Do you ever wonder whether your social networking efforts are effective? Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and many other social network sites are a very low cost or no cost method to communicate with your students and build value for your organization. Here are some tips to ensure your social networking efforts contribute to successful marketing outcomes. These tips mostly focus on Facebook, but they are applicable to any social networking site you choose to utilize.
1. Dedicate the right resources to support your efforts.
Have the resources in place to keep the content fresh. Too little information will make your site stale and uninteresting and will not create the traffic you want, but too much information can lead to information overload. If the information that you are posting is of genuine interest to your students, then it is probably OK. Students are also a great source of technical expertise since they are much more in tune with social networking than staff and administrators.
2. Determine what you want to achieve through your social networking efforts.
Do you want to build your brand, build relationships or achieve commercial results? While social networking can help achieve all of the above, you should identify the outcome you seek to achieve before taking action. It's OK to work on all of the above, but be aware that focusing on one outcome may affect another. Students may not appreciate excessive commercial advertising and that could negatively affect your efforts to build your brand or relationships.
Red Bull is a good example of a site that seeks to build its brand. There is little if any information on their Facebook page about selling their product. Instead, they feature events such as Flugtag, the Soap Box Derby and other X-sports. If building relationships is your desired outcome, perform outreach efforts to sign up fans and generate two way conversations such as answering questions or offering advice. If commercial results are desired, you should highlight products and services or focus on specials to your fan base.
3. Build your fan base.
Outreach efforts are a great way to sign up fans. Have a presence at campus events such as back to school or athletic events to sign up fans. Inexpensive give-aways are a good enticement to sign up, so are contests and other activities. For example, if you have an IPad display in your computer store, encourage students to take their picture using Photo Booth and post it to your site in order to be entered in a drawing. You are appealing to their vanity while adding a new fan.
4. Drive traffic to your site.
The real power of social networking is the ability to leverage your fan base to expand coverage to others' fan base. Use links to other sites to add more content and build interest. Become a fan of other organizations' sites and ask them to become a fan of your site. Add a blog or feature other blogs on your site. Use tags to help web surfers find information on your site. Utilize mentions so that your responses or promotions appear on other Facebook walls for their friends and fans to see.
5. Add video content in addition to pictures and promotions.
Video has become the expectation and the popularity of YouTube is just one example of how powerful video has become, not to mention that third party recommendations are more powerful than tooting your own horn. A video of a faculty member explaining why new editions are not always the best value is better than your bookstore trying to make the same point to their faculty colleagues.
6. Advertise on Facebook.
Creating an ad on Facebook is as easy as going to Facebook Ads. The ads can be targeted to any audience such as people that list your university in their personal information. The ads are extremely inexpensive for the volume of posts they generate. One ad from our bookstore generated 1.1 million posts, 450 clicks on the ad, and 50 sales transactions. That does not include people who may have purchased directly from our online store or bookstore as a result of the ad.
7. Run specials exclusive to your fans.
Offering specials that are exclusive to your fan base allows you to determine if the promotion will be successful and keeps your fans interested in visiting your site. If the promotion is successful, then you might consider expanding it to your entire campus.
8. Measure your results.
If you want to determine if your efforts are successful, measure your outcomes. Positive outcomes that can be measured will help when allocating resources and determining future promotional activities. A couple of sites that measure activity on your site include Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. Google Analytics offers information about traffic on your site and Facebook Insights provides information on the effectiveness of your advertising.
9. Know what people are saying about your organization.
Yelp and ReputationDefender are a couple of sites that give you unsolicited feedback on what your customers are sayng about your organization. One visit to Yelp revealed that our campus pub was considered a very popular place, but our pizza was lousy. Based upon that feedback, we changed the recipe.
10. Develop a policy regarding social networking.
While you can't stop people including your employees from bad mouthing your organization, a written policy would go a long way to encouraging good behavior. If you treat your employees well, asking them to be your advocate should be natural conclusion. There are legal issues to consider as well. Do your managers review applicants' Facebook pages when considering a future hire? You better check with your legal department if they do.
These are just a few helpful tips for successful social networking. If you have some additional ideas about social networking, please share them.