Social Media: a Waste of Your Company’s Time?

By Polly Traylor

There's a wealth of content on the Web about how to maximize your social media presence and gain the most from this exciting new media. But wait: should your business spend much time on social media in the first place? For small companies, the ROI can be tricky. You probably have a small marketing staff, and it's unlikely you can dedicate even one person to a social media program. Despite popular messaging from social media pros on the ease-of-use and affordability of social media, it's actually a time-consuming and increasingly complex marketing vehicle. If you want results, you'll need to spend time on quality content, regular updates, community interaction and integration of your social media pages with SEO and overall marketing strategies. You've also got to keep pace with new features and privacy issues of top social media channels. Can you justify the time?

The first determination is whether your customers are hanging out on social media -- and on which sites. Do your targets regularly use social media for researching products and services in your space? If you're not sure, you'd better find out.

Secondly, you need a distinct plan and a strategy. Most marketing experts don't advise ad-hoc social media posting. How will social media fit into your overall marketing program?

Thirdly, you have to measure social media marketing efforts regularly. This is usually not expensive -- but it does take time and diligence.

Recently, I wrote an article for Business on Main, a Sprint-sponsored community for small businesses on the MSN network: "Are You Wasting Your Time on Facebook and Twitter?”. The story was an attempt to shatter a few myths about social media marketing. Here’s an excerpt:

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"The cost issues are critical for a small business," says Paul Verna, senior analyst with eMarketer. Larger companies can afford to hire an agency or even a team of people to handle the time-consuming chores of creating content, making regular updates and monitoring corporate social media pages. A small company may only have a part-time resource. “Even having one person dedicated to your social media profile better have an intense payoff at the other end," Verna warns.

It's no wonder that a recent Hiscox survey of more than 300 participants found that just 12 percent of small companies described social media as a "must" for their marketing and promotional strategies, and nearly 50 percent of respondents aren’t using social media at all.

"Most people go on Facebook to connect with people like family and friends or to play games, and they really don't care about your ball-bearing company," observes Mark Schaefer, a blogger and consultant in social media marketing. "At the end of the day, you have to go to where your customers are.”

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While social media can be a useful investment for many small businesses, Facebook and Twitter aren't always the top choices. Twitter is an excellent vehicle for science and technology companies and communities. Facebook can be fantastic for consumer goods and services. But don't forget: there's also LinkedIn, YouTube, Yahoo and AOL communities, your company's blog, industry discussion forums and local social media sites. As Facebook and Twitter grow larger, their steady flow of new features may be overkill for small businesses. This article on Social Media Today does a nice job of outlining the issues with Facebook, and offers some helpful alternatives.

Before jumping into social media, understand your choices, customer preferences, and if social media is likely to meet company goals. If it still seems worthwhile and you know which sites will resonate with customers, start small. Once you start posting regularly and develop a community of followers, you have set an expectation for activity.

High-tech marketing: is content still king?

These days, as a home-based writing and PR consultant, I work with a lot of marketing teams. Most of them are in high-tech, and I am also working to build up a business involving green tech and health care. Marketing budgets have been slashed over the past couple of years. I don't have the numbers to show for it, only the anecdotal evidence and my own personal experience—enduring a 20% downturn in income since 2007.

When companies have marketing dollars to spend, they are ruminating long and
hard about how to spend it: what kind of messages and information will resonate
today?

Some people think that micro-blogging a.k.a. Twitter is a high-value activity for marketing when you have a tight budget. Yet despite all the hype it's unclear what tangible results most companies are gaining from social media, and there’s a lot of a palaver that's time-wasting and annoying. Behind the tweets and posts there has to be some useful, valuable content. I'm not talking about quick-hit promotions and spin but information that will help purchasers and decision-makers learn more about your products and services and their industry: research, analysis, predictions, and customer stories. It's about building a relationship, sharing information, and enriching a discussion with customers and other stakeholders.

In 1993, I began my career in journalism, and while I occasionally still write journalism pieces, the bulk of my work has evolved into corporate-sponsored writing and communications activities. I like to call myself an information broker. The same tenets that I learned at the American University M.A. program in Journalism in 1991 and 1992 still apply to my work today: research, relevance, and really good writing.

Sometimes however, I wonder if anyone really cares about that anymore. White papers seem to have gone by the wayside. Cases are getting shorter and shorter. The bulk of news and analysis publish exclusively on the web, which means articles must be tight, concise, and often lacking perspective. Blogging is hot -- yet there's plenty of blabber out there on the Web and it's hard to know what's credible and what's not.

I surveyed a few friends and colleagues for their perspective on the world of marketing content today, and here's what they said:

"Ultimately, I'm thinking the issue is less the mode of content delivery instead of the nature of the content itself," says Jason Gillikin, president of Gillikin Consulting which provides business communications services. “Material that speaks to the effectiveness of some new technology are going to play better than empty sales rhetoric, irrespective of the mode of delivery. So emphasizing the ROI will be a smart move. Show the customer how this new tech will make their lives easier or cheaper or reduce their carbon footprint. That, ultimately, will count for the most.”

Michael Schmier, VP of research and media at high-tech market research network Tippit, still believes in the power of white papers and case studies, as long as they are distributed widely on other sites. Blogging, if attached to a social media strategy, is another favorite of this San Francisco-based former marketing exec. And webinars on products can be very useful for customers, he says.

Michael: I agree wholeheartedly. I believe that diversity is paramount: technical people might enjoy spending five minutes watching a product demo while marketing-savvy execs can quickly breeze through your social media updates on their mobile phones. And, members of the media and prospects can get a better idea of the capabilities of your product or service by reading a well-written and engaging case study. Everyone knows such documents are always one-sided, but they can also offer a valuable snapshot into the real-life scenarios your company enables.

In the world of headlines and sidebars and video clips in which we now live, I sometimes mourn the halcyon days in which I could interview 7 or 8 people and spend hours researching a subject to pen a thoughtful and comprehensive 3,000-word piece. I hope that marketing folks won’t lose sight of the fact that not everything can be consumed in 10 seconds. Nor should it be.

What’s your take on the state of corporate-sponsored content? What do your clients and customers want?

Social media strategy on a small marketing budget

I have been experimenting with social media in my own business, in earnest, for a couple of years. I started with Linkedin for networking and frequently use the question-and-answer tool. One year ago I added Facebook, and six months ago, I started this blog and my Twitter account. I've quickly learned that all of these tools can be painfully time-consuming— particularly the last two. On the other hand, I do believe that at some point, they'll pay off for my business in ways I can’t predict now.

In the meantime, this experiment shows prospects and colleagues that I am investing in new media, which is fast becoming a critical source of information and knowledge-sharing for people in the business world. Since I am in the information business, I've got to use these tools or else, fall behind the times. Increasingly, clients are asking me to advise them on social media practices for promoting their message and building their business.

A small high-tech client I'm working with wants to dip its toes deeper into social media. The marketing chief has set up a Twitter account, which he has been posting news and observations to infrequently, and the company is about to launch a new Web site. Here's the challenge: we have an already constrained budget for PR activities, which means I will only have a few extra hours at most to spend on social media per week.

Yes, the tools are free, but time is not: whoever told you that social media is a cheap and easy way to promote your business is lying through their teeth.

From my own personal experience and the anecdotes of others, it can take 1-2 hours per day to achieve any significant marketing goals with these tools. My client doesn't have the budget to pay me those extra hours on top of all the other programs we have running.

Despite that barrier, I'm eager to get started but I'm also worried: How can we be efficient with the few hours that we have to spend? Automated tools for managing social media are now plentiful— so I know that incorporating these tools will be part of our strategy.

Here's my bare-bones social media plan for the client:

Purpose:

--To position [COMPANY] as an influencer and thought leader in prominent online media communities.
--To buttress and support PR and marketing efforts.
--To generate new marketing and sales prospects, potential partners, and community supporters aka viral friends.
--To gain useful insight into social media conversations around [XYZ] technology, to fuel media relations strategies, contacts and opportunities.

I. Twitter: Guidelines and Tools

There's no “right way” to use Twitter but increasingly, standards are arising about how corporations are using Twitter and some best practices are emerging. As a marketing and public relations tool, corporate Twitter accounts are focusing on striking a balance between self-promotional posts and educational/non-promotional conversations, and re-tweeting of others’ posts which relate to industry trends. Some guidelines that I have read suggest a 60% to 40% ratio of non-promotional to promotional tweets.


Useful links and tools for getting started:

Twitter Bible

Resource Super List

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you.

Twitter Tips: How to Find Experts in Your Industry

Tweetscan. A great search engine for twitter to see what people are twitting about you, your blog, brand, company, product etc.

TweetMarks. This will help your bookmark your twits, keeping all of the links you share organized.

TweetDeck tips (TweetDeck is an excellent dashboard/browser for twitter that I use as my primary interface into Twitter. I love it.)

Twollo to automatically follow the people who are discussing the things I am interested in.

Twaitter allows you to schedule your tweets at specific times.

CoTweet enables multiple people to update just one Twitter account. A permissions console allows you to set up accounts for the team members you want updating the Twitter feed.

Twitter measurement

This is no hard science yet but some of the metrics include: number of followers, number of mentions or retweets, individual tweet performance, clicks per day, and clicks by geographic location. Fortunately, there are many free or low-cost automated tools that collect data for you and graph it. Recommendations for an initial metrics program:

--Number of followers and percentage of increase month to month.
--Number of mentions, replies, and retweets per month.
--Individual tweet performance: graphing how particular posts perform in terms of responses and mentions. This will be, ideally, an invaluable tool for PR/marketing efforts.
--Responses from media, customers, or other key constituents on Twitter to press releases and other news. We will track any contacts that come to us from Twitter.


Resources for analytics:

Eight excellent tools to extract insights from Twitter streams
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/80437


1. Hootsuite— This is another twitter client which also includes statistics tools.
2. Twitalyzer provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one’s propensity to ‘retweet’ or pass along others’ tweets (d) velocity - the rate one’s updates on Twitter and (e) clout - based on how many times one is cited in tweets.
3. Twist offers trends of keywords or product name, based on what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period of a week or a month and display them on a graph.
4. Tweetstats is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and presents them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter.
5. Twitterfriends focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links.
6. Thummit Quickrate This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics’) and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative).


II. Twitter: Schedule and Content plan

1. Budget/Time: Minimum 1 hour per week (ideally, 2 hours) to maintain Twitter account. Below is what I believe to be a useful breakdown of time spent for .5 hour on social media, which I found from another marketer:

1. Sign up for an account at TweetLater (or another tweet scheduling tool).
2. Spend 10-15 minutes every day finding industry articles, news you find interesting, and thought leadership pieces that have nothing to do with you or your business and set those up to be distributed throughout the day. A good rule of thumb is that 60 percent of your tweets should not be self-serving. I set up my tweets 30 minutes apart.
3. Spend 10 minutes every day setting up your “self-serving” tweets - these are links to your blog, white papers the company has written, any articles written about you or that quote you, Webinars or podcasts you’re hosting, etc. A good rule of thumb is these should be only 40 percent of your tweets and you should space them out so they don’t come out all at once.
4. Spend 10 minutes going through your groups on TweetDeck and find things to RT (retweet) for your followers. This expands your follower base, shows that you listen, and provides great influence.


2. Content plan:

Post a minimum of 10 tweets per week consisting of:

--Tweets and retweets of related tech and industry news
--Company press releases (retweet 2-3 x over two weeks)
--Case studies and company media coverage (retweet 2-3 x over two weeks)
--General observations on company happenings or industry events
--Conference/event news
--Blog/site articles

The automated tweet scheduling tools allow you to develop an editorial calendar of tweets so that you can plan ahead and schedule when tweets post and how often. One rule of thumb that I have uncovered is to schedule your posts at intervals throughout the day, instead of all at once.


III. Blog

Ideally, we would launch a blog at the same time as our Twitter strategy. Given resources, this may not be possible, but a best practice is to not begin a blogging program until we are able and ready to commit to weekly posting. (Increasingly, there are services which automatically update Twitter with blog postings.)

Purpose:

--To position [Company] as an influencer and thought leader in prominent online media communities and with fellow bloggers.
--To buttress and support PR and marketing efforts, and as an educational vehicle for customers and prospects.
--To showcase speeches and thought leadership from company execs, and guest bloggers from the [industry] community.
--To engage in conversations with and generate feedback from customers, prospects, partners, and supporters.

Schedule: 1 posting/week. (300- 500 words)
Time commitment: 2-3 hours per week.


Challenges: Budget and resources for producing regular content. One strategy to counteract: cultivate relationships with guest bloggers to help mitigate the time spent creating original content. Strategy two: Re-post blogs on foundational topics.

Is it possible to gain value from social media by spending only a couple of hours per week? I'm not sure, but I'm determined to find out. I would love to find out how others who work for themselves or small companies are handling the time-sink issue. I have to keep reminding myself: social media is just another suite of tools to build a brand and engage customers and the broader community. It's not magic. At the end of the day, the message has to be crystal clear and targeted— no matter the tools that we use.

Ultimately, marketers and communicators need to figure out how to integrate these tools into our regular marketing and sales and customer service activities, without taking valuable time away from the physical time a.k.a. "personal touch" and attention we still need to offer customers and partners. I fear that were all getting too digital and are forgetting how to communicate in person and over the phone. What's the right balance?

Until next time, I'll be here, frazzled as always and trying to figure this all out.