Businesses Cozy Up To Social Media | Central Mass. firms see the value in brand building
We’ve all seen them: Business Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and blogs that start strong, with posts every week, or every day, and then slowly fade away, leaving a post at the top of the page dated sometime in 2009.
For many companies, it’s hard to know what to do with social media. But then there are others that have found ways not just to keep up a consistent stream of posts, but to generate real conversation and — more importantly — turn the conversation into clients and sales.
Mark Carlson, senior vice president of Grafton staffing company The Suburban Group, said LinkedIn is a major part of what he does. When he’s trying to fill a position, he said he can spend hours clicking through pages on the site.
Different social media tools fill different purposes, Carlson said. While LinkedIn, with its professional profiles, is perfectly suited for corporate recruiting, Facebook provides the Suburban Group with a platform for showcasing job openings to a large audience. Carlson is also experimenting with posting job ads in video format on YouTube, he said.
Beyond that kind of direct marketing, Carlson also blogs on the company’s site.
“That kind of information is more about the brand awareness, getting people to recognize that we are experts in the employment field,” he said.
Blogging For Dollars
Paul Wackell of Imagine Web Designs in Worcester said blogs are good marketing because they can give a firm credibility and help a company’s website come up more quickly in a Google search, especially if they’re updated frequently.
“I myself have done well with blogging,” Wackell said. “I’ve gotten clients from blogs. I’ve never gotten a client from Twitter or Facebook.”
But for many larger businesses that market to the general public, those popular sites can be very important. Worcester’s DCU Center has more than a thousand followers on Twitter and 4,000-plus “likes” for its Facebook page. Marketing Manager Lindsey Sonn said following social media is a big part of her job.
“I keep the tabs open on my computer all day long,” she said.
Sonn not only posts announcements about upcoming events at the center, but re-tweets comments about Worcester Sharks games, shares links to videos of upcoming DCU performers and answers questions, and the occasional complaint, from visitors. She said she puts similar content on Facebook, where she said the audience tends to be a bit older, and Twitter, where it’s generally younger.
Calling On The Experts
Another Worcester company that has bought into social media in a big way is Niche Hospitality, which has Facebook pages for all its restaurants. One of them, Mezcal Cantina, has more than 4,000 likes by itself.
Niche’s president, Michael Covino, said the company outsources its social media presence to Vision Advertising of Worcester, sharing such information as schedules and cocktail specials that the firm uses to craft campaigns.
“They can talk about the chef’s special,” he said. “They can talk about signature items.”
At first, Covino said, he looked at every post before it went live, but now he gives Vision free rein and simply monitors posts on his phone as they go up.
Covino said it can be hard to know how much business social media brings in. He knows that not everyone who likes Mezcal’s page is a regular customer, but he figures a long Facebook discussion about the restaurant’s different guacamoles can’t be anything but good for business. And, he said, the fact that Mezcal’s popularity in real life has trended upward right along with its Facebook fan base suggests it’s an effective form of advertising.
The company is so convinced of social media’s effectiveness that it has made the medium part of its advertising strategy, along with billboards and TV and radio ads.
Like Niche, Worcester personal injury law firm Sbrogna & Brunelle LLP uses an outside contractor to run its social media. Firm partner Roger Brunelle said that, as someone who was practicing law in the pre-Internet days, he doesn’t use social media much himself. But he said the web is becoming a necessity for advertising.
“I don’t think the phonebook is an effective medium anymore,” he said. “You go to the net before you go to the phonebook.”
Sbrogna & Brunelle’s blog features informative articles related to the sorts of injury cases the firm specializes in, and its Twitter and Facebook accounts are all about driving more traffic to the blog.
Brunelle said the firm watches the traffic to its site, and it’s able to monitor the phone calls the site generates by listing a unique phone number there.
Regardless of tracking tools, it can be very hard to tell how much business actually comes from social media. At the DCU Center, Sonn said it’s impossible to judge how many ticket sales can be attributed to Twitter or Facebook, but when the venue runs competitions through social media, it does get responses.
What’s The ROI?
The question of how to measure the results of social media is a significant one, according to Matt Ward of Gardner-based inConcert Web Solutions.
“Nobody can measure it,” Ward said. “People feel like they get results from it, but they don’t really know.”
But that hasn’t stopped inConcert from making social media a significant part of its own marketing efforts.
Ward said he treats social media much like in-person networking. He’ll “friend” clients on his personal Facebook account, and he doesn’t mind chatting about the weather on his professional accounts. It simply serves as a way to launch a conversation.
“I need to let them know that we’re not a robot behind the computer,” he said.
Ward said one client he found through social media was a former high school classmate who he had reconnected with on Facebook. Because he posts about his work on his personal page, he said, he was the first person she thought of when she needed help with a website.
Ward said he knows some people may be put off at the thought of sharing personal information over their business channels, but it works for him.
“If they know those things about me, then we become closer to being true friends, and ultimately that gets into the trust factor,” he said. “People will trust me with their money when they pay me for a service.”
Nathan Harris of New Perspective Web Solutions in Worcester said he sees two main ways businesses can keep up a strong social media presence. One is outsourcing the job to a professional, and the other is having a knowledgeable person on staff who’s savvy about technology and excited to share their knowledge with others.
“At the end of the day, the content is what matters,” he said. “If you really want an audience that cares about your business, you need to be thinking about content and quality foremost.”
WBJ Web Partners
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