According to Kevin Dean, president and founder of Manobyte, Grand Rapids is responsible for roughly 90,000 pages on Facebook.

The essentials of social media marketing 
Jake Himmelspach

Technology speeds up everything, including the advancement of entire industries. The marketing industry is a good example, as it enters the realm of social networking Web sites.

Social media marketing has become all the rage. Many companies today are getting more hits on their Web sites because of links found on sites such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter than because of searches on Yahoo or Google — making search engines so 2007.

Savvy companies are also placing links to their Web sites on various blogs. Companies watch for blogs that are pertinent to their business, connect with the writers, and then place links that connect to the company Web site, said Nancy Boese, business tools specialist at the Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center.

“For example, we have a company called Down to Earth Toys, and they sell toys that are only made in the United States,” said Boese. “They are linking to blogs that mothers are creating on safety and parenting, so that people who go to that (blog) would also be able to go directly to (the Down to Earth) site and find toys that are very safe.”

Part of the benefit of linking a company Web site to an independent blog is the opportunity to create conversation about the company’s product or service. It also gives the company a certain amount of credibility.

“If it’s a blog that’s external from the company and you link to it, it’s going to give you a little bit more credibility,” said Boese. “It’s almost as if it’s saying, ‘The person who is sponsoring this blog also supports your business.’”

Kevin Dean also commented on the credibility that using social media can add to a company. Dean is president and founder of ManoByte, a social media analytics consultancy that provides tools to track online conversations and reviews on a company, client or competitor.

“This requires complete transparency. They have to be authentic when using social media as a form of communicating,” said Dean. “When they aren’t transparent, when they aren’t authentic, then people on the Web find out very quickly and it spreads like wildfire.”

Dean said the goal of social media is really to get other people to talk about a company rather than the company talking about itself.

“It’s word-of-mouth marketing online. What that means is you have to be honest. People will say positive or negative things about you based on what they read online,” he said.

There are many differences between social media marketing and traditional marketing, but perhaps the main difference is the focus on relationships. Marketing has gone from one-way communication — using billboards, radio spots and the like — to incorporating a two-way conversation between businesses and customers, and customer-to-customer conversations about a company, product or service.

“The approach that businesses take when they use this communication channel is completely different,” said Dean. “This is totally relationship-based. It’s not a mass marketing channel where you’re trying to reach anyone and everyone. If you market to a thousand people on the radio, you’re going to hope that maybe 1 percent connects to your message.

“With social media, blogs and social networking sites, you’re marketing and talking directly to individuals who care.”

Those individuals are the ones who keep up with a company’s news on Twitter, who read the company blog or go on a forum to look up information on the company and the services or products it offers. And thus begins the bread-crumb trail of communication. A company posts links to its Facebook or LinkedIn page, which each have links to each other and to the company’s Web site.

All of this may change the type of content the company chooses to have on its home page. It also calls for additional “landing” pages — pages in a company’s Web site that have specific content for specific customers, depending on what path they took to get there. It’s a very intricate trail.

“(Content) needs to be transaction-ready. Once individuals hit your Web site, the content is geared toward what they came to your Web site for, and that’s done by creating landing pages on your Web site. You don’t just direct someone to your homepage any longer; you may link them to a specific page that’s dealing with a specific subject that your online profile has led them to,” said Dean.

“Now-a-days, a company’s Web site is really where individuals are coming to make a transaction. They’re not coming to learn about you, because they learn about it from their friends and other places through social media. There definitely needs to be this trail from one to the other.”

What sites a business should use depends on the business. Some sites work better for certain types of companies than others. Still, Dean suggests having a presence on all the major sites for brand protection. He has seen companies represented on Twitter, Facebook and others by individuals pretending to be from that company and giving false information.

To maintain a presence on all of the social networking sites would be nearly impossible and, as Dean says, unnecessary. He recommends that companies participate on two or three such sites.

“You should at least go out and get your name on all the sites you can, just to protect your name, but you don’t have to actively participate on all those sites either. Two to three is probably going to be the max your average business will be able to effectively stay on,” he said.

As for the essentials, Dean said, “(Companies) definitely need to be using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a way for them to network and get new clients and business. Business transactions are happening over LinkedIn every day. They must have a Facebook page, as well. I think that’s a given. You need to have a Twitter account, and I’m not so sure everyone needs a blog.”

Dean recommended that any company that does not have the time or resources to update a blog at least three times a month should not have one. Keeping content fresh is one of the main features to sustain the relationships built through social networking sites.

“You have to have engaging content,” said Dean. “If you get started and participate in social media, you have to be committed to stay involved, because once people start following you, they are expecting to see it. If you stop, then they’re going to stop their business with you.”

No matter how a company chooses to engage in social networking, Dean said there is one fundamental step: listening.

“The most important step in social media is to listen. You have to absolutely listen to what’s being said, then use that to make your decision — and it’s going to change. Now Facebook is really huge. Six months from now, there’s going to be another social networking site that’s just as popular.

“A year ago no one had heard of Twitter and Twitter’s now taking over,” said Dean. “Remember that it’s first about listening. Social comes first, before the media — it’s people before technology.”