It now seems that Facebook webpages, Twitter feeds, a blog and a YouTube route are effectively mandatory for any brand wanting to keep in touch with its customers. Use of these sites can improve brand awareness, but it is just a double-edged sword and needs the same planning, treatment and attention as will any other form of marketing. Companies offering suited services and expertise have sprung up over the last couple of years.
The first question for a brand is to consider whether to buy-in expertise and products, or to use the free tools and the efforts of their own staff. The main sites now famoid social media many free tools available. These types of provide facilities to review activity, manage postings and allow some degree of content moderation.
A research on sale since January 2013 found that practically ninety per cent of advertisers are using these free social media services and products. This is certainly famoid social media because the perceived value of paid-for products is not sufficient to trade them, and partly due to continued skepticism about the effectiveness of these websites for creating business. Continuing bad publicity, including the recent Twitter password-hacking problems, can produce reluctance to pay on this form of marketing due to concerns about security and credibility.
Totally free products certainly have their place, particularly if starting an occurrence on Facebook or myspace, Twitter and the websites. However these products require all the expertise to be in-house, and will have limited support provided. The paid products come with the expertise of the business concerned, and so there is no need for a company to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by having to build an unique strategy and train its very own staff. The improved business intelligence (bi) alone can cause recouping the costs several times over.
Kids of services available differs between providers, and there are many packages and combinations. The primary areas that should be covered are fairly standard, and are discussed below.
Content generation for sites and forums
As the unique content will be the responsibility of the brand, there are some items that are routine to all interactive sites. Customers will want quick answers with their questions and will wish that many of these answers can be found easily. A social media services company can help with this by producing the next:
FAQ (frequently asked question) list -this may need knowledge of the business and may have to be done in conjunction with the brand.
Posting rules – this includes transactions of the goal of the community forum or interactive page, the issues that are allowed, the level of any ‘adult content’ allowed and the moderation method used. The guidelines should also tell users how their data and postings will be used, and that will own the copyright laws for their submissions.