I don’t like to label myself a social media ‘guru’ but I am in the trenches getting it done every day. Here’s my strategy in a nutshell – 1. Build a community of fans using social media by providing useful information, and 2. Eventually monetize a percentage of that community via your products or services. One of my main online businesses is in e-learning, specifically guitar lessons online.

1. Build a community of fans/customers online.

How do I build a community? I go where most people are these days: YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. My YouTube videos have 700,000 views and over 2200 subscribers. I have a Facebook fan page (separate from my personal profile) where I encourage people to become fans. I only put certain information on my Facebook fan page to make joining more attractive (new lessons, updates on upcoming live events, etc).

I also tweet useful information and links to relevant and interesting information. I’m now doing live Ustream.tv streaming video lessons/Q&A sessions. All of this leads to my Online Guitar Coaching site.

Let’s assume you’re a small to mid-size business/entrepreneur who doesn’t want to spend a ton of money just on branding (ie. getting awareness of you or your company). No matter what you are doing you need to be creating a dialogue between your company and your customers/fans. Customers want to be involved and listened to, and are tired of fighting against the corporate walls. But I believe that every person has the potential to build a brand around their knowledge or experience, and that they can monetize this brand.

So we build up fans on a Facebook fan page and add interesting and useful content to the page such as videos, articles, live events as well as encouraging interaction among the community by getting them to post things, contribute to discussions and commenting on the posts.

I create content via video, articles, blog posts and upload them to my websites, YouTube (and all other video sharing sites via TubeMogul). I then tweet the links (via Ping.fm that sends the update to all my social networks). When people respond I get email notifications so that I continue the conversation.

2. Conversion to paying customers

Here’s the basic assumption – if you have a large, engaged community of followers for your business, some percentage of those will turn into paying customers. Up until now this concept was usually applied online to email marketing – build a big list of people who subscribe to your email newsletter and sell things to them over time. You can even segment this list into ‘freebie seekers’, paying customers, etc by moving them into different groups when they purchase something from you.

So when people are getting great content on the Facebook fan page, some of that content will be links to your own website, blog and you can link to your products or services in the blog content, have certain menu items (Consulting, Coaching, Products/Services), or put things in your sidebars.

What I also do with my membership site is provide teaser content. This is where I might show half of my lesson then the second half is protected and requires a login.

Think of all these social networks as tentacles leading back to your main website. A much more subtle approach than beating people over the head with advertising.

Measurement/ROI

Let’s be honest – ongoing measurement of your ongoing social media efforts is very difficult, especially if you are also using advertising and other methods to promote your business. If you launch a short ad or PR campaign of course you might see a spike in sales or email signups, etc. But at a bare minimum you can measure the number of clicks for each link you post on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. And you can track sales as to where they are coming from (your social networks or other places). If you haven’t used social media you can record a baseline of sales before using social media and compare it to results over time after using social media.

Brand monitoring/Customer Service
Other possible strategies, especially for larger existing companies, are brand monitoring and customer service using Twitter. The idea is you search for mentions of your company or products (eg. Westjet, Comcast, BestBuy, etc) and help people that are frustrated (often diffusing the situation).

For some businesses, they need to justify the time and expense of using social media marketing. For my business, it’s the main way I market my business. So less about advertising and more about engaging your customers. For more information on ROI you can read this article on Social Media ROI.

For skeptics
If you still don’t see the value in social networking for business, keep in mind that money flows where attention goes, and if everyone is on these social networks that’s where your business should be. Think about where you would create ads to market your business in the past – on tv, radio, newspaper, magazines. Why? Because that’s where people are, that’s what they are paying attention to. Well now there are spending more and more time online so doesn’t it make sense to follow them there?

If you have questions/comments please post below so I can add to this post.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 11:35 am and is filed under Social media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.