DC Interactive Group’s SmartMarketing Blog

When a company employs social media as a marketing tool or strategy, there is inevitably some trial and error. While each company must find its own niche and strategy for best implementing social media tactics, there are some fundamentals that can ensure maximum results. We’ve outlined a few below to help you launch your social media initiative.

Engage your audience

Social media has changed the game plan for marketing and advertising agencies. We no longer get to choose what we want out audience to hear – they do. And Part of understanding what they want to hear is listening – and engaging with – them. Make it easy for your audience to get in touch with you by having links and buttons leading to your social media profiles. Make sure you employ a variety of different networking sites so that people don’t get left out.

Have a Call to Action

Part of getting people’s attention is proposing something. Again, talking at people is the advertising of the past. Get people involved in initiatives and conversations. Extend the invitation to participate. When you talk people with getting involved, you’ll be surprised how many actually will.

Invite Feedback and Discussion

While your goal may be to educate your audience on your products or services, you should also be actively seeking out feedback. Social media offers ample opportunity for your audience to get involved in discussions surrounding your brand – whether it is commenting on your blog, @ mentioning you on Twitter or writing on your Facebook fan page. This type of interaction is desirable because it makes you transparent and also gives you the opportunity to improve upon your brand in front of an audience that is paying attention.

Don’t Censor

As an extension of the above, censoring should be avoided. This does not mean you cannot filter. For your internal team, put protocol in place on what can and cannot be tweeted or posted. This provides some limitations but should also keep the communication lines open and allow for honesty and transparency on the part of the employees. Similarly, negative comments from customers should not be censored but thoughtfully and promptly addressed.

Promote yourself

Once you’ve got all your social media sites up and running, let people know. Add links and buttons for your social media sites to your websites, e-blasts, blogs and wherever else it’s appropriate. Weave your social media into other marketing and advertising initiatives to create a coherent communication flow.

Back in November we covered the Firefox add-on/desktop application Yoono. As a Christmas present, the folks over at Yoono HQ gave us an updated version of the application a couple weeks ago, and is it ever sweet.

Upon downloading the newest version, I immediately noticed a change in aesthetics and in operations: Yoono now sports a slick silver look and runs much smoother than previous versions, minimizing browser slowdown when streaming multiple updates at once. But these changes were in the rearview mirror once I realized the following.

The new version of Yoono now supports multiple Twitter/Facebook accounts.

For those of us who maintain multiple accounts (On a given day I have anywhere between 3 and 5 Twitter accounts to keep an eye on), this is an unbelievable time saver. Instead of logging in to each individual account, finding something cool, relevant material and retweeting it, then doing the whole process again and again, now Yoono lets me see all of my Twitter accounts’ updates in real time, streaming in my sidebar while I’m free to do other things. It’s a level of efficiency that simply wasn’t possible before.

The screenshot above is what my Yoono sidebar looked like this morning. You’ll notice three different Twitter accounts and a lone Facebook account at the top of the image. I’m still giddy over the freedom it gives me.

Hopefully I already made this clear, but I’ll say it anyway. If you maintain multiple social media accounts on the same platform, Yoono is officially a must-have. The few minutes it takes you to install and set up will save you hours of time down the road.