How do I choose which is the most important social site for my business?

Grant Leboff:  I think where we would agree is that you’d certainly need to concentrate resource on certain channels. So I would definitely agree that for anybody who is watching this today, they need to decide of the more important channels, which are for them, and make sure that they concentrate on doing those well. I suppose what I would say is, if LinkedIn and Google+ are your main channels, there is nothing to stop you having a couple of videos that you have anyway and putting them on a Facebook page and then linking that back to your website, just to get the advantage of indexing.

Steve Barton: True, and linkage is very important, as you well know.

Grant Leboff: I agree. I think it is a challenge today to manage those media channels and there needs to be a purpose behind it. What do you think, if people are watching and they are thinking which are the most important sites for me, how do you think they make that decision? What are the key questions they should be asking?

Steve Barton: Where do my clients go? It’s really easy. Where do my clients’ eyeballs go, and go there. And I’m thinking probably a bit more in a business to business play. But I think if you look through the lens of consumer FMCG it is still the same thing. Where are they going? Where are they going to get information and share information? That’s where I want to be, I want to be in that mix. When they are thinking about ‘skittles’, are they plumbing the depths of LinkedIn? Probably not… But very much from the client perspective, or the customer perspective. And I’ve seen this first hand. Often, people start with; what are my corporate objectives? Where can I distribute the information that I want to distribute, as opposed to; what are they engaging with?

A really useful exercise is to find the key phrases? Look them up on Google, look them up on YouTube, YouTube in particular. What videos are people watching ‘bfff!’ when they are looking at this, and it will give you a sense of what people are prepared to engage with.

Grant Leboff: I think you make a very good point. I want to come back to something you said before. One of the things that people still haven’t got their heads around with the web, – and it’s not that it’s complicated, but I think it’s just a different way of thinking – is that in a lot of traditional marketing, there is the premise that people started with themselves in mind and then went out with their benefits to their customer. I think that if you want to make web work to day, you have to start with the customer in mind and work back to yourself and people don’t do that.

But before we finish, what I was really interested in asking, is about a comment that you made at the beginning which was quite subtle but very important. It’s that I think there was a time when people were very happy to utilise, say, their Facebook page and have all their connections there, and I think there is a realisation now that they don’t have that real estate. And actually it’s quite important to try and get people to come back. So whichever social media platform you are using, to at some point comeback, so they are engaging with you on your website, on your real estate, so there’s some data capture there and some lasting value, otherwise there is a danger that you don’t get bang for your buck, from a marketing point of view. What’s your view on that and what’s the best way to approach that?

Steve Barton: I agree. But it’s back to what they would use your website for? What they would expect to find there, versus what they would expect to find on Facebook? People go on Facebook because they want to communicate with their friends and they want to exchange information in a friendly fashion. Based on the numbers I’ve seen, they don’t tend to talk about brands all that often. They might talk about, for example, any ideas on holidays? But they won’t necessarily name specific brands or airlines, unless they are really in ‘moan’ mode.

So I think it’s back to asking the question of when they are seeking, perhaps, deeper information about your products or your brand, are you providing routes to that and are you delivering exactly what they need? But it’s thinking through when they come and talk to you in that space, what are they looking for? And when they are in this space what are they looking for? And what they will not engage with because it’s inappropriate, given the platform they are in.

Grant Leboff: So ultimately it’s back to what customers are trying to do and seeing it through their eyes, which I think in some ways, bizarrely, companies are still not great at doing all the time.

Steve Barton: no because they trying to get their messages across, you can’t blame them, but that’s their starting point.

Grant Leboff: Thank you very much.

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