An Introduction for Email Marketers - iContact

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{ Social Media Marketing An Introduction for Email Marketers

Peter Ghali - Senior Product Manager

Copyright ? 2011 iContact Corp. | whitepapers

{ Social Media Marketing }

This white paper provides practical advice and key strategies for beginners looking to incorporate email marketing with social media marketing.

Introduction

Sending and receiving emails is easy and free. We do it all the time with our personal email accounts. With more than 600 million users on Facebook and more than 175 million users on Twitter, social media is also easy to use and free. However, once you cross the bridge from email to email marketing, there are suddenly best practices to consider. The same thing can be said for social media marketing.

Email marketing and social media marketing should complement each other in growing your business presence and generating leads and customers. This paper is designed for you if you are familiar with email marketing and want to get started with social media marketing.

Social Media Survey We recently surveyed 414 iContact customers to learn more about their challenges and goals with social media.

According to the survey respondents, their largest social media challenges were lack of time, uncertainty about how to determine return on investment, and lack of knowledge about social media.

Survey Responses

Social Media Challenges

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Lack of resources

The learning curve

There are too many tools

Unsure how to

Lack of

Monitoring tools

determine ROI/ knowledge about don't meet

value

social media

all needs

Lack of time

Challenges

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Survey Responses

{ Social Media Marketing }

Social Media Applications Used

350 300 250 200 150 100

50 0

Social Media Application

For the purposes of this paper, we will focus strictly on Facebook and Twitter, which are the most commonly used social media networks among our survey respondents. The concepts and ideas in this paper, however, also apply to other social sites.

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{ Social Media Marketing }

Social Media ? Some Key Terms

Before we dive into social media marketing, this section defines some of the commonly used Facebook and Twitter terms.

Facebook

? Facebook Page ? Facebook Pages are associated with businesses and organizations. These used to be called Fan Pages.

? Fan ? A fan is someone who joins a Facebook Page by clicking the Like button for that page. They see updates from that Facebook Page in their News Feed.

? Facebook Profile ? This is a personal Facebook account. It is not recommended that you create a Facebook profile for your brand.

? Wall ? The part of a Facebook Page or Facebook profile where fans and friends, respectively, can post messages for anyone to see.

? Like ? When Facebook users click the Like button, they let their Facebook friends know they like particular content, and they give their friends an opportunity to read the content and click the link. This is analogous to a contact forwarding your company's email to friends.

? Comment ? Facebook users can begin a conversation about a post by commenting on it.

Twitter

? Username ? In tweets, you often see Twitter usernames preceded by @. Including this symbol creates a link to the user's profile on Twitter.

? Retweet ? Twitter users can retweet a message to forward it to all of their Twitter followers. Retweets begin with RT.

? Reply ? A reply is a public response to a tweet. The Twitter username of the recipient begins the reply. ? Direct Message ? Commonly known as a DM, a direct message is a personal message sent to

someone. It requires that both the sender and the recipient follow each other, and it is not publicly visible. The message begins with a D and is followed by the username of the message recipient. ? Mention ? A mention occurs when a Twitter user references your brand. Any tweet with your brand's Twitter username is a mention. ? Follower ? A follower is someone who follows your brand on Twitter. Followers receive your tweets, so it is important to grow your follower count. ? Hashtag ? Hashtags include text following a #. Hashtags highlight keywords or topics in a tweet. Twitter users often search by hashtag to find all tweets related to a topic.

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{ Social Media Marketing }

Anatomy of a Social Media Post

One of the key takeaways from our recent survey was that there was a general lack of knowledge about social media (third-largest challenge) and that the learning curve was a bit steep (fifth-largest challenge). Let's examine, then, sample Twitter and Facebook posts, using email marketing as a point of reference.

Twitter Post

Information about the content of the link encourages people to click the link.

In the email marketing world, this is analogous to the email subject.

Facebook Post

Link to additional information. Posts are not required to have links. Once clicked, this would be analogous to the email body.

Email marketers are used to having only a "from" name and "from" address for their emails. On Twitter and Facebook,

you also get a logo/image.

Unlike email marketing, social media allows you to include text that describes the content being shared to facilitate searching for the content online. So, for example, if someone was searching for #emailmarketing, they would see your content even if they were not aware of your other social media efforts.

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{ Social Media Marketing }

As you can see in the above posts, the length of a social media post is much shorter than a traditional email. Twitter limits you to 140 characters, and although you can put more content in a Facebook post, it is still very different than email. One thing you'll notice is that social media URLs are shorter than traditional URLs. There are services that can shorten traditional URLs for your Twitter and Facebook posts.

Social Media ? Key Tips to Keep in Mind

Social media marketing and email marketing share many common traits that help businesses accomplish their goals. For example, both can do the following:

? Help you grow your audience ? Encourage prospects and customers to respond to a call to action (e.g., visit a website,

sign up for a trial) ? Help you fine-tune your marketing efforts by providing quantifiable results

But there are some differences between social media marketing and email marketing that are helpful to keep in mind as you launch or fine-tune your social media efforts.

Segmentation and Personalization One of your major goals as an email marketer is to deliver relevant messages to your recipients. The information that email subscribers provide--such as preferences and demographics--can allow for more advanced personalization and segmentation. This can drive better engagement with your email subscribers.

With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, however, there are very little organized data, such as purchase history or website visits, that a marketer can easily access.

Deliverability The ability to deliver emails successfully to the inbox is critical to email marketing. Some email marketing solution providers have teams dedicated to maintaining high deliverability rates so that customers' limited marketing budgets have the highest impact. These providers also work with customers to help them comply with CAN-SPAM regulations and to ensure that messages are not caught in spam filters.

However, in the world of social media, there are no concerns or limitations regarding CAN-SPAM and deliverability. That doesn't, however, give you carte blanche to go crazy with your social media efforts.

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