Social Media: Free is Bad for Business

Inside Indiana Business just published an excellent and straight forward article by Amy Zucker called “Social Media is Part of the Marketing Mix“. Amy is President and Founder, Synergy Marketing Group, Inc., an Indiana company. Amy eloquently and succinctly points out the value of using social media for business and also suggests some important strategies that I wholeheartedly agree with.

The part of Amy’s presentation that jumped out at me immediately is her bullet point #1 that encourages a strategic approach to social media rather than a casual one. Unfortunately, social media is very easy to use casually and in the long run, I believe that casual users will find less value in social media than those who plan and strategize their efforts.

21 Means 21, Even Online

As alcohol distributors and retailers, the various states make it our responsibility to make certain that we are not serving or advertising our products to minors. Social media can make it easier for minors to get access to us and us to them, so it is imperative in the short term that we be sure that we are doing our best to target only those aged 21 or older with our social media efforts. If we don’t take care to do that now, we may find ourselves on the outside looking in on the electronic future that our consumers will be living in.

What can you do to to vet or qualify your fans and followers to make sure they meet those requirements?

Facebook is pretty simple. For starters, you’re using a Facebook Page for your business and not a personal profile, correct? If you are not using a Facebook Page you’re already making a mistake that needs to be rectified. Beyond that, Facebook collects a lot of information about its members, including their age, so Facebook knows how old your potential page fans are.

All you need to do is to edit your page settings to make your page visible to only people over the legal drinking age. Facebook makes that easy. Go to Page Edit, then Settings and change your Age Restrictions to “Alcohol-Related”. Facebook will then restrict access to your page and limit access only to people who claim to be of legal drinking age in their country of residence. For the United States, that age is 21.

Embrace Criticism!

Your worst fear is realized: social media (Facebook, Twitter or your blog) has opened the door for someone to be critical of you or your company. If it hasn’t already happened, it will. Probably sooner rather than later. But acting professionally and promptly can turn a disaster into the best positive customer service experience your company can have.

Here’s an example. Nestle has a Facebook page. Nestle is also known to use palm oil in their products. Harvesting palm oil requires cutting down a lot of trees, many of them located in the rainforests that provide us with oxygen and help with climate control. So the Nestle Facebook page became the target of some criticism for this practice. In the end, Nestle made a bad situation worse by responding poorly to the criticism.

Content is King!

Content is king. I hear that a lot and I believe it. What does it mean to you? It means that you should post content relevant to your story and message and leave the rest of the stuff you see endless streams of on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to someone else.

Here are some observations on how I would view good content at several social media touchpoints including Twitter, Facebook and a blog.

TWITTER -

You’ve got 140 characters, max, to make a point. So keep it simple. In fact, try to limit yourself to 120 characters, making it easy for people to re-tweet you and perhaps add a word or two of their own in the process.

Here’s one content related guideline – tweet as often as you like, but make the tweets relevant and engaging. If the tweet isn’t relevant or engaging, don’t send it. If you have 10 important messages a day, send them all. You can even send very important ones more than once, but stagger the days and times of day that it goes out.

Twitter Tip: Creating a Custom Background

Nothing looks more professional on your Twitter page than an attractive, custom designed background that provides additional information about you or your business. And while many graphic artists, web designers and social media consultants will be happy to make one for you, it is not all that hard to make one yourself. Here are some of my insights into that process.

First,if you do not have Adobe Photoshop or something similar with which to design your custom background, don’t worry. There are free online services that will help you to create your background. One of the most popular of those services is TwitBack. TwitBack is free, easy to use and will allow you to create a pretty good looking custom image.

Monarch Boot Camp: Kyle Lacy’s Slides from March 8th

For those of you who missed Kyle Lacy’s presentation on March 8 at Monarch Beverage Company, here are his slides from that presentation titled “Monarch Boot Camp.”

Cheers!

Facebook Images Tip plus, Twitter is NOT Dead

First, a Facebook Profile and Fan Page tip that is not often used. Do you know that you can design a 200 wide by 600 pixel tall image for your Facebook profile or fan page? It makes a lot of sense to do so if you want to utilize the most valuable real estate on your page to tell more of your story very quickly. See the image to the right for an example of what I mean and let me know if I can help you design an image for your page.

Second, I just happened across an article titled “Is the Twitter Era Finally Coming to and End?” A pretty provocative title, to be sure, and one title of many similar titles that leads many people to assume that Twitter is dying, wilting or otherwise losing ground. But rest assured that the title is crafted to be provocative based on the overwhelming success that Twitter continues to have.