Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

“Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.” Bette Davis

The basic recipe for marketing your business with social media tools goes a little something like this:

1. Setup a blog.

2. Open a Twitter account.

3. Setup a Facebook Fan Page.

4. Publish content on your blog (A lot of it!).

5. Tweet interesting stuff (including your blog content).

6. Engage in conversation with people on Twitter.

7. Retweet stuff posted by other people so that they in turn might RT you back.

8. Comment on blogs

9. …

10…

I’m all for simplicity and these ideas are worthy of being in a Social Media Marketing for Dummies book but you don’t really need that because there loads of blogs out there spreading this gospel. Problem is they’re all best practices now, so how do you differentiate?

By starting to uncover some insights into your audience’s online behavior like where they hang out, what they do there, how much time they spend there, who they talk to, what they talk about, where will they jump to next and then asking ‘WHY’.

So what’s the first step in social media marketing then? Listening.

Listen and then talk

Listening is not the same as hearing. We all like the sound of our own voice and it often stands in the way of understanding the person we’re talking to (your customers). If we really want to understand people we have to pay attention to what they say and do and once we do that we’ll stand a better chance of influencing their behavior. Nothing new with this statement, repeated often but rarely practiced as I repeat again we like the sound of our own voice.

You need to give a damn about what people have to say to do social media properly and only deep empathy translates into insight.

You need social monitoring tools

If you aren’t familiar with social monitoring tools, here are 26 social listening tools to add to your arsenal, here’s a full presentation. There are both free and paid tools but most of what you need to get started is already on your website in the form of comments, analytic stats, RT’s, Twitter trackbacks, newsletter stats. These will provide you with some good data and information before you move on to the external tools.

I like to say that every business should strive to know their customers better than they know themselves, this takes a lot more effort and goes way beyond the ‘I want them to buy my product and shut up’ mindset most traditional businesses have. Luckily social media tools let us have a 1 to 1 conversation with customers and enables us to get under their skin to uncover those hidden insights that might just give us a new idea for a new service or product.