Using social media for marketing

Perhaps it’s the result of some deeply buried childhood experience but I can’t help categorising things.

And one thing that does need categorising is the way marketers use social media because a lot of people talk about it as though it is just a matter of reputation management.

Of course reputation management – monitoring conversations and where appropriate responding to them and guiding them – is important. But there are several other parts of marketing that can use social media. We can start with search marketing.

Search marketing is of course focussed around keywords and key phrases. Some social media tools monitoring are great at helping with this, and add an extra dimension to the insights derived from Google’s tools. For instance Alterian’s SM2 product will allow you to generate a cloud of keyword tags created by people writing blogs and other content. This is a really easy way of discovering concepts that people think are important on any day.

Tools like SM2 or IceRocket can also be used to influence messaging strategy. If you know what people are talking about, and what they want to hear about, they it is easier to create messages that will have impact.

For instance, what are the big issues with cars at the moment: is it reliability, economy, safety? At the time of writing fuel consumption trumps reliability for motor cars – but only if the term “economy” rather than “fuel consumption” is used. And safety is more important than either.

Social media can also be used for driving traffic to websites. This can be done in two ways.

The simpler way (not that simple really!) is to identify people who are talking about your brand or an issue you are trying to get associated with and send them links to information that will interest them in the hope that they will post your links and other people will see them.

Alternatively you can listen out for people talking about your brand or issue and send them information. This is of course may well be more time consuming if there are a lot of people talking about you but you can automate this to a degree using tools like SocialOomph which works with Twitter.

I had a sweet example of this the other day. Tweeting about late (early?) blooming camellias I was immediately followed by @lovethegarden (a web entity owned by The Scott’s Miracle Gro Company) who have a website (www.lovethegarden.com) of great interest to the camellia lover.

And finally there are marketing campaigns that use social media for launching products, generating awareness or favourability, or even generating sales. More on these another day!

Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk