In advertising, distribution drives content. On the other hand, in social media marketing, content drives distribution – that is, you have to have something important or interesting to “say” in order for someone to be interested enough to engage and pass it along. It is the content strategy that delivers distribution opportunities, audience cultivation and, ultimately, how a social media campaign may play out.

So how do you develop content that provides distribution? Here are four ways to break down social media marketing into specific content and distribution tactics.

Social Broadcasting

This is the most fundamental form of social marketing. Almost all companies engaged in social media marketing are doing Social Broadcasting. This type of campaign is about pushing your message out through social media communities and hoping the story gets further distribution on the network. It is akin to putting a story out on the wire with the hope that it gets picked up for broader distribution.

The Basics: The most basic tactic is to push offers and press releases to fans on Twitter or Facebook pages, or to push blog posts and articles out on Digg or Reddit.

More Advanced: Social applications, videos, games, custom social sites, contests and promotions all fall under more advanced social broadcasting tactics. Distribution can be on any number of social networks that are general (ie. Facebook) or very specialized (ie. YouTube for videos, or industry-related social networks).

You also want to be sure that you are not just pushing shameless self-promotion out to the social media world at large. Mix it in with some actual content that may be of interest.

Social Recruiting

Social recruiting is focused on building an audience. The goal of Social Recruiting is to have as many people as possible subscribe to your social media profiles or communications. This is closely aligned with lead generation for email marketing programs. The general idea is that “friends” or “fans” or “followers” are people whom the business can communicate with directly anytime, without the expense of advertising media costs or paid mailing lists.

The Basics: Many companies start out sending a social media page to colleagues, friends and family with the expectation that their networks will also be interested in connecting via social media. And we are sure everyone at some point has received a new follower on Twitter in hopes that they would reciprocate the follower. You can tell this tactic when you see that the person who follows you is following hundreds or thousands more people than are following them.

More Advanced: Many companies will engage in promotions, paid advertising and extensive content creation to build dedicated audiences of fans, followers and friends. Some companies may build customized support areas for specific customers to create an installed base of experts or promoters.

Social Engagement

Social engagement refers to active discussions with people on social media networks. With social media, everyone is a media magnate with an audience; businesses that engage that audience have an opportunity to amplify their message with genuine endorsements from trusted sources – friends, families and colleagues – or head off trouble quickly if someone is unhappy with the product or service. This is a tricky situation because many companies have gotten in trouble for misrepresenting the true identity of the person engaging with customers on social networks.

The Basics: Having an open message board on your social profiles lets customers have a place to give you their feedback. Think of it as an open suggestion or complaint box.

More Advanced: Many companies employ “digital street teams” to constantly comb the web and engage where necessary. In some cases, automated messaging mechanisms are employed to find, connect and automatically message to people based on a set of business rules.

Social Monitoring

One of the aspects of social media most discussed is the ability for social media to provide access to unfiltered customer discussions and feedback. By listening to customers, businesses can learn a lot and address issues quickly. Social Monitoring is all about simply listening to the chatter on the web and analyzing that information for insights, and then turning those insights into promotional opportunities.

The Basics: The most basic way to do this is to use search engines on sites such as Google News, Technorati or Twitter to monitor news, blogs and tweets.

More Advanced: Many companies use proprietary or 3rd party search algorithms to comb the web for feedback and data related to their products, customer opinion and competitors. They then compile this data to analyze for trends, research and insights.

Concluding Thoughts

Our goal in providing this framework for social media has been to emphasize creativity and content as the driver of social media success.We hope you take this framework, improve it and make it your own as you take social media down new and interesting paths.

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Let’s talk more more about social media marketing solutions! Contact us to start a discussion.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

• Your business has an increasing amount of organic traffic because customers are finding your website via search engines and social media;
• Your customers increasingly interact with you when they visit your website (ie. “helping your customer further down the conversion funnel“);
• Your website is a thriving, continuously improving channel for sales, leads and signups.

What types of services are included? Web Page Optimization is a rigorous regimen of optimization which involves ongoing testing and improvement of your website’s front-end user interface, web content and back-end technical structure. Core disciplines include:

• Website Usability: Optimizing how your customers interact with your web pages and improving the user experience to drive more interaction (signups, leads, sales, etc.).
• Website Design: Optimizing the layout, look and feel of your web pages to determine which designs maximize interaction with your customers while maintaining the integrity of your brand. (Sometimes “science” proves that the prettiest design is not always the most effective)
• Content Strategy: Researching, mapping and developing web content – copy, media, art, photos – that will be relevant in search engines, appealing to your customers and drive customer interaction with your company.
• Conversion Funnel Optimization: Metric analysis of the lifetime and recurring value of offers, conversion channels and follow-on remarketing and optimization of each conversion path on the website.

What are the benefits of Web Page Optimization? Web Page Optimization delivers ongoing benefits that impact success across all online marketing initiatives. Benefits include:

• Increased leads and sales from web traffic;
• More free website traffic from search engines and social media (often collectively referred to as “Earned Media“);
• Increased success rate of each visit to your website;
• Improved return on investment from advertising as website conversion rates increase;
• Superior website user experience for your customers;
• Guarantee customers see the most compelling messaging and design on each web page;
• Obtain and improve upon the quantifiable value of each visit to your website;
• Cost-effective website improvement without the need to constantly do full redesigns.

Web Page Optimization is a key activity for businesses looking to gain a competitive advantage in online marketing while making sure that they provide the best user experience possible to their customers.

Read more Digital Marketing Opinions or Contact Us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Earned media is publicity without payment to the person or company who provides the publicity. One of the primary reasons for the buzz is that earned media is often used synonymously with the term “free media”. The other reason for its recent buzz is that platforms for easily distributing earned media – like Facebook and Twitter – have become very popular over the past couple of years.

Despite the recent buzz, the term ‘earned media’ has been in use for more than 20 years since its first reference in a 1988 Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman. At the time, the authors were referring to broadcasting one’s message on TV or radio without any payment to the broadcaster. Since then, the application of the term broadened to include any type of mention of a company or brand in the news. This landed earned media firmly in the court of public relations professionals.

Consumer broadcasting accelerated with Email Forwards and Link Building
With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990′s, and email in particular, consumers began to send trillions of emails and many companies attempted to find the next big email forward hit (think dancing baby) or tell-a-friend program.

At the same time, online search engines started to give away billions of clicks for free to websites who appeared in their listing; listings were gained partially through linking between websites. Businesses, called SEOs, quickly appeared to help businesses take advantage of the opportunity and in the process have developed a $3B market for this service.

New terms emerge
As the internet boom picked up steam in 1999 and later after it deflated in the early 2000′s, the opportunities for earned media continued to grow and soon word of mouth marketing became a popular method for marketers to reach consumers. Word of mouth marketing refers to consumers telling other consumers about a product or brand with professionals focused on facilitating this process. Similar to word of mouth marketing, viral marketing refers to consumers passing along a specific marketing message to other consumers (coupons, promotions, entertainment, tools, etc.)

Social media provides consumers with drastic improvement over email for mass broadcast capabilities
More recently, social applications like Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (ie. blogs, link sharing services, and social networks) provided consumers with a superior forum to broadcast their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Whereas previous earned media broadcast opportunities were from central authorities determining who got airplay, social applications enabled consumers to reach hundreds or thousands of people with one unfiltered broadcast. The power to guide is now in the consumer’s hands and they are actively endorsing companies, products, and ideas to their friends, family and colleagues.

The old adage that a happy customer tells two people and an unhappy customer tells 10 has now been amplified with social applications so that a happy customer tells 200 people and an unhappy customer tells 1,000.

Earned media is not reserved to social networks
Companies that earn media best always invest resources into growing the opportunity. This could be in the form of public relations, SEO, promotions, software development, customer service and hundreds of other ways to build and communicate one’s brand. In the end, earned media is the ultimate branding exercise where the company educates the public on its products and then observes how the market communicates that teaching back to itself.

If you would like additional information on this topic or to meet with an advisor to discuss earned media, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.