50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social media to Improve Their Marketing

This is a pretty extensive list of ideas and strategies to consider in your business social media plan by Chris Brogan:

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.

Get the full list of 50 ideas here.

ROE – Return on Engagment

Of course, in everything we do as marketers, we are looking for ways to measure results and document our Return on Investment. Metrics such as website impressions, unique visitors, click-through rates, CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and conversion rates have dominated the discussion.

Now, with the continued growth in social media components, this topic has been turned upside down. How do you measure your engagement with your audience in the realm of social media? A new term was born: Return on Engagement.

Patrick Schaber discusses some good insights on the evolution of measuring social media initiatives in business. Most importantly, he says, do not isolate social media, but instead position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

He predicts that within 2 years, there will be measurements in place to measure the “Return on Engagement”.

YouTube as Marketing Tool?

YouTube is a free social media website where anyone can post videos on just about any topic.  Millions of people visit YouTube daily, and some folks have given up watching TV altogether! It is so easy to upload videos that it has become a favorite pasttime for old and young.

More and more companies these days are discovering YouTube as a viable marketing tool, a perfect opportunity to showcase their products and services to a large audience of mostly Generation Y and Generation Z. Big companies like Coca Cola with an entertaining commercial spot, or Proctor & Gamble with a short history of its iconic rise are harnessing thousands of views on YouTube, therefore marketing their brand.

How about the travel and tourism industry? Is it present on YouTube? Sure it is. You will find advice on how to plan your next vacation by a travel agent, why you should plan a meeting or convention in San Jose, or a very creative way of introducing your sales team (embedded in the Jacksonville CVB website).

How are you using video content to spread the word about your destination or services and engage with potential prospects and visitors? Feel free to post your comments and links to your YouTube feeds.