SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Folks, It's Time to Get Social!

Social media marketing is quickly becoming one of the most volatile players in the online marketing mix.  Not only does it have major implications on search engine optimization, but social media sites are some of the most heavily trafficked, making them great places to meet and connect with your target audience.  The goal behind Terrakon Marketing’s social media marketing services is to put your company in a good position to tap into the two-way conversation that is naturally happening online on sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and corporate / industry blogs.  Terrakon offers a holistic approach to social media marketing.  Our social media strategists work with you to develop and implement a customized social media plan based on your individual circumstance.

Let’s be honest, anyone can go and produce a Facebook or Twitter account and start talking.  But those with a well-defined strategy can enter into the social media world in a more powerful way, with brand and voice consistency established, with news and valuable information “in the hopper” and ready for dissemination and with a clear understanding of why they are there and what they expect to accomplish.  Another hurdle with social media marketing is measurability.  Because of the large amount of metrics available with this dynamic media, it can be a challenge to know what you should be watching and to which statistics you should be paying attention.  Our services are designed to show you where people are talking about you, the areas where you can best get involved, the tactics you should use to help increase brand awareness and how you should know if your efforts are working.

No one social media strategy is fit for every company.  Through our social media audit, competitive analysis, and custom-built interactive strategies, we’ll help you decide if social media marketing is a good fit for your company and if so, help you to take advantage of the social web and use it to reap optimal results.

Terrakon Marketing's social media services include:

• Social media audit: Perhaps you are not new to the world of social media, but find it doesn’t seem to working for you.  Through this audit, we can gauge your company / brand’s presence across the various social networks and develop a custom strategy for ways to improve it.  Not every company has a presence on Digg or MySpace, so we cater our suggestions to realistic options including niche opportunities and relevant mainstream tactics.
• Social media marketing strategy: Have you been tasked with spending a social media or interactive marketing budget, but you don’t know where to start?  We can assess your individual needs, outline opportunities and prescribe specific actions for long-term social media success.
• Implementation guidelines: Did you already decide what you want to do with social media, but you need help navigating a complex and seemingly subjective landscape? We’ll work with you to ensure the integrity of your brand, compliance with the different mediums and best practices for future development and communications.
• Social profile creation: We will identify the social networks where you should be participating and where people are talking about you. We’ll also help you create and manage your own social media profiles to attract visitors and leverage the two-way conversation.
• Competitive analysis:  Are you constantly thinking, “How do they do it?”  Is your competition doing an incredible job with videos, blogs, linkbait and community building?  Terrakon can help you with some savvy reconnaissance and identify their tactics, potential service providers and action alerts that you can start implementing to shake their hold on your industry.
• Software recommendations: If there are hundreds of SEO tools, there are thousands more social media tools due to the explosion of open source software and a larger audience. Finding tools to track performance, opportunities, management and more can be daunting, but we can help narrow your choices based on budget, resources and environments.  In other words, we will show you how to best measure the “most measurable” media out there.  See our blog post Measurabley Unmeasurable.”
• Blog design, setup and/or optimization: A blog that is not set up correctly won’t attract readers or bring you the search engine benefits you’re after. We’ll work with you to find the best blogging platform for your needs, help you to optimize your blog for success from the very beginning, and show you how to tweak it to make it more accessible to both users and the search engines.  In this service offering, we can build the blog’s skeletal system with technical details and optimization in mind.
• Blog strategy development: We can work with you to create a blog strategy that carves a space for your corporate or personal brand in the greater blog community. This may include crafting ideas for blog posts, writing the posts themselves, showing you how to comment on other blogs to build awareness, and much more.  With strategy development, we will help you give your blog some heart.
• Community building strategy: We’ll outline which communities are worth monitoring, what the competition is doing and how you can naturally enter these communities and form relationships. This strategy document will also show you how to identify the important conversations in your industry and when, how and whom to reach out to.
• Community monitoring: Don’t have a team in-house that you can allocate community building to? No one knows your services and industry better than you, but if you do want help, we can monitor the communities important to you, track your brand or keywords across those, and proactively respond to both positive and negative mentions.  Social media does involve participation.  Whether you want to be the life of the party, or a wallflower, you still have to show up and at times get involved.

And now we will gift you some bonus value with a few interesting facts about social media:

1. Facebook was started in 2003 (just seven years ago) from a sophomore’s Harvard dorm room.  The website currently has more than 350 million active users worldwide and is the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.
2. Twitter was founded in 2006 (a mere four years ago) by Jack Dorsey of St. Louis, MO and is ranked the third most used social media, behind Facebook and MySpace.  Twitter is unique however, in its ability for fast growth.  In 2009, for example, Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382%.
3. YouTube was launched in 2005 by three former PayPal employees as a way to effectively share video online.  Since, it has been responsible for multimedia sharing and community building, and for overnight Internet fame like the baby dancing to Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies” and the “Charlie bit my finger – again” video with over 142,225,000 views.  YouTube, acquired by Google in 2006, will undoubtedly continue to ask the world to “Broadcast Itself” for much time to come.

To start a conversation with us about your social media needs, fill out the contact form at the bottom of every web page or contact us Toll Free at (800) 605. 4160