Demystifying

Social media
marketing
A Mercadeo Education writeup

Contents
1

Social media marketing

1.1

Strategies for social media

1.2

Common mistakes to avoid

1.3

Manage a Social Media Crisis

Social media marketing

Without knowing how social media affects consumer behavior, companies run the risk of aiming it at the wrong targets,
wasting time and money on ineffective efforts, and generally failing to harness its potential. Marketing folks certainly
know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the worlds third largest, behind
China and India. Marketing folks can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify wordof-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social medias power. Companies
diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social
media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender
loyalty
We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many,
particularly non-marketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. Its no secret that consumers increasingly go online
to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet its often difficult to see where and how to
influence these conversations, which take place across an ever-growing variety of platforms, among diverse and
dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, theres no
single measure of social medias financial impact, and many companies find that its difficult to justify devoting
significant resourcesfinancial or humanto an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.
Its much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help
marketing folks evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management
systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create
critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for
interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way
its employees interact with customers or other parties. Social media is a unique component of the consumer decision
journey: its the only form of marketing that can touch consumers at each and every stage, from when theyre pondering
brands and products right through the period after a purchase, as their experience influences the brands they prefer and
their potential advocacy influences others

Strategies for social media

What to do and what not to do? 2 important qns for any marketing strategy and pretty relevant for strategy involving a
channel where the bouquets and brickbats are almost instantaneous, where pins and stripes are as effective as the
pinstripes.

Create a Game Plan & Stick to It

If you have no execution strategy, your content is likely going to fall through the cracks. Set a limit on how many
tweets/posts/pics you have to publish per day. This number can be adjusted as needed, but having a number you have
to hit, even something as small as 2 per day, gives you a benchmark and a goal at the very least. Investigate how often
your competitors are posting and conduct industry research to see the ideal amount of content to publish per day on
each channel. You want to be active, but not overly active.

Treat each channel as an individual entity

Each social channel needs to be treated as a separate entity. For example, LinkedIn tends to have a more businessfocused audience looking for in-depth, educational content, compared to Instagram, which is likely to have an audience
looking for engaging visual content. Pay attention to your follower demographic on each channel to publish content that
appeals to them. The organic restaurant for example, should focus on a more image-based platform like Instagram or
Pinterest because thats where foodies go to share and engage. But, a law firm wouldnt really benefit from being on
Pinterest. That audience isnt there because they dont want to look at images of a law office; they want information on
how they can be helped. A final example would be not targeting baby boomers on social media, despite the fact that
theyre the fastest growing group on social media.
Again, its discovering who your audience is and where they spend most of their time. Doing this ahead of time will
determine where you should focus your social media efforts. And it doesnt take much time either. You could begin by
checking out stats, like from Pew Research, that break down the demographics of each social network. Or, simply ask
current customers. Just spend the extra time in understanding which network is most effective in reaching your audience

Go above & beyond in customer service (pretty straight forward or so one thinks !!!)
If a visitor tweets at your handle or posts on your Facebook page and never receives a response, trust is lost. Due to
your lack of communication, the dissatisfied potential lead is now turning to your competitors to seek answers to their
questions. On the other hand, when you deliver a thoughtful response in a timely manner that visitor is flattered and
intrigued by your brand. Its humanizing to take the time respond to a personal inquiry, and it builds your authority.
Negative feedback needs to be addressed as well, preferably with patience and respect. But think of your social channels
as an opportunity to display how awesome you treat your customers. Assign a first responder to post and monitor each
channel your brand has a profile on. Create a troubleshooting library of common bugs or complaints that arise, and how
to handle these issues. This will ensure the issue is addressed properly and in a timely manner. (NOTE: If the issue needs
further investigation or requires confidential information, have the user email support, send a private message, or call
your help line.) Be creative use giveaways, personality, and a sense of humor to engage followers and convert them

into free brand promoters. DO NOT IGNORE any comment posted to your account on social, whether stellar or
critical. No need to create brand detractors!

Track & Talk!

Tracking is often perceived as tedious and time-consuming. It can be, but it only needs to take a few hours each month.
Set aside time to review metrics that are important to your business on a monthly basis (preferably the first day of the
month). Here are some stats to focus on: number of posts, follower growth, clicks to your site/products, pageviews,
post likes or shares, impressions, etc. Look at each channel separately, and compare to your largest competitors to get a
sense on how youre matching up (or how youre crushing them!). For example, you realize that Facebook is the best
network for your brand. But, how well is your Facebook campaign doing? How many likes or shares is your content
receiving? Are people leaving comments? Are you making any money or new subscribers because of your awesome
Facebook content? These are important questions that need to be answered. If not, youre continuing to create and
promote content that isnt triggering a response from your audience
If youre crunched for time and analytics is not your thing, invest in software to help track data. A lot can be tracked
using free tools like bit.ly, Google Analytics, and Hootsuite. Diving in to see which content received the most clicks,
shares, etc. will show you what to repurpose in the future. Look for common themes in your analysis, for example if
advice posts with numbers in the title perform wonderfully on Facebook then up these on that platform. Share your
results and set monthly strategy meetings with your different marketing forces within your company to plan for the
future. Working collaboratively and taking a step back to brainstorm and reevaluate your strategy can drastically improve
your social efforts. Also leverage other departments within your business. Various teams like client services and sales
might have stellar ideas for social since they are the people who communicate with prospects and customers on a daily
basis

Common mistakes to avoid

Businesses tend to get all pumped up about their new and innovative pages on Facebook, but within months forget all
about it. The solution is to embrace the business on social media as a daily affair and have a social media strategy. There
needs to be a weekly strategy with systematic goals. Without a plan, you cannot really proceed

When you share too many posts on your page or you automate too much, what you tend to do is, scare away
your fans. They would either unlike your posts or hide them eventually. You can post on each site differently
rather than posting about one on another. Schedule your posts with the tool Post Planner which would enable
you to control your posts. Or just simply list down the strategy. Being on Twitter, Facebook,
Google+,LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, CircleMe, YouTube, Pinterest, all other ones become
overwhelming for some people. Choose just one or two and stick to mastering it, where you get the most
number of fans and quality engagement from them. If you think youre very confident on being able to collate
all the channels then feel free to go ahead but it always is a tedious task!

The mantra for efficient business planning is the division of labor. Make sure to create different departments
specialized for each job like HR, marketing, etc. the marketing and PR department needs to be in the loop

You need to train your customer service representatives to find out the proper answers to the queries by your
customers instead of just avoiding them. Making your customer feel important is the first step, it doesnt matter
even if your solutions take a day. Have a strategy that doesnt only depend on Facebook. Drive your traffic to
the main pages on your website, making them realize that Facebook might be gone someday, but the fans
cannot be lost by depending on only a social networking site. Send them letters and updates from your blog
posts which would helps you to contact them outside of Facebook or Twitter

The favorite subject of people is themselves! So if you continue bragging about your products on your
website, it might push them away. Give your fans a great deal of value and provide resources that help, deals,
interesting updates and be funny. Do not try to fly solo, its social networking so be social! Reach other
businesses or people interested on a daily level and join in conversations with them..

Manage a Social Media Crisis

The growth of social media websites has allowed individuals to easily and readily express their opinions and concerns on
all sorts of matters. This has been positive in many respects, but it has posed new challenges for organisations that are
keen to maintain their reputation which can often result in a social media crisis. A social media crisis is basically the use
of words or images on social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter, which can damage your reputation as a
company. Its not always easy to define what exactly constitutes as a crisis. Generally, it is an issue that arises or is made
worse by social media, resulting in negative media coverage, a change in business process or financial loss. However, if
one customer writes on Facebook that they dont like you, this doesnt make a crisis. Yet if that person not only writes
that they dont like you but your products put them in danger and theyre going to sell their story to the press this is a
crisis.

The Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana came under criticism at the start of a year after a security guard
prevented locals from taking photos outside of its flagship store in Hong Kong, stating that only mainland
Chinese or foreign tourists were allowed to take photos. Because the store was treating locals as "second-class
shoppers", this provoked a major reaction on Facebook a vast number of users joined together to organise a
protest. They created a page, now liked by 22,000 people, and staged a protest outside the store, the number
that attended was so great that the store ended up having to close early

In mid-January, McDonalds launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #McDStories. The campaign was
to get customers to post happy and nostalgic stories about the times they got Happy Meals. However, it wasn't
long before users turned it on its head and Twitter users took the opportunity to share their own horror stories.
Ranging to poor food quality to bad customer service, the campaign only gave the fast food chain negative
publicity
4

German football club Bayern Munich came under fire from Facebook fans after it duped fans into believing
that a staged promotional press conference was real. During the conference, fans were expecting a big name to
be revealed, but instead the sporting director of the club revealed a picture of the person viewing the video's
Facebook profile picture. The stunt was to show how important the fans are to the club, but since fans were
actually expecting a new signing, the stunt didn't go down well and the club was forced to apologise

Sometimes there are actions that are inexcusable. FedEx came under major criticism last December after a
video, showing one of its employees chucking a Samsung computer monitor over a fence to deliver the
package. The video racked up over one million views in approximately 24 hours and it led to many others
sharing their negative experiences with the company

Back in 2009, before Domino's Pizza ever had a social media presence, it found itself in trouble when two
employees in its Conover N.C. franchise, uploaded a video onto YouTube of themselves doing disgusting
things to a sandwich before it went out to delivery. The video went viral and immediately, Domino's was under
pressure, but since it had loyal fans who alerted it to the video, it was able to take action. The brand took a
number of actions to deal with the crisis, it official video statement from Domino USA's president Patrick
Doyle, is one way they dealt with it

A social media exec for music chain HMV tweeted the mass firing of 190 staff live from HMV's proprietary
account. The first tweet announced: ""We're tweeting live from HR where we're all being fired! Exciting!!!",
followed by: "There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the
brand". Unfortunately for HMV, even its inability to lock the outgoing staff out of the social network was
broadcast to the masses. The rogue @hmvtweets tweeter wrote: "Just overheard our Marketing Director (he's
staying, folks!) ask 'How do I shut down Twitter?'"

The popular burger franchise fell foul to some hacktivists who changed Burger King's account name to
McDonald's and added a new bio that stated, "Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =
FREEDOM IS FAILURE." "Look for McDonald's in a hood near you!" This was followed by a string of fake
tweets containing racial slurs, obscenities and references to drugs. McDonald's drew further attention to the
plight of its rival by tweeting: "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had
nothing to do with the hacking."

Recently Air France mishandled the rerouting and cancellation of its flight to Mumbai and esp the harassment
and poor treatment meted out to economy class passengers and esp Indians. This led to a massive Facebook
campaign against the airline with immense publicity against flying that airline and resulted in business and
brand loss

Dave Carroll, a Canadian country and western singer, was traveling with United Airlines where his acoustic
guitar was damaged by baggage handlers. What he did was release a video, United Breaks Guitars, which
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became a viral hit. When it reached almost four million, United Airlines took notice and offered to pay the cost
of repairing his guitar and flight vouchers worth $1,200. However, Carroll told the airline to donate the sum to
charity

When a video about rats in KFC's restaurant appeared, the video immediately went viral and presented a
number of headaches for the brand. Since this was 2007 and a restaurant's quality is based on its hygiene, this
turned a local problem into an national story which KFC responded to poorly

Sometimes not all examples involve the brand directly. BP found itself regretting its lack of social media
presence when a parody account, @BPGlobalPR , started tweeting and got roughly 170,000 followers. Problem
was that many people thought that this was the official account when in fact it was @BP_America (44,000
followers). The reason why it stood out was because BP used its account to announce its news instead of
interacting with consumers

If a social media crisis does break out, the first thing youll need to do is react instantly on the original source where it
started. Acknowledge what has happened. Even if you dont know what is happening and have no immediate solution,
always say you are looking into it and apologise. Do not get on the defensive and never get into an argument, as this will
only worsen matters. Even if you dont agree with the comments made, remain understanding and sympathetic.

This worked well for Kraft who was embroiled in a social media crisis with regards to its Oreo rainbow
cookie, to mark gay pride month, when it was met with some backlash. The brand responded calmly and with
grace, which limited damage caused.

A quick reaction time can limit damage caused and help turn the situation around. For example, when Burger
King found themselves in the midst of a crisis involving an image of an employee standing on some lettuce,
they swiftly used internet tools to track down the employee, instantly firing them. The crisis was resolved
within 24 hours.

If a crisis occurs, dont keep it locked behind management doors. Inevitably, the phones will start ringing so your sales
and customer service staff will need to be primed as to what to say when questions are being fired at them. Let the
whole team know what is going on and how it is being solved. Post an FAQ section on your website, with links on the
social media websites, so that people can read whats happening and how you are solving it. And ofcourse, it is
important to sit down as a company and take stock of what happened. Its vital that you learn lessons from the
situation, such as what you could have done differently and how you could improve for the future, should it happen
again.

 2014 This material is made by Mercadeo Education, and is in all respects

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