If you’ve ever wondered about how social media marketing can help your business, the folks here at Hide & Seek Media were lucky enough to hear four experts give their opinions on the subject at a WBZ Business Breakfast at the Sheraton Boston Hotel this morning (6/23/11).
All four experts, which included Twitter expert Lauren Fitton and the 23 year old CEO, or “Chief Ninja” of SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch, expressed the same overwhelming sentiment that the #1 best thing you can use social media for is to simply listen. Chances are that most of your target market is already on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin, so all you need to do is provide a platform where they can express their needs, wants and desires. Fitton suggests doing this by asking provocative questions or engaging facts related to your field, simply to start a conversation and generate some buzz among your target market. It just so happens that this conversation is occurring right on your company’s facebook page or twitter account, creating a ton of traffic to your site.
Some people in the audience expressed some concern over the potential negative comments their businesses might receive in conversations in such an open platform. While this is a legitimate concern, Fitton believes this negative feedback could actually be a beneficial thing, as she said, “if you had spinach in your teeth and your fly open, you’d want someone to tell you about it,” and thus sees any negativity as a way to identify problems within your business. Mike Troiano, another expert on social media and Holland-Mark blogger, also suggests that any complaints about your company can be remedied with a little bit of customer service, and social media allows you to respond to these complaints and potentially change a negative feeling about your company into a positive one. Dell utilized this strategy to drop their negative comment rates from 60% to 20% simply by keeping an open dialogue with their customers through social media platforms.
Even with top advice from the experts on social media marketing, it can still feel like a daunting task for small to medium business owners to constantly update their Facebook or Twitter pages simply to field conversations with their fans and followers. Lucky for them, as another of the four experts, Paul Gillan, pointed out, they can still take advantage of the “global campfire” of social media by hiring a third party company to do it for them!
Nate from HSM
If your business has a need for some help with social media marketing, website design, or search engine optimization, Hide & Seek Media is a creative marketing firm that could help you out with locations in Boston, MA and Park City, UT. If you’re interested in learning more about developing your own creative marketing strategy, shoot us an email and tell us about your business and current marketing goals.
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