Want Twitter and Facebook Success for your Brand? Stop Being Cheap

I was talking to a friend, colleague and sometimes client recently. She heads up a digital shop for a small agency that specializes in high-end retail clients. She was lamenting that while her clients seem willing to spend some money on digital, these days they want that fee going towards social media – Twitter and Facebook, in particular. As my friend pointed out, there’s not really a lot of money in managing Twitter and Facebook accounts. Indeed, that’s true. What’s also true is if a CMO or marketing director/manager believes simply having Twitter and Facebook accounts are all that’s necessary to have an online strategy these days, they’re in a sad place.

Those companies finding great success with social networking only use social networking as a component of their marketing mix. Companies like Dell, have already laid the groundwork by targeting customers using a marketing mix that reaches the audience across multiple communications channels. Best Buy’s ability to use Twitter as a customer service channel works because customers have heard through other touch-points that Best Buy offers reliable answers for problems they’re having. Neither company has looked at social networking as the only way to reach customers.

If you’re going to use social networking sites to talk to your audience, remember the following things:

1. Always Brand Consistently (ABC) – Your online name is not the time to be clever. @No1CarMfr may be true but @Toyota uses long established brand equity to tell people who you are. The Twitter username Dell has used to generate over $3 million in sales is @DellOutlet. It clearly tells you who it is and what you’re going to get there. And, apparently, it’s working. Speak in your customers’ language and not your own. Also remember that social networking just allows you to extend your brand. Most companies don’t need to create a whole new persona for Twitter and in fact, they shouldn’t do that.
2. Don’t Cheapen It – One of the casualties of the cheap social networking thinking is the dedicated (or even semi-dedicated) resource. You cannot post random Twitter tweets or Facebook status updates once or twice a day and expect customers to flock to your brand. Before you get started, you have to assign a resource with time, decide what tone/personality you want the account to have, understand your audience and then create a schedule of what you’re going to say and when. You want to make your followers and friends retweet (RT) and share what you’re telling them. Random topics may pop up from day-to-day but this is business and this is marketing. Don’t cheapen it to just Twitter. It can work if you’re willing to put in the time to make it work for you.
3. Measure, Measure, Measure – This is a big one. People are unsure of how to measure social networking. As silly as it sounds, followers/friends are not an awful metric. They can at least help you gauge interest in your content. Beyond friends, you must also develop conversion metrics. Maybe a conversion is a purchase. Maybe it’s generating a lead. Maybe it’s someone spending 25 seconds watching a video. Whatever it is, you need to create links that you can track from Twitter/Facebook to your site and then monitor those users on your site. This will help validate your investment into social networking
4. Be Patient … but Not Too Patient – You should not expect results overnight from social networking. That being said if you’re not meeting your short-term key performance indicators (KPIs), then it’s time to change your approach. Maybe your tone isn’t right. Maybe your content and/or frequency aren’t right. Whatever it is, tweak it so that you can hit your stride.

Thinking of social networking as a cheap way to reach customers likely means you aren’t going to be successful at it. As with every other marketing channel, social networking success for brands requires proper planning. If you approach social networking marketing just as you would email marketing or display marketing, you’ll find your probability of success will increase accordingly.