Yesterday, I suggested the return on traditional markets levels off and becomes predictable, whereas the return on social media markets is fickle because people are fickle. Both markets require people, and since people are fickle there are margins of changeability within the predictability of both markets. However, there is more room for changeability within the predictability of social media markets because there is a lower threshold to cross and commitment to keep.
If a company wants to go public and enter the market, they must cross financial and even legal thresholds. A person can’t just open Joe’s Garage on Monday and go public on Wednesday. People also have a financial threshold to cross in order to become shareholders. Companies and people who want to take their social media public have a much lower threshold to cross.
As with traditional markets, those who play the social media market must observe social patterns and adjust their social media marketing efforts according to those social patterns. Those similar social patterns within one’s audience determine the common denominator of one’s audience that should be the focus of one’s social media marketing plan.
Rules of playing the social media market:
- Engage your audience. Three Rules of Social Media Marketing.
- Not all social media has longevity. My blog on FourSquare.
- Not all social media is for everyone. Don’t use Twitter just because everyone else is.
- Don’t follow people just because they follow you.
- The best social media marketing is niche social media marketing.
- Sites like Facebook and Twitter are good for finding your audience and determining how to engage them best.
- The best social media marketing is followed up by meeting your most devoted Facebook friends and Twitter followers in person.
- Unless your famous, start out with a regular Facebook profile. Don’t expect people to want to become your fan when they don’t know who you are.
- Develop a social media marketing plan.
- Include social media monitoring in your social media marketing plan.
Speaking of social media monitoring, here are three more sites for you to check out.
- An open-source social media monitoring platform that offers free and reasonably priced services
- You can add a SociafyQ widget to your desktop or iGoogle account
- You can choose which social networking sites you want SociafyQ to track
I cannot locate any videos for SociafyQ
- Monitor Twitter tag clouds and top tags
- Monitor keywords on Twitter, Facebook (public) status updates, blogs, Flickr, Youtube, news, and Google Buzz.
- Monitor key Twitter metrics, including number of followers, retweets, and mentions.
No videos for Actionly either
- Identify your advocates, critics, and opinion leaders
- Research reports analyze the whys and how of traffic spikes, sentiment trends, brand engagement, customer loyalty, and more
- Monitor global and U.S. Tweet distribution
Thanks to everyone for reading my series on social media monitoring. Come by tomorrow for a special ‘This week in social media monitoring.’
Stay social,
Erick
