Social Media | Indian Social Media Landscape - Part 19 Indian Social Media Landscape

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Answers to a successful Online Brand Relation

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

In today’s fast paced world, virtual social networking has always strengthened existing relationships, and continues to provide a foundation for border-less communities based on common areas of interest.

Some people like to share with others what they know. Some people like to learn by reading questions and answers. Q&A sites offer that kind of information from experts or from everyday people. Q&A sites have grown immensely in the last few years. People are, more than ever, turning to the internet to get quick information about any topic through these Q&A sites.

It’s kind of asking your neighbour, coworker or friend a question and getting a written answer. There are some questions that cannot be answered by even the best reference books or encyclopedias. They need a human expert that can understand a complex relationship.

Opportunity for Brands to be Human.

This provides a great opportunity for Brands to participate in conversation with people who are looking for information about products they manufacture or services they provide. Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions.

Brands are driving leads using Question and Answer forums like LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com. LinkedIn Answers dominates the category usage, claiming 59.2 percent of use for companies participating in at least one Q&A forum. Yahoo! Answers is a distant second at 37.1 percent.

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help Brands in the following ways:

Direct customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
Connect with people in the market, build reputation, and generate leads.
Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

Also, the Internet has a reputation for being shady. You need to let readers know why your answer is reputable and why you’re the right person to answer it. This gives Brands a greater credence and integrity to the response, and a higher likelihood for a recommendation or a vote up. It is this process of informing and educating the general audience that can help the brand establish “Thought Leadership.”

Who is listening to the Brand?

In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. Among those who use Q&A forums, 92 percent say they are at least somewhat useful with 25 percent claiming them to be “very useful.”

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

How do Brands use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

Help others
Build relationships
Push your products and services while answering somebody’s question or request.

In Q&A sites, the starting point is that somebody asked the question that you’re answering.

Specifically you shoul:

Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.

Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In essence, the best practices is to be helpful first, don’t go in trumpeting your sales pitch and focus on long-term relationship building and benefits rather than seeing a sudden influx of leads. An answer should simply touch on all prominent points that deliver a comprehensive, well structured response to a question.

The best part of the Q&A sites is that, they are Search Engine Optimized. This helps in increasing the visibility of the brand. More importantly, it is a credible way of highlighting your product range without sounding like advertising. And finally, Q&A sites are helping Brands become more human. It has allowed a Brand to be the friend you turn to when you have a query. Objective Achieved!

Tags:Answer, Forum, Q&A, Question, SMM, Social Media
Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Target Audience, Windchimes Comm | 5 Comments »

Twitter to roll out official Analytics

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

With Twitter almost ready to launch its analytics service by the end of the year, the market is already abuzz about the impact it will have on the Social Media Marketing scene.

The social networking giant recently announced that it has roped in a select group of users to carry out the testing of the product. It is believed that as of now, Twitter will be keeping this product, free of cost for its 197 million users.

With Social Media Marketing gaining a substantial space in the overall marketing mix, such a tool, which can give insights to a brand’s online efforts will be of great benefit. Not only will it help in deriving the results of a campaign, it will also, and more importantly, help in realigning the SMM campaign.

Tracking the Campaign

Since its launch, Twitter has seen almost every brand using it for promotion activity. Simple #tag contests and customer support have become major online activities. Brands like Starbucks, Dell Computers and Ford motors have thousands of followers on line. Closer home, brands like MTV, NDTV and Kingfisher have successfully engaged thousands of people in the most entertaining manner.

But till now, all the brands were either clueless about where there campaign or SMM efforts were heading or they were paying huge sum of money for getting insights through third party vendors. With the launch of Twitter Analytics, that too, free of cost that is all set to change.

Now, the brands will know exactly which of their tweets has helped them get more followers. Which tweet has caused disgruntle and what topics gets the maximum retweets. Not only that, with analytics available, online reputation management also becomes easier.

At a glance

With the new tool, Brands will have data such as 6-hour bar graph to show mentions, follows, unfollows and retweets that the campaign has generated. Also, it allows you to categories and filter tweets into different groups such as “best,” “good” and ”all.”

The Impact

It is surprising that something that can help Brands so much should be offered at no cost. The rationale behind this seems to be that businesses are more likely to stick with Twitter if detailed statistics are made available to every user, helping them measure and improve upon the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and justify the effort needed to continually update a Twitter feed.

Also, though tracking social media is big business, the news that Twitter is set to enter the ring with a free product of its own may come as a bad news for third party providers.

It would be worth noting that while brands may not be able to make an exact impact on the sales figure through the tool, it will surely help them in becoming more in sync with their audience.

Tags:Analytics, Facebook, ORM, SMM, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

Bring your brand a-Live!

Monday, November 15th, 2010

Live streaming video service Livestream has just released a Facebook application for page owners that offers admins a simple way to stream live video from their Facebook Pages. Livestream is a leading live video destination and platform. Event organizers, content owners, celebrities and artists around the world use Livestream’s social broadcasting tools to engage and grow their audiences on the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs.

Notable content partners include Facebook, The New York Times, ABC News, CBS News, Associated Press, HBO, AT&T, IBM, Burger King, Nike, The Academy Awards, The Foo Fighters, Maroon 5, Ralph Lauren, and Diesel.