The From Line

Marketing Trend:

Social media sharing has given marketers a treasure chest of insight into customer opinions and discussions. But tools that measure social media sentiment have their limits. The human element, such as the use of slang, can throw off reports.

This week's trend discusses better ways to be engaging while gaining feedback and valuable marketing data.

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

• More than 250 million active users
• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
  
  User Engagement

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 8 million users become fans of pages each day
  
  Applications

• More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 2.5 million events created each month
• More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site
  
  International Growth

• More than 50 translations available on the site, with more than 40 in development
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  
  Platform

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than 200 applications have more than one million monthly active users
• More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
  
  Mobile

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

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..

The forward-to-a-Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by e-mail service providers to incorporate viral marketing tools into their applications. Because 100% of the most commonly used e-mail clients have a forward e-mail feature, people use that instead. The only thing we e-mail service providers can do to save face is to hope that the feature reminds people to use their forward button.

A recent survey to online market­ers by the Email Experience Council asked, “What is your most successful list-building tactic?” Only 6% chose “Viral: empowering subscribers to share my e-mails via forward-to-a-friend,” 9% chose “Acquisition: growing by renting lists,” and 84% chose “Organic: capital­izing on sign-up opportunities across all of my channels.”

These statistics prove that the forward-to-a-friend process is inad­equate, and a more formalized referral program is needed for success. A good program is automated, timely and usually starts where the original opt-in process ends. Once a Web site user has gone through the motions of opt­ing in, it is a perfect opportunity to ask for a referral. Ask the referrer not only for an e-mail address, but also a full name. When soliciting the referee to opt-in, always personalize the message and, most importantly, reference the referrer — this gives you instant cred­ibility and will produce a much higher conversion rate.