Choosing the best Social Media Forum for your business

That Social Media Marketing is important as part of your Digital Marketing Strategy is an issue we can no longer debate. That others have done it the wrong way is also beyond discussion. One of the biggest challenges for any business person is choosing the right forum for their online marketing. Perhaps what we can never over emphasize is how cardinal we need a clear Social Media Marketing Strategy. One of the core aspects of our strategy is choosing the appropriate forums for our business. There are several forums that will help us achieve different objectives, and there are some forums in whose presence we can achieve little. Clarifying our goals and objectives should precede choice of forums.  Let me hasten to say it is possible though to be in as many forums, as long as we will attain a good return on our investment. What attracts our availability in any forum is the possibility to engage with stakeholders. Forums attract different people, and our customers could be composed of different types of people as well. However an informing strategy will guide where we should we should be present and the amount of resources to invest in a particular forum.

Blogging Forums
A blog consists of a writer's experiences, observations and opinions and normally has images and links to websites. For a digital marketer, a blog is no exception because it is the best medium for content marketing. Customers no longer buy without enough information. Connectivity and mobility have added social proof as part of customer decision mix, if their friends are talking about your product - it must be good. There are many blogging platforms that one can choose from. 

Facebook
This is the big brother of social media with close to 1.5 billion active members. You can join as an individual and can create a business page. As an individual you are allowed up to 5000 friends but you have an option to have followers and these are not limited. For your business page your number of followers are not limited. Engagement with your followers is in the form of likes, comments and sharing of content. The activity of your followers will give leads into potential sales. You can form or join groups of various interests though some groups have restrictions on membership and engagement could be vetted. Whilst the platform warns against illicit activities it is not always possible to enforce this regulation. Caution has to be taken for vulnerable and sensitive members.

YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing website with over a billion active members. Whilst we can still share videos on Facebook, YouTube comes with more features especially on editing of the videos. Across all platforms, videos are viewed more than all text updates. It is a fact also that videos attract more engagement, as alluded before - engagement is what will give us leads. The brain is said to interpret images faster than it can interpret text. There is a huge collection of material on YouTube that one can edit and include into their own presentations. The shorter the video the better. However paid advertising on this channel can be pretty expensive. A well thought out strategy which addresses all our needs can help us attain engagement that can equal or out compete paid advertisements. One post gone viral would do all the trick.

We Chat
We Chat is actually a messaging and calling application. Although it does not have all the features of a Social Media forum; I have decided to include it here because the services that it offers. We Chat competes with WhatsApp - the biggest messaging application with an active membership of 800 million. The difference between these two is that We Chat allows advertising and as such has attracted a number of other innovations around its services. According to statista.com We Chat has an active membership of 549 million. Some Social Media evangelists believe that active members could be slightly over a billion. I have found a service like We Chat handy in complementing online sales innovations. I have read of fast food outlets in China that have incorporate We Chat as part of their home delivery services. You can place an order using We Chat and when your order is on its way you receive an update.

Twitter
I call this the jungle of Social Media. If you are not clear how the game is played, you may get lost and never find your directions. In this platform you will find current news just about everything. Some organizations live tweet their activities. Without a strategy detailing how you are going to play your game you may spend all your valuable resources trying to figure our what is going on. However they are various tools that you can use to manage all your activities on your twitter accounts. You can create lists of various topics that you are interested in and add those who make valuable contributions. Competitors may add you to their lists, this is a plus for you as they would be exposing you to their customer base.

Instagram
Instagram is an image sharing platform. According to statista.com, its current active members are 300 million as of August 2015 but the company recently announced have gone beyond the 400 million mark. Because of the ability of the mind to process images faster than text, Instagram has a high rate of engagement just like YouTube. I have had some of my clients ask how they can participate on Instagram when they offer services and hardly produce any images. There is literally nothing that can not be visually expressed. A mathematical equation,  expressed with a background of an intriguing picture will draw more attention than a simple text of the same. Our everyday stories can be captured as amazing images, which can help us engage with potential customers.

Other Forums
There are other forums that are not as popular but that command quite a following and would be worth exploring. Google + is said to have up to 300 million active users. Most of our customers are bound to be utilizing a service or another offered by Google and it's easy to reach out to them through Google circles. SnapChat is another video and image sharing platform which basically offer similar services as Instagram. The major difference is that all updates are given a lifetime of not more than 10 seconds. So if you want to share something that you would not want to remain available online this is your best option. SnapChat currently has over 200 million active users. Another platform of note is LinkdIn with active users that are slightly less than 100 million. This platform can be confused for an online job market but marketers for both business to business and business to consumer clients have taken advantage of advertising services offered by this platform. The other advantage with LinkdIn is that it groups professionals and most of your followers seek serious engagement. Leads in this environment are most likely to have a better strike rate.

What has been your experience in choosing the best forum for your business? If you are still not sure which forum to have a presence in, contact us and we will gladly assist.

Aim for Organic Search Engine Optimization and Organic Reach for Social Media Marketing

Digital marketing has proven not only to be the game changer in strengthening brands and reaching potential markets; but as technology keeps developing - new innovations are positioning digital marketing as the best game in town. Two pillars that support a Digital Marketing strategy are - an individual presence in the World Wide Web through a website and Social Media. A website allows you to showcase your products, internal processes, run campaigns and social proofing through testimonials.  You could also offer online sales. Social Media allows you to do the same but the major difference is that all your activities are happening on a rented space. How you link and communicate with your customers is dictated by the owners of the Social Media networks and some of their conditions might be restrictive and frustrate your efforts. Both strategies need a robust plan to drive traffic, identify leads and sales conversion. For our website we need a strategy for Search Engine Optimization, which helps search engines recognize our website and position it ahead of competitors. For our Social Media we our posts have to reach our target audience. 

A lot has been said about search engine optimization, a phenomenon that has actually become a profession for some. When we search for anything on the web, we use search engines and the big players are Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engines use Web Crawlers to read web pages and create entries for search engine index. Our websites need to have proper web addresses or URL, pages have to be titled properly, the structure of our site must allow easy navigation. Where we have used images, they must give them titles using keywords. Our sight should have excellent content and we have to use keywords repeatedly. A few links pointing to our website are cardinal as part of our optimization strategy. As our content is discovered and becomes popular, others will link to our website, this is called backlinking. However linking has been wrongly ascribed to as the most important part of Search Engine Optimization, leading to link spamming (Artificial SEO). Search engines will penalize for links that are deemed spam-my. Ad words can also be misrepresented as a short cut to optimizing. Having a well structured website with excellent content, and tactical use of keywords is the best way to optimize your for search engines. This is optimizing your site organically. Another great way of promoting your website is announcing changes and new developments through blogging and posts in Social Media networks, and direct them to your website through landing pages. 

The advantage with Social Media networks is that all engagement has an exponential or multiplier effect. If we engage with our target audience, those that they are are connected with will be able to see our engagement, making us reach potential customers that we were not initially connected to. Our target audience could be current clients, potential clients, past clients or even those who my never use our products/services but have an interest or are somehow affected by what we are offering. Through Social Media we are able to run various types of campaigns and lead our prospects to our website where we offer a complete online service.With so many Social Media networks, a mere presence in one of them will not assure success. It is critical to choose an appropriate network that will make us meet our objectives and satisfy our customers' needs. We need to have followers who will view our posts and engage with us. Many have been misled into believing that if they buy followers it will lead to the success of their Social Media Marketing efforts. Nothing can be further from the truth. Followers that we gain organically naturally become our community of advocates. Our posts should propel them to engage and our interactions will expose us to those that follow them. Success of our marketing efforts is depended on the quality of those following us, and it gets contentiously multiplied if they also have organic followers.

There has been a misconception that Social Media activities directly affect Search Engine Optimization. This is not quite true. Engagement in Social Media is regarded as nonfollow links. This actually protects us as some comments might direct search engines to places that do not reflect our beliefs and some could even harm our reputation. Our conclusion therefore is that just like Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing will only succeed through organic reach. Both strategies need excellent content that addresses the needs of our customers. Do we know what information to we should share in order to attract followers? Is our website organically optimized for search engines? This is what we do, get in touch and we will gladly assist you.