Becoming a Star of Social Media

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CHAPTER 1

Just start speaking. No one will listen at first but, for now, thats not a problem.
If youre just getting started in social media theres one thing you should know: no one is listening to you and brace yourself nobody wants to.
Harsh truths are done, and now that you know you can take steps to change. Start creating content for the few people who you know are listening. Who are your current customers? Your current friends? Your fans? Your followers? Talk to them. Ask what issues theyre having and where theyre stumbling. Find the pain points and create content to address those points in your content. Then publish it. And keep publishing it. The most important thing you can do is publish, no matter what.

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6 R U L E S F O R TA L K I N G W H E N N O O N E S L I S T E N I N G

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Envision who youre talking to. When youre at a dinner party, its easy to chat with the other guests because you can see who they are and how they react, be it an upturned nose at a political comment or a slight grin after an amusing story. You learn who youre talking to and adjust what you say accordingly. You dont have the luxury of that feedback when no ones listening. Thats why you create a character to speak to. Think about who they are, their personality, what they like, what they believe and how they will react to and benefit from your content. Create a list of ideas for content. Once you know who youre talking to, go ahead and draft out 50 headlines for potential articles. You dont have to write the articles right now, but make sure they are good ideas that you would be willing to write and your audience would be willing to read. Use these headlines as a source of inspiration if you ever hit a writing block. Dont get discouraged. If youre standing at a podium on the national mall, facing a crowd of thousands, its easy to justify talking. These people came here to see me speak, so thats what Ill do. It gets more difficult to justify talking when your podium is in the basement of an office building and youre talking to empty chairs. But thats where we all start, spouting off ideas into the dark, telling everyone who will listen and keeping it up until we get invited to DC. Keep experimenting. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Its easy to dismiss this as a trite expression, but that doesnt make it any less true. If the articles youre creating arent getting the click numbers youd like, dont be afraid to try something new, something out there, something different.

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Keep publishing. Do the writing work up front and keep publishing for at least three months. Aggressively promote your content and change your tactics if they arent working, but give your strategy time to get rolling. Slow your roll. Social media is new, fast and shiny. Its easy to get caught up in the stories you read on Mashable of people becoming overnight sensations through social media. But there are two things you need to realize. First, that happens to such a small fraction of the population that its not even a factor. Second, once that initial wave of attention wears off, those viral companies are back to square one, working their way up from where they started. No matter how you approach it, social is as slow a process as every other form of marketing.

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CHAPTER 2

The Field of Dreams Rule of Content: If you build it, they will come.
Chances are, youre not starting from scratch. Chances are, your company has at least one client, one follower, or one fan.

Chances are, that person is an advocate. That person took a risk and chose to support you and your company, not because youre the biggest or the best but because of you.

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Thats great! That person is your ideal client. A client who wants you to succeed because they believe in who you are and what you do. Take some time to think about who that person is (or who those people are, if you have more than one). Ask who they are demographically: age, gender, location, income. Ask who they are psychologically: hobbies, interests, motivation. Once you have a good idea of who that person is, start creating content for them. If they have a problem, write a whitepaper with a solution. If they have a question, write a blog post with the answer. If they want a joke, make a video with the punchline. Create content for your ideal customer, and your ideal customer will come to you.

3 STEPS TO BUILDING YOUR IDEAL CLIENT

My first job was lead generation. It was my job to call 80 people a day and ask if they were interested in our product. One of the most important things I learned was how to talk on the phone. If I just sat there and stared at my desk, it would come across when I spoke: I sounded disinterested, aloof, and bored. If I pictured who I was talking to, if I really imagined being there and speaking to an actual person face-to-face, it came across in my voice. I became more animated, more excited, more enthused (and my numbers showed it). Picturing who youre talking to can have a huge impact on how you talk. Heres a simple three step process for picturing who youre talking to. 1. Who are your current customers? What are they like and why do you like them? Who are your favorite customers? Who are your least favorite?

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2.

Who are your ideal customers? If you could have any customer, who would it be? Would they never complain? Give perfect feedback? Savvy business folks? Chill consumers? What are 10 of their pain points? Think about the 10 biggest annoyances for those people listed above. What drives them absolutely crazy? Keep this list around and use it as inspiration for future content.

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Take some time and actually write down your answers. You might be surprised at what you learn.

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CHAPTER 3

Set concrete goals. Use exact numbers and dates and hold yourself to it.
Dont set a goal for social media. Set a goal for your business.
Thats why youre on social media online at all, for that matter to make the needle of change jump one more notch into the positive. What does your company need that you can provide? Can you generate leads? Take care of support? Get the word out? Choose something you can do and set it as a goal to do it. Set a benchmark for yourself. What are you doing right now that you can prove leads to that goal? The answer might be nothing. The answer might be something. But whats more important is how you are going to change it. Are you going to bring in ten more leads a month? Make your site turn up higher in searches? Be the next Steve Jobs? Call out what youre going to do a concrete number you can measure and when youre going to have it done by.

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Got it? Good. Email it to me. Lets see if you can do what you say.

SETTING SOCIAL MEDIA GOALS

Lets take a look at some common goals many companies try to achieve with social media. Purchases. The best thing you can do for your company as a marketer is bring in additional revenue. Set a goal that results in customers making a purchase, and make that your primary focus. Getting downloads and collecting leads are nice, but nothing says marketing success like landing a sale. Downloads. It could be a whitepaper, a webinar, an infographic or any other piece of marketing material your company creates. Dont just let people download it though. Thats all give and no take. Ask for an email address, a Twitter handle or a name something you can use as a starting point for leads. Leads. If your company sells stuff, you need leads. Like the download goal, this goal is all about getting two things: information and permission. Ask your readers to give you their email address and ask if its okay to give them more information about you. Keep count of how many of these potential customers come from social. Registration. Like ecommerce, this goal is only useful for people who have something to register for. If you host classes, conferences or webinars, keep an eye on how many people end up there from social. Other. Every business is different, and every goal will be too. Talk to different departments in your organization and figure out what their goals are and if social media marketing can help.

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Once you know your goal, follow these steps to shape it: 1. Note the business outcome. Write down why youre striving for this goal. What will the result be for your company? Make sure these goals arent too obscure or too far removed from real business outcomes. Stay practical. A timeframe. Know when youve reached your goal. If youre trying to get 10 leads each week, you havent reached your goal until you get 10 leads every week. Hold yourself to your timeframe, and if you dont make it, evaluate what went wrong Tiers for achievement. If your goal is to raise the number of leads by 15%, then set the minimum goal at 10%, the real goal at 15% and the stretch goal at 20%. If you dont reach the minimum, reevaluate. If you reach your stretch, celebrate.

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If you take 20 minutes to set a good goal now, youll be amazed at how much time it will save you later.

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CHAPTER 4

You set a Social Goal for a reason. Create content for one too.
You want people to do something. You want them to go out of their way to perform some action so that you, sitting in that chair, will benefit.

This is what you want. This is your goal. Make it easy. Design your site around your goal. Dont be garish about it, but make what you want known and make it easy to accomplish.

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Provide content in exchange for leads, and create content that helps people better understand your product, your industry or your ideas. Ask people to do it, and youll be shocked at the number who do. Dont trick your way to your goal. Thats not why you set it. You set a goal for a reason. Create content for that reason, too.

C R E AT I N G VA L U A B L E C O N T E N T

Make it readable. Its been said that Joyces Ulysses is one of the most poignant pieces of literature in modern culture. And no one has read it. You know why? It is the least readable, densest string of words pounded out in the last 100 years. Joyce wasnt trying to talk to the masses. You are. Focus on creating readable content by using tricks newspaper journalists have been using for years. Create an inverted pyramid of information, putting the most valuable information in the first sentence and expanding on it though the content. Use well defined chunks to break up walls of text. And take a page from the internet handbook by making lists. Make it actionable. Youre creating content for a reason to get people to act on a goal. Make sure your content reminds people to take that action. Ask people to register if they like what they read. Know what you want and dont be afraid to ask people to do it. Make is sharable. The content you create needs to be made with the internet in mind. When monks wrote books, they would put huge effort into making the pages of their tomes so beautiful that people would preserve, admire and flaunt them. The monks knew their medium and used it. Todays medium is social. Know it and use it. Give your articles compelling headlines, create content addressing the hot topic of the week, give people more of what they are already sharing.

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CHAPTER 5

Find an audience who actually cares about what you made and show them.
Talk to the first person who talks to you on social.
It doesnt have to be anything serious. Just drop a stone in the well to hear the echo. Think about who that person is, how she found you, why she talked to you, what you did and if you can do it again. Start talking to (or towards) her. To the people she associates with, hangs out with, is friends with. Then have a little faith that someone else there will listen, too. Dont fall back on that faith, though. Sometimes big fish live in empty ponds. Sometimes youll have to cut your losses and move on. But not every time, and all you need is once.

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FINDING YOUR AUDIENCE

As you start collecting information from your social networks, youll also be collecting insights into who youre talking to. Heres how to mine those insights for all theyre worth. Youll usually start out with a name and a company. Google it. Youll get a good idea of who they are and their position in the company. Use this information to inform which people and positions to go after in other companies. Check their social networks. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook these are the resumes of the 21st century. Use these networks to figure out who these people are, what they like and how they act online. Find the connection. Your goal is to have a successful first conversation. Thats why youre collecting data. See if you have mutual friends, interests, ideals. Once you find that in, go out and have that conversation. Dont learn too much. You dont want to come off as a creeper.

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CHAPTER 6

Grow your reputation through your contributions.

Speak to your community. Speak in your community.
Go where they go and do what they do. Dont be afraid to throw your opinion in. Dont be afraid to contribute. Listen for questions youve had to deal with, and ask questions about your current problems. Its not a weakness. Its a trait. Its a part of being social. Put yourself out there. Put yourself into the group. Its a requirement; otherwise youre just the guy in the corner talking to himself.

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TIPS FOR CONTRIBUTING TO YOUR COMMUNIT Y

Lurk. Before you contribute to the conversation, listen to what people in the community are talking about. Pay attention to the posts that draw large amounts of praise and conversation and ask why? Is the poster a well-known contributor? Is the topic a hot-button issue? Is there a key phrase that always gets a response? Lurk More. Dont stop lurking because you know what works. You also need to know what doesnt. Find posts that dont get any response and scrutinize them in the same way. Learn the language, the dos and donts. Answer questions. Go to a question and answer site like Quora, find the section on a subject you have some information on and start answering unanswered questions. Google questions you hear over and over, and if theres not a good blog post written to answer it, make one. Join in conversations. There are a ton of conversations in every corner of the internet. Go to Facebook, to Twitter, to message boards and niche sites and put your two cents in. Be civil about your opinion and about the opinions of others, but dont be afraid to speak up. Ask for Help. If theres something thats been stumping you for a while, reach out to the community and ask for help. Be interested in their response, and be thankful for it.

Argyle Social is on a mission to help marketers drive meaningful business outcomes through social media marketing. Argyles Software as a Service (SaaS) social media marketing solution enables marketers to more effectively manage and measure marketing campaigns on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Hundreds of mid-sized businesses rely on Argyle to power their social media marketing programs. Argyle Social is based in Durham, NC. For more information, visit http://argylesocial.com, read the blog at http://argylesocial.com/blog, and follow us at http://twitter.com/argylesocial.