I proposed in an earlier post that Social Media might just be a waste of time (and money) for small businesses. I challenged readers to show me a study which shows ROI for the effort spent in developing Social Media marketing channels. A few very interesting submissions have been received, but no one has gotten the cigar yet (check out the challenge and win a $500 package of cash and services).
The fact is that the jury is out on this method of marketing, although it is being investigated intensely by many large companies. I expect to see the studies I’m looking for eventually. Meanwhile I have a method for those that want to be sure they cover this territory, but are just not interested in spending 10 hours a week doing it. Or even one hour for that matter. There are actually many ways to achieve social media presence and interaction “lite,” and I am going to show you how to do it the way I do it, in case you’d like to try this.
Broken down simply, what we are going to do is:
- Create Social Media Accounts for our business
- Connect those accounts via email and RSS feeds
- Generate multiple posts/tweets/outbound html emails…all just by sending a single text email.
This may take up to an hour to get started, but then requires only 10-15 minutes per week, or however often you want to publish messages. Let’s get started.
Step One: Open the Accounts
This almost doesn’t need stating, but just in case, please open accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and any other social network site where you think there’s a chance your customers might be spending time. Here in Gold Country, there is a Ning Network called “Gold of the Mother Lode” (GOTML) which some of my clients participate in. It’s a good idea not to use the same passwords in each, but make sure you have a passwords database somewhere on your local machine, you’re going to need it.
Step Two: Prepare to Blog
Launch a blog if you do not have one. The easiest way to do this is to open an account at WordPress.com or Blogger.com and choose one of the stock themes (designs) offered. These tools are very user friendly. If you can put two words together and type them into the fields provided, you can blog.
Next we’re going to setup your blog to post your messages by simply sending an email. Using WordPress as our example, login to your dashboard, click “Settings” in the left column, then click “Writing.” You’ll be shown various ways to get new posts into your blog. Under “Post via Email,” you can enter your email account information to enable the blog to accept your posts automatically. If you can create a new secret email address/account just for this, it’s a good idea, since anyone who knew the address could automatically post to your blog. If you don’t feel like doing that, it’s still pretty easy to copy/paste your words from your favorite word processor or text editing program into the blog program.
In whichever way you prefer create a test post, and publish it..
Step Three: Setup your Social Network Connections
For purposes of this article, we’ll do Facebook and Twitter (which you already have if you followed step one), but this step applies to all social networks. Login to your Facebook account, then check out these “apps” which you can use to plug your blog posts and twitter tweets into your Facebook page automatically: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/presentation.php?ref=st . It does this by taking the RSS feed from your blog page and “syndicating” it to your other pages. The instructions that come with this widget are detailed but you will need to know the address (URL) of your RSS feed for your blog, which is usually found near the little broadcast icon (like the orange one in the illustration above), or in text at the bottom of the page. In the browser Firefox, you can also click the blue broadcast icon that appears in the address bar to see the location of your feed.
Once you install this widget in Facebook, your visitors will see new headlines of your blog articles and be able to click to read the full articles. You can place this widget almost anywhere on your page. Other social networks (like Ning) have a built-in RSS feed publisher and searching “help” files for the keyword “RSS” will likely bring up how to use these tools in other networks.
Next, go to this site: http://twitterfeed.com/ and setup a connection between your Twitter account and your blog. This is a simple 3-click process where you authorize Twitterfeed to access your blog periodically and then post the subject line of your articles as a “tweet.”
Step Four: Test What You’ve Built
Your first test blog post should be appearing in Facebook now, but that “tweet” is nowhere to be found. So now create your second post, and in the timeframe that you specified, you should see it appear in Twitter. As you know, these “tweets”have a maximum of 140 characters and are frequently seen on mobile phones. If you’ve done these steps correctly, you should now see two articles in your blog, their headlines are appearing in your Facebook or other Social Network pages, and you have one “tweet,” based on the subject line of your second post. If you get stuck, I welcome your email or call to see if I can help.
In next week’s installment, I’ll show you how to use your blog posts to automatically send a beautifully designed email message to your email list. Following that I’ll give you some ideas for what to write about in business newsletters and blogs.
