Social media is all around us and social media methods of communication allow us to connect with each other in ways that were never before possible. Usage of these methods is increasing dramatically, allowing new and more efficient styles of communication between people, businesses and other types of organizations. This informative video provides a brief overview of the history of social media and the different types of social media that are being used today.
By paying attention and listening to the information that is surrounding us from our life of daily interaction and contact, we find ways to communicate through social media. This book will show you how to use social media to communicate with your future, current and potential customers so as to keep them up-to-date with products, services and latest announcements regarding business updates.
Marketing is often divided into three types of communication: One-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. To a great extent, these have evolved in sequence, changing as communications technology evolved. But that doesn’t mean that we have arrived at a single best solution.
Charting the Past and Present
At one time, most marketing consisted primarily of one-to-one communication: Traveling sales representatives made the case for their product on a one-to-one and door-to-door basis. One brand of beauty products was so well known for exploiting this sales channel that the medium itself became the basis of a marketing slogan: “Avon calling!”
As mass media evolved, marketing moved into the one-to-many mode with print and later broadcast advertising. New developments in technology allowed marketers to reach millions with a single campaign that involved popular publications along with radio and television advertising and sponsorship. Even the World Wide Web began as a one-to-many medium, in which site owners produced content for a mass audience, but frequently did little to interact with that audience directly.
Now in today’s Internet, many-to-many marketing has come of age. Social networking and viral marketing enlists the assistance of customers and other contacts to spread the word in ways that one-to-many marketing never could.
Media for many-to-many communication include blogs, wikis, online forums, file sharing (including photo, podcast, and video sharing sites), as well as the usual Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn networks. Although word-of-mouth marketing has been around since the beginning, the web has expanded that power exponentially.
Reversing Evolution
Today, you can still find marketers debating the relative merits of one-to-one vs. one-to-many vs. many-to-many marketing. But the reality is that marketers can’t afford to favor one mode over another. Instead, the savvy marketer will exploit all three, working backward on the evolutionary scale starting with a many-to-many campaign and ultimately ending with one on one.
To understand how this approach would work, consider a common case, that of a webinar to promote your service or product.
- Phase 1: Many-to-many. Start by promoting the webinar on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You might also want to post a promo on YouTube and promote it in a relevant blog. To maximize efficiency, use tools that let you automate some of these processes such as scheduling Twitter posts and post on multiple networks at once.
- Phase 2: One-to-many. While many-to-many communication spreads the word about your webinar, the webinar itself uses the older one-to-many mode with the speaker addressing whatever audience you’ve been able to muster. Afterward, report on the webinar on your website. Post it on YouTube and related sites. Follow up with a newsletter to your contact database, recapping webinar highlights and reinforcing its message. In all cases, of course, you include links back to the related page on your own site.
- Phase 3: One to one. Reach out to individual attendees. Send them a personalized email. Schedule a follow up meeting or demo with a sales representative. Take time to meet new prospects face to face. And continue to nurture longtime customers to ensure their continued loyalty. One-to-one marketing doesn’t mean each contact has to be a one-off. But the more you can customize your message for individual contacts, the more they will feel your personal touch.
5 Tips for Using the Right Communication Method
Savvy marketers use all three modes of communication. But how do you know the right time and the best way to use each? Here are five tips to get you started:
- Align communication mode with purchase stage. To achieve maximum success, align the communication mode with the stage of the prospect in the purchase. For example, prospects in the early stages of the cycle are less likely to respond favorably to one-to-one communication, while prospects in later stages of the purchase cycle will more likely require that personal touch.
- Align communication mode with channel, tactics. Not all communication methods are appropriate for every channel and marketing tactic. For example, although you can certainly call each of your leads to personally invite them to a webinar (one-to-one communication), an ad on your site or a mass email (one-to-many communication) would be much more effective and smart. On the other hand, some channels allow for multiple communication methods, and you should be leveraging all of them. Example: Use Twitter to reach the masses (one-to-many and many-to-many) but also DM specific users (one-to-one communication) when appropriate. Choose the mode of communication on these channels that will most efficiently achieve your goal.
- Align communication mode with goals. As a rule of thumb, one-to-many is best for generating awareness and building your brand, many-to-many is for word-of-mouth and building reputation through referrals, and one-to-one is for driving purchase decision and eliciting action.
- Let the prospect choose. In many cases, you can and should offer all three modes and let the prospects decide which one suits them. For example, you might post and promote an engaging YouTube video that includes a number to call for one-on-one details. When you make all three modes available, prospects will use the ones that suit their personality, taste and stage in the purchase cycle.
- Use tools that make one-to-many look and feel like one-to-one. Personalized emails are already a mainstream tactic used by most marketers, but the development of marketing automation tools in the last few years let you do more than just put the first name of the prospect in the email. Use visitor and lead intelligence tools to tailor the messages you communicate based on the prospects’ profile and behavior. Use re-targeting services to stay top of mind even when prospect leave your site. Use Facebook insights and Twitter’s promoted products platform to leverage many-to-many methods in the most personalized way possible.
Social media communications direction flow
Social media communications flow between participants and organizations such as businesses and brands occurs in one of three directions.
1. One-to-many
This is the traditional marketing broadcast model. Use it to get your message to the largest possible audience.
One-to-many social media communications may require additional paid advertising support.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Use hashtags to attract a broader audience. This aids findability when you use keywords.
- Mention others in your comments. Only do this if you’ve explicitly mentioned the people in your content or they’ve expressed an interest in it. Don’t do this just to get the attention of an influencer.
- Build relationships with influencers. When they comment or share your content, it reaches a larger audience. This has the added benefit of their endorsement.
2. One-to-one
This is the prime form of personal interactions. It’s a great way to reach out to people you already know. You can use this to contact people with whom you want to engage. But understand that you must be willing to provide value to the person with whom you’re seeking to connect.
Additionally, marketers can send targeted messages to answer inquiries and customer service questions.
BTW, Don Pepper and Martha Rogers popularized this concept in The One to One Future and Seth Godin took this idea a step further in his book, Permission Marketing.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Use private messaging to engage prospects, customers, fans and influencers. These are hyper-targeted messages. Most social media platforms require you have permission to communicate with individual members of your audience.
- Be available when you first publish your content. Reply to comments and shares to keep the momentum going.
3. Many-to-many
This form of communications is unique to social media. Communications go in multiple directions concurrently among participants.
Unlike other forms of communication, they can happen in real time or lapsed time. Participants respond when they’re interested and/or available.
Most of the activity tends to occur instantaneously, up to a few days or even longer on some platforms such as blogs.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Monitor social media for brand mentions. Reply to people who contact you via social media. Understand that customers’ time expectations are short on social media. They expect you to respond immediately.
5 Key types of social media communications and how to use them
To maximize your marketing efforts, use a mix of the 5 key types of social media communications.
1. Notices or status updates
These are time sensitive, short one-to-many communications. They can be targeted at your connections or more broadly to everyone on a specific social media platform.
Status updates keep your name top of mind with your fans. This can be useful on platforms like Facebook and Google+ where followers are notified via email of your message.
From a marketing and customer service perspective, they’re useful for time sensitive information or to announce promotions.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Add keyword related hashtags to your status updates to broaden your audience. Be consistent with what’s appropriate for each platform.
2. Information distribution
This is a one-to-many method of delivering your content to a broader audience, often by placing it on a variety of social media platforms.
When distributing content, make sure that you’re maximizing your social media distribution by using a checklist.
Add social sharing to distribute information to your readers’ followers.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Tailor your content to the specific social media platform. Understand the different social media nuances to maximize your results.
- Craft attention getting headlines. Don’t assume that your followers read everything you publish.
- Add social media bling. For most platforms this means visual content including photos or video. People are visual beings.
3. Commentary
An individual or a brand representative provides their unique perspective on a piece of content or product. It can be in the form of a social share, like or comments.
Encompassing likes, comments and reviews, commentary provides a conduit for interactions with your connections and other participants more broadly.
Depending on the platform, this form of social media communications can be an influential factor in purchasing. Includes review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor as well as Amazon customer ratings.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Be attentive and responsive on the social media entities where your audience engages. Regardless of whether the information is positive or negative, answer it. You don’t want to show up only when you’re on the defensive responding to negative reviews.
- Don’t feed the trolls. Beware of participants who just want to rant. As Jeff Goins pointed out, spend your time on the people who already love you. In other words reward the people who love you. (It’s the opposite of Jay Baer’s Hug Your Haters.)
4. Discussion
Conversations occur on social media. They’re a form of interaction and engagement.
Their distinguishing factor is that they’re many-to-many since multiple conversations occur at the same time.
They’re exemplified by Twitter Chats, LinkedIn Groups, blog comments and forums.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Participate and respond to participants who mention and contact you. Show you’re paying attention and care.
- Target your interactions by letting followers know where the conversation is. Copyblogger did this by closing their comments and their Facebook page. The conversation occurs on Google+.
5. Messages
This is what is we conventionally consider communications. It’s information that’s timely and more in-depth.
Messages are one-to-many or one-to-one. They provide information the recipient wants and, often, actively seeks. The more targeted the communication, the better.
Don’t forget that email is still the king of social media.
Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Respond promptly to social media messages. Otherwise followers think no one is home.
- Provide recipients with a reason to respond. Give them the “What’s In It For Me.” Remember social media is about your audience’s needs not yours.
Target your messages based on platform and type of communication in order to maximize the effectiveness of your social media communications. Make it easy for your customers and influencers to support and share your messages.
And don’t forget to add bling in the form of images and video where appropriate.communication through social media essay
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this report is to inform readers about different social media platforms, the advantages of using these methods, and its implications in general. This report will also explore if these platforms are efficient when used for different facets including communication, collaboration, marketing, and organizing