Social Media Use by Companies
MarketingSherpa is a great resource for information and weekly charts on several marketing topics. I particularly like when the topic is about social media or search engine optimization (SEO). This week’s chart summarizes how companies use social media as part of their marketing program. VERY interesting, but I have a slightly different view about marketing and communication in terms of priorities for companies.
Marketing vs. Communication
Most companies don’t differentiate marketing from communication. Corporate messaging, public relations, marketing, advertising, etc. all fall under the directive of ‘communication’ from a company strategy. Interaction with leads, prospects and customers is more sales, not necessarily communication – but it should be. Social media and the use of social networks enable direct and ‘instant’ communication to all groups and provide a forum (in the chosen medium of the lead, prospect or customer) for the company or stakeholder to interact. In other words, it is pretty easy for a customer and a marketer to interact quickly on Facebook.
Why then isn’t this ‘social media’ thing then always corporate communication? It absolutely should be! Companies need to build a strategy surrounding their communication efforts that include goals, tactics and key performance indicators for a successful communication strategy.
Corporate Communication Strategy (i.e. the chart)
The MarketingSherpa chart demonstrates an online social media strategy and the amount of time/effort spent on each area. Social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, are the top item, Micro-blogs (like Twitter) second and Multimedia (YouTube and Flickr) third…tactics used MOST by companies, not the effectiveness of each, nor the capability impact the others.
When I do a ‘non-scientific’ evaluation of our clients from a traffic-generation, content syndication, reputation management and search engine optimization standpoint, the most effective item on this chart is “blogging on company managed blogs”. Even when not looking at the fact that the blog can feed social networking sites, micro-blogs and email newsletters…can be the repository for online press releases and news stories…and can be the place you send traffic when you ‘tease’ your content on other industry blogs and blogger/wordpress…even when you take ALL these time management and integration components out of your blog, when build right, it still is a top 5 referring site to your main website and appears one the first page of Google and the other search engines for your targeted words (sometimes higher than your website.)
mRELEVANCE builds a LOT of effective blogs. We moderate many of them monthly for our clients to maintain top placements on search engines and track the traffic and effectiveness. If you want to increase your qualified traffic by 50-200% on a monthly basis, contact mRELEVANCE to see how.
