Page 294 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

The best way to engage the positional influencers around your customers is to
have your customers engage them for you. You get them to engage the positional
influencers by giving them incentives to do so or by converting the purchasing
decision into a group decision.

Translating Influence to the Offline World

For all the discussions about social influencers, we would be remiss if we didn’t
discuss how the concept of influencers ties into having influence in the offline
space. The online world is not separate from how influence works in the real
world. The following sections include recommendations for how you can tap into
social influencers to affect physical-world purchasing decisions.

Putting your customer reviews

in your stores

If you sell products in stores, consider putting the customer reviews that have
been created by customers on your website next to the actual products in the
physical stores. If there isn’t space to place customer reviews, at least include the
customer ratings. Along with the customer reviews, consider adding expert
reviews and ratings. Reviews and ratings do a lot to give your customers confi-
dence about the purchasing decision and also help them choose between products.

Marrying social media marketing
with events and PR

Here’s a tip about social media marketing that’s worth paying a lot of attention to:
Marketers who tie together social media marketing initiatives with traditional
events and surround them with PR tactics invariably have immense success. When
you’re trying to tap into social influencers, consider organizing an event that your
customers can bring their social influencers to. Promote the event heavily on the
social platforms, and use your presence on those platforms as a way to manage
invitation lists and reminders and to post event communications.

For example, send invitations through Facebook, and encourage your potential cus-
tomers to RSVP through Facebook itself. You can also create a special hash tag (#)
for your event so that when you’re tweeting about your event, others will see it. It
helps generate buzz for your company and encourages people to attend future
events. In addition, you can use Facebook Live (https://www.facebook.com/
facebookmedia/solutions/facebook-live; see Figure 18-3), which is a live

278 PART 4 Getting Your Message to Connectors