Nail a need. Make your offers highly targeted.
If you are involved in social media marketing you can use the information that you gain from constantly monitoring and engaging in the online conversation around your brand to generate offers and promotions that are specific to the needs being expressed by your audience. For instance, let’s say you are monitoring the social conversation around your restaurant and you find that the health-conscious portion of your audience often comments favorably about the dietetic options on your brunch menu. You could develop an offer that is specifically designed for them by offering a discount to a local spa or free admission to a local fitness event as part of a package. In fact, if you are monitoring the sites that your health-conscious audience frequents, you can use those sites to help get the word out. The advantages here are many:

• Higher redemption rates of more specific offers with lower overall promotion costs
• Generate fan loyalty in your audiences by speaking directly to their needs
• Generate promotions and discounts that add value to your brand rather than cheapen it.

Test and monitor. Use the channel to refine your offer strategy
The immediate data that you gather from distributing offers online affords a great opportunity to test and tweak different aspects of it. What if you change the value, make it time sensitive, make it referral-based, or make it a contest? You may notice that some promotions generate interest but lower redemption rates whereas others get less click activity but generate better sales.

Keep the balance. Make the largest volume of social media marketing about engagement with your audience’s interests.
This is the tricky part. Your audience wants to be rewarded for their loyalty but they don’t want to be barraged and bored by your endless series of offers. Whats the right balance for you. Is it a deal of the day or of the week? If you have 6 specific audiences that you can monitor online do you make sure you offer at least one promotion to each audience each month? The right fit will become apparent of you continue to track things like your rate of new followers, click-through rates on all your posts, how often your posts get passed along or commented on, and the engagement of your audience off-site. Your primary emphasis should continue to be on creating the force of attraction that draws them into your social media marketing with a generous sprinkling of offers and promotion to keep them active.

Be specific, keep testing and trying, and don;t overdo the promotions and you will find that social media channels can help you get those sales messages out in new, cost-efficient, and effective ways.

What is the prevailing opinion out there? Anyone seeing more potential in this than my admittedly snarky views suggest?

1. For page owners, Facebook will track impressions and interactions relative to each post. Right there in Facebook you will be able to see how users are interacting with the content you post which will greatly enhance your understanding of what to post that best suits your audiences preferences.

2. Facebook seems to be planning to offer ad targeting based on a function they call “Real Time”. It’s not completely explained yet but the supposition is that you will be able to target based on the content of the audiences posting activity. So if I post an update about a concert I went to I may be served ads that relate to the artist, venue, genre or anyone else that finds that subject to be defining of their audience. This could be very interesting.

Both of these changes indicate that Facebook is taking a harder look at the needs of marketers on their service. If they continue to make wise choices like the ones listed above I think they will allow marketers to better use the platform while not intruding on the basic experience of their users. In fact, in both of these cases the net result could be a higher quality experience for the Facebook users. Hope to see more about these in the near future.

There are several tactics not listed here that I wish were.  For instance, apps, games, contests, and communities come  quickly to mind.  However it is interesting to see that blogger relations is considered so highly by those surveyed.  Many companies lack the resources to put consistent effort behind this but information like this might change their reasoning.  I also think that many of these tactics tend to be excuted in tandem and are probably most effective when that is the case.  Also, the greatest amount of effort tends to reside in simply creating valuable content and communications that can flow out into the social media arena.  Once you have done that, it is much easier to leverage it across multiple tactics.

• If you track online marketing conversions back to the nearest click that precedes them it will always make things like search and email marketing campaigns look like they are tactics driving revenue.  They may be but they are more likely to be just the only thing you are tracking.  Many steps usually lead up to that precious moment wherein a user types your name into a search engine, finds you and buys your thing.  Be careful not to over-attribute revenue generating actions to just the nearest measurable click.
• Benchmarking is forgotten yet it is a very valid method of tracking.  “My metric was X before I did these three things and now it is X+25%.  That means these three things are likely to be good things to keep doing…and doing them together.”  Maybe one of those three things was a search marketing campaign that got a lot of clicks.  If you had not done it in concert with the overall campaign might not have worked so well.
• Display ads (banners) don’t get many clicks.  That does not mean that they have no value.  You have to develop other ways of monitoring their impact on awareness, intent to purchase and the impact that they may have on overall site visitorship outside of the direct clicks they generate.
• Each click is actually a person..not a click.  Each non-click is also a person.  We are interested in engaging all people within our audience.  Clicking does not qualify you or disqualify from my consideration as a marketer.

I hate the click.

But I got this great click-through-rate on one of my PPC campaigns by making some changes to the offer and ad copy.  Let me tell you about it.

People: Spend time identifying,  finding and listening to your audience.  Where do they go online?  What do they do?  What are they saying?  What kind of online content do they like (articles, reviews, images, video games etc).  Do they like to create things or just watch?  If the web can be thought of as a playground, what toys does your audience like?  How might you best join with them in the play?

Objectives:  What is that you hope to accomplish by joining in the play?  What would you like your audience to do?  Though objectives are often linked to revenue generating activities you would be best served by having some objectives that are not.  The objectives will lead directly to the communications strategy and it needs to be focussed on the audience..not the sale.

Strategies:  This is where you develop a content and communications strategy.  How will you play with the audience.  What will you share.  What will they share with you?  Where will the content come from?  This step gets overlooked a lot.  Much of the time businesses just share their promotional information.  Blah.  No engagement there.  Spend the time planning the content generation and communication strategy and you will find much more success.  Make sure to bear in mind the sustainability of the effort based on whatever internal (staff) and external (agency)  resources you have to use.

Tactics:  All of the thinking in the previous steps should lead to this but it is amazing how frequently this becomes step one for many businesses.  Would this plan be best executed on an existing platform (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, dare I say MySpace etc.)?  Would it be best executed on your own site via a blog, game, widget or some other form of interactivity that you build. Don’t overlook this option. There is no law that says all businesses must be on Facebook or Twitter though it may appear so by the level of discussion about it. Also, this is is the step to develop your plans for tracking and optimization.  You may need to develop some specialized approaches in your web analytics  or you may need to use outside services as well.  What software and services can help you and your team administer this?  Finally, what sorts of training or coaching might you or your teams need to be able to carry this through?

I can’t believe I wrote a post about POST.  It works though.  Build a social media marketing plan and your prospects for success will be much higher than those who jump in by saying “Hey let’s post some special offers on Facebook and see what happens!”

• count the clicks from your feed to your site
• what kind of reader generated the click
• count those that come from email
• see the geography and reach fof your feed audience
• breakdown of click activity by piece of content

Here is an image showing what the data might look like in your Google Analytics account:

I’d be interested in hearing from those of you who have implemented this.  It looks a little awkward in the sense that you have to bounce between your Google Analytics account and your Feedburner account depending upon the kind of data you are looking for.  Also, if you have been using tracking URLs in your RSS feeds then you might find this data to be redundant at best.  However, for the lion’s share of site operators who have not had the tools to track their RSS feed activity this could be big help.

• Tweeters tend to be under 49 and the audience skews slightly female
• Twitter users are still less than half the number of other social network users but they are the fastest growing group
• Mobile users and people with multiple devices are more likely to Tweet

Here’s a chart showing the disparity in the age ranges of Twitter users:

As the demographics of our social media audiences continues to evolve it suggests that we should expect to use different communication strategies across each platform according to what suits not only the functionality of the platform but the different audiences adn modes of use (i.e. mobile versus computer).  How are you adapting?

We also love the new advanced analysis feature that allows you to filter data within a table without having to generate custom reports and perform the analysis in as separate database or spreadsheet.   For instance, what if you are viewing a list of referring keywords and you would like to see which have a bounce of less than 30% and meet a certain number of page views?  In the past you would have had to export the data and do your filtering on the desktop.  Now you can filter for these results within the keywords table itself.  That’s a handy time saver and will encourage more people to delve deeper into their data.

In addition, Google has rolled out a new features that allows you to createa wider variety of custom variables to track more details about your users and your content while also offering the ability to create repprt sharing rules that allow to share specific reports with specific audiences in your company.  If you want to create a report just for your sales team this is your solution.

One other favorite new addition is the ability to create custom alerts whenever a certain metric shows a noteworthy change.  If you wanted to know whether you got a sudden spike in traffic from that website you just formed a partnership with or that video you placed on YouTube this could be a handy method of staying informed.

Thanks to Google for continuing to develop these tools!  Let us know if you are finding any new ways to use them.