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Category - Social Media

Social Media

The Essentials of Social Media Marketing

The devil is in the detail when it comes to social media marketing. A small mistake can become a big one and may risk you losing everything you have worked so hard for.
So how do successful business owners use social media to promote their business?
1.    Website link. Social media is a communication platform. It allows you to directly interact with your target clientele. So, you’ve got the Facebook and Twitter page, what do you do with it? Keeping it updated with the latest about the business would be great but forgetting to add the website link is like asking your clients to look for a needle in a haystack. Make it easy for them to find you with a website link at the end of every post.

2.    Targeting campaigns to a specific audience. Targeting and re-targeting are smart tools in content marketing. Doing so will help small businesses on Facebook and Twitter to keep track of specific leads that could be helpful to the business. Targeting content can turn potential customers to real paying ones in a snap.
3.    Exert effort on social media. How many social media pages do you have? If you think having all of them and being active in all is the secret to your success, you remain uneducated. Social media marketing is about keeping one or two social media pages and working hard on building readership and following in these areas. You can expect higher engagement at relatively affordable costs.
4.    Email marketing rules. Email marketing may seem like old hat for this generation of digital natives but its ability to form one-on-one connections with clients still keeps it in the top spot in your social networks. The likelihood of your emails being read is high IF the subject line is compelling and the content relevant and engaging. When read, the chances of email content being shared in Facebook or Twitter is very high too, which of course is good for business.
5.    YouTube is still an online strategy. Don’t underestimate YouTube because the suggested videos on its sidebars are as good as the ads that you pay for in websites. Make your own videos today and start sharing them on YouTube. Be the expert that you are. Share videos that show your expert how-to’s which potential consumers might find too interesting to share or better yet, they might be entertained by it. Winning their heart is always the best way to go.
6.  Content marketing always lends itself to small-scale or large-scale business owners. It’s the one strategy that any kind of business can use. Like all of those I have mentioned, this digital strategy thrives in originality and details.
 
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image Courtesy: Shutterstock
 
 

November 1, 2014
3 min read
Social Media

Frozen Friendships

Recently I reconnected on Facebook with some guys I hadn’t had any contact with for over 30 years. We had been friendly at school but not friends.
It’s a strange thing looking at a person’s life, albeit through the distorted lens of social media, when there has been such a long gap. Jolting is the word that comes to mind.
Wives, children, jobs, friends, holidays, emotions, victories, disappointments are laid bare to varying degrees depending on the personality of the person in question. Rapport and context are important parts of any relationship and re-connections invariably rely on memories of your last experiences. If those experiences were a long time ago it’s sometimes hard to get a read on that person.
Of course it’s quite a nice thing to re-connect with nice people and maybe I’m over-thinking this but it does make me think about similar experiences. Like when brands ‘go social’ and expect everyone to follow them or to be fascinated in every photo, post or video. You haven’t connected with me personally for decades and now you’re asking me to like your ‘Aren’t we happy it’s the weekend!’ comments. Does it really work that way?
Look, it can. But with any relationship there are some steps that you need to take; it’s like being brought up to speed. I’ve written a book about it called Customer Romance! Brands forget the steps at their peril. Miss a step or two and it feels weird and, quite frankly a little presumptuous.
That’s not anyone’s intention of course but you can’t just drop into someone’s life, inbox or newsfeed and expect that they’re going to be instantly fascinated with everything that you do or say.
 
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Images Courtesy: kateey.deviantart.com, www customerromance.com

October 31, 2014
2 min read
Social Media

A Star is Tweeting…I Mean Born

What’s not to love about Robbie Williams? He can sing, dance and transfix a crowd with his charisma and the feeling that he’s “one of us”. I witnessed this first hand last month in Singapore at his outdoor concert.

Just before he came on at 10.30pm the rain started pelting down and didn’t stop for his whole performance. Instead of sheltering under cover with the rest of his band he came out and was saturated within minutes as he put on a magical show. It made for an unforgettable experience.
So too is the birth of your child. But when it’s Robbie Williams’ child, it’s SHOWTIME!
Thanks to some nifty live tweeting the whole world joined Robbie as his wife Ayda Field went through labour and gave birth to their second child. Words, videos and pictures caught every stage of the process.
You can say that he has one INCREDIBLY understanding wife; and you’d be right. But given the number of retweets, favourites and news stories you could also ask why we need to voraciously devour every detail of celebrities’ lives. It’s as if their music, movies and books etc. are no longer enough. This pressure seems to compel some celebrities to allow access into parts of their lives that for most of us are incredibly private.
All of this begs a very human question though: if the performance never ends and the lights never go down, what happens to that person when we inevitably lose interest?

 
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Images Courtesy:  www.straitstimes.com, Youtube.com

October 29, 2014
2 min read
Social Media

I Post Therefore I Am

I didn’t post on Facebook today. I didn’t upload a photo to Instagram or a video to YouTube. Today, I didn’t exist.
That’s what it seems like for those of us who ‘must’ regularly post, tweet, upload, like or comment. One of our 20 something client service staff had her mobile phone stolen and was without it for three weeks. It was purgatory for her – and for us. Being off the social grid is like being off life support.
In the old days people kept diaries. Every night they confided their deepest and most personal dreams, fears and aspirations to a book meant only for themselves. It was part confessional, part friend. There was never any judgement or comments from others. Your diary was sacrosanct; it was for you and no-one else.
How quaint. How boring.
Now if what we do and feel is not there for the world to see and judge, we’re somehow diminished. There’s only one thing that’s worse: if one of our posts gets no likes or comments.
It’s ridiculous isn’t it. Call it an addiction to social validation or to our mobile phones; either way, it has to have an impact on how we interact with the world.

Try walking down a busy street and see how often you’re almost bowled over by someone walking the other way engrossed in their mobile phone. As for the impact on car accidents, the numbers – according to a US National Safety Council study – are terrifying with 1 in 4 accidents caused by ‘cell phone distraction’.
Is there a solution? I can’t think of one. As technology permeates every corner of our lives and increases our slavish consumption of social media, our values are changing. We seem to care less about what we personally see, touch or smell and more about what we read, watch or listen to.
The sad twist in the tail is that so much of what is posted and consumed on social media is trivial beyond belief. Photos of daily cups of coffee, pets, inspirational quotes, selfies at the beach, child standing/walking/swimming etc. This is the content that’s so vital eye contact can’t be established or the road watched.
If this is a younger generational thing, what will the next generation cling to? Or given that everyone under 35 seems so obsessed with their digital world, perhaps there won’t be another generation.
 
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image Courtesy: twoinklingsintheshire.blogspot.com.au, prezi.com, broku.ca

October 27, 2014
3 min read
Social Media

I Was a Male Stripper; Now I’m Not

This is your life today. Yesterday it wasn’t. You may have been a male stripper like Channing Tatum, or an illegal base jumper, or a painter in Tahiti. We all have a lot of yesterdays. That’s what memories are for.

October 20, 2014
3 min read
Social Media

DeepFace Facebook

Have you seen the movie “Her”? It’s a love story about a lonely writer (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with a highly intelligent (and seemingly human) operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).
The movie touches on many current topics such as social media, a person’s right to his or her own sexual preferences and our tendency to become engulfed by the online world. It’s an interesting and quite beautiful movie – but it’s nothing more than science fiction.
Or is it?
Dear old Facebook has been working on a little something lately. It’s called “DeepFace” and it’s what will close the gap between humans and computers as far as facial recognition goes. You will be able to recognise the same person with a different set of images with an accuracy of 97.53%. The human brain is truly one of the great marvels in the history of existence, DeepFace comes close though – very close in fact. The new technology supposedly recognises people’s faces 97.25% of the time.
DeepFace uses knowledge from another Artificial Intelligence (AI) project in great part adopted by a key player in the digital business, namely Google. The Deep Learning technology mimics 80% of the brain, the neocortex, where thinking takes place. It does this by means of simulated neurons, capable of recognising patterns in huge amounts. DeepFace creates a 3D model of any given face, rotating it until it faces the screen. When this is done the Deep Learning makes a numerical description which can then be matched with similar descriptions.
So Facebook has pretty much gotten itself a brain of its own. But don’t expect to have your own, personal Scarlett Johansson living in your smartphone any time soon. The technology will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June this year. There is bound to be some tweaking done before the tech gets mistaken for an actual human being; but what will happen then?
Maybe we’ll have AI netizens mimicking real people, capable of recognising others, remembering past events, speaking and typing in a human-like way. Our entire lives could be filled with AI friends, making loneliness a thing of the past while creating completely new problems – net scammers would be given completely new opportunities, as would law enforcement. Or how about an entire online community made up of AI individuals? Artificial consumers creating an entirely new economy dealing in cryptocurrency – a new world taking the hassle out of our own. As for Her, it’s no coincidence that it seems to take place in a not so distant future. The day when we can speak to AI draws nearer and nearer.
The mind wanders when you realise how far technology has come – and we still have a long way to go before we can put our minds into a machine and become immortal (or maybe not?). Anyway, it’s comforting to know that technology is there, continuously providing us with new opportunities and solutions to our problems. Maybe we’ll all get to fall in love with artificial intelligence some day.
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image courtesy: wonderwhizkid.com, wikipedia.org

March 24, 2014
3 min read
Social Media

The Anti-Texting Bear

What does it take to get people to forget about their smartphone for a moment? Mashable’s Sam Laird thought long and hard about this while visiting “South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival” (SXSW) and came to an interesting conclusion; it involves hugs and a man in a bear suit.
You’re not alone if you ever shook your head at all those souls slowly being consumed by the online world. Maybe you blogged about it, maybe you tweeted or posted a snide comment on Facebook via your smartphone, unaware that you’re in fact one of those lost souls. Nowadays it’s a natural motion – walking, eyes down and smartphone in hand – as if part of evolution. We’re not even aware that we’re doing it.

 
Sam Laird came to another conclusion as well. The same as blogger Jamie Krug, who went on a social media free vacation with her family, realising that she started living for her loved ones rather than for the online community. You miss a lot when living through your smartphone. Krug speaks of an obsession with constant status updates – not for our own sake, but for the sake of others, your followers and friends. At the same time, we lose the moment that was subject to our attention in the first place, that sliver of beauty in our everyday, real lives.
Social media is a great invention – as a way to keep in touch, as a creative outlet, as a productivity tool. But in the end of the day, it’s just that; a tool. In the business world, social media marketing is an integral part of the marketing mix, having clearly shown that’s a great way to create brand awareness, get a product out there, it’s one of many puzzle pieces in growing a business. Social media will not solve all the problems in the world, but it’s a stepping stone towards real life solutions. Everything in moderation, as always.
So how did the visitors to SXSW react to that bear looking for human warmth? From the look of it, it was a welcome distraction and maybe they even got a glimpse of the actual event.
 
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image & video courtesy: dailyscene.com, Youtube; Mashable

March 14, 2014
2 min read
Social Media

What’s in a Social Media Policy?

Almost everything you post online is open for public viewing. This should come as no surprise but you wouldn’t believe how often a lack of common sense is the culprit in social media mishaps. Yes, there are numerous examples we could provide: People posting (what many of us would call inappropriately) silly videos of themselves on YouTube or tweets that were meant to be funny but took to Mama Mia’s leading story within minutes. Then there’s the occasional picture meant for a partner that in some way managed to reach the entire Instagram public. What people do in their free time is their business, but what if they are doing it whilst representing your business? The obvious solution is to ban social media, but as it turns out, it’s also a very bad idea (unless you’re going for a reign of terror, and employees will just find a way anyway).
What you need is a social media policy.
Ah, yes, one of those policy thingies. If it’s well put together, it could save you a lot of embarrassment whilst getting your brand out of harm’s way. But this goes beyond risk management; there are clear benefits in allowing, and encouraging, your employees to update their social media accounts at work (in moderation of course). As experts on most things related to your business they are ideal brand advocates, and all come with their own networks of potential customers.  Your employees are your extra marketing team, customer service team and in house support team. Allow them the opportunity to communicate amongst themselves and with the rest of the world and they will help your business grow. They do however need guidelines.
A social media policy should do two things; provide guidelines to the employees, preventing them from causing or getting into trouble and inform them of the disciplinary actions that will be taken if they do. You could of course Google another company’s policy and use that as a template, but the document will be that much more effective if it’s customised to your particular field with your employee’s particular positions in mind. Ask yourself these three questions;

        What’s the worst that could happen if employees are allowed access to social media?
        How does my social media policy prevent this worst case scenario?
        How would it have employees respond to it if it happened?

Be clear and concise in your policy. “Be professional in what you say on your social media profile” is a good start, however when not put into context this alone leaves a little too much for self interpretation (note, don’t be too precise either, or you’ll risk drowning the message in definitions). It should all be based on common sense; the policy should be a supportive document, not a hindrance. It won’t do you or your company any good if it diminishes social media efficiency.
So, what can be found in a valuable social media policy?

        A paragraph on who the document applies to – are freelancers and employees working from home included?
        Guidelines on what employees shouldn’t do online (what information to disclose, what not to share, what sites not to visit etc);
        Guidelines on what employees CAN do (encourage creative behaviour that indirectly hints at your amazing corporate culture);
        Information on disciplinary measures;
        An educating section on online behaviour, just in case;

The positive effect your employees’ online presence can have on your business is too good to pass up. Make sure to educate employees in the potential dangers of online activity and about sharing information too generously. Present them with so called “Cosmic Law”, coined by Jay Shepherd; always assume that the one you least want to see your post will in fact see it. With this in mind let your people get out there and endorse your brand to help it grow.
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image courtesy: thesocialworkplace.com, socialnewsdaily.com

March 10, 2014
4 min read
Social Media

General Pants + Tinder = Strategic Partnership

If marketing was easy, then every business would be a success (theoretically speaking). Of course it isn’t easy and businesses spend hours upon hours developing marketing strategies to clearly communicate what they actually want to say. Content creation, budgets and social media updates can be time consuming and if you’re unlucky (or get it wrong), sadly unsuccessful. But what if you could be offered a well deserved break? What if someone else could help you lift that heavy load of online marketing? Enter a strategic partnership in the form of a fashion retailer combined with a digital dating app (which go together like a horse and carriage don’t you think?)
General Pants hooked up with the flirting app Tinder around Valentine’s Day this year, offering users the opportunity to send a push mobile notification inviting other users to “get in my pants”. Tinder users could show their profile in a General Pants store to get 20% off their next purchase. Everybody wins – users get a Tinder experience plus 20% off pants, all at a lower cost than the usual marketing campaign.
Tinder has been busy getting it on with other brands in the form of strategic partnerships. The app helped promote the TV-show ‘Suits’ as well as ‘The Mindy Project’. Characters in the shows would discuss Tinder while Tinder would display the same characters within the app. This is perhaps as subtle as eating a giant Mars bar on live television, but at least in the case of ‘The Mindy Project’, the Tinder appearances kind of make sense as the show has a romantic focus.
It would be impossible to write a post about strategic partnership without mentioning the almost legendary alliances involving Ron Burgundy, the scotch loving main character in the Anchorman movies, played by Will Ferrell. The most famous was Burgundy’s promotion of the Dodge Durango via 70 YouTube videos, or perhaps we should say “promotion”, as Ron (or Will Ferrel as himself for that matter) wouldn’t always speak well of the car at all. It was a huge success (apparently sales went up 59%) that cost Dodge close to nothing, as the movie makers payed for the videos in order to promote Anchorman 2. A less well known partnership hosted by the man with the mustache included a limited edition Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The flavour? Well… scotchy scotch scotch of course!
Strategic partnerships are a smart form of marketing – as long as they provide customers with sufficient value and grow the businesses at a low cost for all parties involved. A bit of logic does help, don’t put a giraffe on a skateboard unless it makes sense in some way. Consumers are becoming more skeptical when they see brands working together and collaboration without some kind of common ground will only create uneasiness (which a clever enough marketing team could no doubt use to its advantage). Don’t overdo it – people eventually get tired of Ron Burgundy and those Tinder related dialogues becoming a little too obvious at some point. We’re talking collaboration, not necessarily a merger, so don’t rely too heavily on others to pull your brand.
The Message is brought to you by Tick Yes – providing solutions for all your digital and content marketing needs.
Image courtesy: pixelworld.deviantart.com, examiner.com, nolandalla.com, abine.com

March 7, 2014
3 min read