Now Entering Facebook Nation

Free. Fast. Personal. Powerful. Smart companies are a-Twitter over social media.

by Pamela Mills-Senn

When was the last time you took a tip from a teen? Well, maybe it’s time. Their 24/7 obsession with Facebook, YouTube and other “social media” is showing you today’s consumer reality.

Welcome to the new “viral” frontier, where one person’s word can zap to hundreds, even thousands, of waiting ears in just seconds.

Play it smart, and your company can benefit from this turbocharged grapevine. Because despite their reputation as teen time-wasters, these media have become serious marketing and networking tools. Best of all, they’re free.

“This isn’t a teeny-bopper phenomenon,” says Michael Stelzner, executive editor of San Diego-based WhitePaperSource Publishing. “The average users of social media are in their 30s and up. They’re involved in business and are decision-makers.”

Stelzner’s recent “Social Media Marketing Industry Survey” backs him up. Gathering input from 880 marketing professionals, he found:
• 81 percent said their social media had increased exposure for their businesses. Many also noted new partnerships and increased traffic.
• More than half said social media had improved their search engine rankings.
• Half said social media had generated qualified leads.

Those advantages await any business that is ready to jump on board now, says Stelzner: “This is the gold rush in social media, and there are major first-user advantages.”

Let’s take a look at a few of the hottest viral vehicles around.

LinkedIn: Strictly business
More than 40 million people across 170 industries were registered on LinkedIn in May, Wikipedia reports. Unlike Facebook and My Space, LinkedIn focuses solely on business relationships.

Users establish “connections” by invitation and can build various contact networks. Profiles remain private until connected.

LinkedIn draws more small-business owners than employees of large companies, making it an excellent networking hub for contractors, Stelzner says.

The hub includes Neil Parsons, vice president of sales and marketing for Mark of Excellence Remodeling in West Long Branch, N.J.

“What I like about LinkedIn is that it creates a forum for business topic discussions,” says Parsons, who uses it to keep tabs on markets locally and around the country. “You can get a discussion thread going and get opinions from people you would never otherwise meet.”

Franklin Davis, of the American Subcontractors Association, calls LinkedIn the most “grown up” social networking site and says contractors nationwide are using it to connect to suppliers, architects, colleagues and other industry professionals.

Facebook: Double identities
If Facebook were a country, its 300 million users would put it in the top six worldwide, Stelzner notes. The onetime young adult social networking site is now embraced by all ages and occupations for personal and professional use.

Facebook users can create a personal and/or business page and join various networks. No one can view a page without the host’s invitation. Those who accept become a “friend” (of a personal page) and/or a “fan” (of a business page).

No direct business promotion is allowed on personal pages; indirect business comments (“the weather was great, so we finished this deck”) are permitted.

Contractors love Facebook’s marketing/networking potential. The believers include Ken Anderson, owner of Anderson’s Famous Painting Co., in Timonium, Md.

Anderson has both a business and a personal page. Providing regular updates, posting photos, thanking people for referrals, and communicating frequently online keeps him firmly in people’s minds and brings him business.

“A friend of mine on Facebook told me he saw some equipment from one of my competitors and that all he thought of was my business,” says Anderson.

Personal or business?
Parsons also has personal and business Facebook pages but says the personal page has actually driven him more business. Most of his referrals come from “friends” and friends of “friends.” He invites his business “fans” to become personal “friends,” and most do.

“The personal page allows you to reach a larger, more varied audience and to become friends of friends,” explains Parsons. “We’ve gotten referrals from friends of friends, just because someone has passed along a picture of a job.”

He adds: “In hindsight, I’d rely solely on a personal page. But someone who’s concerned about maintaining a professional demeanor on their personal page should have a business page.”

Broadening the company’s reach, Parson’s boss (the company’s owner) also has a page. Parsons will post a photo of a job, his boss will comment (“that was a great client”), and the whole thing shows up on both of their pages, hitting both networks.

It is those kinds of “elegant interfaces and relevancy” that have made Facebook popular for business, says Rebekkah Hilgraves, president of SheTech and Company, a web marketing consulting firm in Knoxville., Tenn.

Twitter: Short but sweet
Do you tweet? If so, you have a lot of company. The “micro-blogging” service Twitter has mushroomed to over 1 million users in just two years. Users can send their own “tweets” (messages limited to 140 characters) and read and forward tweets of others (“re-tweeting”).

Tweets are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to “followers” who have subscribed to that page. If desired, senders may restrict tweet delivery to certain followers.

Twitter has gotten a reputation as being somewhat irrelevant, thanks to over-tweeting users with little to say (“I’m getting a cup of coffee!”).

But the service can still be “incredibly effective,” Hilgraves says, depending on the quality of your “followers,” whom you follow, and what you tweet.

What makes Twitter so attractive is its simplicity, Stelzner says. You open an account; start putting out status updates, which people find through keywords; and before you know it, you’ve got followers.

Prospecting
Stelzner advises using Twitter as a prospecting tool. “Search Twitter to look for people talking about repairs or painting,” he explains. “You can reply with tips or advice. Small businesses can look at this as a way to get into discussions.”

Tim Burch, president/owner of the Burch Builders Group, in Warrenton, Va., calls Twitter “a quick and constant information source.” He tweets to drive people to his blog and Facebook page, to post questions, and to share information about his projects or general building topics.

“Almost instantly, I’ll get a reply back,” he says. “Twitter is almost like a search engine. For example, someone could search ‘painters in DC,’ and a list would come up. And the more followers you have, the higher up on that list you go.”

Blogs: The soft sell
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, blogs are not part of any single networking service. But these popular running commentaries, project descriptions, graphics and video are integral to today’s viral marketing. Blogs are typically incorporated into a website as part of a broader viral strategy.

“Blogging’s huge,” agrees Stelzner. “People need a destination point to learn more about you, and that’s a blog. And you can use Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to your blog.”

Tim Schrock, owner of Design Build Solutions in Lebanon, Ind., blogs on his site to drive brand awareness. Like the most effective bloggers, Schrock does not directly sell or promote. He focuses on informational topics, such as staying within a budget, and uses Twitter and Facebook to alert readers to his weekly updates.

Schrock has the right idea, Hilgraves confirms. “You must find a way to capture the interest of your audience without selling them,” she says. “Contractors could talk about the amazing job they just completed, or something that happened on the job, or a new product or technique they tried.”

Blogs should be professional and educational, echoes Stelzner. As with all social media, he says, sales talk should be less than 10 percent of the content.
“Think of social media as you would a trade show,” he says. “You go there primarily to build relationships that turn into something later.”

YouTube: Seeing is believing
YouTube’s millions of daily users include plenty of contractors, who are posting videos and linking to the video-sharing site from theirs. No wonder, says Stelzner; he sees lots of possibilities with YouTube.

“Take a video camera to your projects,” he suggests. “Show before and afters, various techniques, etc. Make them instructional, rather than promotional. You can drive traffic to them through Twitter or Facebook and also post them on your blog.”

Parsons says his company has made one- to four-minute videos of 18 projects, showing them in various stages from start to finish, adding text and setting them to music.

“We’ve put a hyperlink on our website to YouTube, and we also put this link on Facebook,” he says. “We’ll put the video on Facebook, but if you link directly to YouTube, it boosts your traffic count and puts you up higher in the search engines.”

Putting it all together
So, which site or medium is best? There’s no simple answer. And that may not even be the best question to ask.

For example, Facebook and Twitter both get a thumbs-up from Debbie Zimmer, of the Paint Quality Institute (formerly the Rohm & Haas Company).

But the bigger goal for contractors should be to learn to learn to manage multiple tools, to achieve the greatest exposure, Zimmer and the experts say.

Example: You post a comment about a project on Facebook, then tweet people to let them know. Back on Facebook, provide a link to the blog on your website, where you can go into greater detail about the project.

Updating your blog? Send out a tweet, linking people to your blog/website, and add a link on Facebook.

Managing everything is a common concern, says Hilgraves. Services like Ping (http://ping.fm/) allow users to update any or all of their social media at once, she says. Google Alerts allow users to track postings related to them or their business (http://www.google.com/alerts).

But such details will be less overwhelming if you map your strategy and define your goals up front, experts and contractors advise.

“Approach social media as deliberately as you would any other kind of marketing,” says Davis, of ASA. “Not every form may be right for you, and the problem is, you won’t know this if you don’t have a clearly defined strategy.”

Remember, too, that the same juice that zaps your kudos to hundreds of people can also spread negative content that is hard to undo (see “Digital Do’s and Don’ts”).

“You shouldn’t do this because it’s cool, or because everyone else is doing it,” continues Davis, sounding positively parental. “It has to serve a purpose.

“Develop a plan about how and what you want to communicate. And remember: In any of this, you have to be accurate and correct. Once you tweet it, everyone can see it.”

Contact Pamela Mills-Senn at pms@charter.net.