Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have a huge influence on consumers. Studies are being done every day showing that traditional advertising just doesn’t cut it anymore. Corporations are learning to think out of the box to keep up with the next generation of consumers, and social media creates a wonderful opportunity for potential customers.

Social Media Influence

• Being earnest, or sincere, in your efforts to provide content to your customers is perhaps your most important task. Until recent years, your “content” was advertisements, flyers, coupons and other promotional materials. Outstanding content today requires a new mindset and intent. You’re not selling your customers with your content, be it that from a blog, an email newsletter or a posting on a social network, but instead you are providing them with value. – Social Media Today

• 91% says consumer content is #1 aid to a buying decision
• 87% trust a friend’s recommendation over a critic review
• Social network users are 3 times more likely to trust peer opinions over advertising
• 1 word-of-mouth conversation has the impact of 200 tv commercials
• 28% of Christmas shoppers in 2009 said social media influenced their buying decisions (13% of that influence came from blogs)

Being earnest, or sincere, in your efforts to provide content to you customers is perhaps your most important task. Until recent years, your “content” was advertisements, flyers, coupons and other promotional materials. Outstanding content today requires a new mindset and intent. You’re not selling your customers with your content, be it that from a blog, an email newsletter or a posting on a social network, but instead you are providing them with value.

 – Social Media Today

Just over a year ago (which shows you how quickly this has become a big marketing tool), I had a conversation with a client about getting some quality content on their website. I told her that she needed to put content that provides information of value on her website, and if that means including links to other helpful sites or ‘how-to’s’ so that visitors can learn how to do certain things, then that’s what had to be done. In order to gain trust, gain traffic, and gain conversions and customers, you have to give them something to get something in return.

Needless to say, she hated the idea and didn’t want to give away any ‘free’ information. Everything that was of value on her site had to be paid for, and it hurt her in the long run. This is not the way to market your site. Banners, advertisements, and sales chatter is probably one of the worst things that you can do for your site.

Sure, on your landing page or home page you can run your sales pitch, but you have also got to provide content of value to your clients. Just a few months ago I was working for a debt settlement company, helping them to market their websites. It was all sales, all advertising, and all boring chatter. It meant nothing to the visitors because they could get nothing out of it.

Through experience, I found that the sites that brought in the most traffic, and thus the most potential for customer conversions, were the ones that provided the most value. The sites with a blog or frequent content updates that helped visitors find questions to their answers got the most hits. The sites that provided value and information on debt issues brought in the most visitors, and it’s all about the numbers. The more visitors you have, the more possibilities you have for customer conversions.

Gone are the days of advertising chatter on your website. You will no longer get the traffic and conversions that you want if you only try to ‘sell’ them. These days, blatant advertising doesn’t work. You need referrals, branding on social media, and you need to provide something to get something. By providing information of value, you will get conversions in return.

Internet marketing was once about registering your sites with the big three, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. That was it. Then you’d do a little on-site optimization and work out a few relationships with some affiliate sites, and you were golden. Or so, at least that’s what they say. I’m not really speaking from experience. In those days I was still writing the great American novel and getting through school.

Today, internet marketing has many forms, and with the every changing economy and business landscape, so has web marketing changed. There’s a lot more that goes into it besides registering your site. Today, you have link marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and many others. My favorite; content marketing.

Here’s the deal. This is where you, as a small business owner, has to make a decision. Do you pay the big SEO companies, the ones who make all those promises to get you to the top of Google for just a couple thousand a month, or do you turn to the little guy who could very well be your neighbor. In this economy, with our tight marketing budgets, I would go with the latter.

It’s not always about who is the most expensive and who promises the big results. I recently had a client tell me that he had heard it all from the big SEO companies. He heard all of the promises and shelled out all of the money, and saw nothing from it. Well, I told him that I don’t make promises. I do the work, I have the passion and the drive, and I work with the budget that you have. Within two months we’ve gotten his site to the second page of Google, and are very close to breaching page number one.

My point here is this; times are tough right now for everyone. Big and small businesses are struggling. What I can offer you is a different approach to marketing your business. I’m a writer. I write blogs, press releases, and articles to spread around your brand. I hit people up on Twitter and Facebook occasionally and direct them to your website. I work the language of the internet, feel out the trends and what people are talking about, and attract them with curiosity to check out what you have to offer.

I do this in two ways. The first is by working your website to the top with a lot of fresh content and SEO techniques. The second is to work the traffic to your site first, then worry about getting your page to the top second. Option number two is all about the blogs, and getting traffic to read the blogs. The more traffic hits the blogs, the more possibilities you have to get customers. Each visitor that reads a blog is a potential customer.

The economy is changing, and maybe your marketing ideas should be changing too.

Businesses of all sizes should get involved with Facebook and Twitter for the simple purpose of customer service. While MySpace has sold out and is falling swiftly off a cliff, Facebook and Twitter are still growing by leaps and bounds, which means your customers are probably on at least one of these networks. If your customers are on them, then you should be too.

Big businesses should integrate social media into their marketing to stay fresh and act like a small business by communicating with their customers. Small businesses should integrate social media to keep their customers happy and informed.

Big Businesses and Social Media

In my personal opinion, big businesses tend to get boring after a while. They shut-off connections with the real world, block the websites that keep their marketers informed of what’s trending online, and drain employees with small offices and bad lighting. If you’re a big business that has thick protections against any sort of social media while at work, you’re probably only doing yourself harm.

Twitter and Facebook allows for big businesses to be fresh and current with what their customers want. Sure, marketers take stats and polls and understand their customers in many ways, but understanding your customers on a social level adds another layer to your marketing plan. And what’s wrong with knowing your customers better.

Many big businesses, like Starbucks and Hewlett Packard, use Twitter efficiently to communicate with their customers. These are big businesses who know how to market to their customers. They offer specials, news, and interaction focused on customer satisfaction.

Small Businesses and Social Media

Small businesses tend to communicate with their customers better than big businesses, simply because they see them more on a face-to-face basis. That doesn’t mean social media isn’t for you. By having a Facebook and Twitter profile, you are only stretching your reach to your customers. Offer specials, discounts, promotions, and company updates to keep your customers involved and informed.

When you send out newsletters or update your blog, invite your customers to continue the conversation on Twitter or Facebook. The more that you can get people to talk, the more your company will grow. Conversation on social networks is the key to spreading your brand like wildfire, and all you have to do is get people talking.

There is not one good reason to not have a social media marketing plan. Whether you’re a big business trying to connect and understand your customers, or a small business looking to simply ‘keep in touch,’ Facebook and Twitter are the best ways to do this. You need to always be thinking of what will take a conversation to the next level, and what will spark your customers’ interests. Record what works and what doesn’t, rinse and repeat.

Remember, ROI is not always measured in initial traffic to your website, but the amount of influence you have throughout social media and the impressions that you make on your customers. If you can keep them happy by offering information and promotions to only your friends on Facebook and Twitter, you will make them feel like VIP’s and create wonderful relationships.

Getting accurate and conclusive statistics regarding Facebook pageviews, Twitter clickthroughs, or simple blog visits is tougher than you might think. Sure, you can enlist Google Analytics, try bit.ly or su.pr, attempt PostRank, or jump on TweetStats, but if you were to compare all of those numbers to each other, they will never add up.

If your Twitter shortener (the platform that you use to shorten your links for Twitter’s 140 characters) says that you received 115 clicks from a certain link, your Google Analytics will no-doubt show far less than that for the amount of people that actually viewed the page. Sounds confusing, right? Here’s the visual.

See what I mean. I used to use bit.ly for my Twitter shortener, until the numbers really went haywire and didn’t match in the slightest to what the other analytics stats were saying. So, I did some research and decided to give su.pr a try. Su.pr is owned and operated by StumbleUpon, which gives your blog post an added boost. When you shorten the link, su.pr will automatically post it to StumbleUpon. I also heard that su.pr is more accurate than bit.ly because it weeds out the bots. But, as you can see from the visual above, it’s still hard to tell exactly which numbers are correct.

So, in some more research for accurate social media statistics I heard about PostRank, a brand new analytics program that combines Google Analytics with social tools like Twitter. It takes the numbers from Google Analytics, and from my  understanding, compares those numbers with the amount of interaction that happened on Twitter concurrent to a specific blog post. Than it takes the blog visits, combined with the Twitter conversations, and creates a interaction score.

Pretty sweet sounding, right? Well, after getting truly excited about something that might actually be accurate, I decided to give it a few weeks. As you can see below, it’s still not entirely accurate. Not only are the followers numbers off, the numbers pulled over from Google Analytics don’t always match up, nor does the amount of Twitter conversations or the social bookmarking stats.

I give PostRank a lot of credit, however, for attempting such a feat. Being able to accurately track social media numbers is incredibly crucial in this field, and finding a system that works will probably make millions for the creator. I’m still waiting for that day.

Until then, I simply use a variety of analytics including Google and su.pr. I continue to switch it up every couple of months to try and find the most accurate program, every time wishing that the perfect social analytics tool is out there. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

Update: As I was going through my feeds this morning, I came across an article from Social Media Today regarding this exact subject. This is the section that I found most interesting:

Unlike traditional forms of gathering consumer insight, online tools are often cheaper, based on much larger sample sizes, and are quicker to deliver results.  For the past few years the value of search engine marketing (SEM) are measured largely by ad impressions, page views and click through rates.  However, as internet users are more willing to input additional data online, companies are now looking to measure key metrics of engagement on a person-level.

According to a recent comScore and Starcom USA’s study on how U.S. Internet users click on display ads, “Only 8% of internet users now account for 85% of all clicks… The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact.”

That’s just one of the examples that web analytics can be misleading.  It will continue to be challenging for marketers to abstract reliable data as social media adds another pile of data to the media measurement mix.  The future trend to measure more accurately will be to combine technical web analytics (server logs) with a sampling of user surveys (opt-in by visitors) that visits the site.  Although there will be sampling errors, it certainly beats making assumptions that doesn’t reflect real user behaviors.