B2C Social Media Isn’t Rocket Science

@BossyWeb #SocialB2C

Michelle Magoffin

Founder, Bossy Interactive

michelle@bossyinteractive.com

Facebook.com/BossyInteractive

LinkedIn.com/in/magoffin

Raise your hand if I interrupted you in the middle of posting to a social network. Raise your hand if you’ve already posted to a social network since you sat down. Raise your hand if you will post to a social network as soon as I stop asking you to raise your hand.

If this room was your pool of potential customers, we’d have 100% social media saturation, which is completely unrealistic. We’re hardly representative of the average consumer but, they’re catching up.

With the ubiquity of social, you can no longer control how and where customers come into contact with your brand.

It’s this knowledge that inspires the frenzy and fear around social. Fear of the loss of potential clients, and the loss of market share, to competitors who you think are doing more or better in social. This fear drives businesses to jump into social media, and to act without a plan.

Take a deep breath and step back from the ledge. Let’s look at social media as part of a bigger picture.

When I‘m working with a new client, I don’t ask what their social media goals are, I ask what their business goals are. Social media is just one part of your complete digital strategy You digital strategy is just one tool you use to help you meet your overall business goals.

Because you can’t control how and where your customers first come into contact with you, you have to control what they see when they do. No matter how your customers find you, they need to be presented with: • a consistent look • a consistent message • and a consistent level of service It is your top priority to deliver a consistent brand experience.

Don’t expect your customers to come to your web site or even to your front door.

Your customers are out there, online.

GO WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE.

You’ve done your homework. You know that your social customers are a subset of your total customer base. Now, you need to figure out who they are and which social networks they’re using.

On Facebook, the demographics skew younger than the other networks, with nearly half of users under the age of 25, but it has a broader reach.

My 82-year-old father-in-law is on Facebook…

…so is my 14-year-old cousin.

Twitter skews a little older, a little more educated, and with a little more cash in the bank.

Pinterest is changing rapidly. It’s not all women anymore. 30% of users are men. Half are parents. The age breakdown is very similar to Twitter.

Every B2C company needs to be on these three platforms. I can’t imagine a single company that doesn’t have a portion of their customer base represented on each of these networks.

Raise your hand if you’re wondering about Google+. You absolutely need to be on Google+, but not because your customers are.

Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. You need to be on Google+ for the search benefit. Create a page, link it to your URL, fill out your profile, pop in once or twice a week to post and engage, then forget about it. Maybe my advice will change in the future but, for now, your time is better spent elsewhere.

Social media isn’t rocket science.

Your goal, as a B2C company is to sell your products or services to consumers.

Social media serves those goals, indirectly.

Social media is a long game. It’s about establishing connections and building relationships. By deepening your relationships with your current customers, you can turn them into advocates for your company or your product.

Your customers will spread your message to their networks, adding a level of trust and authority to it.

That is the pot of gold in social media. The word of mouth. The reach. The friends of friends. THAT is what’s going to help you reach new customers and sell more products.

Social media is about ROR, not ROI. Ted Rubin, a thought-leader in social marketing, coined the phrase, “Return on Relationship,” which he defines as “the value that is accrued by a brand due to nurturing a relationship. ROI is simple dollars and cents. ROR is the value that will accrue over time through connection, loyalty, recommendations, and sharing.”

What Ted Rubin said is quotable and meaningful, but how do you make it

actionable?

First, I want you to think about something. What is the one big thing your company is about? It’s bigger than your product It’s bigger even your business goals. This is your brand ideal.

When I was running social media in-house at Edmunds.com, company activities were starting to form around the new brand ideal. Edmunds provides automotive research to consumers, but the brand ideal isn’t even about cars.

Edmunds’ brand ideal is, “Simplifying life’s big decisions.” When they thought about WHY people are in the market for a new car, they realized that it usually coincided with a big decision or change in their lives: a new baby, a new job, moving across the country. Edmunds is there not just to help you buy a new car, but to help you through a big change in your life.

With the social media strategy that I laid out for Edmunds, I kept that brand ideal in mind. What were we doing on each platform, with each post, to serve that ideal? It’s easy to deliver a consistent brand message when you have that one big idea in mind.

This carries over from offline activities as well. For example, if you’re running a television ad campaign, I should see that copy and that message wherever I find you online. I should be able to get that exact offer. I should be able to find an easily shareable digital version of the commercial.

The brand ideal serves as the foundation for the actions you to take in social media. Those actions fall into three categories: -Engagement -Conversation -and Reciprocity

Conversations go two ways. You listen, then you respond. And you don’t respond with, “Here’s my product. Have you seen my product. Buy my product.”

If your customers are saying they love your product, you are thanking them for using it. You are telling them how to get more value out of it, better ways to use it, how to maintain it. You are returning the favor by publicly thanking people and partners. You are helping others to spread their messages, when it is relevant to your own and useful to your followers.

If your customers are saying they hate your product, you are reaching out to them to ask them why they hate it, and how you can improve it, and if there is anything you can do for them RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT to fix the situation. Then you do it.

If your customers aren’t really talking about your product at all, then you are paying attention to what they ARE talking about, and finding a way to continue to add value to their lives. You’re sharing relevant content from other sources, not just your own.

You don’t have to remind your followers that your product exists by continually trying to sell to them. By keeping your content interesting and relevant to what is going on in their lives, you’re continually reminding them that YOU exist and that YOU are valuable to them. THEN, when it’s time to make a purchase or a referral, your brand is there, top of mind.

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And Here is such a simple example of this. Wine Library posted a question asking what people would be drinking that weekend. I answered hard cider – not wine – but they quickly responded with information they knew would be valuable to me but which, in no way, helped them to sell me some wine, or to drive me to their web site. But, look what they got out of it as a result. I publicly thanked them, which had the potential to be seen by my 2000 followers. I’m talking about it to you. You might repeat this example to others. I’m also going to put this presentation on Slideshare. It cost Wine Library nothing to send me that tweet. They’re doing it right.

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And Some brands are doing it wrong. This is where I present YOU with a consistent brand experience for Bossy Interactive by bossing you around and telling you what not to do.

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And Do not use RSS feeds! Every tweet and Facebook post must be written individually by a person. Schedule some (but not all) of them in advance if you like, but no automated feeds! The LA Times Twitter feed is nothing but a sea of links as far as the eye can see. Later, check out CNN for an example of how to do the same thing better.

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And No broadcasting! If you’re broadcasting, your feed is all you, you, you, with no conversation and no engagement. Dropbox has over a million Twitter followers, partly because they incentivize customers to follow them by offering additional free storage space if they do, but also because they have a popular product, but their social media strategy stinks. They do write the tweets individually, but this is one-way communication. There is no customer interaction at all.

No cross-posting! Don’t post the exact same thing on Facebook that you post on Twitter, and vice versa. This is an example of how ugly it can get. A friend of mine accidentally posted a tweet to Facebook through a third-party tool. The post @ replies to eight people, contains two hashtags, and a link, and it looks like crap. In case you can’t read the comment at the bottom, I told him that this is the worst Facebook post ever. It really is.

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And No blitzes! Spread out your posts over time so that you reach more of you audience and you don’t overwhelm and annoy them. This is a screenshot of a Pinterest board for Coach. By itself, it’s not bad. However, the day Coach created this board, and five others based on color swatches, my entire Pinterest feed was filled with these swatches. I unfollowed every single color swatch board just so I could see the rest of the pins in my feed.

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And No selling! I really can’t stress that enough. The only time I want to hear about your products is when you have something new, you’re giving me a great discount, you’re giving me an offer exclusive to that social network, or…

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…you are telling me something useful or entertaining about your product. This is a Facebook post by a company called Knock Knock, they talk about their products all the time, but in such a fun and relevant way, that I never seem to mind.

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One last reminder… Social media is about deepening relationships with your customers. Start from that place and build upon it with every action.

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