Choosing Social Media Tools for Your Business

by Sarah Cornelisse, Sr. Extension Associate, Dept. of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education

"What social media should I use for my business?"  This is an often-asked question, and unfortunately, not one that is easily answered by an outsider.  The appropriate social media tool(s) for your individual business will depend on a number of factors, several of which I discuss below.

What are your goals?  Any time you implement the use of a tool, you should have an identified goal that the tool's use will help you in reaching.  The same goes for social media tools.  It is easy to post lots of content to one or more platforms without accomplishing anything.  Keep in mind also, that it is entirely feasible to identify the use of more than one social media tool to accomplish one or more goals, such as using both Facebook and YouTube to share videos of recipe preparations.

Who do you want to connect with?  Are you looking to connect with consumer, businesses, colleagues, women, techies, etc.?  Different tools attract different types of users.  You'll want to research the demographics of the users for the different social media tools you're considering.  For instance, women are the primary users of Pinterest, while connecting with industry peers may call for using Linkedin.

Where are your competitors?  Some degree of weight should be placed on what social media tools your competitors are using.  What platforms are your direct competitors most active on?  If enough of your direct competitors, or businesses similar to yours, are active on a particular platform, it's likely that is where you should be as well. 

What type of content do you want to share?  Typically, the type of business you operate and the products/services you sell, dictate the type of content, but not always.  Different social media platforms lend themselves better to different types of content.  Photos and recipes are great fodder for Pinterest.  Facebook handles a variety of content types, but photos and video are more likely to be shown in the newsfeed of followers.  To tell stories, educate, or discuss industry related information, blogs are likely preferable.

How do you want to engage?  You may have a preference for how you would like to engage with consumers and followers.  If you enjoy ongoing conversations, can be "connected" a great deal of the time, and are not concerned with followers finding past posts, you may prefer using Twitter. 

Track analytics.  If you're using more than one social media tool, study the analytics that each provides on your activity.  You may find that your followers are conversing with you, sharing your content, etc. more often on one platform than on another.  If that's the case, you'll want to focus your efforts more on the tool that is generating this "return."

Answering these questions should lead you to identify the most appropriate social media platform(s) for your business.  Remember, you don't need to be everywhere.  It's fine to start out with just one social media tool.  The trick is to start with the right one.

An Easier Way to Connect With Your Customers on Foursquare

In just the past few weeks, Foursquare released it's Foursquare for Business app (if you don't know what Foursquare is, read Jeff's post from 2010).  The app allows business owners to share information with their customers and view analytics right from their smartphone.

This new app seems to be a nice and quick way to connect with your customers across multiple platforms.  From the app, the business owner/manager can create a Foursquare update and also cross-post it to Facebook and Twitter.  

Another useful feature of the Foursquare for Business app is the ability to view check-ins.  In the past, you could only view check-ins from the past 3 hours, but now you can see check-ins from the entire day. You can also easily view who your top customers are.

Also, the app will allow the manager to drive traffic to their store by posting Foursquare specials.  For example, a coffee shop manager could quickly post a picture of a latte with a caption "the next ten customers who check-in on Foursquare will get a free latte with the purchase of a muffin."  

As an ag business owner, have you used Foursquare?  If yes, how have customers responded to your Foursquare presence?  Do you think this new app will allow you to manage your Foursquare presence more effectively?

Instagram and Small Businesses

Using photos in your social media efforts can provide amazing results. Recently, I heard Julie Flinchbaugh (@flinchsorchard) talk about her most successful Facebook posts (as measured by Facebook Insights) of 2012.  The top ones all had an image.  Photos capture a moment unlike words ever could (unless you use 1,000 words, or so says the proverb).  Is there any wonder why, then, two of the hottest social media tools are Pinterest and Instagram?  We've discussed Pinterest in this blog a few times.  (Check out Lots of Interest in Pinterest... and Pinterest Secret Boards - Make Use of Them for Your Business. That first one needs a bit of an update...)  Let's briefly talk about Instagram, though.

My Instagram page as viewed on a web browser. Your business's pics in this format could be very engaging!

Instagram is a photo-based social media tool designed primarily for mobile phones and tablets.  (The website is a relatively new feature.)  It allows the user to snap a new pic (or use one stored on the device), edit it (notice the various effects in the pics above) and add a caption.  The user can also share the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and foursquare.  Users of Twitter and Facebook will also recognize the usefulness and power of @ mentions of other users as well as hashtags.  These act just like they do in the other tools.  Finally, all content is public by default.  Users follow each other similar to the Twitter model and, like Twitter, you can make your profile private.

I made this Granny Smith
tower. What if I had linked it
to my favorite orchard or grocery
store?  What if I had tagged a friend
to tell them how good the apples were?

According to its website, Instagram currently has over 30 million user accounts and over 5 million photos are uploaded each day.  Individual use of the tool continues to grow.  Here are 6 ideas how you might use it to connect with your customers and tell your business's story....

1. Post pics of cool stuff around your business; how you make your product, the view from your farm market, a customer enjoying your product.  Be sure to add appropriate hashtags to expand your reach.  Add a comment asking for people's thoughts or challenge them to identify what they see.
2. Add a personal touch if customer relationships are important. Pics from a family vacation, holidays, or weird things you see on any given day are all good stuff.  Show them whatever you are comfortable sharing.
3. Tie Instagram to your other social media accounts.  This will help you spread your word and hopefully attract people to connect with you in multiple ways.
4. Encourage users to post pics of themselves using your products.  Ask them to @ mention you.  You might even create a hashtag to group all those pics.  (This could be a photo contest opportunity if you can decide how to judge them. Random drawing, perhaps?)
5. If you have a retail location, encourage users to post photos and tie them to foursquare check-ins.  This builds your presence on foursquare and adds that powerful image to what might otherwise simply be a check-in notification.
6. As with other tools, be social with it.  Like things that those you follow post (if you really do like it).  Comment on it.  Respond to comments on your pics. Etc.

I've grown to enjoy Instagram for its simplicity and ability to engage another user (including a business) around a photo.  With just a bit of thought, I think there's a lot of potential to use it effectively in marketing a small business, especially food and agricultural businesses.  If you follow me (jeffhyde), I'll absolutely follow you back!

Winter is a Great Time to Make Your Social Media Plan

Winter provides farm and food business owners the opportunity to reflect on the year past while planning for the coming year.  While you are planning planting and/or production quantities and schedules, updating financial records, attending professional development events, and evaluating marketing outlets, consider developing your social media presence and strategy as well.   And if you are using social media, remember that your presence shouldn't go into hibernation even though the ground outside may be covered with snow.

Don't let your social media presence go 
into hibernation, like this bear, 
during the winter months.

I read this article yesterday that provides a timely reminder about the importance of creating a social media strategy and maintaining your presence year-round.  The author also provides a couple of helpful tips:

• Plan a schedule of topics for posts during the coming year.
• Use scheduling tools offered with many social media tools to pre-load content.

If you have an active social media presence during the growing and selling seasons, you want to maintain that visibility during the off-season.  Followers unfamiliar with farming and food production may be interested in learning about what goes on "behind-the-scenes" that makes what is visible, and easily shared during the summer months, happen.  You can easily recruit followers to provide their input for decisions and options you're weighing.  Larger packages vs. individual servings? Heirloom tomatoes vs. standard breeds? Which new products to offer? Ask! Read about how one farm marketer did just this.

Interested in creating a social media presence for your business or jump starting your existing presence with a social media strategy?  Check out Penn State Extension's Social Media Boot Camps for Ag Businesses.  Registration for the first two ends on Dec. 3, 2012.

Don't Get Left in the Cold. Use Social Media to Connect with Your Customers!

With sixty-five percent (65%) of internet users using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others (Pew Internet, 2011), social media can justifiably be considered a legitimate marketing tool by businesses large and small.  In fact, in a survey by Chief Marketer, 92% of respondents indicated that they either were using or planned to use social media for marketing of their brands.

Farmers and small ag business owners shouldn't overlook the power that social media tools provide in connecting with consumers.  Surveys conducted by two of my colleagues, Kathy Kelley and Jeff Hyde, in May 2010 with consumers who used social media, found that over 30% of respondents expected farmers' market/on-farm markets and U-Pick operations to have Facebook presence.  Consumers' expected use of Twitter and blogs by these types of ag businesses hovered around 20%.  I would expect that surveyed again two and a half years later, we would see these results, or expectations, to be higher yet.

Consumers' Expected Internet Presence by Type of Food Business

But having a social media presence, or profile, on any of these tools isn't enough.  You need to provide consumers with a reason to "like" or follow your business.  When questioned on why they connect with businesses on social media, approximately 60% of the individuals responding to Kelley and Hyde's survey indicated that they did so to learn about new products/direction of the business, while almost half wanted to learn about sales before the general public.

Expectations by Consumers who Follow Businesses on Social Networks

We see that the evidence exists that consumers expect ag and food businesses to exist on social networks, as well as to provide them with things that they value in return for following them.  You probably also have your own reasons, or objectives, for committing to developing and sustaining a social media presence for your business.  By developing a social media strategy, you can ensure that you, and your followers, get what you need from a social media relationship.

If you own, or are involved with, a farm or small ag business in Pennsylvania, and want to jump into the world of social media with a guiding hand, Penn State Extension can help.  Come to one of three scheduled Social Media Boot Camps for Ag Businesses.  These two-day workshops will give you a hands-on opportunity to develop Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare/Yelp profiles, as well as mapping out your personal social media marketing objectives and strategy. 

Why Should You Care About Analyzing Your Social Media Presence?

In the development of a social media strategy, or any strategy for that matter, measurement and analysis plays a key role.  Without this, how does one know whether they've accomplished what they've set out to do? Simply, they don't.  Below are brief introductions to just a few of the analysis tools available for three of the most popular social media tools out there - Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Facebook
Insights. Facebook provides administrators of Pages with their own internal measurement and analysis tool, Facebook Insights.  Not only can you get simple demographic data about the people who "like" your page, you can get a breakdown on the level and type of interactions that are occurring when you post content. Paying attention to Insights data can help you provide the content your followers value, a key to measuring the success of your social media strategy.

Check out my blog post on using Facebook Insights.


Twitter
TweetReach. This third party tool measures the activity of your tweets.  Enter a search term - hashtag, username, keyword, URL, etc. - and TweetReach will generate a report telling you how many accounts were reached, how many impressions were generated by the tweets, the types of tweets in the report (tweets, replies, or retweets), and the top contributors.

There are both free and paid TweetReach account types.  Unless you're a real data junkie that thrives on real-time monitoring of your tweets, the free account will probably meet your needs. 


Pinterest

PinPuff.  PinPuff provides you a score, similar to Klout, for your Pinterest activity.  It also attempts to measure your reach, activity (influence), and the virality of your pins.  While I don't find these scores particularly helpful - descriptions of what the scores mean are vague and seem subjective - the quick stats are nice.  PinPuff gives you, for both your overall Pinterest account and each of your boards, the number of followers, repins, and likes; numbers that are hard to come by on Pinterest.

www.pinerly.com

Pinerly. This is a tool that I'm just beginning to check out.  Pinerly lets you create campaigns with your Pinterest pins, adding a few analytics (click-throughs, likes, repins, reach) to your pinning activity that Pinterest doesn't fully provide.  From what I've seen by creating one campaign for our Social Media & Mobile Tech webinar series, Pinerly seems best suited for pins where you want the viewer to ultimately take an action (registering for an event, purchasing a product, etc.)

Multiple Tools
Klout. Klout attempts to determine people's level of influence by measuring their interactions on social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, foursquare, etc.).  Your Klout score, a number between 1 and 100, is calculated by looking at aspects of social media engagement - likes, comments, re-tweets, shares, etc.  The number of followers or friends you have doesn't impact your Klout score; engagement is the only thing that matters.  Klout is also the only tool (in this list at least) that draws together information from all of your social media accounts.

www.Klout.com

Are there social media analysis tools that you're using and find valuable? Tools that you know of, but would like to learn more about?

To learn more about social media analysis tools and how to effectively use them as part of your social media strategy, check out Penn State Extension's upcoming webinar series - Social Media and Mobile Technology for Ag Businesses - where you can learn about this, and other great topics.

Monitoring Social Media Strategy

Source: www.social2b.com

I'm developing a social media strategy for our Extension team.  I've been making presentations on this topic over the past few months, and am finally putting in practice what I've been telling others.  Of course, I've been thinking about what our strategy might look like this whole time, but I'm finally writing those thoughts down and clarifying our team's social media goals and objectives.

Part of this process involves thinking about how I, or someone else, will monitor and measure the success of the strategy.  It's important to me to ensure that we're effectively engaging our audience on all of the social media tools that we use and providing them with value, of some sort, in return for following us.  For each tool (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blog, etc.) there's at least one related tool that allows you to analyze and measure in impact of your activities.

To share an example, I recently spent some time reviewing the information I can collect and follow through Facebook Insights.  Beyond seeing how many people "like" our Ag Entrepreneurship Extension Team page and some basic demographic information (gender, age range, and geographic location), I can see which posts had the most "engaged users" (i.e. unique people who clicked on the post) or the most people "talking about this."  Insights provides more than just this overall number.  I can click on the "talking about this" number for any post and see exactly how many people took different specific actions (i.e. liking, commenting, or sharing a post, answering a question, or responding to an event).

Source: scottwyden.com

What's the value of this?  First, I'll be able to track which posts generate the most engagement with our followers.  More importantly, since the different types of actions people take may indicate different levels of content value, I'll have a sense of which types of posts (or post content) people may value more highly and are thus motivated into taking those different actions.  For instance, I'll know which posts people are driven to comment on, one indicator of value, perhaps leading our team to post more on those topics.  Alternatively, I'll be able to see which posts, or content types, people appear to be less interested in.  As time passes, our team will be able to use this information to adjust our social media strategy to most effectively meet the needs of our social media audience(s).

Monitoring the impact, or effectiveness, of your social media activities is essential if you have business or organizational goals that you're trying to achieve with its use.  Take the time to learn about the different analytical tools available to you and decide what information you'll need to measure your social media success.  Once you're able to start identifying how you best connect with your audience that also moves you toward your goals, you'll feel less like you're running on the social media hamster wheel and instead running a race with the finish line in sight.