Last week we hosted a webinar, How to Make Social Media & Email Work Together, which was part 7 of our Social Media Series. We had quite a few great questions from that webinar and we wanted to share them with you. Happy reading, it’s a long one!
Email Marketing
Q: During this webinar you recommended we communicate on a regular basis. How often is too often and how often is not often enough for email campaigns?
The answer to this question really depends on how often your audience would like to hear from you. If you are sending email every few months, and every time you have customers who have forgotten about you then I would say you are not emailing enough. But if you are mailing every day and your unsubscribe rate is very high then you are emailing too much. We really tell our customers to do what they promised their customers when they first signed up to receive email.
Q: On the topic of subject lines, we've been sending using our company name as the start of each subject line. Is that a best practice?
This is a debate that has been going on a long time. If you use your company name as your from label then I wouldn’t waste the space using it in your subject line. Some email readers cut off the subject line after 40-50 characters so you’ll want to put the most important information up front.
Q: You suggested that we should reuse the content from our blog in our newsletter. Won’t this be the same audience if we get our blog followers from our emails?
Many times they are similar audiences, because we all hope that our blog followers are signed up for our email marketing list and visa versa. Truth is, when you publish your blog content, you’ll have a lot of people that don’t know you’ve put out some quality content. What we suggest is that you give your email marketing recipients a “teaser” of your blog content, and have them click off to read the rest of the story.
Social Media In General
Q: How much time should an entrepreneur invest daily on social sites to be effective?
This is always a good question. Anyone who has signed up for social media knows that it is very easy to get sucked into it and spend too much time doing it. I always recommend that people put limits on how much time they spend on social media. Maybe try checking social sites once or twice a day to stay on task and limit yourself to a half hour at the beginning.
Q: Is it wise to post the same message on Facebook and Twitter or should they be completely different?
I say post the same message everywhere your audience would appreciate it. At VerticalResponse everything that goes on Facebook is also posted to Twitter. But it is not the same for the reverse. We feel that our Facebook audience would not like us to post more than 2-3 times a day, but our Twitter audience loves as much information as we can give them. So we use more content on Twitter than we do on our Facebook Fan page.
Q: Can you offer some good examples of how to keep people engaged once they're fans/ linked/ followers?
I always like to recommend asking questions, commenting on your fan’s and follower’s status and possibly throwing in a contest once in awhile. You are trying to get a response and to do so you have to give them a reason to respond.
It is always good to reach out to them as well. On Twitter every time you respond, you get their Twitter handle in front of your followers and everyone likes to get more followers! On Facebook I like to see companies who highlight some of their happy customers.
Blog
Q: How can you add an opt-in form to your blog?
Adding your opt-in form to your blog is a great idea. Here are a few links that will explain exactly how to do it.
Adding your opt-in form to your blog is just like adding it to your website. Check out our video here.
If you have a TypePad blog click here to get information about our TypePad widget. It’s a few clicks and you’ve got an opt in form on your blog.
If you have a Wordpress blog click here to read more about the Wordpress Widget.
As a bonus here are the directions for adding your opt-in form to your Facebook Fan page.
Twitter
Q: How many tweets do you consider to be too many?
It depends on who you are and who is following you. Figure out what works with your schedule. Most importantly, pay attention to how many interactions you get if you increase or decrease the number of tweets you send.
Q: When you send a tweet, does it only reach people who are following you? Or the entire twitter universe?
When you send a tweet it is sent to the home feed of everyone that is following you. But the entire tweeter universe could see it if they went looking for it.
If you RT or retweet someone the same is true.
If you @Reply to someone then that message is sent to the home feeds of only the people who follow you and the person you sent the message to. But again, anyone in the twitter universe can see it.
Facebook
Q: How do you track which fans are generated through an email campaign?
As far as I know there is no way to track which fans are generated through an email campaign. To put a number on how many people became fans because of an email you have to watch the timing. If you track how many followers you get on a weekly basis then it will be easy for you to see a bump in the number of fans you got after your email campaign was launched.
Q: Do you think it is better to have a ‘personal’ profile page for your business, a fan page or a group on Facebook?
I have seen companies do all three of these. I would recommend the Facebook Fan Page as the best resource for your business. A profile page is for one single person, so if you are not the only person behind your business this isn’t the best fit for you, but I have seen it work for consultants and people that are the face of their business. I would pick the Fan Page over the Group since this is better for communication purposes. When you write on your Fan Page Wall it will be shown in your followers feed, but the same is not true for the Group. You also want it to be as easy as possible for your Fans to find information about you.
LinkedIn
Q: Are "company" pages available on LinkedIn or just individual pages?
You can have both an individual profile and a company profile. An individual profile is beneficial because it is a great place for your professional network, but it is a very individual thing. A company page is beneficial because you can host your company information. You can also post your job openings on your company profile. LinkedIn is a great place to find potential employees.
Q: My understanding is that you cannot have "Connections" to a LinkedIn COMPANY profile on an individual's profile. Is that correct?
The only people that can be directly linked to a company profile are the people who work there.
YouTube
Q: Should you be concerned about your company branding because on YouTube you have no control over what related videos come up?
Most people who have watched videos on YouTube before know that YouTube controls related videos. So I would say that related videos would not hurt your brand. But if you have uploaded a video and feel that the related videos are hurting your brand it is very easy to pull down your video. Take a look at the video title, description and key words because they can all affect what type of related videos appear.
If you take it a step further and customize your YouTube page then no related video stream will be shown. Only videos that you have produced will appear on your page. To see an example check out our channel VRTube.
Q: What are the advantages to posting videos to YouTube versus your own website?
Videos can be very large files. So the biggest benefit is that you would not have to host that video yourself. YouTube makes it very easy to embed your videos on to your site, which is what we recommend. The real benefit to hosting your video on YouTube is that you’ll get your video in front of new people since YouTube has many millions of views. Make sure you tag your video with relevant keywords.
If you would like to listen to any of the 7 parts of our Social Media Webinar Series, you're in luck, we recorded them all and have posted them here.
Thank you for answering some very important Questions. I have also found a free service that helps give all your social media juice when you post something head over to ping.fm sign up its free and add all your social media sites and join those that you are not a member of. Then just add your post in one place and ping.fm will do the rest for you. I hoped that this helped.
Posted by: Russell Tayler | December 31, 2010 at 03:22 AM
Very helpful tips and ideas. Thank you for sharing.
Posted by: WiseClicker | March 03, 2010 at 09:45 AM