Back to NY! I was thinking throughout my trip here to California that my biggest setback as social media wannabe is simply getting started. It is daunting and sometimes scary to take on a client who is entrusting you with their social media presence and marketing. A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to be the “director of social media” at an older health and beauty e-commerce site. Essentially it was an internship, but it was my first time actually using social media for a business as opposed to my own music marketing. I found some social media marketing plans to model after and I got to it. Well after just a week, I realized how little I knew about what i was doing. So in this post, I’ll go through some of the problems I faced and realized as social nooby.
1) Being on Facebook/Twitter does not make you a social media pro!
I had used Facebook and Twitter as a marketing tool for my own music, but what I was really doing was simply being a user of the two sites. I interacted with fans, friends, and family, but what I quickly came to realize is that when it comes to a business, the people you know and that know you are not going to like that page. Developing a strategy to draw leads and get existing customers to like and follow is a whole different ballpark then posting links to iTunes and the like.
2) Don’t forget the MARKETING!
I graduated college with a degree in marketing, so I had a little bit of education in the matter. But choosing the path of a musician did not allow me to really hone my skills as marketer. I never did an internship or have been involved in a business until I realized that maybe, just maybe I could do something in social media. What I soon discovered in actually working for a company in social media, was that you need to focus on how to use social media to market. Social media is simply an outlet and a tool to market, and you need to focus on marketing through them. You need to develop a marketing strategy before a social strategy is even talked about.
3) How to I get followers!?!?!
I was really at a loss for the first week of running the social media presence for this site. I kept to my planned tweeting and Facebook schedule, retweeted, responded to tweets, and yet no one followed, liked, or even interacted with me. It only hit me after a week that I needed to let our existing customers know about our social media presence. So we sent out a “Going Social” email to our customer list, offering a discount for everyone who liked or followed. Now that got things going.
On that note, something I am struggling with, and maybe someone can help me out here, is how do I go about getting like and follows for a brand new business?
These are just 3 things I struggled with and am still struggling with. I would love to hear your advice and thoughts on the matter.
