Page 28 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

engaged and entertaining lives in the social media world. Your content can’t
just be about your product. It needs to be valuable to them and their lives.
» Know when to resist the next shiny object.

As you well know, new web tools pop up daily. The best way to avoid being
distracted is to write down your objectives. The last thing you want to say to
yourself is, “Everyone is using such and such, so we should use it.” Place your
objectives in a prominent place and refer to them often. If they change, revise
the document. But whatever you do, don’t try to do something on every social
platform — you’ll quickly discover that you don’t have the tools, training,
and — most critically — the resources to support all the tools.

» Be prepared to be wrong.
This is a tough one. In your role as marketer, you want to lead your company to
successive victories. SMM is not a sure thing. You need to be prepared to
experiment and change course using the feedback that you get from custom-
ers. You may start with a small idea and develop it into a full-blown campaign.
It’s unlikely that you can start out with a very expensive big effort and not have
to correct along the way. When management and staff start out with the notion
that they are testing and experimenting, changes in direction won’t seem as
shocking. This cuts down on wear and tear of the psyche for everyone. It also
limits the risks to your core marketing efforts while you learn this space.

Understanding the role of the influencer

To understand how social influence works, you need to look at how people are
influenced in the real world, face to face. Social influence isn’t something new.
Long before the web, people asked each other for advice as they made purchasing
decisions. What one person bought often inspired another to buy the same prod-
uct, especially if the original purchaser said great things about the product. That’s
how human beings function; we’re influenced and motivated by each other to do
things. We’re social beings, and sharing information about our experiences is all
a part of social interaction.

Is influence bad? Of course not. More often than not, people seek that influence.
People ask each other for advice; they share decision-making processes with
friends and colleagues; they discuss their own experiences.

How much a person is influenced depends on multiple factors. The product itself
is the most important one. When buying low-consideration purchases (those with a
small amount of risk), people rarely seek influence, nor are they easily influenced
by others. Buying toothpaste, for example, is a low-consideration purchase
because each product may not be that different from the next one, and they’re all
fairly inexpensive — so you won’t lose much money if you choose one that

12 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing