Social Equity Archives

Social Equity: Thought Leadership on Social Media

August 16, 2013/by Corey Padveen

What is the value added to your business from thought leadership on social media?

Earlier this week, Carl Icahn tweeted to the world that he saw Apple as being undervalued. A few hours later, Apple’s stock price shot up past $500.00 for the first time since January of this year. The perception of industry and thought leadership on social media can add value to your business in a very big way.

Not every tweet is going to result in a $20 billion increase in a company’s value. That said, your company’s value stands to benefit considerably in terms of Social Equity from increased thought leadership on social media.

Increased Virality

We all want our content to go viral. One of the goals of sharing content to our social networks is to reach as wide an audience as possible and increase the exposure and market share of our business.

When your audience perceives you or your brand as an industry or thought leader, the chances of that happening are far greater. People want to share relevant content to their networks from industry heads.

SEO Benefits

One of the most powerful ways to increase your search rankings is still through link-building strategies. Granted, those have begun to change with the increased importance of social media in search.

As a thought leader, your content will be shared, linked and promoted far more than the average individual’s. There are several benefits to your search optimization that might have taken much longer and cost you far more had you not been an industry leader on social media.

Create Brand Advocates

We often return to this point. The key to a company’s long-term success is the loyalty of your customer base and the advocacy of said customers for your product. This increases market exposure and ultimately grows your clientele.

As a thought leader, your brand’s loyalists will increase in number. People will want to hear what you have to say and encourage others to listen to your words as well. This relates closely to the virality mentioned above, and is an offshoot of that point.

People ultimately want to share relevant content wherever they can find it, and when they find a source that is full of knowledge, insights and expertise, it is that much more likely that they will enthusiastically share that content.

Becoming an industry thought leader does not happen overnight. It is going to take a lot of work to reach that point. It will also mean positioning your brand in a unique way, and offering concepts and expertise that are found nowhere else in your industry. Those are quite a few demanding criteria. The results, however, can mean great things for your brand.

Who do you consider to be a thought leader in your industry? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Crisis Management on Social Media

August 9, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Crisis management on social media can help prevent devastating consequences to your brand.

Not everyone engages in crisis management on social media. Many brands choose to remain silent until an event has passed, and prefer to deal with it in a more conventional manner (e.g. press conferences).

While it may be a little nerve-racking to deal with a crisis in media as public, active and real-time as social networks, it can be a very valuable feature that should not be ignored.

Get a Handle on the Situation

The ability to monitor conversations on social media about your brand means that when a crisis does break, you will be able to know about it at the same time as everyone else. After all, social media is one of the first avenues people are using to spread the word nowadays.

Waiting until after the issue has evolved beyond your control can be far more detrimental than engaging at the outset of a crisis. Thus, you have a much better chance of quelling issues by taking control of it with an active, live audience.

Show People You Care

It might be for legal or PR reasons that you are not engaging with an angered audience on social media. But whatever it is, your brand stands to sustain far more damage when it does not engage.

People tend to think that when they are ignored by a brand on social media – particularly when they are speaking specifically to that brand’s social personality – it is because that brand does not care about the small, singular customer. That is not only an insult to the customer, but a bad representation of your brand to the customer base as a whole.

It is important to plan for crises on social media in order to know how to engage your audience when one does come up. (No brand is immune to these sorts of issues!) In this way, if a crisis should arise, you can have a legal department-approved approach to handling the issues.

This will show your audience that you care and will go a long way with them.

Social Equity of Crisis Management on Social Media

So where is there value added to your business? The Social Equity derived is both in the form of long-term value to your company and in terms of what your brand stands to lose without such a plan.

In the long run, your brand will have a carefully laid out strategy that can be applied to prevent issues from shooting beyond your control. With regards to what stands to be lost without such a strategy, think of crises you have witnessed in the past where brands did nothing to engage their audience.

In a recent case study about Nutella, we pointed out that the backlash which resulted from doing nothing to handle a crisis that broke out on social media meant some significant repercussions for the brand. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.

What other incidents can you think of where crisis management on social media has helped (or could have helped) a brand? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Real-Time Marketing

August 2, 2013/by Corey Padveen

What makes real-time marketing such a valuable asset to business?

Real-time marketing is a phenomenal tool and one that is severely under-utilized in business. According to David Meerman Scott, real-time marketing is only practiced by 28% of Fortune 100 companies, yet these companies saw significant growth in their stock prices over a designated period of time while other that do not engage in the practice saw a 2% drop.

So how exactly does real-time marketing generate Social Equity for your business?

Increased Lead-to-Buyer Efficiency

Imagine the ability to engage with a lead the moment they express an interest in a product or service you offer. Then imagine the value of reaching out to that user before any of your competitors in the hopes of beginning the nurturing process, leading to a conversion.

That is real-time marketing.

By monitoring social media effectively, you can find conversations as they are taking place and engage with users on different platforms in real time. Thus, as the intent to buy is made clear, there is little time lost in nurturing the prospective client. This helps to make the conversion process more efficient and much faster.

Increased Market Share and Presence

As with the point above, the ability to actively participate in conversations surrounding your industry as they are taking place opens an entirely new opportunity to increase your brand’s presence and share in the market.

If, as users of social networks are discussing industry keywords, you (appropriately) participate in conversations and make them aware of your brand, you gain a significant competitive advantage over other industry brands.

Now, it is important to ensure that you are engaging properly, and not deterring potential clients from your brand. However, if done the right way, the results can be your brand coming to mind before any other when buyers are faced with a decision.

Increased Brand Loyalty

People prefer a humanized brand. The big corporate image simply does not work for people. They want to know that the company with which they have decided to do business will care about their needs, help them in any way they can and present themselves as more than a logo or a product.

Real-time marketing offers potential clients that kind of security. By responding to comments, questions and concerns in real time, or engaging in conversations around your industry across the social web, you can reassure prospective clients that your brand will out-serve any of your competitors.

Real-time marketing can have tremendous benefits to your business. Though the advantages are clear, few brands are properly participating in the practice. Be among the first in your industry, and see your success levels increase dramatically!

Is your brand engaging in real-time marketing practices? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Media Monitoring

July 26, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How can social media monitoring generate Social Equity for your business?

Keeping an eye open for brand, competitor and industry news mentions is certainly a helpful practice, but you might be surprised to find out that social media monitoring also generates significant Social Equity for your business!

The ability to track news and stories as they are evolving opens up the opportunity to share content when it is at its most relevant to an engaged audience. This phenomenon also lends its hand to Social Care, the Social Equity of which was discussed here, and provides a first mover advantage, which, as we all know, can be highly beneficial to business.

Let’s take a look at how value is added to your business from social media monitoring.

Engagement

By monitoring your brand, competitors and the industry as a whole, you have the ability to pick up on conversations that you may not have even known were taking place.

Imagine monitoring your competition and finding that a significant proportion of the conversation is negative. By engaging with these users in real-time you have an ability to convert leads that may not have even known they were leads yet.

With regards to Social Care, social media monitoring allows you to monitor your brand and prevent issues from spiralling out of control. By engaging with users speaking negatively about your brand and addressing their issues, you prevent said issues from escalating beyond your control.

First Mover Advantage

In the field of Economics, the ability to capitalize on a market before anyone else has is among the greatest advantages. Social media monitoring provides this kind of value.

The ability to watch industry conversations and analyze trends gives rise to opportunities never before made available in business. Tailoring your strategies and marketing efforts to the observed discussions allows your brand to preempt major (or even minor) changes in preferences as opposed to making said changes in a reactionary way. The value this can have both in the short and long run is virtually unsurpassed.

Social media monitoring can be an exceptionally powerful activity, yet so few brands are properly taking advantage of it.

Are you monitoring your brand, competition and industry conversations on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Sharing with Email

July 19, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Have you ever received an email and found yourself clicking the ‘Like’ or tweet buttons? There is big value in social sharing with email.

By allowing social sharing on your email content, you are effectively opening up your content to an entirely untapped market. The same way you aim to expand the reach of your content through Facebook shares and retweets on Twitter, you want your email content to have the same opportunities.

There are two main characteristics about enabling social sharing on emails that increase the value of your business.

Rapidly Increase Brand Awareness

Slowly, we are reaching a point where sharing content on social media is becoming second nature to people. Unlike the days of the rolodex, your contacts are a click away, and those clicks happen more often than not.

By allowing people to share your email content on social media, awareness of your brand to new markets and potential clients increases dramatically. The byproduct of such reach is growth of your immediate set of contacts.

There is a certain snowball effect that arises from social sharing. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to start building a quality following on social media (whether it is likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter, subscribers on YouTube, or any other social network) but after time, your network starts to increase at a faster rate and in much greater numbers? This is due to that viral effect we all strive to achieve.

Content alone is not the only thing that can go viral. Your brand can reach those same levels of virality and a large part of that is through social sharing with email. A viral brand is a valuable brand.

Build Your Network of Leads

So what is the result of this increased virality? As people become more familiar with your brand and begin following you more closely (i.e. subscribing to the newsletter that was originally shared) your social rolodex increases. Each new member in said rolodex is a potential client. (Whether or not that is true, the goal to good business is treating them that way.)

If we have learned anything from public valuations of social networks like Facebook, the value of a large database can be greater than any physical property you might have. Big database means big value.

So the two takeaways here are as follows: a viral brand is a valuable brand, and big database means big value. All of this starts with social sharing on your emails, so don’t miss out on the potential value it adds!

Do you enable sharing icons on your emails? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Guest Blogging

July 12, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How can guest blogging add value to your business?

Guest blogging is becoming more common practice in the world of online content development, and for good reason. Guest blogging offers certain benefits to your business that few other practices do, and those benefits translate into significant value added in terms of Social Equity. But before we dive into the great value that guest blogging brings to your business, we should probably understand what guest blogging is.

As a site or blog owner, you have the burden of constantly populating your site with new, engaging content that readers (and search engines) want to see. This may sound easy enough, but managing both your blog and your business can sometimes become overwhelming, and while a blog is a tremendous business tool, it sometimes unintentionally falls by the wayside.

Guest blogging offers business and blog owners an opportunity to invite outside writers from within their industry to post relevant content to their website. There is a reciprocal benefit in that guest bloggers can build up their portfolio and increase links back to their own sites while blog owners can have fresh, insightful content loaded to their blog while having third parties promote their website (and, essentially, their business).

So where is the value added from guest blogging to your business?

Link-Building

Traditional link-building is time consuming and can be quite tedious. There are companies that have been built entirely on offering this service to other businesses that simply do not have the time to do it themselves.

Guest blogging is a great way to go about link-building as your guest bloggers are happy to link to your content on social networks as well as their own websites. This saves time and money while providing you with a great service to promote your company.

Authority Building

It takes a very good blog to attract high quality guest bloggers. And while not every blog is willing to accept outside bloggers, those that are want only the best.

If your business blog has the clout to attract industry and thought leaders to share their insights, it bodes well for your blog and your business. Essentially, a guest post, though in a way self-serving, is an endorsement by that blogger for your company. That builds your business’s authority and, subsequently, your Social Equity.

New Brand Advocates

When a blogger shares content to your website, he or she is not going to keep it a secret. They, in all likelihood, will be going out there and promoting it as if the site was their own!

Garnering brand advocates is among the most difficult things to do in marketing, but when you do, you have struck gold. Guest blogging creates pseudo brand advocates as the aftermath of their post being published is, usually, heavy promotion of your site by third parties.

Guest blogging is an excellent tool and can add significant value to your business. To inquire about guest blogging for t2Social, click here.

Does your blog offer guest blogging? Have you every been a guest blogger? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Bookmarking Your Business

July 5, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How does social bookmarking your business on sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon generate Social Equity for your brand?

There is virtually no shortage of benefits when it comes to social bookmarking your business. In addition to building links, increasing your readership and targeting niche audiences, it is a relatively simple process that adds significant value to your business.

There are two areas in which social bookmarking generates Social Equity: SEO and visibility.

Social Bookmarking and SEO

It wasn’t long after social bookmarking sites like Reddit came about that SEO experts began to notice that links shared to them were treated as backlinks by search engines. While there is much that new techniques on social media have to offer with regards to SEO, backlinks are still an excellent means of increasing your SERPs.

The ability to create links to each piece of content on your website is a valuable tool, and these links remain in search engines and on social bookmarking sites indefinitely. Staying power and the ability for users to find your business through search on both engines like Google and bookmarking networks like StumbleUpon mean real value added in terms of findability and reach.

Social Bookmarking and Visibility

In keeping with the theme of findability, one can also look at the value added from social bookmarking sites as increasing your brand’s visibility inexpensively, quickly and to a very targeted market.

Similar results might require significant SEO efforts. The ability to categorize your content, share it to engaged audiences and provide pseudo titles and meta descriptions on these networks is a tremendous asset. Furthermore, results arise much quicker and, once again, generate a certain staying power for your brand online.

By showcasing your content to niche audiences, you gain a certain attribute that most other social networks do not afford: longevity. On networks like Facebook, where a post has a shelf life of roughly a few hours, or Twitter, where a tweet’s shelf life can be as short as a few minutes, the ability to maintain one’s presence for an extended period of time is virtually invaluable.

Over time, with ongoing attention paid to such a practice, a ripple effect will take place and your content will make its way across the internet, all leading back to your landing page, blog or website. It is hard to imagine too many other techniques as simple as social bookmarking that add that kind of value to a brand.

Do you share your content on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Reputation Management on Social Media

June 28, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Reputation management on social media is becoming more and more important, and engaging in the activity properly can add significant Social Equity to your brand.

Reputation management on social media can take many forms. There is not one single network where a brand can monitor and manage its reputation; it is an ongoing process that needs to be heavily intwined with a social media strategy. If, however, it is done properly, then the value of that brand stands to increase significantly.

There are two main areas where Social Equity is generated from reputation management on social media: effective reputation management creates brand loyalty and crises are handled effectively and in some cases staved off.

Though reputation management on social media also benefits brands in a number of other ways, these two aspects add the most value to a brand in both the short and long terms; brand loyalty and crisis management.

Brand Loyalty

Brands survive because of consumer loyalty. Brand evangelists and loyalists are very difficult to cultivate, but when your brand finds them, you have struck oil.

The benefit of brand loyalists is that they will advocate for your company in good times and in bad, but these gems only come about when you are treating your customers properly. And that means before, during and after the purchase has been made.

Properly managing your reputation online through engagement makes it easier to both acquire new brand loyalists and keep them happy over the course of their involvement with your company. Think about it: people might be talking about your company (in either good or bad lights) and if you are not monitoring your online reputation, you will never know about it.

Finding and engaging with your brand loyalists also relates closely to crisis management on social media.

Manage a Crisis

In the world of social media, a second can change the perception of your brand indefinitely. Now imagine if you let that second turn into minutes, then hours, then weeks. Eventually, your brand is known for nothing other than that second, and your reputation is damaged irreparably.

Properly managing your reputation means addressing these issues in real time with an active audience on social media. Before issues spiral out of control, you can get a handle on a situation and potentially resolve a crisis before it is out of your hands.

Crisis management on social media by proper reputation management can do wonders for building Social Equity for your business. The ability to prevent disasters before they happen means maintaining your brand’s sterling reputation, and allows the value of your brand to remain undamaged.

Reputation management is an important area for brands to focus on when it comes to social media. Not only does it help brands better understand their consumers, flaws and catch on to issues, but it also adds a considerable degree of value both in the short- and long-run.

Do you manage your reputation on social networks? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Targeted Campaigns on Social Media

June 21, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Targeted campaigns on social media provide certain unique benefits that can add significant value to your business.

There was a time when a few carefully placed television ads would reach 80% of your targeted audience. Those days, however, are long gone, and to reach those same numbers today you would, in most cases, need to spend far more than your budget.

Targeted campaigns on social media, however, provide similar capabilities at a fraction of the cost, and generate a significant degree of Social Equity.

Targeted campaigns generate Social Equity for your business in two distinct ways. First, while your reach may not be extremely broad, it is far more specific than with conventional campaigns and therefore generates higher conversion rates. Second, targeted campaigns on social media are far more cost effective than other types of marketing and advertising that generate similar results – and those are few and far between.

Value Added

As noted above, the ability to target a very specific audience leads to higher conversion rates. When you are able to tailor an ad specifically for the audience that it is reaching, you can expect that the engagement levels will be significantly higher than a case where a generic ad is shared to a mass audience.

Of course, marketers and advertisers try to do this on other media as well. Using the available data, campaigns are launched to specific audiences wherever possible. However, on social media the ability to narrow down your targeted audience is far easier and the results of a well-executed campaign will be much higher.

One example of this is a social media case study we looked at recently about Vestas, a wind energy provider. Vestas put together a very targeted campaign and sent it to 50 companies. For each executive or employee that came into contact with the campaign, Vestas had created a version of the campaign targeted specifically towards that company. The results were high engagement, significant conversion and the campaign was an overall success.

Costs Saved

The second area in which Social Equity is derived from targeted campaigns is in the costs that are saved from engaging in this type of campaign on social networks.

As noted at the beginning of this article, reaching 80% of your desired audience was easy at the dawn of television, but today the cost is far too prohibitive. On social media, however, you can still reach your targeted audience at a fraction of the cost.

The ability to launch targeted campaigns geared towards engaging your desired audience for a relatively low cost (compared to reaching the same audience with other media) is a big value. Increasing your exposure and growing your business at rates comparable to those that involve significant ad spending will benefit your business significantly in the long-run.

Often, Social Equity is as much about how much you are saving as it is about how much you are making.

Have you executed any targeted campaigns on social media? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Care

June 14, 2013/by Corey Padveen

The concept of Social Care – customer service through social media – is growing in popularity, and the benefits it has to your business can be significant.

Today, one-third of online adults prefer to engage with a brand on social media compared to conventional forms of customer service (i.e. phone). That is a significant number. Ignoring it can mean two things: a loss of competitive advantage in your market and an increased likelihood of finding your customers dissatisfied with your customer service.

Social Care is a tactic that has been adopted by several international brands and it is a trend that is catching on with medium and small businesses as well. In addition to offering your customers a new avenue through which to engage with your brand, it also adds value to your business.

Social Equity from Social Care

There are two principle returns from Social Care that generate Social Equity for your business. First, there is the added value for your customers’ experience with your brand that maintains satisfaction and gives you a competitive advantage over competitors that are not offering the service. Second, Social Care is far more cost-effective than conventional forms of customer service.

First, let’s look at how Social Care gives your company an edge over your competitors. As noted above, not many small or medium sized businesses are offering Social Care at the moment despite the major proportion of online adults that prefer this method of customer service. This is not to say that Social Care should replace your current customer service options; it should be added to the mix to offer both clients, prospects and leads a means of reaching out to your company at any time, from any place, without having to worry about whether or not someone will be on the other end of the line right away, or leave them waiting for what seems like an eternity.

The convenience that comes with the option of Social Care adds value to the customer experience. 39% of consumers avoid further business with a brand after a bad customer experience. You can reduce the number of these occurrences by providing alternative means of reaching out to your brand, particularly one as simple as a tweet. Clients and leads can send their message and go about their day, allowing your Social Care team to read, review and respond to these messages in an efficient and timely manner.

The second area from which Social Equity is generated is in the cost-efficiency of such a program. One representative with a sufficient amount of knowledge can handle a significant amount of social inquiries in a much timelier fashion than one that must respond to clients over the phone.

When a customer is sitting on the phone waiting for a representative, it behooves the company to have that call answered as quickly as possible. In order to do that, more representatives are required. On social, however, clients can send in their inquiry, as explained above, and a single representative can handle hundreds of issues daily (theoretically, of course). This system is both a money-saver in the short- and long-run.

Social Care is a new phenomenon, but it is one that has tremendous potential to increase the value of your business.

Does your brand engage in some form of Social Care? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!