Open For Business! Are You Ready?
Photo: Symlinked
Opening for business or expanding into a new location takes loads or work and planning; certainly not a venture that a wise business owner would tread into without proof points. Before the location is selected, neon sign ordered and the store is merchandised you started with a plan to validate against. You invested time and resources to the proper planning to understand location, demographics and market habits of your customers. Did you do the same for your social media brand sites?
It is true that you could turn on your brand in many social media communities in minutes, a few days if you take your time but how do you know if you are in the right place for your brand? Social media communities are the home of friends, conversations and facilitated by technology to facilitate the amplification of both. How do you take the same care to launch your brand in the social world like you have taken in the real world?
Location planning
Choosing the social community that best serves your brand offers many choices. Your criteria should start with alignment of your communications objectives. Are you establishing your social media brand site for sales or service? Employee retention or recruitment? Market research or competitive intelligence? When you hone in on your purpose – well there is a community for that.
The Social Media Prism is a great place to start. This visualization of the many categories your brand could or should have a home are offered to help align the tools and destinations that help sort through the blur of familiar or unfamiliar social media options.
Getting to know your customer in the community
Your defined objective along with short list of social sites now need to be pared with the behaviors of your customers. Considering a video-sharing site like YouTube to improve customer service? Need to be in a micro-community to reach your customers in real-time to alert them about your freshly baked pies? Follow these three steps to help validate your social hunch.
- Listening in your potentially new social neighborhoods is a great first step. Listening for the use of your brand name or service within the social communities of consideration will help understand if you are in alignment. Certainly keyword searches and general search engines will inform you about the historical archive of your brand on your target community. An additive approach should be considered leverage the very verbose Twitter community to gain insight about the conversations, shared destinations and categories of content about your brand. A great free service ChatterBox can be a great place to start. With this collaborative tool you can start your process of mining the vast amount of “real-time” data and compare to the search data on your target sites. The alignment of these sources will help to understand if you are near or far form the prize.
- Studying the behaviors of your customer is your second layer of understanding. Like observing foot traffic or commute patterns of your customers to understand when and where they engage, these behavioral studies are keenly collected in this exceptional free reference by Forrester. Forrester’s Social Technographics classifies consumers into indexed levels of participation of online behaviors to help you understand the engaged activities of your target segment.
- Study the traffic and demographics of your short list of sites. The audience insights service Quantcast offers a neatly packed web based free report to help you qualify your target sites and understand your audience. Additionally, the advertising planning tools of Google Ad Planner or Facebook Advertising are great ways to understand the frequency and geography of your target consumer. These and many more reference tools help to align your expectations of reaching your audience – no ad buy required.
Are you ready?
Armed with your newly validated knowledge of where to set up your socially connected shop you can now prepare to launch your new social profile. Preparing for this new grand opening now that you have determined the location is very exciting. Certainly driving this excitement is the cost of reaching your customer! Are you staffed to meet the needs of your socially connected customers in your newly opened location? Next up is a guide to your resource plan for engaging and measuring your results of your new social media brand site.