Getting to Grips with Social Media
The digital revolution is one of the most exciting things to have happened to us as a species, dramatically changing how we lead our lives, how we communicate, how we influence change, and how we do business. I am a complete social media enthusiast, as it has really empowered us as businesses, opening up our worlds. It has dramatically changed the PR industry.
From presidents, prime ministers, to royalty they are all now on social media posting, particularly on Twitter and Instagram.
I think it is also important to remember that everyone on social media who is doing it well is actually self-taught, which means that it is easy to do, once you know how. There are so many different social media platforms and you will enjoy using some platforms more than others and once you get started it can be really fun and reap benefits.
There are so many businesses not using social media platforms and as a result are holding themselves back. These businesses and brands need to change their mind-sets and be open. I meet lots of different business leaders, business consultants, and entrepreneurs who are either talking to or advising businesses on how to strengthen their businesses plans and strategies, yet they have no visible online profile themselves. I always wonder how can they be advising businesses on the future, when they themselves are not part of it?!
They all have excuses of why they are not online—ranging from we do not understand it; it is for young people; we have no time; what difference will it make. Well, if you are not online how will your customers find you, and you can bet, while you are not online, your competitor will be.
We have evolved from ink and quill, from typewriter to now the use of e-mails, blogs, and social media posts. Whatever happens we are not going back to ink and quill, so it is important to get online. The next generations are already there and are your potential future customers, clients, and business leaders; to survive and to be relevant you need to be online and active.
To help you to change your thinking, I strongly urge you to go online and watch what I consider to be one of the best video overviews of social media trends with their data sources, which is produced annually by Socialnomics, a movement created by Erik Qualman’s number one international bestseller of the same title (https://socialnomics.net/).
Social media channels are free to use and here are some real facts to get you thinking of the value of social media for your business/organization:
There are many social media platforms and I recommend finding the ones that work for you, but at the same time suggest that you are working on what I view are the key ones; and that means being active on all of them simultaneously—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. We need to be engaged on each, as each platform attracts a different age group, which means that you are casting a much wider network to attract customers and an audience.
To get the most of your social media activity there are a few things you need to do, to ensure that you reap the maximum benefits. They are:
It is important to note that there is a certain etiquette about being online and I always describe it as being at a dinner party, where you want to be a good guest and be invited back again. Make sure you are listening, engaging with people, and not talking at people. Social media marketing is not about talking at people—it is about creating good conversations.
Always share the love online by retweeting others’ posts on Twitter, sharing content that you like and tagging others in, who you know will also enjoy the content. Paying it forward online grows your own following and helps your brand reach a bigger community and bandwidth.
As a rule of thumb—and one that works for us whatever age we might be—do not share anything that you would not want your parents to read. That way you always keep it clean.
You cannot control social media, so be brave. Being online is very serendipitous, where you can create lots of business opportunities without knowing where they may come from (see Chapter 12).
Once you start broadcasting on social media, you need to turn up every day. It is like being an actor at the theatre; you need to turn up for your show as your audience expects it. If you are unreliable, people will lose interest in you, your brand, and that affects your following.
Your collective social media following on all your channels is something called your “social media capital,” and this has a value. There have been many times when I have been speaking to the media, whether they are based in the United Kingdom, the United States, or South Africa, where I have been asked, “What is the social worth of your client.” Why? Because the media also want to attract new readers and if you can bring more people to their magazine or online platform then you will be of immediate interest.
Case Stories
A small family-run business working with people with learning difficulties was doing strong work around the world, but found they were not attracting the clients they should be and as a result their business was not thriving. Their social media activity and engagement was virtually nonexistent and acknowledged they had to turn things around; they had shifted their mind-set.
Another story that predates Instagram is about a professor at a leading global business school, who had just written his new book and wanted to raise both his book and his own profile. He created a Twitter account, started tweeting daily, tagging in relevant journalists, the media, and influencers. Within three months he had been invited to speak abroad based on the topic of his book, was interviewed twice by the BBC, and boosted book sales.
Another author, who was a business consultant, had a zero social media profile, but he got active and engaged online, tagging current clients and companies that he would like to work with, and started to win new business based on the content of his book that he was sharing, without reducing the value of the book.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Social media marketing is a fundamental part of any business. It drives sales and those businesses that focus on building their social media engagement benefit from a strong PR reach, which generates greater brand awareness, which ultimately makes it easier to attract new customers.
Businesses need to understand the success of their online activities and what is working for them and, to do this, they need to measure their social media key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking KPIs improves your online PR and marketing strategy. However, it is important to recognize that we do not all measure the same things or measure the same ways, or use the same tools or terminology. To help us all be more aligned, we need to understand exactly what we mean when we use or say certain words in measuring our activities.
So, with this in mind, I recommend the Dictionary of Public Relations Measurement and Research (Stacks and Bowen 2013), which has become one of the most popular papers the Institute for Public Relations has ever published! Visitors can download the dictionary for free (https://instituteforpr.org/dictionary-public-relations-measurement-research-third-edition/).
Otherwise, to get started, there are four core social media KPIs that I strongly suggest businesses and organizations focus on and they are:
Based on the foregoing discussion, we will look at each of several important social media platforms individually to better understand how they can be used and how they are evaluated.
Right at the start, Instagram was created as an app and has quickly become a powerful marketing tool for businesses looking to expand their presence and the visibility of their products. This is a fairly new platform, launched in October 2010, and is evolving with a greater emphasis on making money through product placement. Its latest program, called “shoppable posts,” allows businesses to add “tags” to the products in their photos with links that include a product description, price, and the ability to “shop now,” which will lead the user to their online stores. This service is simple for a business to attract actual sales from the site and 72 percent of Instagram users admit to purchasing products through the social media platform (Business Insider 2017).
You will need to approach it as a curated visual experience that showcases your brand, which needs to be both creatively presented and strategically planned if you want to build a strong relationship with your audience. You should use Instagram hashtags (e.g., #theprknowledgebook) to help place your content and products in front of the right people.
For example, if your brand’s target market is female entrepreneurs, you will want to start thinking about what kind of content resonates with this stakeholder group and you could post about women in business and entrepreneurship, or write blog posts about marketing and branding, thus empowering females in the workplace. These topics will influence what kind of hashtags you will want to use for individual post; when it comes to choosing your hashtags, it is important not to be generic. You might think using the “#entrepreneur” hashtag is a good one. But that would be mistaken, as this hashtag has nearly 40 million posts under it, which is updated every couple of seconds. This means the results are too broad, the market is saturated, and means you run the risk of your post getting lost in all that noise. Instead, find hashtags that are more streamlined and targeted to your audience, such as #womenentrepreneur, which is specific to female entrepreneurs and more likely to reach your target group of stakeholders.
To find suitable hashtags go into “Instagram’s Explore page,” and search for a hashtag that you know would work for your brand and messaging. When Instagram produces the results under that hashtag, it also gives you a scroll bar at the top of related hashtags. This is a great place to find new hashtags for your posts. Remember to check how many posts have been published under the hashtag you have chosen; if it has been used thousands of times, it could be too saturated, and your posts will probably go unseen.
When you are running a small business, time is restricted and, as you will not be able to dedicate your days to Instagram marketing, you will need to stay organized and plan ahead to have the most success. With this is in mind, I suggest posting at least four to five times a week. Look at your analytics, which will show which days and dates are popular for you to post. Decide which KPIs you will use to base your decisions regarding success or failure or improvement. By simple planning and creating an editorial calendar for your Instagram profile, you will be able to build a more balanced relationship between strategy and art into your feed.
Instagram Analytics
Instagram provides for free insights to help you learn more about your followers and the people interacting with your business on Instagram. For example, you will find insights such as gender, age range, and location. You can also see which posts and stories your audience sees and engages with the most—depending of course on which KPIs you think are most important. Insights and metrics about your account should include paid as well as placed or owned activity. KPIs such as reach, accounts reached, impressions, and impressions by day reflect both paid and organic activity.
To access this, you need to convert your profile to a business profile, where the insight can be accessed. Here you can select specific posts, stories, or promotions you would like to view data and you can also learn more about your audience.
In Instagram analysis the website Activity tab allows you to track weekly interactions, reach, and impressions. The Content tab lets you see how your posts, stories, and promotions are performing, while the Audience tab gives important insights on your stakeholder groups.
Instagram Suggestions to Follow
Following are my top three favorite influencers on Instagram who I feel I learn from, as their curation of posts is clever and because I believe we can learn from people around the world:
Facebook Business Page
A Facebook Page is another platform that allows businesses to develop their brand, grow their audience, and start conversations with customers and people interested in learning more. To create a Facebook Page, you will need to already have a personal profile, as only people with profiles on Facebook can create or have a role on Pages.
It is free to create a Page for your business, and all you need to do is follow the steps for creating a Page and decide how you would like to use your Page to interact with people and customers on Facebook. Once your Page is created, you can get access to free features, from Page Insights, publishing tools, and others that help you manage your Page.
Like Instagram, you need to create an online presence for your business, which will help build social connections with your audience and drive real business results. Again, it is about curating the tone, style, and personality of your business.
Posts with images do better on Facebook and you can showcase your brand through photos and video. Plus, putting a face to your business through a Facebook Page reminds your audience that it is run by real people and is authentic.
The platform also helps you engage in one-to-one conversations through comments and messaging.
Facebook ads can be a way to grow your brand and audience that is not expensive to use. You are in control and can choose where you place your ads, your target audience, budget, and schedule. You will have access to other Facebook advertising tools to help you understand what you are getting in return from each ad you run.
Facebook offers many tools to connect with the different communities that you care about via profile, pages, groups, and events.
Facebook Page Analytics
I suggest posting at least once to twice a week to keep your Facebook Page active. Understanding your Facebook page’s KPI metrics gives you the information you need to make sure you are putting the right content in front of the right audience. It helps you work with Facebook’s algorithm instead of just sending content into the void and hoping someone will see it.
Facebook also sends you weekly statistics to show you how your posts are doing, and you can also click into your actual Facebook Page and click “insights,” which tracks three important measurements:
Facebook Pages Suggestions to Follow
Here are my top Facebook Pages that keep me fresh and inspired:
Twitter is perhaps my favorite social media platform, because I enjoy the way it can randomly connect you to people and everything is in real time. I find it serendipitous and fun; like Instagram and Facebook, it drives engagement for your brand and is about being active. Here are some of the things you need to know to get started and to get the most out of the platform.
Twitter Insights and Analytics
Twitter’s analytics help you understand how the content you share on Twitter grows your business. Your “Account home” features high-level KPI statistics tracked from month to month and highlights your top-performing Tweets and introduces you to the influencers in your network, people that you should be following.
Twitter Suggestions to Follow
There are so many people that I could recommend to follow here on Twitter, keeping with Twitter’s randomness here are my eclectic three:
According to LinkedIn editor Daniel Roth (2018), every day, over 2 million posts, videos, and articles course through the LinkedIn feed, generating tens of thousands of comments every hour—and tens of millions more shares and likes. It is one of the best networking tools for business owners and job seekers and, by using a LinkedIn business page, you can attract top talent, position yourself as a thought-leader in your industry, and promote your products or services. One of the things to think about doing on LinkedIn is to create a company page, which will help potential customers learn about your business, brand, products, services, and job opportunities.
Company Page
Creating a LinkedIn company page is easy and similar to the Facebook Page, where you will need a personal LinkedIn account and a verified e-mail address. LinkedIn guides you through the process of setting up a company page and, if you have questions, you can always visit LinkedIn’s help page.
Once created, you can start editing your company page; LinkedIn requires that you include a company description, which should be information about your business, such as what products and services you offer, your company’s history, and its mission.
After crafting your company description, fill in other company details, such as your website, where you are headquartered, company type, company size, and your company’s specialties. Make sure you upload your company logo and cover image before hitting publish.
If you have a team, let them know the page is active so they can edit their position description and add the company page to their personal accounts.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups are great places to build an engaged community surrounding your business and to grow your online community. There are so many groups that you can join on LinkedIn that will fit your interests, from public relations to branding, to publishing, to films and media, to women in business, to blockchain, to fashion, and more! You can also join groups based on location, a good way to enter a new location that you have been thinking of by being active in that group. Or, you can also create your own group. Either way, being active in LinkedIn Groups will establish you as a thought-leader and an industry expert. It also sends more people to your company’s LinkedIn page.
However, LinkedIn Groups are not a place to share ads for your business; instead, share valuable content with people who are interested in your business and industry. It is about creating meaningful conversations. Once you have created a company page, career page, and LinkedIn Group, regularly use these assets and create content for them. Here are some tips on where to get started and how to build these pages:
LinkedIn Tracking and Analytics
The best way to offer relevant content to your audience is knowing what they want by monitoring and tracking past posts. You will determine what works and what does not. LinkedIn’s Company Page analytics allows you to evaluate KPIs such as engagement on your posts, identify trends, understand your follower demographics, and learn more about your page traffic.
LinkedIn Top Voices
LinkedIn also does something called “Top Voices,” which is a global annual list of influencers on the platform, where its editors bring their data scientists together to sort through various articles and updates that spanned over the past year.
Again, there are so many Top Voices that I could recommend, but my personal favorites are these three, mainly because I know two of them and have seen them become the superstars they are:
YouTube®
As we now know from the previous chapter, video is key, and it makes sense to be here as a business. Just like any other social network, it is free and YouTube represents a community and is specifically designed for uploading and sharing video content.
It is important to understand who the YouTube user is, as they are much younger than those on other platforms along with some clear trends. Understanding what these are can help you to create content that will appeal to your target audience:
People use it to watch videos and visual content from brands, as well as other users. It is this user-generated content that YouTube is particularly well-known for; while the average user may see it as a means of accessing entertainment and visual content, the site represents another platform for businesses to incorporate into their social media strategy. Some of the most popular categories on YouTube are:
To get started on YouTube, you are going to need a Google account, where you can either create a new, dedicated account specifically for your YouTube business channel or use an existing, personal account. Once you have created a channel for your business, you will need to brand your channel, which includes:
There are two things to be aware of when using YouTube and they are:
YouTube Analytics
In your channel homepage, there is a tab called “Views,” which takes you to the analytics, where you can see how your videos are performing based on a number of KPIs. The “overview” report in analytics will show data for the past 28 days, which can be altered to show different time periods.
YouTube® Suggestions to Follow
The Stanford Graduate Business School allows viewers to step inside the classroom via their YouTube channel and experience interviews with big influencers and business classes taught by renowned scholars (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGwuxdEeCf0TIA2RbPOj-8g).
The Google Small Business channel features advice from experts on how to get your small business noticed online and offers a variety of channels based on your area of expertise (https://youtube.com/user/GoogleBusiness/featured).
The Harvard Business Review channel gathers all online and print content into one place with topics ranging from business leadership to current news (https://youtube.com/user/HarvardBusiness/featured).
The Last Word About Social Media
It may be impossible for you to be on all the platforms, but if you can do four make it: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Remember to have fun with it and be open to connect with people, as you just do not know who people know within their own circles and feeds—remember it is all about your mind-set.
Finally, learn from the next generation, whether they are your kids, nephews, or nieces. This next generation understands better than us, of how things work and how to engage. Some of my best Instagram lessons of “how to” have come from our 12-year-old!
Podcasts
Before we leave this chapter, I want to mention podcasts, which have been proven to be extremely popular in 2018, especially with young listeners, who are more likely to use podcasts to discover news rather than listening to the radio (Podcasts Insights.com, 2019). A podcast is an audio file similar to a radio broadcast, without the commercial breaks, and is available to stream online for listeners. Once your audience members have found you based on your specific content, they can subscribe to your channel. When you upload new content, it will automatically download to their devices. They are relatively easy and inexpensive to make.
Podcasts offer opportunities for audiences to share in-depth discussions and incredible real-life stories. As a business owner, you want to build your credibility and your authority on your platform; podcasting is a great way to do this—share your knowledge and position yourself as an expert in your field. You will need to make your audience understand the amount of value that you can bring to their lives and businesses. If you deliver high quality, you are building trust, credibility, reputation, relationship, and authority.
Now is the time to build on that popularity, focusing on podcasts as a source with fresh, interesting content, where you can interview guests to strengthen your content. When you are starting a business, or even if your business is established, connecting with influencers is an asset. It is your chance to connect, exchange, share opinions, and sometimes even share some valuable information. It is a first step to various collaborations with those guests. Getting in touch with influencers can be done during live events, via e-mail, on their blogs by adding comments regularly, or via social media (see Chapter 4 on working with influencers and celebrities). These collaborations could lead to joint ventures, products creation, online summits, speaking engagements, and guest blogging.
Podcasting is a medium that can be accessed while your stakeholders are on the go—travelling to work, going to meetings, at the gym, on the school run—wherever they are listening, the experience is that it feels as though you are part of a conversation. It is intimate. Therefore, it is important to be authentic and speak with your heart, as the way you communicate with people is the way they will perceive who you are and what your brand is like.
Talking is extremely powerful and being listened to is even more powerful. As a small business, or organization or being self-employed, you can look to build awareness and engage a new audience.
Case Stories
A small, global publishing house that publishes business books creates podcasts by interviewing its different authors, who share their knowledge and wisdom for the business community.
A life coach does a monthly podcast, interviewing other therapists and coaches whether they are nutritionists, dream analysts, and well-being experts. It has positioned him as an expert in his field and grown his audience and client base.
Summary
After reading this chapter and absorbing all the facts, there is little doubt that social media is one of the most empowering mediums to have evolved for all types of businesses. The key is not to be overwhelmed and think of it as another task to do in your busy business day, but instead to approach your social media activities as part of your business strategy. Investing in your social media PR plans and measuring your KPIs means you will not only be raising the profile of your brand with your stakeholders, but you could actually be making sales.
Probably, one of the best things social media can do for a small organization or business is open up your business to a whole new world, which is not on your doorstep. In one clever social media swoop, by taking the data from your KPIs, you could be engaging with new stakeholders in Hong Kong, Dubai, Barbados, Mumbai, Ghana, and more, where the world is really your oyster. All you need is a global frame of mind, so let’s discover what this means and how to get going in the next chapter.