Monthly Archives: October 2012

Small businesses entering in the social media world

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Nowadays it is very easy to find successful social media strategies in big companies. If we think about some of them, it will quickly come to our minds big brands like Starbucks, Coca Cola and Heineken.

However it is more difficult to think about successful strategies with small business. Maybe we haven’t thought about them, but they are using social media too. Plenty of customers are using social media so that gives small business owners a lot of incentives to join in.

It is not easy thought for small companies to generate traffic to their network pages and create traffic and engagement, as they don’t have the Brand awareness that big international business have.

Connecting with customers is the most important reason for small companies to use social media. It is also a tool to give them visibility and self-promotion. Although small companies think that social media is very important, they don’t spend a lot of money on it, they think that it is very easy to use it and that you don’t need too put so much effort, but that’s wrong. For this reason some times small companies aren’t as successful in social media as the big companies.

However I have found a Spanish company that made a good social media strategy and it was successful. It is a Spanish shoe company called Victoria that now has a very large fan community and with a very high brand awareness outside of Spain. They did the following things:

1. They went slowly to build a good strategy:

They spent a few years exploring and learning the social media world and how it works. In the beginning they had only a corporative blog where they published the new products and give an image.

Its current priority is to move from the networks as a tool to raise awareness to get social media becomes a two-way communication channel.

2. They use each platform for different approaches

They have their corporative blog in two languages to communicate the different products and even. They also have a facebook page in two languages too (they can reach a major audience). The aim of the facebook page is to create a relationship with the customers. Furthermore, victoria also has a twitter account to be more attached with fashion prescribers and tendencies. It is important to have different channels do reach your audience, but it is also important to know the communication that you want to give in each media as the audience can be different.

3. They take care of the content and they adapt it

The content that they publish is about their products, fashion tendencies and promotions. As they have two different facebook pages they publish different promotions and campaigns, as the promotions aren’t the same in Spain as in the other countries, which depends on the season and the culture. Now between the two facebook pages, they have almost 80,000 fans, that is pretty much as they are a small company.

4. They have created a plan for the crisis

When they started with social media they were improvising if they had any critic or any complain. Now they have elaborated a plan depending on what the customer says. If it is someone complaining about a product that he has bought, the community manager responds to him saying what should he do in a respectful way.

Having social networks it is not everything; you have to know how to manage them, how to communicate to your audience and which social network fits better with your brand.

 

Be socialized and a buyer at the same time

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Consumers have a bunch of information due to the Internet; they have so many data to analyze before purchasing a product or service. Nowadays there are so many brands to compare that they offer the same with different prices and different add values, so consumers have the opportunity to study deeply each product. There are also now different Internet engines that make this job easier for the buyers. There are so many pages that help you to make the best decision at the time of buying a product. One of the most known page is Amazon.com, which is a web site were you can find all kind of products classify by their category. You can enter in each category and find all the different products with all its prices, descriptions and stars (the value of the product). Like amazon it exists other web pages where you can compare different items before making the purchase, and every time more the volume of these new pages is bigger as consumers are using these sites more often.

I have found a very interesting comparison engine that mixes the comparison engine with the social activity. This web page is called SocialCompare, it is an innovative sharing community where you can make your own comparisons and you can share them with other people that are registered in the web page.  These other people can add items in your comparison or modify them (with your permission).

How does it work?

You as a user want to make a comparison between different brands of the same category. First of all you create a table with the different brands and in this same table you add in another column the qualities that you want for your product, thus you compare the different brands with the different qualities. Moreover, in the table you will add the pricing and other relevant information. Below you can see an example of how the table would look like:

With these comparisons other users that are looking for the same product as you can use the comparison to make a good decision in order to purchase the product. Other users can also add information, vote for the table that you have made and make comments.

In my opinion this comparison engine is different from the others and in some point more especial, as you can connect with different people and they can give their opinions. Furthermore, this site is proactive and customized as you make your own table and you set up the features that you like for the product that you finally will buy. Moreover, this webpage is also a tool for companies, they can see what people look for when they buy a product, what are their priorities and if they are price sensitive or not.

10 mistakes that you can’t make in the social media as a Brand

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I have found a very useful article about social media and companies in a Spanish magazine. This article explains what are the mistakes that you shouldn’t do as a community manager in a company:

 

  1. Making posts only about your Brand: the social media is not an online magazine about your products. You must write interesting articles that may be useful for other people. Of course you can introduce new products and news about your brand but always with an interesting article behind.
  2. To include not descriptive links: when you include a link in your post you have to make sure that people will click in the link, so you must write a post which drive people to click the link.
  3. Delete the negative comments: It is true that the critics of people can underestimate your Brand, but it is also true that gives credibility to your profile. The critics are also an opportunity, as you can respond them and create engagement with the users.
  4. Not responding to your fans or followersà To create engagement you need to have a social network with fluent communication. If your fans ask questions or make some suggestions you must answer them.
  5. Not thanking your fans and followers: Saying thank you to your fans and being nice to them will increase their loyalty towards your Brand.
  6. Making understandable posts à People will reject your Facebook page or twitter if they don’t understand you.
  7. Not keeping updated your social network: Social media is the most immediate way to have new information, so your social network has to be always updated, if not people will unlike your pages.
  8. Abusing hashtags: Twitter is a good media to summarize information of your Brand and hashtags help you to classify this information better. But be careful with adding a lot of hashtags in one tweet.
  9. Not following your competitors: it is good to follow your competitors to see which are the best practices.
  10. Being in only two social networks: It is positive to have more tan two social networks for your Brand as you will be able to reach a bigger audience.

 

I think this advises could be very useful. Every time more there are more people connected to these social networks and companies should now how to communicate through them.

Why should companies be in social media?

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Nowadays we are living an evolution in consumer behaviour, what I mean is that consumers have changed the way of purchasing a product or service, before they received a lot of information and inputs from brands, however now this have changed, while brands are sending all kind of inputs to improve their awareness, consumers are getting their own information of these brands from internet and social media. Consumers have now to listen to the brand but they have also to listen to other parties that talk about this Brand, which are other consumers making comments in the social media about their experience with the Brand, making videos and some critics sometimes. This fact scares the marketers a lot as it is very difficult to control what people say about your Brand in the internet. For this main reason all companies have to make the decision of being in the social media, what means having a Facebook page, twitter and other networks. Therefore they will be able to see what are the comments and respond to them, what it means, communicate with their consumers. On the one hand entering in the social media world is scary and sometimes is nebulous as there aren’t metrics that demonstrate the relation with social media and the growth in sales. On the other hand it is an opportunity. But why having your Brand in social media is such an opportunity?

Social Media enables targeted marketing response at individual touch points along the consumer decision journey by doing four main actions:

Monitoring: Analyze each moment what it is said about your Brand, so that enables you to know how is your Brand perceived and what consumers think about it.

Respond: Consumers can communicate with your Brand, so that means that you are able to respond all consumers’ questions. If the communication with the Brand and the consumers is fluent the engagement grows. Your objective with social media is to create traffic to your social network and a high engagement

Amplify:  Social media is a very useful tool to amplify your product or service making them an experience for the consumer. You have to create a good content for your Facebook page; you can make contests for the users and good campaigns that can become viral. You can also create forums where people can talk about the Brand and their experience. This can create a high loyalty and engagement.

Lead: It enables you to buzz through product launches, generate traffic and sales with offers and free samples and you can also solicit the consumer input after their purchase.

After doing this introduction about why CEOs have to think about the entrance to social media, I would like to share with you some facebook campaigns of the most known companies around the world. With these examples you can see clearly how social media can make your brand not only a brand but also a great experience. Consumers have a lot of choices; there are so many brands to evaluate so you must make yours unique, and social media gives you the chance to do that.

One of the campaigns that I liked the most when I saw the best 25 facebook campaigns was the KLM one, I think this one shows clearly what means converting your service to a new experience and something unique for the consumer. They transformed a simple flight to the opportunity to meet new people and have fun during it.