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SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media & Social Networking Strategy

Social media sites have dramatically changed the way consumers communicate online. Social networking websites have provided more innovative ways for marketers to communicate online with their customers, fans, campaigners. Being involved in social networking from a business point of view can help you learn from the wisdom of the crowds, gain support, find out if people are talking about you and talk back. It is important for companies to take note of social communities as more and more consumers now look to their peers to help them make online decisions.

Industry trends predict that the usage of social networks will surge even further in the next three years with more than ½ of the online population using networks. Nielson Online indicated that social networking has overtaken email in popularity – an indication to marketers that if they are not yet already on the bandwagon, then they need to jump on board.

Rocktime’s Flashlight team have identified that the main benefits of setting social media/networking strategy are targeted opportunities, hierarchy flattening, low cost information sharing, increased customer engagement, online brand reputation monitoring and increased communication with key influencers.

Social media websites and social media technologies can provide you and your business with tremendous opportunities for your organisation, campaign, group: the most notable being increased customer engagement by sending out emotive replies (in comparison to non emotive replies).

A few ways on how you can engage your audience further and how Rocktime can help are listed below:

Also you may want to read our "seasonal blog post" for Valentines Day, explaining how Social Media is like dating, read our blog post here.

Engaging your audience:

We create and produce targeted campaigns, pages, utilities and applications on social networks to enable brands to use the social web to build better relationships with their customers. We can create bespoke bespoke communication tools on the clients site and also help our clients measure the impact of being out there. There are several ways in which Rocktime can help you engage your audience, we have listed a few of these below, click the header to find out more.

Gain presence on social networks

The vast majority of our E-commerce clients use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as a customer service tool (to react to custom enquiries) and feedback tool. Rocktime can help determine your social strategy to move into these networks, (talk to us about our: Social Media Tool Kit), and also help you analyse the data you receive from social networking using our Social Media Monitoring Tool.

Creation of a corporate or brand Blog / Compelling copy people want to share

UK consumers use information from blogs to help influence their purchase decisions. This behaviour is increasing as more blog posts are referenced within search engine result pages and bloggers themselves receive more press coverage in national media. You can encourage sharing of your blog post by writing the blog, with an enthusiastic approach; creating compelling/interesting copy; using RSS feed technology and including sharing icons to social media sites and news aggregator sites like Digg and Reddit. The sharing technologies help spread word of mouth/web of the blog post, plus they increase relevant links to your blog/site can also help increase your rankings in the search result pages (Search Engine Optimisation).

Stat: Over the last 3 years UK Internet traffic to the Blogs and Personal Websites category has increased by 208%, compared to 70% for News and Media (E-consultancy, Internet Stats Compendium, Jan 2010)

User Generated Content on your site / Ratings and Reviews

For E-commerce sites the main reason for adding customer reviews is to provide customers with the ability to shape the brand/service/product; enhance the customer experience; increase customer loyalty and most importantly drive sales.

For examples of user generated content, ratings and reviews and Wiki’s talk to Sales.

Stat: More than half of UK online customers say reviews are extremely or very important in making an online purchase, and more than ½ say that they have more trust and respect for brands that show product reviews, (Source: Bazaarvoice/Vizu Research, 2007) this trend continues as it was recently identified that 84% of consumers surveyed by Brand Reputation said they are more likely to look for online product reviews than they were just a year ago. [Source: Brand Reputation via Econsultancy Blog, October 2009]

Creation Bespoke communities

A number of our clients with a clear target market and large enough consumer base, understand the importance of building an online community to further increase brand engagement; enhance loyalty; to learn from others and above all have fun with their loyal fans.

Rocktime have devised a "Community Portal", which has all the features of a standard forum, enabling you to talk, network, listen and participate. As the community portal it is built by Rocktime is has the ability to be enhanced as social trends develop.

To view case studies talk to Sales.

Onsite Video Portals

To increase reach in search results and to increase site visitor engagement we have advised a number of our clients to add video content to their sites, either creating their own videos or using video sharing sites. Rocktime have designed a video portal template, which you can use on your site which includes videos, share options and call to action buttons, talk to Sales for more details.

Stats: UK Internet traffic to video sites rose by 178% year on year in Feb 08, (Source: eMarketer, April 08)
By 2013, the sum of all forms of video (TV,VoD, internet video, and P2P) will exceed 90% of global consumer IP traffic, (Source: Cisco, June 2009)

Widget development, Applications & RSS technology

The use of bespoke widgets, applications and sharing technologies is increasing, providing ability to post items from a site directly to a social network, share your content one to many or one to one.

To view case studies talk to Sales.

To find out more on how you can incorporate social media and social networking tools into your marketing plans talk to the Flashlight team.

We are working with internal PR teams and external PR agencies with the above social media strategy formula, find out more how our roles interlink at the attached PDFs

How we align our social media strategies with PR agencies and Internal PR teams
How we align our social media strategies with Content Providers

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Social Media Tool Kit

Find out how Rocktime can help you understand more about your social landscape and how through collaborative working we can help you define your social media strategies.

Find out more

Social Media Monitoring Tool

Talk to sales about our latest development