At risk of sounding like I fabricated it just to introduce this blog, I was sent a simple request for quote recently, with the requirements pretty much summed up in the opening:
“I am a classical guitarist. I was wondering whether you might be able to provide me with a quote for the development of two websites: one for me as a solo guitarist and one for a duo.”
It got me thinking about the amount of website content out there that might be better positioned within the warm embrace of various social media platforms rather than just floating around in the ether, all out of context. And I realised that this is particularly relevant when someone has more than one set of information and more than one desired audience. In the old days, this would equate to more than one website but recently, the diversity of social media spaces has opened up the opportunity to replace static web sites with ‘online profiles’. Instead of peddling your product on site A and pontificating about industry developments on site B you can share everything you need to say online across some diverse social media platforms: your facebook account, twitter and LinkedIn profiles etc, and then draw it all in under the one umbrella – an online profile home base.
Your classic website tends to have a singular focus but often what that website represents is one element of something bigger, you! For example, my business has a site at www.links.com.au which is important, but my profile, and that of the work I do, extends beyond that and is better represented through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn respectively. I realised that I needed somewhere online that captured everything in a series of branches extending from the source. The extensions make plenty of online noise on their own but seen in the context of each other they truly resonate.
So, back to the guitarist. As an experiment, I suggested he set up a flickr account to post captioned images of performances and then setup a twitter account and begin to update this with his ‘stream’ of influence in his field. He could also set up separate Facebook pages for himself as a solo performer and for the duo: at risk of doing myself out of work Facebook has a, free, online page builder that’s not half bad if your requirements are pretty simple. He could then set up a LinkedIn account to provide an online CV and yet another method to grow his connections. Where he might go beyond that is to develop a wordpress blog, and this could also serve as a formal website. Once all these branches are covered he could then connect them with a simple social media page, or ‘home base’, provided by www.flavors.me, which for $20 per year he can link to a specific domain.
You can see how I’ve done all this for myself at www.stevendecosta.com.au. My blog is at www.starlen.com.au, twitter is at www.twitter.com/starl3n, LinkedIn is at au.linkedin.com/in/stevendecosta and the complete profile adds authenticity to the work I run through www.links.com.au.
All in all what you end up with is an absorbing profile for connecting with your audience in a myriad of ways, not a static and charmless information site.
As the owner of a Digital agency, I don’t come from a purely marketing background which means I only speak conversational ‘Marketese’ at best. I’m also afflicted with my own self imposed honesty and integrity. So when a client asks me, “Is there really anything my business can gain from social media” I know they’re expecting more than a “why, yes, if you take a widescreen strategic approach and commit to a number of channels over a long period of time” type response.
There’s so much talk about social media that there’s now just as much talk about there being so much talk. Yet there still doesn’t seem to be much talk at all about practical means of measuring how a social media presence might be affecting your bottom line. You’d be hard pressed to find a ‘Digital Strategist’, or the like, who would actually say “no, I don’t think a Twitter profile is really right for you and your business at this time”.
Then there’s the somewhat inconvenient fact that all social media is free which makes it even harder to choose because now you can’t site your financial shortcomings as an excuse to not join the revolution. Obviously you still have to gauge where’s best to put your resources in terms of time and effort, so here are some actual ways to a) figure out if a social media platform is worth exploring, and b) monitor how well it’s working for you.
Facebook Fan Pages
Who should use it? At risk of contradicting my introduction – everyone. Facebook is a good starting point for the social media newbie. The thing about Facebook is that, with over 5 million Australian users, spread pretty predictably over a broad age range, it enjoys more appeal than some of the new kids on the block. Everyone’s heard of it and its existence actually makes sense to just about everyone without needing to be explained or justified. It’s also easy to build a targeted page, evidenced by the fact that there are over 20 different Facebook groups whose sole purpose is to complain about people flying Australian flags post Australia Day. Facebook business pages are also highly customisable and make it easy to build in a lot of information about your business - which Twitter is not quite so good at (more on that later).
Is it working? Facebook encourages business participation and as such, provides genuine tools for tracking the success of your page. With the ‘Insights’ tool you can see how many comments Fans make on your posts and track how many Facebook users start and stop viewing your posts in News Feed. More than this, the Insights portal focuses on the quality of content in the stream and presents all of this lovely information in pretty graphs: everybody loves graphs! To access this information all you have to do is click on the ‘View Insights’ link beneath your profile picture. If you’re redirecting Facebook users to your website you can also track these redirects from your own site.
Twitter
Who should use it? Anyone with the time/resources to engage, often. Twitter is an ‘all or nothing’ social media tool. What I mean by that clever phrase is you can’t just open up a Twitter profile and let it sit there waiting for the followers to stream in and do all that stuff they automatically do once they find you, like visit your website. You have to engage with it on an ongoing basis, i.e. tweet regularly, re-tweet, and direct-message followers. When you’re getting started you also have to spend a bit of time getting a following together. Which may or may not involve “negotiating” your way around Twitter’s ‘rules’ in that regard. So you do need to recognise the ‘time sink trade off’ here. Having said that if you have the time/resources to provide honest, open and interesting tweets you will start to see your following grow and with it genuine business interest. If you want to determine whether you bother with Twitter based on user and demographic data, you should seek out a proven market researcher such as www.nielsen.com. I could include some stats here but it’s just growing so fast in every sector that that’s really all you need to know.
Is it working? Measuring your success on Twitter is much easier than you think. In fact, flying in the face of Twitter’s own apparent rejection of all things commerce, there are a bunch of ways to do this. The most obvious first thing you can do is put tracking codes on the URL’s you use on Twitter. You should also use a better URL shortener than the one Twitter offers. Go for one like http://bit.ly/ that allows you to monitor clicks and who is tweeting about the URL link. There are also re-tweet monitoring tools like the imaginatively titled http://www.retweetrank.com/ . And there are tools to monitor how many times your Twitter name or product is mentioned and to measure the number of people following and un-following you per day. In fact I should probably confess that my earlier, somewhat negative, references to Twitter in this article were actually just tricks to appease the naysayers amongst you and keep you reading. The truth is, Twitter rocks!
You Tube
Who should use it? Anyone with a film worth showing. Even if you only have one short flick to upload and you don’t look like making anymore soon, You Tube is just too big a search engine to ignore (let’s not forget it’s owned by Google). If you want a YouTube profile that includes your own branding, some corporate info, web links and links to Twitter and Facebook et al, you can even design your own Channel page and draw in relevant videos from across You Tube to prop up your own stuff.
Another big selling point for You Tube is that not only is it free, it can actually save you money. Posting your video on You Tube as opposed to your own site can mean you don’t have to engage programmers to create media player functionality in your website. Alternatively your masterpiece can appear on your own website as it appears on You Tube. As is the nature of social networking, You Tube also enables people to share your epic five minute cinematic tour de force with colleagues and friends and nothing says ‘these guys are cool’ better than somebody else’s voice. One more selling point for You Tube is it needn’t be as much of a time sink as some other platforms because it relies more on the video’s than on discussion. Finally, detractors can say what they like about Facebook being the domain of phony friendships, or Twitter being just plain ridiculous, but nobody is disputing that You Tube is way cool!
Is it working? Video content is a proven marketing device. Users are lazy and tend to gravitate towards the quickest and most succinct way to find information. If you can give them a quality package that combines visual images, the spoken word, music and visual text, so all they have to do is sit back and absorb, you know you’re on a winner even before you start measures like tracking the number of people who have viewed your videos over time (which You Tube enables you to do). If you’ve created a channel you can also monitor channel subscriptions and, as with most social media, you can also track visits to the URLs you include on your You Tube profile.
MySpace
I’m not even going to launch into a discussion about MySpace because all signs point to it starting to lose relevance. Feel free to dispute that but I’m basing it, in part, on the fact that from June 08 to June 09 MySpace’s total unique visitors for Australia only grew by 5%. Sure, that’s still growth but it just doesn’t measure up to the 95% for Facebook and the whopping 6,000% for Twitter. It offers a platform that doesn’t do anything Facebook can’t do (with the possible exception of some music stuff) but frankly it’s just plain, well, daggy. The writing is on the wall, quite literally. Google ‘MySpace is dead’ and you’ll probably find as many genuine links as you would for “Twitter is taking over the world’.
There are also a number of other burgeoning social media platforms with varying degrees of relevance but Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain the leaders with the broadest appeal and significant market share. What I am sorry I haven’t had the opportunity to get to is tracking the effectiveness of web users accessing your social media pages on their mobile phones. Maybe in my next blog I’ll talk more about how well social media ties in with consumer demand for mobile accessibility or, maybe, I’ll just say some more damming things about MySpace, who can say?!
