Google+ Communities are a new tool from Google that allow users post information and start conversations on specific topics, interests, organizations, etc. Before we go into how to actually create a G+ Community let’s go over the four types of communities that can be created.

1. Public- Anyone can join
a. Great for meeting people on G+ to share interests

2. Public – Moderator approval needed to join    
a. Anyone can request to join but moderators need to approve membership. Posts   are still visible to public.
b. Great for sharing content but limiting who can actually post.  University alumni groups, local communities, and private organizations can best benefit from this type.

3. Private – people find through search and request to join
a. Same structure as type 2, but all posts invisible to non-members until their membership is approved.

4. Private – Hide community from searches
a. Same as type 3, except that the group in completely hidden from search results.

Creating a New Community

Step 1: Click the communities icon on the left side of the Google+ menu.

Step 2: Click the red “Create a Community” button at the top right of the screen.

Step 3: Select whether you would like the community to be public or private. Refer to the types of communities above to help decide which best fits for your cause.

Step 4: Name your community. If this community is going to be public be sure to make sure your community name easily searchable and clearly represents your purpose.

Step 5: Click the “Create Community” button at the bottom right of “What kind of community are you making?” window.

Step 6: Add a photo and fill in your information.

Step 7: After you have filled in all the proper information you can begin to invite people into your brand new community!

Stay tuned for more information on Google+ communities and how to successfully manage your newly created community.

Tagged in google+ google communities social media community marketing.

1. Brand Awareness

Social Media is a powerful tool to create awareness for your business. With over 1 billion members on Facebook, your business has a chance to potentially reach a very large target market. Although the potential reach is very large, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to reach everyone over night. Business owners may get discouraged, especially ones that are well established offline, because the process of building a good brand awareness strategy on Facebook takes time. Starting a “Page” on Facebook is like starting your brand awareness strategy from scratch. Think of it in terms of the early stages of your business, you will need to build up a community of brand advocates over time with a long-term strategy.

Thousands or even millions of people may be aware of your business offline, but these same people won’t necessarily know that you exist on Facebook. In order to be effective on Facebook you must merge traditional efforts with efforts on Facebook. Let your customers who come into your business know that you are on Facebook. Incentivize them to go and “like” your page. Social media is an important distribution network that needs to be completely integrated into every other form of your marketing strategy. Most importantly, do not be discouraged if your page doesn’t get 1000 “likes” overnight; or even in the first month. Posting consistent content, interacting with customers, and providing value outside of trying to sell will organically establish a community of brand advocates for your business over time.

2. Extraordinary Real-Time Customer Service

Channel Customer Relationship Management(CRM) is perhaps the most important part of running a business. Your customers are the heart and soul of the company because in reality they are the ones buying your products/services and paying the bills. Simply having an awesome product isn’t going to cut it. You need a way to provide customer service in a timely and effective manner. Customers are going to have questions and problems that they are looking to solve immediately.

Facebook is a perfect tool for businesses to answer the questions and solve certain problems their customers may have in real time. When a customer has a problem with your product or service they usually will turn to social media to vent their problems on your wall and to their friends. If these questions or problems are left unanswered you are potentially losing that customer and all of their friends. Facebook allows you as the business owner to guide the conversation by responding to these questions and problems in a timely manner. Facebook is about building and managing relationships with customers through an environment driven by two-way dialogue. Actively engaging your customers on Facebook can transform a bad customer experience into a positive brand advocate for your company.

3. PR Channel

Facebook is a great channel to spread news and content about your business and industry to the public and the press. It is also a great hub to manage public relations in a crisis control situation. Public relations and Facebook go well together because Facebook is a public platform and the core of PR is the management of communications between an organization and the public. Billions of conversations occur on Facebook every single week. Specifically, both positive and negative conversations about businesses occur everyday; whether or not that business even has an actual “Page.”

The only way to spread positive press and manage negative press on Facebook is to actually have a presence online. This is especially important in the instance where negative press goes “viral.” Negative press is always the first to go viral and it can become viral almost instantly on Facebook and other forms of social media. If a certain business doesn’t have a presence on Facebook to respond to the news they will have no way to control the outcome of the situation. Managing PR on Facebook is all about a timely response. Business owners are often afraid to create a presence on Facebook because they are afraid of negative press, posts, or comments. What they should be afraid of is not being able to control the conversations about their business on Facebook because they don’t even have a Facebook “Page.”

4. Converting Paid Media to Earned Media

The difference between paid media and earned media is quite simple. Paid media is any form of advertising that you as the business owner pay for. Earned media is any form of advertising that happens organically. A business’s Facebook “Page” can use both paid and earned media to market themselves. In order to be effective with Facebook, a business must use a combination of both paid and earned media in order to reap the highest potential out of the platform.

Facebook uses an algorithm known as EdgeRank. EdgeRank is the deciding factor as to where your content goes, and to whom it reaches. It was developed by Facebook to limit the amount of spam found in its user’s newsfeeds. It also allows Facebook to utilize its advertising (paid media) platform and be profitable. Facebook has forms of advertising called “Promoted Posts” & “Sponsored Stories” where you as the business owner can choose to promote content to reach a greater target audience. Essentially the more money you pay, the greater the amount of people that will see your content. So why is it worth it to pay all this money for a platform that is free to sign up? That answer is simple. Conversions. When you as the business owner pay to play Facebook’s game, you gain more traction online because your content is reaching more people’s eyes.

Through Facebook’s advertising(paid media) your content is reaching more of your current audience and also new potential customers who may not currently “like” your page. This is extremely important because over 80% of posts are seen through the newsfeed alone. Most of your current fans won’t even return to your actual “Page” to see your posts, so you must rely on that content being seen in the actual newsfeed. The only fans that will return to your actual Facebook “Page” will be your brand advocates. These brand advocates along with fans who organically view your content are the true “earned media” on Facebook. Brand advocates are the earned media of Facebook because they seek out your specific content and are likely to share it among their friends. The most effective way of creating brand advocates is converting the audience that you are paying to reach organic viewers of your content. If the audience you reach finds value in your content they will actively seek you out for more.

Tagged in facebook social media social internet technology marketing brand paid media media earned media PR.

Facebook Ads and Promoted Posts are two of Facebook’s advertising tools that many marketers confuse or group together as “Facebook ads.” Although the true reason behind the confusion is unknown, for one reason or another marketers find it difficult to understand the difference between these two separate advertising features on Facebook. Often times the varying terminology can be difficult to understand based on which type of ad is more beneficial for marketing objectives.

Facebook Ads are well, ads. Based on the objectives of the advertiser, they can specifically target customized ads to various demographics. Some targeting demographics include interests, education, location, age, gender and work. From the beginning Facebook’s traditional ad model has always had problems. The extremely low CTR (click through rate) led many marketers to believe the value wasn’t in ads, but in content and creating a conversation around the brand. The problem that many traditional marketers fail to understand is that people don’t go on Facebook to be bombarded with ads, they log on to be social with their family, friends, and favorite brands.

Promoted Posts begin as organic content, or earned media. Promoted Posts push content that is typically more relevant and interesting to a user than an ad. Sponsoring a story simply increases the reach of the specific post beyond the reach of the brand’s Facebook Page community and into a targeted market of users. Through the use of “Promoted Posts” businesses can pay for their posts to show up more often and on more News Feeds. This allows for more people to see their post, opens the door for more engagement, and increases the reach of the content beyond the brand’s Facebook community. We’ve put together a visual description of the different types of Promoted Posts on Facebook and how they work below.

Tagged in facebook ads facebook sponsored story promoted post advertising marketing social media social media marketing.

As a social media marketing agency one of the biggest things we focus on communicating to new clients is that social media is not about hardline sales. Many of our clients come from different business backgrounds from all over the world and for many it is difficult to correlate money going out with ROI. As business owners they are trying to conduct a constant cost-benefit analysis on social media marketing, but they fail to realize several problems with correlating bottom-line sales and social media marketing.

1. Marketing and advertising include integrated multi-channel strategies.

Social media is not the be-all-end-all marketing medium; it is one tactic in an overall integrated marketing strategy. A brand’s social strategy, email campaigns, print campaigns, Google Adwords, blog posts, and any other form of marketing should all be interconnected and seamless. If your strategy is properly intertwined you should be able to point back to the overall marketing campaign as the reason for an increase in sales or brand awareness. Placing all of the pressure for a sale on one marketing medium is a mistake far too many business owners make. Whether it’s with social media or any other marketing medium, you shouldn’t place all of your eggs in one basket.

2. Marketing and advertising are long-term, not instant.

As with any form of marketing and advertising, social media marketing should be viewed through a macro lens and judged from a long-term standpoint. Traditional ad agencies create campaigns that typically last a minimum of three months, however I would argue that a proper social media strategy requires at least six months of data in order to make any concrete decisions about the value of the current strategy. Many clients are expecting instantaneous results of varying measurements. Some expect immediate sales while others expect to receive 1,000 Facebook likes overnight. Many agencies choose to conduct what I would call “black hat” social media strategies such as buying likes for a low price in order to inflate the appearance of the brand’s online community. The problem with this is two-fold: first this “community” (if you can call it that) is comprised of fake accounts with “users” who will not engage, interact, or see your brand’s message and secondly, Facebook recently cracked down on this fraudulent activity by removing the fake likes from brand pages. These likes provide no value to the business and anyone with a bit of common sense can see that no one is interacting with the brand’s content. At Kuhcoon we create real communities of people who are actually interested in our client’s product or service. This doesn’t happen overnight, but rather organically overtime with a consistent content strategy and targeted ad campaigns. 

3. Users are not on social media to be sold.

Nobody logs on to Facebook and says “what can I be sold today?” People are on social media to interact with friends and family, receive real time news and updates, and to be entertained and educated by brands they love. In order to foster a thriving community, brands need to provide some sort of concrete value to their customers or users through their social media accounts. Chances are if the user connected with your brand on social media they already know what product or service you have to offer. They are more interested in what value you are going to provide them outside of a hard sale. At Kuhcoon we use a combination of our proprietary technology and strategies to help brands stand out in the noisy feeds of social media users. Our agency provides our client’s communities with educational value, entertainment, exclusive deals and coupons, direct feedback or input on new products or services, insight into the culture of the company, data-driven content, optimized ad campaign scheduling, and a two-way window of transparency placing customer service as a top priority.

4. Social media marketing and advertising are about building brand equity.  

For many brands social media offers a clean slate to begin fostering a new community of brand advocates and long-term customers. For the first time social media has placed every business on an equal playing field, forcing businesses with years of built of reputation to start from scratch and build up a customer base on various social media platforms. When a business starts a social strategy they should think back to when they started their business: they had to build their reputation and customer base one by one over a period of several months or years. Building a social media community is no different; your business needs to build up the brand reputation and community overtime; not overnight. At this stage in the social media revolution, business owners recognize the need to be active on various social media platforms; but often lack the understanding, time, and money necessary to execute a strategic plan revolved around building the digital version of their brand.

So what is the point of social media marketing?

Social media has forever changed the way we communicate and conduct business. Facebook has over one billion users, whether the social network king stays on top is up for debate; but it’s pretty safe to say social media won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. According to BIA/Kelsey the local spending on social media was valued at about $3.8 billion in 2011. By 2016 this spending is going to reach $9.8 billion as local business owners knowledge and understanding of social media increases.

The value social media provides to a business is very dynamic. It goes beyond the basic sales cycle and delves into the complex relationship between a customer and a brand. It serves as a platform where current relationships with customers can be nurtured and new relationships can be formed. Traditional advertising is the marketing medium that creates awareness for a brand, whereas social media takes the customers that are already aware and molds them into loyal brand advocates. Customer retention is important to any business and social media provides the medium for a two way street of interaction, value, and superior customer service. The business must interact and provide external value outside of the “sale” itself. Social media is about humanizing your business, building relationships, and creating a conversation around your brand with loyal brand advocates. 

Tagged in social media marketing advertising sales business community management community managers customers relationships.