Why you want a social media presence

Our roughly 1,000 Digital Sherpa clients buy one of our Sherpa programs for a variety of reasons.  Of course everyone likes to attract online traffic, find new customers and generate leads.  And while those are outcomes of a good social media and content marketing program, that’s not always what brings our customers to our virtual door step.

Some buy it for the content creation; it takes a lot of time and discipline to write 2 quality blog posts per week.  But there are a great many who buy our program because they want to build a social media presence.

The adoption of businesses in the social media space has been exploding in the past year.  And Sherpa clients are a part of that surge of businesses on that leading edge of social media adoption.  But often when we ask new clients why they want to build a social media presence, the answers range from “because I don’t want to be left behind” to “my son/daughter/grandson/friend said I should” to “I really don’t know, but I feel like I probably should”.

The answer to why you want to be in social media can be found in a recently published report from Comscore.  Comscore is an internet marketing research firm that tracks and reports on online behavior.  Their recent report “Women on the Web:  How Women are Shaping the Internet” gives some great insight into the very question of why you want to be in social media.   The report speaks for itself, but I’ll highlight a few things I found particularly relevant:

• Women are more enagaged than men on the internet
• Social networking is central to women’s internet experience
• Women drive a disproportionate amount of online spending
• 9 out of 10 women in North America visited a social networking site in April 2010

Social networking sites are prime areas for attracting new customers whether you want to lure them to online sales or to visit your showroom.  The audience is there, what are you doing to make sure they find you?

Design Sherpa brings 100 design enthusiasts closer to a dream trip to Paris

Design Sherpa, our Digital Sherpa product for the home design and remodeling industry, is hosting the What Inspires You? contest.  In this contest Design enthusiasts are competing to win $10,000 and a 10-day trip to Maison & Objet in Paris.

Phase 1 has ended, the judges have spoken and narrowed down the field to 100 winners which are announced daily on the Design Sherpa blog.

Each winner submitted a photo and up to 100 words telling us what inspires them.  Below are a few of the images submitted.  You can view these, the 100 word design inspiration messages and the rest of the 98 winners on the Design Sherpa blog.

Phase 1 winners will now move to the second phase of the contest.  In this phase each contestant will enter a 350 word blog post about an interior or architectural design topic that communicates both his or her unique passion for design and writing style.

Social Media Marketing: In-House or Outsource?

Challenges to consider with social media marketing:  In-house, or outsource?

There is little question that a well-executed social media program will generate new business by engaging your customers, increasing your “Google rank” and turbo charging word of mouth.  As an example, in a recent study of over 1500 businesses by Hubspot, a social media research company, they discovered that
business to consumer companies have a high degree of success finding new customers.

A critical question for many businesses is simply should we do this ourselves?  Or should we outsource it?  There are pluses and minuses to each approach but no matter how you proceed — here are the critical success factors that you need to consider.  It is not as simple as throwing up a facebook fan page and hoping for interaction.

1.    Setting up a well-designed blog and linking it to your other social identities (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is an important first step.  This is not exceedingly difficult, but does require a focussed effort and for someone to learn basics and best practices around blogging and your specific blog.  There is absolutely a learning curve

2.    Staying current with technical changes in social media platforms.  New features are constantly added to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the various blog platforms.  Someone needs to stay current, and have it be part of their job.

3.    Creating ongoing content is the single most important key to success in social media marketing. Someone needs to be focussed on the creation of fresh and relevant content (blog posts, Facebook posts, Tweets).  Without it, there will be no engagement, no “Google juice” and no benefit.  There are countless examples of companies starting with the best intentions, getting setup, and then failing over time to continue to create posts and content.

4.    Tagging tagging and search engine optimization (SEO) tasks need to be managed, as this is one of the key benefits of social media marketing.  Whomever is creating content needs to be saavy to making that content as findable as possible by Google and the various search engines.

5.    Measuring results. Traffic, visits, comments, engagement can and should be measured.  Part of any social media program should be measurement and analysis to gauge program effectiveness and make adjustments.

More and more businesses are finding social media highly valuable for generating new customers, and retaining existing ones.  Your next marketing plan should absolutely contain some basic social media marketing efforts — bearing in mind the key success factors outlined above.

If you have a person on staff that has the time and expertise to handle your companies social marketing needs, that’s great.  If that is not working for you or if you seek a more professional perspective, outsourcing might be the answer.

For additional information, contact Bill Pryor at Digital Sherpa, bpryor@nci.com  781-254-3677