expanding your community\'s presence online with social media

$: Expanding your Community\'s Presence Online with Social Media$
Expanding your Community's Presence Online

with Social Media

Economic Development & Community Marketing Experience

WHO WE WORK WITH

Economic Development Organiza3ons

U3lity Company ED Teams

Chambers of Commerce

Tourism

Downtown Redevelopment

Main Street Programs

Local Governments

Na3onal Heritage Areas

  Website Design   Community Branding   Retail Recruitment Guides   Wayfinding Signage   Target Industry Marketing   Social Media & Blogs   Content Development   PowerPoint Presentations   E-Newsletters   Graphic Design

? Why is having a strong online presence for your

community important?

The vast majority of research to narrow down a list of potential sites is done online.

! If you haven’t made a commitment to provide a great website and actively use social media, you are

missing the boat.

What We’ll Cover Today

1. Defining Your Community’s Brand

3. Exploring Your Social Media OpJons

4. Managing Social Media AcJviJes

2. Monitoring Your Brand Online

5. Measuring Results

6. IntegraJng with Other MarkeJng AcJviJes

Establishing a strong, consistent brand will help your community stand out.

Think about who you are trying to reach

Site Selectors Industry Reps

Retailers Industry Sectors Existing Industry Stakeholders

We’re Different!

Branding Your Community   Your community brand captures both tangible

and intangible qualities that create a community personality and make your community truly unique

  Your brand is your reputation and your promise of distinct value

  Your website is the primary place to develop your brand online, but your brand should be consistent across all social media

What are your top options?

What can you talk about?   Industry announcements   New business startups/entrepreneurship   Workforce programs and education   Company profiles   Local business news   Unemployment updates and related reports   Share blogs, videos, photos   Learn from organizations featured in this

presentation

  If nothing else, participate here   Broad reach beyond local market   This is your top business networking

tool, without having to travel to a conference or other networking event at a distance

  Participate daily - or weekly at a minimum

LinkedIn

Make sure all key employees have profiles and actively build connections

Search for and actively participate in industry groups locally, nationally,

internationally

LinkedIn groups are a great way to monitor buzz and trends

Communicate and engage with site selectors online

Make status updates of your own to show up in feeds

  Rapidly growing in importance   Young professionals   Tech Savvy participants   Broad reach beyond local market   Participate daily or multiple times

per day

Twitter

Continue your branding

Share videos, local news and communicate with others

Promote your organization’s tweets with your individual tweets, and vice versa

Search for topics to monitor trends (#hashtags)

Using # and @   Use @ to mention an organization or individual

by name – this shows up in their feed (and is very desirable) @RedSageAL

  Use # to highlight topics to show up in searches such as #EconDev #SiteSelection #Branding

  Create your own #hashtag for an event or campaign such as #SEDC2012 or #RS_SageAdvice – use to create buzz at an event

  Engagement and relationship building with your local market primarily

  More personal, informal and friendly

  Know your goals for using this:

  Top of mind in local market   Sharing local business news, or building

support for a local issue   Cross sharing/SEO opportunity

Facebook

Promote action on community issue

Share local economic development news

  Very small (but growing) audience

  At a minimum, duplicate the posts you are posting to Facebook or Twitter

  Cleaner navigation than Facebook – almost works like a micro-site with social media engagement

Google+

Google+ Profile example

  Terrific opportunity to give your take on local news and trends – plus this is the best way to:   create new personalized content to

share across web and all channels

 Drive traffic to your website   Increase the odds you will show up in

search engines – awesome SEO tool

Blogging

  Personal thoughts about current news or situation

  Keep short – 1 paragraph is fine

  Best is at least once a week, but even a well maintained once a month blog is better than most communities

Blogging

  New business announcements   Career tech education locally   Expansions – and why   Entrepreneurship   Local business resources   New regulations   Top jobs locally   Etc.

Blog Topics

  Part of your website   Blogger   Blogspot   Wordpress Doesn’t really matter what you use as long as you are sharing and promoting your blog

Blog Software

  Highly recommend starting to incorporate video into your efforts, if you are not already doing this

YouTube

Greenville, SC http://www.youtube.com/gogadc

  About GADC video   Industry profiles   Testimonial videos from young

professionals

Jacksonville-Onslow, NC

  Follow industry leaders on social media and on their blogs

  Promote those already championing for you   Be an active follower by retweeting, sharing,

and commenting   Actively participate in LinkedIn Groups   Continuously find and add LinkedIn

connections

Growing your audience: Follow to be followed

Give it time!

  It can take up to a year of diligent work to see the results of a good social media participation

Choosing How to Participate

  Choose how and where to participate: What do you have time to be consistent with? (Don’t start a blog if you aren’t committed to keeping it going)

  Give it time: You won’t see results overnight, be patient and be consistent

  Devote a realistic amount of time for social media each week – half hour a day? One hour a week?

  Make it a priority and be committed to it   Scale back and focus on one thing if time

is an issue   Don’t forget to take the time to plan in

advance

Carve out time:

  Add an agenda item to a weekly or monthly meeting: what should we blog about this week? What is going on that we want to talk about in social media?

  Decide what topics you’ll cover: use an editorial calendar to keep things organized but make sure you build in flexibility too

Build a process

  Encourage ideas from employees or members of your organization

  Give others a chance to create blogs, posts, videos, photos, and more

  Share the floor with other industry experts and guests

  You don’t have to create everything – retweet and share other’s posts

Share the load:

  Great free (or inexpensive) tools for this: •  Facebook – allows scheduling now

•  CrowdBooster.com – Facebook Page & Twitter

•  HootSuite.com – Facebook and Twitter

•  TweetDeck – Facebook, Twitter

Schedule ahead:

Know what is being said   Whether you use social media or not,

people will still be talking about your organization and your community online

  Monitor all social media platforms for comments and respond to comments as quickly as you can

  If at all possible, respond to negative posts rather than deleting them from your feeds

  Do not get into a “he said she said” argument if the post was negative – respond professionally and move it offline

Respond quickly to any negative posts

Don’t say that!:

A textbook best practice response:

  Offered by Constant Contact   Monitors mentions and activity:

•  Facebook •  Twitter •  LinkedIn •  Foursquare

  Reports are emailed to you   FREE!

Easy monitoring: NutshellMail.com

  Search for variations

  Find people singing your praises and follow them

  Search for your competitors

  Search for industry terms

Twitter.com/Search

  Set up alerts for your company name, products, and other identifying keywords

  Set up alerts associated with your competitors

  Set up alerts for terms associated with your industry

www.Google.com/Alerts

  Increase the number of people who actively engage with a like or a share or a mention by 5 each month

  Get three-four responses on average for all posts within one month

  Gain 10 new followers/fans each month

Sample Social Media Goals:

Answers questions such as:   How much traffic is coming to the site?   How did visitors get to the site?   What keywords are working best?   What content is working best?   Is social media & blogging driving traffic?   How did social users engage with the site?

Measure website traffic with Google Analytics:

Facebook Insights   Answers questions such as:

•  How did people respond to my posts?

•  How far is my reach?

•  How much has my following grown?

•  Which types of posts are the most shared and commented on?

Measure your online influence with Klout.com

•  Measures engagement with your social media accounts

•  Measures reach by the number of people who share your posts and how many followers they expose you to

•  Requires very consistent effort and very high quality posts to score high

•  Great way to look at who is most influential online and how they are using social media

Don’t forget to promote social media engagement

  Links and feeds on your website   Icons on your business cards and print

materials   Actively promote and link to from e-

newsletters   Anywhere you market yourself – make

sure you are promoting social media

We’re done! 1. Defining Your Community’s Brand






Thank you! Ellen Didier, President

Red Sage Communications, Inc. Stop by my booth!

www.RedSageOnline.com www.CommunityResults.com

twitter.com/ellendidier facebook.com/redsage linkedin.com/in/ellendidier

expanding your community\'s presence online with social media

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