each potential ‘stalkee’ and ask yourself some of these questions:

•             What’s their influence score?

•             How many followers do they have?

•             Do they post regularly?

•             Have they posted recently?

•             Do they have an active blog, or do they regularly contribute to a blog?

•             Are they active users of any other social networks?

•             Do they communicate with others or do they just Tweet information?

Once you’ve narrowed down your list, there’s just one more thing you need to do: Create your social media strategy. We’ll look at how to do this in part five, and in part six, we’ll look at what to say and how you should say it.

Now you know who you’re targeting with a social media campaign and how you’re going to target them. So the next step is to get all of your profiles set up and ready for you to start posting.

I won’t go through every step of setting up every social media profile – I want to get straight to business and explain how to optimise your profile. However, if you’re stuck, here’s some advice on setting up accounts on the big players:

Facebook

Google Plus

Twitter

YouTube

Pinterest

LinkedIn

In most cases, setting up your profiles is the easy part. The difficult part is knowing what to do to them so that you get the most out of your social activity.

Use the same photo/logo on all your profiles

You want people to be able to recognise you/your business instantaneously, so it’s important that the main profile picture on all of your accounts is the same.

For a company profile, your company logo will likely be your best bet for all profile pictures. If it’s a profile for a personal brand, choose a close-up head-shot, ideally taken by a professional.

Remember that as much as you might like looking at photos of you and your family on holiday, a photo in which you can barely make out your face is not a great advert for your personal brand!

This is the sort of photo you should be using as a profile picture:

Write a brilliant description

This isn’t something you should rush over. Remember that in some cases, a social media profile could be the first bit of contact someone has with your business. Your company description therefore, is almost – if not as important – as the description on your website.

Remember to take the nature of the social media site, and any constrictions (i.e. character limits) into consideration. However, the most important thing is to ensure that your company description makes people want to know more.

Complete as much of your profiles as possible

This takes time, but it’s worth it. Just to reiterate what I said above – a visit to your profile could be the first time a potential customer comes into contact with your company. Therefore, you need to give them access to as much information as possible, directly from your page of said social network.

Of course, each site has its limits. Twitter doesn’t allow you to include as much information as Facebook or LinkedIn, for instance. However, where you can include lots of information – make sure that you do.

Include images, opening times, contact details, menus (if relevant), and details on your products and services. If it’s on your website see if there’s a way for you to include it in your social media profiles. For example, you can get the most out of Facebook for business by using custom tabs.

Link your profiles together

Most social media sites will allow you to include links to your profiles on other sites as well as to your website. If the option to do this is there, use it. This will help to ensure that all your social efforts aren’t contained to one site.

For example, here’s a section of the Boom Google Plus page, including links to our Twitter and Facebook profiles:

Avoid auto-updaters

While it’s a good idea to ensure all of your social profiles are interlinked, it really isn’t a good idea to use software that automatically updates one site when you update another – however tempting this might be.

Every social network operates slightly differently. On Twitter, you’re only allowed to use 140 characters, and you’re encouraged to use symbols such as hash tags (#) and @ signs.

As a result, if, for example, you use a tool that automatically updates Facebook each time you send a Tweet, your Facebook update could look something like this:

 So remember:

1. Choose a great profile picture and use it on all of your social media sites.
2. Write a great description that sells your company.
3. Fill in as much information as you can.
4. Link to your website and your other social media profiles.
5. Don’t auto-update your sites – it looks lazy and often makes no sense!

Watch this space for part four of ‘Boom’s Guide to Social Media for Business’, when we’ll be look at identifying thought leaders within your industry, and discussing the benefits of building relationships with influential people.

When people think of social media channels, they then to think of Facebook and Twitter; however, while these two sites play very important roles in the social media sphere, they are far, far, from the be all and end all of the social spectrum.

In fact, there are thousands upon thousands of social networks out there; pretty much whatever your niche, there will be some corner of the internet for you to target.

The Big Players

Of course, the presence of niche social channels doesn’t mean you should discount the value the ‘big players’ can bring to you.

Facebook and Twitter:          

I’d recommend that every company at least looks into whether or not Facebook and Twitter will bring them any value. In most cases, they will, and you’re missing a trick if you’re not utilising them. They’re both free, and they both happily let companies use them for marketing, so it’s a bit of a win-win.

Google Plus:

Then we’ve got Google Plus. Whether or not we can call it a ‘big player’ is still debateable, but Google will fight tooth and nail until they achieve that accolade.

The fact is, because it’s Google, it’s safe to say that the network will have some impact on search engine rankings. For a start, we know that usage of Google’s AuthorRank is, or at least will be, pretty relevant to how important Google thinks you are, and your content is. And you need a Google Plus account to use AuthorRank.

So hooray, you better get started with Google Plus. Even if none of your friends or customers are on it…

YouTube:

If you’re not already, you might want to take a look at YouTube too. Video marketing done well can be very effective, and if there’s one place you want to be uploading your videos to, it’s YouTube.

Remember, Google owns YouTube, so they often choose to include it in their ranking results. If your video is ranking in Google, give yourself a pat on the back. Even if your website is still struggling to make headway, the fact that people are seeing your video is a massive plus.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is ‘the’ social network for professionals. So, if you’re in a B2B industry and your target customers are high-flying professionals, LinkedIn could prove to be very valuable.

Pinterest:

Pinterest is the fastest growing social network to date, and is showing no sign of disappearing just yet. It’s also being adopted by lots of businesses, who seem to be reaping a lot of success from it.

If you want a bit of inspiration on how to utilise Pinterest for business, take a look at Scholastic, Whole Foods, Parenting Magazine, or Southwest Airlines.

Niche Social Media Sites

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. Social media does not start and end with Facebook, Twitter, and their friends. There are thousands more sites, usually dedicated to a specific niche, which you might be able to utilise.

Here’s a big fat list of niche social media networks to get you started.

However, the best way for you to find niche social networks, is to use our old friend Google.

Have a search for the name of your industry, along with ‘social network’. When thinking about the name of your industry, start off by being as specific as possible. If you don’t find anything useful, make your search more general until you find sites that are relevant to you.

You might also want to change your search to say ‘social site’, ‘social website’, ‘social networking site’, ‘social media channel’, ‘social media site’, or ‘forums’.

Alternatively, you can find out precisely which social networks your customers are using simply by asking them.

If you already have quite a large following on Facebook or Twitter, you can ask them there. Alternatively, you could place a poll on your website, or add a quick survey to the end of your buying cycle (I’d recommend only doing this once a customer has completed a purchase).

However, I would advise against only using the information that your current customers give you: this could well alienate potential customers that are hiding away on undiscovered social networks.

Before You Get Started

Do a bit of research to find out how much value the social media channel will give you

Is the network definitely active? Are the active members using the site regularly (ideally daily)? How many people are using the site?

You should also check the location of the members. Generally a site will have a majority member base from a particular country (though this isn’t true for all sites). If your target market are all in the UK, you don’t want to be spending lots of time on a site with members primarily in the US.

The majority of niche networks will have rules against you joining specifically to promote your company.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t join, and become a valuable member of the community.

Make sure to join up as a person; never use your company name as your username. This is likely to result in instant banishment! Once you are a member, don’t go in and just start talking about your company.

You need to provide value to the community. Join in discussions. Offer your expert industry advice. Before long, opportunities to mention your company will drop in naturally. So long as you’ve taken the time to prove that you’re going to offer more to the community than the knowledge of your latest half-price sale, people should respond well to a well-placed mention of your firm.

When you learn about an amazing, new, growing social network, secure your brand.

Even if you don’t think the site is going to be useful to you. You never know when you might want to use the site in the future, and if you’ve waited too long to secure your brand name, you might find so other sneaky so-and-so has snapped it up.

Watch this space for part three of ‘Boom’s Guide to Social Media for Business’, when we’ll be looking at hints or tips for setting up absolutely awesome social media profiles.

Why Is Social Media Important to Businesses?

There are five primary benefits to using social media in business:

• It allows you to interact and engage with your target audience on their domain (within their social circle). This will help you to develop relationships with both existing and potential customers. Not only will this help to grow your customer base, but it will help turn one time customers into repeat customers.

• Social signals are part of the search engines’ algorithms. With regards to which sites matter, and to what extent, we can only guess. However, Bing have confirmed that they do use social signals from Facebook and Twitter in their algorithms. And while the official word from Google is that Google+ doesn’t affect its algorithms, author rank, which uses Google+, can help you appear higher up in personalised search results.

• Your competitors are probably using social media themselves. If they are, you need to be using it too in order to keep up. If they’re not, they’re missing a trick and this is your opportunity to get ahead of them.

• Social media enables you to push yourself as a thought leader and authority figure within your industry.

• Social media can act as an additional line of customer service. Having a presence on social media also makes it possible for you to monitor what your target audience and customers are saying about you, giving you the opportunity to respond as quickly as possible.

But Social Media Isn’t Right for Our Business!

Sadly, no matter how many times we explain the above points, some people just don’t believe social media will work for their business… Why?

“Social media wouldn’t work for us. We have a very boring and stagnant industry.”

This is a really common objection. There are countless industries that appear boring, and that don’t obviously lend themselves to social media marketing. However, regardless of your niche, there will be a section of the internet out there that you can utilise, and whatever you think about your business, chances are, some people will find it interesting.

For example, at Boom we have a client that sells refurbished welding equipment. Hardly glitz, glamour, and Hollywood. However, they’ve embraced social media and surprising as it may sound, they’ve got a buzzing Facebook page and have recently started getting involved in Pinterest too.

“We don’t have the time.”

This objection is even more common than the first. Most of us are very busy people, with far more to do than there are hours in the day. And for many businesspeople, social media sits pretty far down their list of priorities.

However, social media is a vital part of marketing in the 21^st Century. The key is to rethink how you see social media. It’s not something that if you have a few spare minutes somewhere, you might mess around on Facebook or send a couple of Tweets. It should be a key part of your wider marketing strategy.

And yet if you schedule tasks and ensure they are attacked with the same urgency and attention as any other part of your marketing, it should, become much easier to fit into your day.

Setting Objectives for Your Social Media Campaign

A social media campaign should be treated in the same way that you treat every other part of your marketing campaign – you need to have clearly defined objectives.

Ask yourself what the purpose of your campaign is. Are you looking to reach out to and build relationships with existing clients? Do you want to push yourself as a thought leader and authoritative voice in your industry? Do you want to do both?

Once you have a clear idea of what you’re looking to achieve with social media, you should ask yourself how you would define the campaign as a success. This entails choosing one or more quantifiable goals. Goals that once achieved, you can say, “yes, this is working”.

Examples of these goals might be:

“Gain 1,000 ‘likes’ on my Facebook page”

“Get xx super influential person on Twitter to retweet me”

“Be asked to write a guest post on xx awesome site”

What you must remember is that quantifying the success of a social media campaign in monetary terms is very difficult.

While it’s possible to see the revenue that comes directly from social media traffic, this fails to take into account the impact of social media on other types of traffic.

For example, someone might see a tweet about you, decide that you’re fantastic and so they link to you from their blog. Any traffic that comes via this link isn’t “social media traffic”, and yet, without that first tweet you wouldn’t have the link.

Traffic like this is almost impossible to trace back to the original social media campaign. So how can you pinpoint precisely how much revenue is being made as a result of the campaign?

Never think about a social media campaign purely in terms of monetary gain, this mind-set will set you off on entirely the wrong foot.

Social media is about being social and engaging with your audience. It’s not about money.“I’ve reached my goal. What’s next?”

Once you achieve your goals, your work isn’t done – you simply need to set more goals. If you’ve reached your goal of 1,000 likes, aim for 5,000. If that person you really admire on Twitter has retweeted you, aim to get them following you.

Defining Your Target Audience

You need to ask yourself who your target audience is. Lots of people will say, when asked this question, “everybody”. “I have a product everyone can use, so ‘everybody’ is my target audience”.

However, unless you’re selling oxygen to a settlement of humans on the moon, this probably isn’t true.

Although ‘everyone’ might be able to use your product or service in theory, chances are, it’s a much narrower demographic of people that use it regularly, or have a real, vested interest in it.

For example, have a think about bottled water. We all need water, so surely the target market for a new brand of bottled water is ‘everyone’ – right? Wrong.

At a guess, the biggest consumers of bottled water are likely to be relatively young, health-conscious, and have at least a small disposable income. Statistics have also shown that minority groups are some of the biggest consumers of bottled water.

Only once you have an accurate picture of your target audience can you begin to create an effective marketing campaign.

Once you have a more definite idea of your target audience, you can begin to think about where and how best to engage them.

Watch this space for part two of Boom’s Guide to Social Media for Business; we’ll be looking at which social media sites you should be using.