Social Networking is not a fad, it is not going away. Adding Social Networking to your marketing plan is no longer a novelty, it has become an important part of Internet Marketing. Social Networking provides retail jewelers one of the best opportunities to develop relationships with your current clients and bring them back into your store.
With the tremendous growth of Social Networking websites, it is necessary to add Social Networking to your marketing mix. Marketing online is no longer just about having a website where people come to learn about your store. It’s about going where they are online and connecting with them in those locations.
Utilize all 5 of the Top Social Networking Websites to Promote Your Store.
It is essential to your Social Networking success to integrate all five of the top Social Network websites, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, and Linked-In. This combined approach reaching across various platforms creates a powerful network that provides you the greatest marketing success.
You need to be active in all the places where your target customers hang out online. Even with over six hundred million users (which may reach one billion by early next year), not everyone is active on Facebook. To successfully reach the broadest audience you need to establish your presence across the Internet on various Social Networking platforms. In addition, by effectively integrating the top Social Networking websites together you can create a post once and have it display on all of them saving you time and maximizing your ROI.
Social Networking Facts:
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- Twitter users that integrate with a blog have 70% more followers
- YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010
- Businesses that have blogs receive 55% more traffic than those that don’t
- A new member joins LinkedIn every second of every day, approximately one million every 12 days.
- 33% of Twitter users have household income of over $100,000 per year
- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- YouTube’s demographic is broad: 18-54 years old
- The top 100 business blogs average over 30 posts per day
- Over 12 percent of all time spent online is on Facebook
- The top 10 Twitter users each have over 5 million followers
- The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet
- The fastest growing demographic among Facebook users is 35 to 65 year-old women
The Goal of Social
Network Marketing
The goal of Social Networking is NOT getting lots of Friends, Fans & Followers and having conversations with them.
The goal of Social Network Marketing is getting customers into your store giving your sales staff the opportunity to convert the in-store traffic into new purchases. Apps, Contests and Campaigns to get more Fans and Followers are all fine, but the real payoff is your status updates. They need to be frequent, interesting and compelling.
Social Networking is not set and forget. You need to stay fresh. Social Networking is like big grocery stores – there’s a sell-by date on every message – and it’s today! If you create a Social Network page about your store and then only up-date it once a week or a couple times a month it will not be effective.
There is no such thing as an ideal number of Social Networking posts. You are only posting too often if all your posts are about you selling your jewelry. The content of your post (the quality) is more important than the quantity of your posts.
If you post pictures of your jewelry and informational videos and text about jewelry, the more the merrier. Inform your followers how to care for their jewelry and how to build their jewelry wardrobe. Tell stories about gemstones and the history of jewelry. Make it interesting to your followers and they will look forward to reading all your new posts and up-dates. Also link to informational articles about jewelry, such as jewelry fashion trends, jewelry news, etc. If all your posts are about ‘Buy My Jewelry’ people will tire of reading them and either ignore them or un-friend you.
In addition, the more often you create new posts on Facebook and other Social Networking websites the greater the chance that your followers will see your content. Facebook tells us that 90% of people who ‘Like’ a business page never return to that page. The only way to reach your fans is through their News Feed. People log onto Facebook at different times during the day and on different days of the week. You need to be posting at various times so that you have the opportunity to be in your Fan’s News Feed when they are online logged in to Facebook.
If you have 10 new pictures of your jewelry to post, instead of posting them all at the same time, spread them out over a couple of days at different time intervals. If you post them all at once, everyone online at the time will see them. However, if someone logs in 3 or 4 hours later, they may never see your pictures as the content has been pushed down by more current posts.
If you spread those 10 pictures out over several days at different time intervals you will reach more people. The chance is greater that they will be online when one of the pictures are posted.
Mix It Up
If every one of your status updates is simply a notification that you are having a special event, you will find some of your best customers reacting, but little else. It’s okay to talk about your events, but real engagement comes much faster when you mix your content up giving people a variety of information in different formats.
Add pictures to your Facebook page, then link to them from Twitter and LinkedIn. Use those pictures to create a video slide show to post on YouTube and embed the video on the other Social Network websites. Write a Blog post and have it sent to your Facebook and LinkedIn news feeds and create a link to it from Twitter.
The content you create should include information on Gemstones, Diamonds, Precious Metals, Jewelry Care, Jewelry History, Jewelry News, and Jewelry Trends in addition to the information you share about your store.
Use Tools to Save Time
Take advantage of the various social media tools that are designed specifically to save you time. They can help you by sending updates to multiple Social Networking websites as well as enabling you to schedule when your updates are made. This way you can spread those 10 new pictures over several days at different time intervals without having to set an alarm clock to remind you to log in and create a new up-date.
Some of the top Social Networking Tools are: Ping.fm, TweetDeck.com, AtomKeep.com, CoTweet.com, HootSuite.com, SocialOomph.com, MarketMeSuite.com, and Seesmic.com. Some of these tools are free while others have paid memberships.
If you still have trouble finding time to effectively use Social Networking or are uncertain how to set it all up and what to do, Brad and Debbie Simon are owners of Internet 4 Jewelers and provide Social Networking management as well as other Internet Marketing services. Log onto http://Internet4Jewelers.com for details.
