Page 141 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

» Watching the macro trends of the social platform.
For example, does the platform look like it’s emerging, has it settled into a
plateau, or is it fizzling? Accordingly, you may want to devote more or fewer
dollars and effort to it.
» Determining whether the social platform is a place where your brand
will have permission to participate and one in which you will want to
participate.
Participating in some social platforms may hurt your brand. For example, if
you are a high-end, exclusive brand like Chanel, it may not be appropriate to
engage in conversations in a casual, music-oriented social environment such
as the relaunched version of MySpace.

Your customers move between platforms as time passes. As a result, be prepared
to adjust your social media marketing campaign significantly. Your customers
may not always stay on the platforms that you’re targeting them on currently.
This potential migration matters, especially to small business marketers.

Each social network has a reputation. Make sure that your brand is in alignment
with that reputation. For example, Tumblr is known to be photo centric and has a
reputation for attracting a young, creative user. Keep a platform’s reputation in
mind as you choose where and how to market.

Addressing your industry influence

A look at your industry yields a very long list of potential competitors, partners,
vendors, and associations for you to connect with. The SMM goal is to make this
group aware of your influence in the marketplace. We address the importance of
influence and the role of influencers in Chapter 1 and discuss them in more detail
in Chapter 18.

Here, we take a brief look at three free tools you can use right away to make a
quick assessment of your overall business influence. Obviously, you want to take
a much more thorough look, but the following can give you some feeling for your
current state of influence:

» Kred (www.kred.com): Kred measures your reach. You can evaluate your
organization across such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at the
same time. If you have an employee who has her own influence on these
platforms, you can also check her out separately.
» Marketing Grader (https://website.grader.com/): Evaluates the marketing
on your website using HubSpot’s tool for grading websites. It looks at a variety of
measures, including your traffic rank, indexed pages, and linking domains.

CHAPTER 7 Finding the Right Platforms 125