How to Use Blog Lists for Your Social Media Strategy

My recent post 52 Cool Facts About Social Media seems to have been a bit popular.

Hopefully it helped show some of the reasons why social media is a platform that all businesses should take seriously, and at the very least investigate whether they should be active or not.

One of the things I saw as a result of the post were a few emails that said, “Great stats, but how would you use information like that for your business?”

Now, it’d be tempting to say, “Easy – hire my company!” but instead here are a few ways on how you could use a stat from each platform.

Facebook

- Stat: The average Facebook user is connected to 60 Pages, Groups and Events.

- Strategy: It’s clear that Facebook Pages or Groups offer a great opportunity for your business, either by having one or targeting those where you could both benefit. So build a Page and then offer a clear call-to-action on why folks should connect with your page.

Or use Facebook Search to find Groups or Events that your business can help, and get to know the folks involved. Can you sponsor an event and give special offers to attendees? Can you offer your expertise to groups that have questions about your industry, and then offer free or discounted samples/reports/service to Group members?

Think of what you can offer to receive.

Twitter

- Stat: Over 60% of Twitter use is outside of the U.S.

- Strategy: Where are your customers from? Have you carried out an audit recently to see where your main market is today? If it’s outside the U.S., how are you using Twitter to be more specific to that audience?

Consider hiring a multi-lingual team to connect in the native language of your audience on Twitter. Look at cultural holidays in these countries and see if you can offer a promotion that ties in with it. Have dedicated landing pages on your website for your different audience, and tweet direct links to it in the language needed. Once there, have a call-to-action purely for that nationality.

LinkedIn

- Stat: Recruiters account for 1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles.

- Strategy: How does your business recruit? Does HR use an outside agency or is it via newspaper ads? What’s the cost involved here? Think of how much you’re spending on recruitment and then check on the recruiters that are on LinkedIn.

Taking away heavy ad costs or agency costs when you can utilize a recruiter connection (paid, of course) could save you tons in the long run.

They’re also better-suited to your recruitment needs as they’re monitoring folks themselves on LinkedIn, saving you potential employee searches. And the savings made can be re-invested in other parts of your business.

YouTube

- Stat: Over half of YouTube’s users are under 20 years old.

- Strategy: When you consider that could equate to around 1 billion Gen Y views per day, that’s a shitload of potential eyeballs. So why not utilize them? If your business is for Gen Y’s and you’ve got a product to launch, what better way than actually being able to see it and get the lowdown from trusted sources?

Use a social search platform to find who the key Gen Y users are on YouTube and then approach them to see if they’d be interested in taking part. Note the “taking part” description – don’t try and force them to be who they’re not. Keep it honest and real.

Offer a vanity URL that viewers of a particular YouTube channel can click through on to buy the product at a special launch rate. You could then give that YouTube channel owner an extra thank you “reward”, as well as make them part of your trusted promotional team for future launches.

Blogging

- Stat: More than half of all bloggers are married and/or parents.

- Strategy: Ever carried out a blogger outreach program? If not, you might want to start considering it. If you take the stats that there are more than 133 million blogs out there, then it’s more than likely your audience is reading some of them.

If you don’t have a blog yourself (and if not, why not?) then use the existing bloggers in your industry. If you provide diapers, search for the parent bloggers and offer free samples to try and give their readers too. Same goes with kiddie toys or books.

Or if you’re in the wedding industry, offer tickets to an upcoming wedding show in a blogger’s city and have the “winners” as guests of honour. All the blogger has to do is write about the experience – you use it to improve for the next show.

There are a ton of things you can do with statistics and information like the 52 cool social media stats list I put together. All you have to do is think how they affect your business.

How about you? How are you using statistics for your social media strategies, and what successes are you seeing?

photo credit: Eric Fischer
photo credit: woodleywonderworks

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