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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780174525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?
Social media is a broader category than many people realise. The big names such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are there, of course. But there are many more, often with little in common other than being used by a community of people. Wikipedia is social media: its content is created by lots of individual users. The Audi Owners' Club Forum is social media. The controversial discussion site Reddit is social media, as is the Q&A site Quora. All kinds of businesses now have a social media element: for example, sporting brands' sites enable customers to compare their personal bests with others; many businesses' websites have blogs where senior figures let loose; and media sites enable readers to comment on articles.
If the site enables users to create or share content or network with other people, it's social media.
WHAT DO BUSINESSES DO ON SOCIAL MEDIA?
Social media is not just where we share photos or argue on Twitter. It's where businesses advertise – Facebook alone has more than 50 million small businesses using Facebook Pages to connect with their customers – and it's where their customers expect them to be: 95 per cent of online adults aged 18 to 30 will follow a brand on social media (Leslie 2018).
It drives sales. The Drum reported that by 2015, Facebook was influencing 52 per cent of consumers' spending, both on the internet and in bricks and mortar shops (McCarthy 2015).
It's where customers complain. Time magazine reported in 2017 that one retailer, Target in the US, was fielding 3,500 tweets and direct messages every month (Stainmetz 2017). Social media is also where mishandled complaints can go badly wrong, with 60 per cent of consumers saying they would take 'unpleasant actions' to express their dissatisfaction with companies online (Petersen 2015).
It's where fashion lives and dies, where products can be funded overnight, where employers seek new staff and where businesses give their staid old image a funky new makeover.
It's somewhere your business probably needs to be.
CH-CH-CH CHANGES
The rise of social media has had some interesting consequences, both good and bad. The rise of user reviews has been a blessing and a curse. For some industries, such as the hospitality industry, the benefits of word of mouth marketing have been eclipsed by a plague of malicious comments on travel and restaurant guides. And for consumers, it often means wading through plausible-looking but utterly fake reviews on big retailers' websites.
It has enabled companies to respond more quickly to their customers, but that just means customers expect ever faster responses: 53 per cent of Twitter users expect firms to respond to them within the hour, and they get publicly angry if firms don't (Vaughan 2017).
For many organisations, it's replaced the telephone call as the primary method of customer or client communication, but for others it's also enabled critics, the perpetually outraged and all kinds of time wasters to cause more trouble than ever before.
How do you make it work for your business?
HOW TO BECOME A SOCIAL MEDIA MOGUL
The first step is to identify which social networks are right for your business. Would a Facebook presence bring people through the door or help to sell products, or is the Twitter crowd a better demographic? If you're selling parts for Audis, would your time be better spent on focused sites such as the Audi Owners' Forum than on one of the big social networks? Would social media work as a marketing tool, or is it best suited to brand awareness and perhaps hiring new people? Can it bring you closer to your customers in a cost- effective way?
Armed with that knowledge, you can then create content for your chosen network or networks: shareable content to build your brand; adverts that encourage people not just to click but to hand over their credit cards; long-form articles establishing you as an expert in your field; blog posts to delight your existing customers and attract new ones too.
Over the coming chapters you will discover the dos and don'ts of writing for social media. We won't just cover the nuts and bolts of what to do where and how to craft compelling copy, we'll also look at the wider context: what encourages people to share businesses' content? How do you ensure you don't fall foul of the perpetual outrage machine that even the big brands sometimes underestimate?
In this book, I will tell you what you actually need to know, and I'll do it without overselling and overhyping things like the self-proclaimed 'thought leaders' of social media.
In fact, that is the first tip. Don't let anybody in your organisation call themselves a thought leader.
SOCIAL MEDIA: THE SKILLS THAT MATTER
The mechanics of social media posting, scheduling and analytics are no more complicated than any basic function built around using software: it's not hard, and it doesn't take long to learn.
The skills that matter most are communication skills and a good understanding of your business's brand pillars. Think public relations or communications, not advertising; social media is a conversation, not a broadcast. A thick skin is often helpful, especially in business sectors that attract a lot of criticism such as retail or transport, and an eye to the future is invaluable: being able to see what's coming next means you're not stuck posting to MySpace, when everybody's jumped ship to Facebook.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Social media is not just Facebook and Twitter. It's anywhere users create and share content.
• For many customers, social media is their favoured way to contact businesses.
• Unfortunately, social media empowers critics as well as customers.
• Don't call yourself a thought leader.
CHAPTER 2KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE
In many respects, 'you need to be on social media' is today's version of the 1990s mantra 'you need to have a website', and, like those faraway days, it's resulted in an awful lot of organisations spending an awful lot of money on things that are, well, awful.
Do you remember the days of businesses offering 20 screens of Flash-heavy animations about their vision, but neglecting to include their phone number? A lot of companies' social media presences are just like that.
That's because some businesses simply follow the latest trends and rush into things without actually working out what they want to achieve. It's the investment equivalent of driving around aimlessly in a place you don't know in the hope that somehow you'll end up where you want to be. Even if you do get there, it will be by luck rather than judgement and you will have wasted a lot of petrol.
As we have already discovered, there are multiple reasons why a business might be on social media. For your social media to be successful, those reasons need to be SMART.
SMART THINKING
I try to steer clear of acronyms, but I will make an exception for our old friend SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely objectives enable you to identify exactly what you want to achieve, how you're going to know if you've achieved it or not, and when you expect to have achieved it by.
We apply SMART decision making to all kinds of investment decisions. We plan and measure our marketing efforts, our investment in training, our investments in new hardware or software – and we can do exactly the same with social media.
For example, if you see social media primarily as a marketing tool, you can apply SMART thinking to that. If the goal is to increase sales: by how much? In which particular region or product sector?
Or, if you see social media as a customer support channel, you might have a target of reducing customers' wait time between initial contact and their problem being resolved, or increasing the average number of customers helped by each operator. Again, you can quantify and monitor that.
Even fairly vague-sounding goals can be quantified and monitored. For example, you can measure customer satisfaction or brand awareness with surveys.
Of course, you do not need to have specific goals in order to be on social media. But you should if you're planning to invest time and money in it.
FIND THE WHY
The key here is to find the why: why are you on social media? If a company can't answer with a straightforward reply, that company is probably wasting its time and quite possibly a whole bunch of money too.
As we'll discover throughout this book, social media is a serious business tool – but without direction and SMART thinking, it can be a serious waste of time and money.
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
It's important to have realistic expectations of your social media activity. If your organisation is expecting a huge and immediate rise in sales or profitability as a result of social media, the adventure is probably going to end in tears. Despite the apparent fast-paced nature of social media, it's a slower, more organic media than other forms of media, best suited to brand awareness and engagement. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Social media without a strategy may well be a waste of time and money.
• Find the why: why do you need to be on social media?
• Set specific, measurable goals wherever you can.
• Social media is more about awareness and engagement than the hard sell.
• Social media is a marathon, not a sprint.
CHAPTER 3DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Different social media platforms have different audiences, and that affects your writing: there's a world of difference between the young people of Tumblr and the older executives of LinkedIn. There are also differences in how those audiences access their favoured social media services, and the devices they access them on. You will also find some differences from country to country, although such differences are usually relatively minor. For example, while users in the West sometimes found Twitter's original 140-character limit frustrating, users in countries such as China didn't; their language enabled them to express much more with fewer characters.
The main difference in language is in tone and content. LinkedIn users are not big fans of frivolity; Instagram isn't really a place for being serious. Twitter can help warn you of incoming public relations (PR) problems – although its echo chamber effect can make problems look bigger than they actually are – or be a forum for customer service or amusing brand awareness campaigns. Pinterest is a good place to market small, design-focused firms (and sadly, a good place for large, money-focused firms to steal those small firms' ideas). And Facebook wants to be all things to all men and women.
So, how do you decide which social network or networks are best for your brand or business? It's all in the demographics. If you want to reach white collar job-hunters and affluent employers, for example, then LinkedIn is the place to be. If you're promoting products to the widest possible audience, Facebook may be your new best friend. You don't have to be on every conceivable social network to get results, and it's often better to focus your efforts on a small number of platforms.
With a little bit of help from the Pew Research Center's excellent Social Media Study, let's look at the key characteristics of each major social network. As most of the English language social networks are based in the US, their biggest markets are often there too and, as a result, most stats about social media usage tend to be very US-focused. However, the breakdowns and trends are remarkably similar everywhere.
WHO'S ON FACEBOOK?
Facebook is the 500-pound gorilla of social networking, with more than a billion daily users. It's also the easiest social network to study thanks to its Audience Insights tool, which you can use to find out exactly who's online where (https:// www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights).
According to Facebook, its UK demographics break down like this:
Gender: 52 per cent women, 48 per cent men
Education: 65 per cent university level, 6 per cent postgraduate, 29 per cent high school
Job title: Facebook provides a big breakdown on this, but the biggest numbers are for people in sales (36 per cent), admin (28 per cent) and management (18 per cent).
You can break these statistics down in all kinds of fun ways with the Audience Insights tool; so, for example, you can limit your search to people in the agriculture industry or aviation.
Globally, Facebook is used by 83 per cent of women and 75 per cent of men who have internet access. It reaches 88 per cent of 18–29-year-olds, 84 per cent of 30–49-year-olds, 72 per cent of 50–64-year-olds and 62 per cent of those over 65 (Brennan 2017).
WHO'S ON LINKEDIN?
Daily user numbers are not available for LinkedIn, but the most recent statistics at the time of writing show 467 million registered members, a quarter of those in the US and just over 20 million in the UK. Its business focus makes it much more urban than other networks – 34 per cent of the urban audience, but 18 per cent of the rural one – and more educated than Twitter or Instagram, with 50 per cent of users having graduated from further education. Its audience is better off too: 45 per cent of adults earning over $75,000 pa use LinkedIn.
LinkedIn provides another useful statistic: in the US, 35 per cent of unemployed adults and 17 per cent of employed adults use the service.
WHO'S ON INSTAGRAM?
Instagram – which is owned by Facebook – skews younger and has a smaller user base, although at 600 million active users it's still huge. Where Facebook reaches all demographics equally, Instagram is more urban (39 per cent urban users compared to 28 per cent suburban and 31 per cent rural), much more popular among women (38 per cent of women with internet access compared to 26 per cent of men) and much more youthful (reaching 59 per cent of 18–29-year-olds, but just 8 per cent of the over-65 internet audience). Women are the dominant gender in each age group.
WHO'S ON TWITTER?
Twitter's become quite a big deal for customer service, but it doesn't reach the big numbers that Facebook does. It's more cagey about numbers too. The tech site Recode.net estimated 157 million active daily users in 2017 (Wagner 2017), but that number includes large numbers of bots. Bots are automated Twitter accounts and an ongoing headache for the service alongside fake followers, which can be bought by the thousand for around £20. That makes it exceptionally difficult to work out how many real human beings are on Twitter and how many of those human beings are actually interacting with the accounts they follow.
The numbers show that in the US, Twitter reaches 24 per cent of online men and 25 per cent of women, that its reach is identical in urban, suburban and rural areas, and that once again it skews younger than Facebook: it reaches 36 per cent of 18–29-year-olds, 23 per cent of 30–49-year-olds, 21 per cent of 50–64-year-olds and 10 per cent of the over-65s.
WHO'S ON PINTEREST?
The photo-pinning site doesn't immediately spring to mind when you consider social media, but it's an important site for designers and the fashion business and for a wide range of artistic businesses including home decoration and improvements, wedding planners, gifts and so on. It skews very female (45 per cent of women but just 17 per cent of men) and fairly young, reaching 36 per cent of 18–29-year-olds, 34 per cent of 30–49-year-olds, 28 per cent of the over-50s and 16 per cent of the over-60s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Writing for Social Media"
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Copyright © 2018 BCS Learning & Development Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- What is Social Media?
- Know What You Want To Achieve
- Different Strokes For Different Folks
- Who Are You?
- Big Ideas In Small Spaces
- How To Write For Social Media on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and The Rest
- How To Write Things People Want To Share
- Ready! Fire! Aim! 13 Mistakes To Avoid When Creating Social Media Content
- Timing is Everything: When To Post To Social Media
- Everyone's Offended: When Businesses' Social Media Posts Go Badly Wrong
- Do Not Feed The Trolls: How To Handle Online Unpleasantness
- Tools of the Trade: From Apps To Analytics
- Afterword
- Appendix: The Top 11 Social Networks People Are Actually Using