What is social media marketing (SMM)?
Social Media Marketing or SMM is the ability to successfully create dialogs with existing and new customers through social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.  Successful dialogs are created by identifying and reaching out to influencers – people who regularly share content and opinions. Continued personal engagement and targeted content with influencers are the biggest challenges with Social Media Marketing.

Why should I have a SMM strategy?
Since marketers love to have reasoning backed by statistics below are Facebook’s most recent stats for your reference:

       General Growth

 

Even thought these impressive stats are just for Facebook the growth trends, engagement and generational penetration are not limited to Facebook alone.  There are hundreds of other social media sites and your customers are there, somewhere.


How can I develop a SMM strategy?
Just as with any emerging marketing techniques mastery comes from education, patience and a lot of trial and error.  Any successful marketing strategy involves goal and objective setting and social media is no different.  Once you’re secure with your objectives you will not only need to do research as to which social media sites your customers use, but if they will be receptive to creating a dialog with you via these sites.  For example, if you’re a B2B company with an objective to do lead generation, there may be a number of prospects that don’t want to hear from you via Facebook because they consider it more for social communication amongst close friends however would be more receptive to hearing from you through a business site such as LinkedIn.  

After determining the proper social media outlets content should be created, tagged and linked specifically for your social media strategy.  For example, if you send an email newsletter with multiple stories, a social media sharing link should be created for each story, not just the entire newsletter.  This makes the sharing of the exact content easy and seamless to the end user instead of putting additional obstacles to subscribers.  Once you start to receive feedback you’re your campaigns you will notice a certain group of people who consistently click on the share links to pass your content to their friends.  These people are the influencers and it’s important to develop an entirely different strategy of communicating with them once they are identified. 

What do I have to do to implement SMM into my emails?
Implementation is very simple. In eLoop it’s a simple three step process which takes about a minute..

Most important is your strategy.  This is the key to your SMM success. When devising your strategy, think about your end goals.  Perhaps you are promoting an event, encouraging an action, or simply just providing valuable information. Each of these tactics takes a slightly different approach.  However, the one component that is similar to all is that you want to make it exciting! There is no point in posting dull and boring information to Facebook or Twitter.  Give them something to talk about, post about or tweet about!

Once your SMM is included in your email, you must TEST, TEST, TEST! You have put a lot of brainpower and elbow grease into your strategy and the last thing that you want is for a mishap to be posted all over the social media marketplace.

What is the “Add This” feature in eLoop?
Gold Lasso has partnered with AddThis, the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet.  We chose AddThis because of its ease of use for our clients, it’s quick setup and it’s transparency with eLoop.  The AddThis button can easily be integrated in to your email marketing efforts after a quick less than a minute setup.  Once setup, you can include a preset button of your choice or a custom button that you can design.  eLoop gives you four choices on what to post using your button.  The most common usage is to link to the current message that you are sending out.  We also offer the ability to link to another message in eLoop, a link to a website, or a link to a Data Collection page in eLoop.

When recipients receive the message, they can click on the button and post your link to more than 50 social media sharing sites.   This will help to drive your message home by letting your recipients help to pass the word along.

To help with your Social Media Marketing efforts, you will now see that social media is reflective in your eLoop reporting.  You can measure the amount of clicks on your AddThis button in the Campaign Reporting section within eLoop.  For more detailed analytics, you can use your AddThis username and password that you created during the setup process and login to AddThis’s website.  From there you can measure sharing trends, top content, top services and much more.  In the future we will be integrating this valuable information in with your eLoop account.

If you are interested in developing a SMM strategy or have questions regarding implementation, please contact your Gold Lasso Account Manager at 301.990.9857 or via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..