Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy
A fundamental aspect of marketing is to gain the attention of a target audience and engage or redirect it in a way which fulfills specific objectives, such as a positive increase in reputation, legitimacy, mindshare, exposure (visitor traffic), sales and captured leads (subscribers, users, clients etc).
In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to 'spam', in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.
And then there are a few that adopt a particularly powerful social media marketing strategy that consistently extracts attention with ease. A way that reaches out to every new and future member of a social community automatically with minimal effort. A tactic that markets continuously as long as the social channel exists and grows, without end or interruption.
Introducing the Method
Image Credit: Mick Ø
You might have heard about Dell earning $1 million in revenue from posting product offers on their Twitter account. So they're using Twitter like email, as a sales alert system. Not a big deal really. But they've also recently started posting exclusive 'Twitter-only' discount offers on their Twitter profile (Over 100K followers!). Exclusive to Twitter. Those are the magic words. Exclusive to Myspace users. Exclusive to Bebo users. Exclusives, exclusives.
When a social media channel (like Twitter) becomes large enough, it's time to think about devoting serious attention to leveraging the size and reach of the userbase. Marketing doesn't need to only target the lucky demographic you manage to data-mine and filter out from the online crowd. Sure, its more 'targeted' but why limit yourself to just that? Why not reach everyone and let the interested few fall through the net themselves? Move the masses. Not just the few. No market segmentation needed. No need to selectively pitch and sell.
Exclusive product or service offers for users of a specific social website are only the beginning. There are a lot more ways to deeply tap into and gain the favor of large social communities. But first of all you'll need to understand the mentality of social media users. People will consciously or subconsciously self-identify as members of a particular online social tribe. "I'm a Digg user. I'm a Facebook junkie. I love being a Youtuber."
Put aside your demographic notions of gender, age and location for a moment. People are more than all that when they are online. They create identities, behavioral patterns and personas based on the community they most frequently use. This constructed online identity is a proxy that can be used to not only engage these users but develop a favorable impression of your brand. Tap into their love or hate for the service and reach from there.
Image Credit: myspace is for losers
A powerful social media marketing strategy is to create a service, tool, system which perfectly complements, faciliates and improves each individual users experience of the specific social website. Think of the features that unite them and the problems that frustrate them. This creation must be almost indispensable and extremely useful to a very broad audience. They must be able to pick it up easily and integrate it into their daily routine.
It must be highly customizable and relevant to the different ways one can participate in the social community. A powerful long-term strategy would be to invest time and money on creating free complementary services for large and growing online social communities. Each new or future user is drawn towards to your tools naturally because they help them to better enjoy the social channel. They will gravitate towards you and pull other users along.
The Twitter Example
I'll use Twitter to illustrate my point again but note that what is said here applies to most social media communities. Twitter is not exceptional in this regard. All large social media communities online operate in a similar manner: they all have devoted users who love ways to improve their experience of the community or service.
Many popular blogs (like Mashable) and other websites have a huge Twitter fetish. Whenever a new and interesting app/service is released, they'll write about it immediately. Twitter users will often tweet and retweet a new app because its relevant or interesting to them. So what's the end result when you create an exceptional tool for Twitter users?
A large influx of traffic and links that'll flow towards your service's webpage, which can easily to funneled to your Twitter profile, other websites and business. The large influx of new users is continually exposed to your brand (indirectly via the service). You're essentially appealing to a guaranteed audience that'll always be there.
If your tool/service appeals to a broad enough market, it'll develop a userbase. Work at it and soon enough it'll grow itself. People will recommend it to friends, new users and the general public even withou any direct incentives from your end. Why? Because it is genuinely helpful. There is minimal trace of self-serving marketing and little effort or cost at your end to continually leverage a community that is all too willing to promote you.
Reaching the Peak of this Marketing Strategy
When someone asks for a good non-mobile way of using Twitter, the names of popular desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl often come up. They are considered essential tools for a better user experience. They are near the peak of our social media marketing strategy.
The pinnacle is reached when your service achieves great recognition and mindshare within the community. At this point you can easily expect an endless flow of user recommendations, backlinks, referral traffic and support from a community interested in evangelizing their favorite social media channel and inadvertently, the value of your brand.
This may even lead to the specific social media channel directly recommending your service as a worthy addon to what they offer. For instance, Twitter is very explicit about what third-party tools it endorses: the Apps page feature Twhirl/Tweetdeck amongst other tools and its one of the first few pages that is pushed to a new user when he/she signs up.
Even if you do not reach this level of achievement for a single service, you can create many diverse services to fulfill different needs. Don't release them all at once. Spread them out and launch over a certain timespan so links and traffic can stream in consistently from blogs that monitor news about the social website. Be sure to interlink and promote your previous tools/services. This is another way of gaining attention and building influence over time.
Alternatively, you can sponsor and fund creative web developers who have a knack for creating addons for the specific social community. You don't always have to build them yourself, you just need to strongly associate them with your brand.
Publicity is Giving Someone a Reason to Talk about You
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Why would a popular tech industry blog like Techcrunch write about an unknown web designer in Toronto? Or a freelance writer in Tokyo? Because these two people did something interesting. Something relevant to Techcrunch's blog and topic focus. Publicity is easy to get when your target is content-hungry publishers in a news cycle that loves novelty.
Many people encounter problems marketing online. You can't get mentioned in a popular blog that sends a lot of visitors. Because you're not relevant. So the solution is simple: make yourself compatible via an action, association or proxy. Build/do something that people in a specific field will talk about. The social media marketing strategy we are talking about is a publicity funnel. It gives you attention you can redirect to grow your core business or brand.
In the long run, you always should aim to build excellent authority services that grab a big chunk of user mindshare but should you fail in that aspect, there are short term advantages to using this marketing strategy. It can be a cyclical tactic to leverage news publishers for free traffic. Build a system, launch and promote. Grow users. Update with new features, send out news alerts. Build another service, launch and promote. Interlink systems, cross-promote. Grow users. Update features. It's a way to get free traffic and links over and over again.
It's kinda like linkbait on a mullet page but this is a lot more effective. You don't just become a flavor of the day on Digg but an actual service with registered users. Attention isn't given to you for the duration of a funny article but everyday when someone returns to re-use your service. Over time, user loyalty can develop into hardcore evangelism.
Monetization Won't Be a Problem When You Command Attention
In general, monetization comes easy if you're willing to work hard to develop your service's reputation and value amongst the community of social media users. Remember Ashley Qualls? She's a 18 year old high school dropout who created a website for Myspace layouts early on.
Most new Myspace users want to customize their layouts so layout providers were in hot demand. Her popular website was widely embraced by the community and it made $70K and more in revenue every month (back in 2007). While Facebook's popularity has eclipsed MySpace, there's still a guaranteed user audience for established providers like Ashley.
There's always a way to make money when you have people flowing into your site on a daily basis via the proxy that you've set up for a particular social media channel. In the end, what you've created is another notch in your resume and can be used in many ways to demonstrate competence or expertise. Apart from monetizing via display ads or premium service plans, you can heavily promote your core business or offer B2B consultancy programs.
But don't spend all your money and time only creating hit-or-miss services. When it comes down to it, a strategy like this must only be an add-on to your core business model or income system. Until it becomes a massive success, never mistake the means for the end.
What Social Media Sites Should You Target?
This particular method works best with very large and well known social media communities because you're relying on their popularity and the size of the userbase to get attention. If you're unfamiliar with what's hot nowadays, the Alexa Top 500 gives a rough listing of the heavily trafficked social media sites both globally and in each country.
Focus on them but always keep an eye on other growing social communities. Read sites that report on new startups and be in the loop for news about specific social sites, especially the ones that appear to be growing fast. The key is to look out for problems faced by users, while enhancing features which are the main draw of the specific social service.
Keep trust-worthy programmers/coders and designers close by so you can materialize ideas as fast as possible. It also helps to be an active user in the specific social media community so you can develop an instinctive understanding of its architecture, usability and possibilities.
Sounds like a Lot of Effort Doesn't it? But it Works.
If you're feeling tired just by reading this article, this tactic is probably not for you. If you're really excited (with wheels turning in your head), you're on the right track to success. There has to be some enthusiasm for you to see this method through. And one last important tip: always build relationships with key influencers, way before you begin to pitch. Trust me, it helps a lot.
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