Is Social Media Trustbait the Future ?
There has been lot of changes in the search industry during 2010. The key term we heard during 2010 was “Social Media Optimization/Social Media Marketing”. We are now onto 2011 and social media marketing is to grow much more as search engines have started to give importance to social media links. The social media links needs trustbait rather than linkbait.
So what is trustbait?
A sophisticated link building strategy in which trust plays a major role. For a effective and successful social media strategy it is highly important to create strong relationships. To build strong relationship it is highly important to gain the trust of your followers. To gain trust you need to provide useful information that is useful and that can be easily shared. You should make your followers feel that you are the first person that can be contacted to gain expert advice on specific topics.
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are going to be used more and more in the coming year. It will be important to find out the right content as well as the most discussed topics. Social Media Signal Monitoring is going to be much more important to build a right strategy. Below are some important questions for which you need to find out the appropriate answers:
Who talks about your brand?
Who talks about your competitor brands?
What all positive things are being said about you and your competitors?
What all negative things are being said about you and your competitors?
Who follow your brand advocates?
Who follow your competitors and their promoters?
Which all communities your brand advocates are actively participating?
Which all communities your competitors and their promoters are actively participating?
How does your social graph and your competitors social graph look like?
What kind of content do your competitors share?
When you have the answers to the above questions you are in a better situation to start your own social media campaign. Now the biggest challenge is to decide whether to recruit a social media person or try out a current employee. Initially it is better to try out a customer focused employee in your organization who can present the headlines in a better way to the right audience. The employee should be social media savy and should have a keen interest in interacting with online customers.
A present employee can easily share the best reasons why a customer should purchase from you rather than your competitor. You can also have a social media expert who can help the employee with social media trends and updates. The social media expert can help the employee technically and the employee can help the social media person to learn about the product and services your company offers. There should be certain “rules of engagement” and it should be strictly followed by the social media team. The company should have its own social media guidelines and policies which each and every employee of the organisation should follow.
If your company has a good social media team they can easily share and make your company social in social media. This will make your company gain trustbait from the social communities where your company has a presence. Make your brand advocates feel that your are seriously looking into their contributions and rewarding them with special discounts and incentives. Everyone needs to be motivated and there should reason for everyone to promote your company or brand. Provide everyone what they are looking for and this will help in increasing the trustbait as well as to build a stronger online presence.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Tom Coates
