Social media is entering the third inning of its evolution as a marketing channel. Are you ready to score new business?
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The First Inning: Batter Up!
The first inning of social media marketing involved businesses creating social media pages and accounts and learning how to listen and communicate in a non-damaging way.
PR and marketing led this phase. This is where first-generation social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and HootSuite got their start, as listening emerged as a first step towards managing social interactions.
There are still plenty of examples of organizations struggling to get through this initial stage, but most have moved on.
Second Inning: Foul Ball
Today, we are in the second inning, where marketers use social networks as broadcast (mass media) advertising channels.
Working through influencers wherever possible, companies of all sizes are pushing ads, offers and interesting content into social networks with little to no customer targeting. They are hoping that word of mouth, viral sharing and new discovery platforms will help spread their content far and wide.
When it comes to measuring results, second-inning players are primarily focused on attracting a large number of followers and obtaining high engagement rates. Unfortunately, the evidence is that engagement rates remain depressingly low.
Most second-inning teams don’t measure the quality of their followers, the quality of their engagement nor the business impact. This is why so many companies cannot report ROI.
When it comes to tools, a second inning equipment locker may include BuddyMedia, Vitrue and UnifiedSocial, in addition to any of the hundreds of specialty tools and services available to connect brands with their key influencers such as Triberr, Klout and Kred.
The Third Inning: Time To Keep Score
The third inning is just beginning. It involves precisely targeting individual people with content crafted for their needs and measuring the results of your engagement in terms of meaningful business impact. In other words, third-inning players are focused on the numerator of ROI – sales, earnings, and profitability.
For marketing and sales professionals, the third inning is all about attracting new customers, generating quality leads and closing more sales. Metrics like engagement, likes and retweets won’t cut it this time around.
In a recent Forbes article, a survey of managers and employees (performed by Appiro.com) showed that attracting new business is the highest priority for social media marketing today:
As we enter the third inning, how well is your business prepared to score new business from your social media investments?
Getting Your Lineup Ready
Here’s a “third-inning” readiness checklist, with our company’s internal assessment offered up as an example:
- Do you know where your sales prospects engage online? Most of our customers already use social media monitoring tools, so we spend time participating in LinkedIn groups, Twitter hashtag channels and active blogs that discuss tools and techniques for social selling.
- Are you actively listening for opportunities to help potential customers solve problems? We look for opportunities by monitoring 45 LinkedIn groups, using NeedTagger to monitor Twitter, and monitoring email alerts from dozens of specialty forums and blogs we participate in.
- Do you have helpful online content in place, ready to answer your prospects’ most frequent questions & to address their most critical needs? In our case, we publish detailed blog posts that help our customers organize their plan of action for selling on Twitter. We host a ton of content on our Customer Service Desk and inside our app’s Help Desk. We also leverage other people’s posts that we find using tools like Triberr (awesome way to network with other bloggers) and Zemanta (inside WordPress).
- Have you made your content “findable” online? We are a startup, so we don’t grapple with legacy content that needs to be re-formatted for the web. Everything we publish and share is freely available on the world wide web.
- Are you attributing your inbound traffic, leads and sales correctly to your social media selling activity? We are almost there. Using NeedTagger, we can attribute Twitter-generated traffic and engagement to our inbound traffic. We just implemented KissMetrics and upgraded our use of Google Analytics to understand how our outreach efforts in social drive certain behaviors on our website and within our applications.