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Setting "Social" Expectations
Cullen Swanson
Cullen Swanson is the Creative Director and Owner of Innovated Media – a locally owned graphic and Tulsa web design firm. Cullen is a graphic and web designer, Internet marketer, and consultant for small to medium businesses and churches of all sizes.
Innovated Media specializes in custom website design, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, logo and branding development, e-mail campaigns, and Social Media Marketing. Contact Innovated Media if you are considering a new website or Internet / Social Media Marketing. Cullen can be reached at cullen@innovatedmedia.com
Even though "social media" is a broad term that encapsulates hundreds, possibly thousands of social networks, mobile apps, and websites, chances are when you hear the term "social media," you think of Facebook. With several other major players in social media such as Linked In, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace (although dwindling in popularity), Facebook has become less of a website and more of a game-changing communication tool that some believe will one day replace e-mail.
In order to make my point in this article, when I refer to social media, you can assume I'm talking about Facebook.
Legitimate Concerns
I understand many of the reasons why some individuals resist getting involved in social media (particularly Facebook). There are privacy concerns to be certain, and with Facebook's upcoming facial recognition upgrade coming later in 2011, there will certainly be more gripes and complaints regarding privacy. In addition, I recently spoke with a family therapist and marriage counselor that stated high school and college reunions are no longer the leading cause for marital unfaithfulness—Facebook takes the cake hands down (at least in his experience).
It's Important So Stop Ignoring It!
With over 500 million users, Facebook is impossible to ignore, especially for business owners and ministry leaders. Promoting your organization on Facebook and social media is just as important (if not more) than having a website.
"Why," you ask? Well, social media is primarily focused on bringing content to the end-user instead of them having to go out and find it, and your website doesn't do that. Millions of people are already on Facebook, but they are not on your website. When people visit your website, there isn't a digital public trail of their activity for other people that they know to see that a connection has been made with your organization. And since the number one goal behind any marketing campaign or outreach is to ramp-up sales, increase the size of your mailing list, and forge new relationships, neglecting to have a strong presence for your organization on popular social sites such as Facebook is like refusing to use a cellular phone and, instead, insisting that a pager and a pay phone will get the job done.
Your message doesn't have to change, but the methods and tools that you use must constantly change and be under scrutiny in an effort to stay relevant to an entire generation that is constantly changing.
It is essential that your organization be proactively involved with social media so that you can monitor, moderate, and positively influence the people and groups that are talking about you - and believe me - they are talking about you.
It Won't Happen by Itself
Much like having a website, your phone is not going to start ringing off the hook just because you decide to have a presence in social media. It takes time and actual effort if you want to recruit a large following of people to connect with you. Having an unattended presence on Facebook is like having a blog with no content—you're better off not having one at all. Simply from a marketing standpoint, you are defeating these two main objectives if you choose to setup a page on Facebook and neglect it:
#1: You'll remain invisible to search engines.
#2: If people do connect with you, they will forget about you.
In the beginning, you'll get less than what you put into it, so be prepared to set aside some time daily—or at least weekly—to put some engaging content on your Facebook page on a regular basis (or find someone to do it for you).
How "Social" Do You Have to Be?
Try to imagine this scenario:
You walk into a giant room of crowded people that you want to connect with. The room is filled with thousands of people that all know each other or are connected in some form or fashion, but they don't know you yet. So, you introduce yourself to a few people, pass out your business card, and then stand in the corner and say nothing the rest of the day while everyone else shares what's going on in their lives, swaps stories, and shows pictures of their kids. After a while, everyone goes home and you wonder why days and weeks later no one called you. Ridiculous, right? Of course it is, but countless organizations are doing this right now on Facebook and they don't understand why social media marketing isn't working for them.
Understand that people live their lives on Facebook and other social networking sites. If you want them to connect with you, talk to them.
Promote A Page, Not Your Profile
Keep your personal profile and your organization's page separate. Facebook currently limits how many "friends" you can have, but does not limit how many "likes" you can get.
So, if you are using your personal profile to push your organization's agenda, you are setting yourself up for a difficult transition down the road. Once you reach the limit of "friends" (currently set to 5,000), that's it—no one else can connect with you. Then, you'll spend countless hours trying to get your "friends" to "like" your organization's new page, and only a very small percentage of them will because they are YOUR friends - not your organization's. After all, have you "liked" all of your friend's places of business? I didn't think so.
They don't want to connect with your organization - they are friends with you because they want to be friends with YOU. Plus, if only your friends "liked" your organization's page, it doesn't really do you a lot of good because chances are those people know what you do anyway. The object of having a presence on Facebook for your organization is to make NEW connections in addition to strengthening the ones that you already have. Your friends likely won't do business with you, but there are scores of people that you don't know that are interested in what your organization provides. Using your personal profile instead of having a "page" limits Facebook users from finding your organization, and even if they did find you, sending a "friend" request to connect with a business or ministry is not the way they are accustomed to using Facebook, which just shows them that you don't know what you are doing.
Custom Facebook Pages
In the early part of 2011, Facebook provided developers better tools to create customized Facebook pages that have been proven to generate more "likes" and establish a stronger connection between the user and the organization. Instead of users trying to figure out what an organization does by reading in-between the lines of status updates, you can now customize a "landing page" to look like your website that helps establish your organization's brand and contains anything you want on the page. This unique feature gives you (the owner of the page), total control over the first impression experience for new connections that you make on Facebook, which helps to educate end-users better and strengthen the connection they are making with your organization.
To see some custom landing pages in action, visit a few of these Facebook pages:
Church Without Walls International
Justifying the ROI
Time is money—we all know that. As an Internet Marketer, I approach everything we do at Innovated Media from an ROI standpoint. That's the great thing about the Internet—unlike direct mail, phone book advertising (you aren't still doing this, are you?!), or print advertising, the Internet provides countless numbers of ways to track your efforts online in order to justify the time and money that you spend to increase your organization's influence.
So, how do you justify your ROI through social media?
If you have an actual paid advertising campaign on Facebook to promote your page, new product, or upcoming event, then you know that they provide enough graphs and charts to look at until your eyes cross. Other providers of social media measurement tools include BuzzLogic, Trackur, Seesmic, and Visible Technologies.
However, when it comes to social media the brass tax doesn't come down to dollars and cents. Your organization can place value on such factors as "likes" on Facebook or new followers on Twitter, as well as the number of comments you receive on your status updates.
The Bottom Line
The whole purpose of having a website for your organization is to maximize your influence online and engage your target audience. Even though the social media landscape is constantly changing, and is difficult to keep up with most of the time, it is counter–productive to ignore social media; your website just isn't enough anymore.
If you are resisting the plunge into social media, you need to realize that you are passing up the opportunity that other advertising channels don't provide: not just a way to establish professional relationships, but a way to strengthen them on a daily basis.
Contact Innovated Media
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