If you’ve sat down with me in person or talked on the phone, you’ve probably heard the six reasons I usually give for a business to get into the social media space:
1) Presence – Simply being in the space can be of value from a search standpoint.
2) Social SEO – I’ve written about this here extensively.
3) Brand Awareness – Monitoring the social graph for people talking about your company or industry.
4) Lead Generation – Finding people actively searching for the product or service you offer.
5) Word-Of-Mouth – Encouraging your current customers to spread the word or leave reviews.
6) Direct Marketing – Linking or posting special offers and incentives.
There are two ways I tackle these with clients – what you might call the ACTIVE and PASSIVE approaches.
The Active hits all of the above, the Passive hits some – usually 1-4, with a touch of 6.
Obviously #5 is the one that’s left out, the reason being that one really needs to go “all in” with social to make it effective. That generally means bringing it in-house to make it truly Active.
It needs to become a full part of the marketing and customer service protocols. In my experience, a lot of businesses just aren’t ready for that kind of commitment.
That’s exactly what it is, also – a commitment. Once things are up and running it’s a more smoothly operating machine, but there’s a period wherein someone has to say WE’RE DOING THIS, making it a true priority to learn the hows and whys of social networking.
An outside contractor or consultant can (and often should) guide the business through that process, but to get all pseudo-deep on you, the desire to do it has to come from within.
The Passive approach still has massive benefits, one of which is greasing the wheels to go Active when the time is right. My best Passive program is the Social Page One.
