Building business success with social media

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Building business success with social media

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

Increasingly businesses are understanding that the value of the internet is not straight sales, but relationships, and social media is an unparalleled tool for building closer links, creating trust and undertaking advocacy, when linked to a retail or service function that’s accessible online.

Celebrities Score in Social Media

One definition of this form of social media use is microblogging – Twitterer Stephen Fry is perhaps one of the most famous micro-bloggers, closely followed by Eddie Izzard, who is tweeting his 1000 miles in 7 days run for charity.

If you’re a public figure already, using social media to document your activities is a natural outgrowth of your celebrity – but businesses can use this approach to become more informed about their customer base as they build brand loyalty. This means that marketing successfully to this generation of web-savvy consumers is about more than SEO and refresh rates, you need to be able to find them through social media they use, and convert them from that to becoming a customer.

Relationships are Two Way in Social Media

Tiny publisher Salt looked like folding a few months ago, but using their committed customer base (people whose books they’d published) to reach out through Facebook and Twitter, as well as their own website and mailing list, they launched a Just One Book campaign that made it to the literary pages of the broadsheets and won ‘celeb’ endorsement from Griff Rhys Jones among others. Their technique of using their authors to sell a message, rather than a book, is a way of building loyalty. They continue their campaign by asking their followers questions like ‘can you recommend a T-shirt printer – we need new merchandise?’ or ‘which living poet would you like to see move to Salt and why?’

The cleverness lies in asking the already Salt-aware public to share their expertise, a subtle flattery that the big publishers aren’t capable of delivering to their market share, and that encourages the Salt-aware to share their positive experience of this small, but no longer nearly so struggling, publishing house.

The most famous story, of course, is that of Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration. The Inauguration Facebook page was getting 4,000 status updates per hour, while Twitter experienced five times the normal number of tweets per second in the run-up to, and during, the ceremony.

These are all examples of successful brands filling the gaps between where their brand is positioned in the anonymous online world of the internet and where relationships are built: in chatrooms and forums, on livejournal, Facebook and Twitter.

Three Rules for Social Media Success

To achieve mastery of social media it’s important to:

Greet the contact as an equal, not a customer
Respect their expertise which may exceed the brand’s own expertise in other areas (Salt asking about T-shirt printers is an example of this)
Allow contacts to run with your business, rather than trying to patrol or curtail their enthusiasms.

There’s always the risk that your fan-base may misrepresent you, but that’s part of the ruggedness of the social media world, as long as you make clear the demarcation between your business and their input, reputation can be enhanced by this kind of ‘fanship’.

Photograph courtesy of egadapparel at Flickr

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