DreamGrow Social Media

Reaching out to customers without direct branding – the Facebook way

Creating a Facebook fan page for your business or product is quite a common approach today. We create a page for product x and then go on the journey of getting as many people as possible to like our product. A good enough way to get clients, when done right – but you can push it even further.

A much less used tactic today is using the same fan pages, but two of them. By that I mean creating the first fan page for the generic field itself. So lets say that you are in the yoghurt business. What is the wider field connected to that? There are probably more than one, but the main one would be milk (I am in no way connected to the “Milk” fan page in Facebook, I’m just using it as an example). This is the first thing you should do – create a fan page for the generic field. Why? Because if people will like Momma Jane’s yoghurt better than Pappa Jay’s, they will still like dairy products. People may not be familiar to your own brand, but they may very well be fans of the overall field. This is your main advantage – with a generic page, you will now have a group of people interested in your product field. So get that generic page living, generating discussions and content.

However you should consider that Rules for Facebook Page Usernames state: Generic words such as “flowers” or “pizza” are not available as usernames.

The second step would be to create the fan page for your product (Pappa Jay’s). Use that fan page as you normally would, but now you have one more extra channel to market it in – the generic Milk page. Just keep it light – flooding the generic page with Pappa Jay’s will decrease the credibility of the Milk page to zero. You can advertise your own product in the sidebar, or sometimes give away your product as prizes. Just don’t get into the habit of doing it weekly What will you get from it? A well-segmented group of people to market your product to. If people will already like milk, they might be interested in your yoghurt brand as well. Slowly directing them towards your brand is an effective way to go.

This strategy is getting increasingly more difficult to use, at least when your’e trying to make it happen in English – most of the generic fields have already been taken in Facebook (you may reach a deal with the generic page’s owner, though). There is, however, plenty of room for this strategy among smaller languages. So go for it, just keep in mind to have a good product aswell

Link Building And Social Media

Social media is getting all the attention, but we must not forget that SEO and link building are still important. Most sites are still getting their traffic from search engines. When social networking site mature we will see more and more traffic originating from those sources, but right now you shouldn’t forget link building.

May be link building is not as cool as social media, but that is where you will get sustainable traffic. The good news is that social media will help you to build links. Here’s terrific presentation about linking and social media. From the presentation

Links are tha new currency. Social media is a linking machine.

In studies of the networks of citations between scientific papers, Derek de Solla Price showed in 1965 that the number of links to papers—i.e., the number of citations they receive—followed a Pareto distribution or power law. Recent interest in scale-free networks started in 1999 with work by Albert-László Barabási and colleagues who mapped the topology of a portion of the Web, finding that some nodes, which they called “hubs”, had many more connections than others and that the network as a whole had a power-law distribution of the number of links connecting to a node…

Coke: Fans First In Social Media (Case Study)

A really interesting presentation by Michael Donnelly laying out Coca-Cola’s sosial medai approach. Michael is Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola. The presentation was created for the iStrategy2010 conference. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelDonnelly.

Social Media New Business Formula

A formula for generating ad agency new business through social media. This presentation concentrates on ad agencies but can be use for mos t B2B marketers.

Social Media Weekend: Case Studies, E-Commerce, Social Media Budget, Strategy

7 Key Findings On The Use of Social Media And E-Commerce: New Study. Online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise. A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.

The Compete study overview: Consumers Slow to Embrace Social Media As Shopping Resource.

Where Will Social Media Budget Flow to in 2010. Where will the money go? This post explores some of the avenue where social media budget will flow to this year.

Case Study: Social Networking Does Work. M+R Strategic Services released their 2010 NonProfit Social Media Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Growth and Social Engagement Metrics for Nonprofit Organizations. The findings in the study are quite re-assuring for some of the best practices we already know.

Paul Gillin’s Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools. Most companies have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap and easy way to build their brand and bring in sales? Social media demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough.

B2B Case Study: How to Get Started in Social Media. The second in a series of “How To’s” to help you add social media to your integrated marketing communications program. Integrated Marcom Minute interviewed Katherine Watkins, Marketing Communications Manager, Eastman Chemical Company, to learn how she and her marcom team integrated social media into their marcom mix.

Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise. Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.

Introduction to Social Media

A great presentation about basics from way back but you can share it with people who are not up to speed yet. Enjoy!