This is a continuation of my post two weeks ago about Social Media Strategy.
Unlike Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the networks I’m going to detail here aren’t for everyone. Hence, these are niche networks with specialized strategies built around your brand’s core appeal.
Eventbrite: Yes, it’s a social network, too.
Eventbrite (and Meetup.com and other sites in this niche) is probably the easiest of these networks to decide if you should be using. Do you host events? Do you want interested members of the public to be able to find and attend your events? Do you want to easily collect payment for your events? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you should probably use Eventbrite in some capacity.
At its core, think of Eventbrite as a more robust, dedicated version of Facebook’s event function – you invite people or they stumble on your event and they RSVP to receive updates and reminders about it. However, Eventbrite gives you a dedicated search engine for its events, so people looking for meetups on a topic in your area can find your event easily. It also has killer mailing list, social media, and payment portal integration. Essentially, your social media strategy for Eventbrite is to put your event out there with good copy and wait for interested people to find you (while directing them to your Eventbrite page through other channels, of course).
Foursquare: What the hell is a mayor?
Foursquare is a check-in app with a game layer. You can use it to make your brand more fun, while providing incentives and rewards to your most frequent customers. This assumes, of course, that you can work out worthwhile incentives.
Why shouldn’t you use it? Foursquare’s user base is only about 1% that of Facebook’s. Additionally, you exclude non-smartphone users with any foursquare campaigns. I’m not entirely sold on the idea of foursquare or of location-based services in general, and they’ve had limited success to date. Still, some enterprises are pushing location-based campaigns pretty heavily.
Yelp: Reviews are a double-edged sword.
(You can skip this section if you’re not a service company.) Yelp is probably the most controversial social network here, since you don’t have a choice about joining it. Anyone can list your company, and reviews made about you cannot be filtered. For this reason, Yelp can be disastrous to your reputation.
I think your social media strategy for Yelp should revolve around encouraging positive reviews while not antagonizing negative ones. Thank positive reviewers and encourage them to come back anytime. Sleep on negative reviews before replying, and always be polite. Negative reviews will happen, but be on the lookout for trends that may provide valuable insight about the shortcomings of your services.
YouTube: Beyond video streaming.
Many businesses choose to use YouTube solely as a CDN for their videos, locking down their profile and commenting. Most organizations don’t bother with that latter part and just host videos at the site like a normal individual user. However, for content producers, YouTube can offer a basic interface for interacting with your viewers. I can’t comment much on YouTube social media strategy, since I’ve never tried it very much, but two companies that I think leverage their channels well are Sony and (of course) Google.
So that’s that. Social media strategy as I see it – the big and the niche. What networks are you on? What strategies do you think work best for these smaller networks?
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