What can your community do for you?

The efforts of your social media campaign don’t begin and end with the number of followers you have on Twitter, or the amount of fans you have on Facebook. If you are engaging with these areas, you have to ask yourself why. What is the value of twitter followers to your business?

While social media is about the organic nature of your community, it is worth analysing the potential sales value of your online community to your business. One example that worked for a previous client was through their facebook fan page. This was built to encourage engagement with the brand, the client wanted to talk to their customers, to start a conversation. But when the client had a particularly good ski holiday deal, I sent a message to their facebook page fans. I then tracked sales on the clients’ site, with the facebook email inbox as a referrer.

The facebook page wasn’t originally set up as a revenue-generating channel and that shouldn’t be the sole purpose of any social media marketing you carry out. If it is, then the chances are you won’t do all that well, as everything will be focused on that one goal and you probably won’t be very interesting to listen to. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t ever consider using you community as a way of generating sales. This is often the  elephant in the room. Many are happy to talk about the ‘social’ aspect of social media, but not how you can directly make money from it.

The key is only doing this when you know you have something of particular value to your audience. If you are spending time building a good, strong community, that community will ultimately reward you. With that client example, I also put the offer out to our Twitter followers and many retweeted it to their followers, without us having to ask. Our immediate audience instantly multiplied and our community grew.

This is also tied in to your perception of social media data capture. Why not begin looking at Twitter followers in the same way you would email subscriptions?

There are many out there who will decry using social media in this way. The point is that on this occasion, it worked because I was continually engaging with the community and this one offer formed a part of that conversation. Don’t be afraid to approach social media in this way, but just know that the value to your business depends on the time you take to actually get to know your community and what they will respond well to.

Social media and sales – they can get along.