Restaurants and Social Media: How to Optimize Your Networks

Restaurants and Social Media: How to Optimize Your Networks

Written by Amanda DiSilvestro in Blogging Tips

Social media is a great tool for any restaurant to connect with customers – but only if you use it right. Though these sites are a casual online meeting place for customers, it’s a strategic business opportunity. Thus, optimizing your site to be found and get customers in the door is key to making your efforts worth your while.

To make the most of these sites you’ll want to consider keyword use, coupon sharin,g and call to actions. With a few simple changes you can make all the difference.

How to Use Keywords for Your Restaurant’s Social Accounts

More than ever consumers are looking to social networks to search for their favorite restaurant. However, just because you’re present doesn’t mean you’ll be found – and being found on social sites is integral to staying relevant, current and appealing to new customers. To ensure you’re discovered by the hungry eaters who want to find you, you need to use keywords within your page to optimize it.

• Step #1: Perform a keyword analysis to see how you’re being found and assess how you want to be eventually found.
• Step #2: From there, you want to use the keywords within your posts, the name of your page, etc. Just like a website, these should reflect who you are and the verbiage people may use to find you.
• Step #3: Continually analyze the keywords you’re using to make sure you’re targeting keywords that can make you successful.

Remember, you’re optimizing your site to be found when a potential customer uses a social search. In other words, this does not have anything to do with Google, but rather the search engine results pages of a search on a social network.

Using Coupons on Your Restaurant’s Social Networks

Every restaurant knows that coupons are a smart idea – even if it only gets diners through the door, you can charm them into coming back for more. However, the real trick is enticing the customer enough to utilize the coupon. Social media is a great way to use this to your advantage.

• Pinterest is a smart place to direct customers to your coupons; utilizing tantalizing photos of the menu items that are being offered, or a host of items. This gets customers to click open the pin, and then ultimately head to your site for the coupon.
• Facebook makes it easy to offer coupons, and the new timeline layout highlights photos; thus making it even easier to get people to notice your coupons and click.
• Google+ also makes it easy to offer deals and filter where you want these deals to appear. Try to put all of your new customers in one circle and get them to come back!

Creating a Call to Action

While this term may be familiar to your blogging or web design, it’s also important for social media. Though customers are interested to look through your page or tweets, they may not be so inclined to convert – until you tell them to.

SocialMediaExaminer.com suggests, “A call to action encourages or even incentivizes fans’ responses to your content, and it can be as basic as a simple status update.” This can be a very straightforward statement that is still encouraging – getting customers involved is the key.

• Come choose your favorite coupon.
• Tell us what you want to see on the dinner menu tonight. (Make this an easy to run contest)
• Tell us what item should be on special this week.

Social media is a fantastic tool for any business, especially a restaurant. As an often intimate environment, your food connects customers over a nice meal, and it’s time you connect with them too. By optimizing your social sites you have a better chance of making the conversion – whether you use keywords or a call to action, simple changes can make all the difference.

Photo Credit: kirklands.com

Amanda Dee is a professional blogger that writes on a variety of topics including New York City restaurants. She writes for Restaurants.com, a leading directory of restaurants.

Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: coupons on social networks, restaurants, social media and restaurants

This post was written by Amanda DiSilvestro. You can visit the Author Archive for a short bio, more posts, and other information about the author.

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Social Media Marketing: How to Get Your Team's Buy-in

In my last column, I mentioned that your team is one of the best sources for creating sharable content. You cringed a little when you read that, didn’t you? (See “Where to Turn For Quality Social Media Content”, July 9, 2012.)

Team cooperation is not necessarily easy to achieve when it comes to social media marketing. People resist or don’t feel like it’s their responsibility. Others just plain ignore it.

Here are a few ideas to get your team sharing and caring about your online success.

Give your team a reason to care
Your social media marketing efforts will benefit immensely if you show your team that their contribution is worthwhile.

Start by celebrating successes regularly with everyone. When you achieve massive “likes” on a post, make a sale, get a positive customer endorsement or similar, let your team know that good things are happening online and give them a chance to celebrate with you.

If you want to kick things up a notch, create friendly competition around the content submitted by team members. (A free lunch for the most-liked post submission of the month?)

Make it a habit of rewarding good ideas that move your efforts forward.

Empower your people
While it’s a great idea to have one person “own” your social media marketing plan, you will get more participation if you make your strategy a team effort.

Start by identifying goals and putting together a rough plan. Then, share it with your team and ask for input. Brainstorm during staff meetings, ask for ideas on specific challenges or provide a “social media suggestion box.”

The important thing is making everyone aware of your goals and getting them in the mood to contribute.

Provide training and support
Many travel consultants don’t participate in social media because it seems hard to grasp or they think it will be time-consuming. Turn those thoughts around by providing learning opportunities and giving your team time to take advantage of them.

You can hire an expert to conduct a workshop, sign up for online programs or provide a library of readable resources – whatever works best for your group.

Create a space where anyone can ask questions freely without feeling stupid. This can be in the form of email access to a resource person, question periods during staff meetings, or a Q&A space on your company’s intranet.

Make social media an integral part of your business
There’s an agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, that encourages every team member to blog and network online. They allot time for this during the day and then promote their efforts.

As a result, the agency receives a healthy amount of bookings, referrals and new leads from the collective effort.

This shows that your team members will accept new things more easily when they become an organic part of your business.

Case in point? Think about the early days of email in business. You can facilitate a similar integration with social media by: including it in staff performance goals, integrating it in office policy and requiring share-worthy content from people who go on familiarization trips.

Make it clear that their contributions are not only appreciated, but also expected.

Most importantly: believe in it yourself
You can try as many tactics, tips and internal policies as you want. The fact remains that your team won’t believe in the importance of social media if you don’t.

So, before you attempt any of the ideas mentioned above, make sure you are convinced. Have a plan you believe in, share your goals and lead your team to success.

Sophie Bujold is a social media coach who helps travel professionals achieve online success. She speaks at industry events and works individually with travel agencies across North America. For more insights from Sophie, visit her website and sign up for free weekly email tips.

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How to Become a Social Media Ninja to Grow Your Small Business ...

Social media is the perfect marketing tool for a small business. If you are a start-up or embarking on a reinvention or perhaps trying to become a thought leader in your industry, social media is the ideal place to build a platform. But do you know how to leverage your social media for your small business?  Since 2007, I’ve reinvented my entire business using social media. Forbes Magazine has named me the #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter, and I write a weekly column on social media for the New York Times.

Since I’ve built my @SmallBizLady brand, I’ve been called a Social Media Ninja — and now I’m going to teach you how to become one too!

If you want to learn advanced techniques on how to build a social media brand, use hashtags, create a tweetchat, how to most effectively use LinkedIn, create Facebook fanatics and repurpose content,

About Melinda Emerson

Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is one of America’s leading small business experts. As a seasoned entrepreneur, professional speaker, and small business coach, she develops audio, video and written content to fulfill her mission to end small business failure. As CEO of Quintessence Multimedia, Melinda educates entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies on subjects including small business start-up, business development and social media marketing. Forbes Magazine named her #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. She hosts #SmallBizChat Wednesdays on Twitter 8-9pm ET for emerging entrepreneurs. She also publishes a resource blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com Melinda is also bestseller author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 months; A Month-by-Month Guide to a Business That Works.

View all posts by Melinda Emerson →

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How to use your community to generate social-media ideas

If you're giving a speech, your audience's body language can tell you what they like or don't. But in social media, you need to look at different signals for feedback and ideas.

Shama Kabani

You may know the basics of successful social-media content: valuable, interesting content that your followers will want to read, interact with, and share. Sometimes, however, it’s hard to what you should be writing about.

Maybe you’re still getting a feel of what your customers want – or maybe you’re simply running out of ideas. The good news is, your customers are likely already telling you what your content should be, if you know how to ask and listen.

1. Ask them

Sometimes using a direct approach can yield excellent results. Whether through a multiple-choice poll or asking for feedback via replies and comments, your social media can let you know what they’d love to see more (or less) of, or tell you what they think about recent content you’ve posted. Your followers’ responses might confirm whether you’ve been going down the right path with your social-media content, and may give you ideas to go in a new direction that you hadn’t even previously considered.

2. Monitor engagement

Often, your most popular social-media content is also the content that receives the most interaction. Using built-in analysis from Facebook Insights or various other tools, monitor and track how followers interact with each post or tweet. Comments, “likes” and shares on Facebook, as well as retweets and favorites on Twitter, can indicate what topics and subjects your followers found interesting and valuable.

3. Read comments

The comments that your fans and followers leave on your social media and blog posts can often give insight into the type of content that they enjoy or would like to see. While the overall level of response (or the lack thereof) a post or tweet gets can in itself be an indicator of your followers’ interest in a particular topic, they could also be giving you more direct feedback. Take the time to read through the comments and replies for ones that ask questions, request clarification, or show enthusiasm for a related topic. All of these can give you ideas and inspiration for new subject areas to cover.

Shama Kabani is CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a social media and digital PR firm based in Dallas and servicing clients all over the globe. Her best-selling book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing has just been published in an updated 2nd Edition. Her "Ask Shama" column appears regularly on Upstart Business Journal.

Follow Your Favorites with My News

My News is a way to create a customized news feed based on companies and industries that matter to you.

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How to keep your social media working for you while you're away ...

From: Women Unlimited - 4:11am - August 30, 2012

As business owners we can’t always be at our desks, we have meetings, events, networking and all the other fantastic things that come with being our own boss, so knowing that social media needs to be nurtured can seem like […]

Continue reading this article »

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Social Media: How to Build Your Brand Using Pinterest

lifestyle • hobbies-me time

by Sarah DeNike on August 30th, 2012 | No Comments »

Pinterest, the self-proclaimed virtual pinboard, has quickly become one of the fastest growing social media sites. It isn’t just for crafters or home users; it can also be a useful tool for building your brand and connecting with followers.

When using Pinterest with your business hat on, you should look at the site as a place to show all the different aspects of your brand or business, not just the products you produce. It can be a great way to display the breadth of content that is available through your brand and other ways for users/customers to connect with your brand.

Here are a few tips to help make the most of Pinterest.

Make your profile compelling and link to your website.

This may seem basic, but how many of us see abbreviated business descriptions on Twitter and Facebook? Be sure to include a link to your brand’s website and a well thought out description of your brand.

Create pinboards for all of your content or product areas.

Whether your brand is a blog, service oriented business, or product producer, use Pinterest to highlight all the different aspects of your brand. These pinboards can show the breadth of your skills, products, or content and entice new people to become followers. These pinboards can effectively highlight reoccurring features on your blog, especially photos or projects.

Pin your visuals, photos or infographics and others’, too.

Once your pinboards are created, pin the images you use on your site on the boards. The better the content you include, the more likely people will start following you and make their way back to your site. By adding pins of other people or brand’s content to your pinboards, you are extending your reach, showing compelling content beyond your brand and not just self-promoting.

Fill your pin and pinboard descriptions with keywords.

By filling your descriptions with keywords it will make them more searchable. Using words like “cute” or “fun” might be easy, but it doesn’t allow for others to find your content easily.

Have a “follow” button on your site and “pin it” button on posts or product pages.

Just like with Facebook and Twitter follow buttons, have your Pinterest button prominently displayed on your site. By having “pin it” buttons on each of your blog posts or product pages, it allows your followers to quickly pin images, content, or products they like. Each time someone else pins your content, it links back to your site and will display for their followers to view.

Use #hashtags in your description.

Pinterest, like Twitter, supports the use of hashtags. By adding hashtags in the descriptions of your pins, it makes them easily searchable.

Add links to your content in the description of your pin.

The pinned image is supposed to be linked back to the original source of the content. However, sometimes these get broken. By adding the link in the description, it makes it easy for someone to find the source. With that said, make sure your links are short.

Hopefully these tips and a little bit of well spent time can help you build your brand using Pinterest and help you find some new followers that may not have found you before.

Are you on Pinterest? How do you use Pinterest to get more traction on your blog or site?

Sarah is the mom to two boys, a mompreneur, an aspiring author, a technology geek and passionate blogger. Since her oldest child was born in 2005, she has been a stay-at-home mom and in 2009 she started her blog The Will to See. The Will to See is her outlet and forum that chronicles her experiences, including raising children with vision and GI issues, becoming a mompreneur, and learning how to write a book. She also writes for ShePosts and Girl Power Hour.

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Category: hobbies-me time, lifestyle
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Find out how to use social media to support your farming business

FARMERS have a chance to learn more about social media and how it can help improve their business at a seminar being held at the Royal Cornwall Showground.

Tim Relf, community editor for magazine Farmers Weekly, will be the principal speaker at the event on September 25 from 7pm.

Social media covers sites such as Facebook and Twitter, increasingly being used to communicate to customers and between businesses.

Mr Relf has spearheaded the development of Farmers Weekly social media platforms and their own interactive forums.

The seminar will include examples of farmers using social media, from marketing their business to keeping on top of news and campaigns.

There will also be short talks by James Small, a West Country farmer embracing social media, and staff of host Duchy College Rural Business School about using its online resources to learn what help and support is available to rural businesses.

Admission to the event is free for farmers, farm workers, smallholders and foresters.

For more details or to book a place, contact the Rural Business School on 0845 4587485 or send an e-mail to rbs@duchy.ac.uk

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An entrepreneur's guide to social mediapart seven How to get ...

In part one of her series on social media skills, Colette Mason focused on social media for technophobes, part two looked at identifying your social media goals, the third examined how to find your social media voice, part four revealed how to stand out from the crowd, part five showed how to master your social media updates and part six outlined how to avoid being boring and predictable.

In part seven of the series, the internet marketing expert explains how to get a return on investment from your social media activities.

The whole point of your social media marketing campaign is to make your business more profitable; otherwise why bother?

That means you to need to measure the cost of your campaigns against the additional profits your business receives as a result of the uplift in sales. Costs are relatively easy to track accurately, effectiveness less so.

"There is always an opportunity cost to doing free social media marketing – don’t forget that."

Your return on investment can be difficult to measure with extreme precision because there are often no real clear-cut answers to what finally convinced the customer to complete a purchase or make an enquiry with you.

Let’s take the following example.

• Day 1: Customer searches Google for "office stationery next day delivery", clicks on a search results link to your site.
• Day 2:Customer follows you on Twitter, clicks several special offer links in your emailed newletters over the course of a month.
• Day 15: Customer views some testimonial videos from your other satisfied customers you posted on your Facebook page.
• Day 30:Customer searches Google again for "office stationery next day delivery", this time clicks on your paid advertisement on Google then purchases a widget for £200.

Which marketing program should get “credit” for the conversion — SEO, email, social, or paid advertising?

Effort vs other forms of advertising and marketing

Don’t forget, just because all the techniques listed in this mini-course are free to try, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost attached – for example, whilst you are updating your profile information you’re not networking at a face-to-face event, or calling your existing customers to see if there’s something else you could be doing for them.

There is always an opportunity cost to doing free social media marketing – don’t forget that. If you're a startup you'll be used to burning the midnight oil to save money, just be careful it doesn't take over.

Things to track

When you're running your campaigns, check that you're heading in the right direction with these key statistics: 

Increasing traffic: if you're an advertising revenue supported website, you care a lot about eyeballs on your site. More eyeballs mean more advertising dollars. You want to use social media to drive a larger and larger audience to visit your website. Similarly if you run an online shop, the greater the number of visitors, the more likely you are to make a sale.

Increasing leads and enquiries: You want to use social media to drive people to your website to download free advice or place an enquiry and become a lead.

Increasing reach: reach - the number of people you're connected to - is not usually a primary end goal but rather a means to one of the other two goals of traffic or leads. That's because the greater reach you have, the easier it is to get significant traffic or leads from social media channels. Reach is very important when you’re a startup business, or trying to boost your own authority and carve your own niche in the marketplace.

Increasing social proof and buzz: the more positive mentions your business, staff, products and services get means more social proof for you and the great products and services you offer. Other people’s positive comments and status updates are like mini-testimonials for your business.

If buzz or awareness is important to you, you will want to measure mentions of your company name, experts, and brand names in social media over time, which you can track for free with Google by setting up a Google Alert which catalogues all the mentions of your brand and emails it to you.

Increasing customer happiness (customer support): I often tell my clients who are still too scared to start their social media campaign that people are talking about them whether or not they want them to! Social media allows you to tune into conversations your customers are having, be they positive or negative.

By participating, you can control what they find first about you. For many businesses, social media has turned into a particularly great tool for responding to customers directly and quickly when they're having problems with your product. Check out some big PC or mobile phone suppliers to see how they handle this situation.

You can combine analysing your social media efforts with your website statistics, your CRM system, people on your helpdesk and so on, to start tracking how effective your campaigns are and which ones are working best for you.

In our final lesson we’ll look at what it feels like to run a campaign in the long run and how you manage your campaigns.

Colette Mason runs an international online consultancy which shows businesses and entrepreneurs how to use the internet and social media to boost their business online. With an IT background, which started in support and development and moving on to usability and online marketing techniques, she has worked on some of the biggest projects in Europe. Colette is also author of 'Social Media Success in 7 Days'. For more information please visit: www.socialmediasuccessin7days.com.

This article originally appeared on our sister community, TrainingZone.co.uk.

For more articles in the 'An entrepreneur's guide to' series, click here

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29 Companies Tell You How To Rock Social Media

Social media can send businesses in a lot of different directions. Some use it as a marketing channel, others use it to spread content, while others start without a plan and end up abandoning social media altogether.

Before businesses dive into social media, they should have a plan. What do they hope to get out of it? What are they going to use it for? How often? Are there any goals to set?

Here, 29 companies tell us how they approach social media and what they recommend for others. These companies don’t fit into any one industry. Many are in the tech field, but we also have a range of businesses from grocery stores to car rental companies. Each offers its own unique perspective.

Read below and see what you can learn.

Backblaze

"We are a very open company and try to ensure that our social media persona matches who we actually are and how we run the company. Thus, we share information about the inner workings of the company, the people, how we build the service, and other interesting tidbits...along with the way we think and approach our decisions.

While being as open as we are may not work for every company, being authentic to the way the company operates should. If a company is very formal, having a wacky persona will feel forced and users feel that. And vice-versa.

Let the culture of the company dictate the voice and approach of the company in social media."

Gleb Budman
Co-Founder and CEO of Backblaze

Backupify

"Our approach to social media at Backupify is essentially three-fold. We use our social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and sometimes Google+) to spread helpful information, be there for customer support and to put a genuine face and voice to the company. I'll break down each of these strategies.

Spreading thought leadership:

To be effective with social media marketing, you can't be self-serving. These are not channels to promote everything about your company and its products. This is a place to teach people about your industry, topics they care about within that industry, and also share articles from thought leaders in the space. So each day we scan for interesting, helpful articles based on keyword searches on the web and from relevant blog posts from others. We occasionally throw in our own blog posts but first and foremost focus on helping people learn from posts we share rather than being self-serving by promoting information about Backupify.

Customer support:

Be where your customers are." We know customers reach out to us in several channels - by phone, email, Twitter, etc. Our social media presence on several channels gives customers several outlets to reach us based on the channel they are most comfortable using. We see many customers coming to us, primarily on Twitter, asking support questions, because that is the channel they are most comfortable using to reach us. If it's a small question or issue we try to solve it right there on Twitter, or we bring it offline via email if the question can't be answered in 1-2 140 character or less tweets. This approach works extremely well for us.

Putting a genuine face and voice to the company:

There is nothing anyone hates more than automated responses from a company or the feeling that they are talking to a robot. We bring to life our brand by being friendly, helpful and genuine on our social media channels. We take time to engage in conversations, help solve people's problems and share with them relevant information. By being there and giving off the sense that there really is a real person behind our brand and social media accounts, we become a more approachable and reliable company that people want to interact with and do business with."

Kristin Dziadul
Marketing Analyst at Backupify

Braintree

"Our approach to social media is to engage and listen to our users. We want everyone in the company, from support to HR to our product team, to benefit from the communication that is occurring online about Braintree. It's important to take the time to analyze and understand how the audience interacts with each platform and use that knowledge to tailor your message accordingly. For instance, as a B2B company, our target audience doesn't often look to Facebook to make business decisions, so instead, we post content that reflects our internal culture and utilize it as a great recruitment tool."

Kristi Lynch
Community Manager at Braintree

Buffer

"That's a great question. The way we approach Social Media comes in 3 key aspects, I believe:

- Use Social Media for amazing customer support. One of the key focus points we have at Buffer is to give absolutely outstanding customer support, delivering happiness to our users day in, day out. Twitter and Facebook are great for doing this, most importantly because you can achieve an extremely short response time. If you can reply to Tweets within 10 minutes, the responses from users are amazing. We were able to measure that the shorter the response time, the higher the number of friendly Tweets posted about us, that is awesome.

- Secondly, we use Social Media as the key driver of our content efforts. Social Media is the best friend of content marketing I believe. So, whenever we have a new article written up, we distribute it. What we found to work best here is to use a ratio of 1:6. Post 6 great articles from other sites and then 1 from your site. That way you can really become a top content curator in your followers and friends stream and not just be self-promotional. Every morning I fill up my Buffer with around 10 Tweets and a few Facebook updates and that gives us a great day's worth of content for our followers and friends.

- Lastly, Social Media is absolutely terrific for building your personal brand. We encourage everyone at Buffer to be very vocal on their own Twitter and Facebook feeds, sharing their stories and lessons they have learned on a day to day basis. It is a great way of helping everyone turn into an expert, not just internally in the company, but also externally.

I would definitely encourage everyone to use Social Media, of course, I'm not sure which way is best for each company. I would guess that the first way - giving outstanding customer support, is something that will be most useful for nearly any company out there. With the second and third point it is more a personal choice of how you have setup your internal values."

Leo Widrich
Co-Founder of Buffer

CarWoo!

"CarWoo! approaches social media both as a customer engagement tool and as a broadcast tool. As a customer engagement tool, we use social media as a support channel and as a relationship builder. As a broadcast tool, we use social media to make company announcements, distribute job postings, and to push unique content to our 200,000 followers.

Whether others approach it the same way depends on their own needs. Anybody looking to expand their social footprint will first need to think hard about their goals and the measurements of success. Of course, there’s also a budget consideration: Should you hire a full-time social media person? An entire social media team? Should you also use Twitter and Facebook’s paid products? What third party tools should you consider? It’s very easy for a company’s social media efforts to become a black hole of expenses, so establishing ROI expectations is very important to do at every step of the way."

Phil Yeh
VP of Marketing at CarWoo!

DODOcase

"The social media strategy at DODOcase has always been about transparency and human connections. It has always been a two way street with our community so we've listened as much as we've spoken. Having this kind of open dialogue allows companies to quickly identify opportunities and react to customer needs. We can't imagine any new company approaching social media in any other way. Customers will continue to expect more and more of a dialogue with brands. While we'll readily admit that it can be challenging at times, if you can orient your company around this model, we are confident the return is there."

Craig Dalton
Co-Founder, President of DODOcase

drchrono

"The most important thing to remember with any approach to social media is to be authentic.

Social media provides an online outlet with unmatched transparency. This transparency is great because it allows you to build rapport & establish trust in order to connect with users at a deeper level than traditional online methods. But, if you attempt to manipulate that trust by trying to game the social media landscape purely to further your own agendas, the repercussions can cut equally as deep.

Be authentic and continue to build your outreach strategy from that simple foundation."

Michael Haverhals
Marketing at drchrono

Earbits

"We approach social media as a tool to engage our users in conversations that are related to what we do, music.

Instead of trying to push our product via social media, we make a strong effort to create content which our users will find interesting. As a result, our brand gains more visibility, and we develop a stronger connection with our users.

Social media is a long term investment. If done correctly, it can be a very effective tool in building a brand."

Yotam Rosenbaum
EVP of Music and Artist Relations at Earbits

eBay

"From the very beginning, eBay has been a social company, encouraging discussion, dialogue and feedback through our platform. And, we continue to embrace social - both media and commerce - as natural extensions of our DNA. Whether through our social customer service approach, our social media sellers program or inspiring social shopping through applications and experiments on eBay and other social sites, we have a tailored approach to the social space. We base our approach on how and where to best reach our communities of customers, investors, technology partners and more. We recommend that others think about their short-term and long-term goals for social media engagement and approach each social channel individually and in a way that complements their existing channels."

eBay

Expensify

"Expensify's approach to social media is to simply make the best product and let users rave about it. Word of mouth isn't created, it's earned."

David Barrett
Founder and CEO of Expensify

Grooveshark

"Grooveshark's approach to social media centers around our relationship with users and artists. Primarily we focus on proactively and reactively connecting with them to acknowledge and address their issues with compassionate support. We use social analytics tools and services, such as Desk.com, to manage our interactions, enabling us to converse with hundreds of users in a personal context and give attention to every single interaction – nothing is scripted and every response is unique. Learning from these interactions, from the kindest of compliments and the harshest of criticisms to bug reports, feature requests, and account management assistance, allows for growth and improvement that is in line with our users' interests. Seeking out opportunities for engagement and effectively managing our relationships and interactions on social media results in Grooveshark's Community Team being able to better advocate for users internally whenever decisions might affect the user experience. We pride ourselves on fostering a relationship and rapport with the individual, while simultaneously developing a sense of community around the love of music.

The biggest mistake companies make is misunderstanding why people use social media in the first place. Sure, it's a great tool for marketing and PR, but that’s not its core purpose. And it's certainly not a soapbox from which to shout about how awesome you are or why people should use your service – that's just adding to the noise. If someone next to you at a restaurant were to lean over and say they love your company and you responded with marketing spiels, sales pitches, and partnership promotions, best case is they nod, smile, and pray it's over soon; worst case, you dismantle their positive perception of your brand by painting it as apathetic and money-driven. Treat your current and potential customers as real people, not as figures in a sales presentation. Don't tell them you're awesome by yelling it at them, prove it by genuinely being engaging and receptive to everything they say, caring about the problems they're experiencing, and becoming a resource of information they value. Communities thrive through mutual respect and understanding, not canned responses and bits of promotional copy."

Andrew Frauen
Community Developer at Grooveshark

Hertz

"Hertz's approach to social media is utilizing it as a unique platform of communication with our customers. Whether it’s addressing customer service issues or supplying fans with Hertz news, engaging content or promotional materials, Hertz shows its appreciation to our loyal customers, fans and followers via social media."

Lemore Hecht
Manager, Communications & Social Media at Hertz

Honest Tea

"We seek to approach social media with a very personal, consumer-driven mindset. We see social media as an opportunity to bridge a gap that seems to be present today between large enterprises and the consumer — it then becomes a tool of our transparency and authenticity, as we engaged, educate and respond to consumer inquiries. We continually ask our fans for their opinions on new product varieties, what they appreciate about our brand, and take that information back to the drawing table as we innovate new products—there's no better tool than daily access to 125,000 of your most dedicated fans!"

Jordan Mitchell
PR & Social Media Manager at Honest Tea

Hubspot

"Your fans and followers are offering up their time to listen to what you have to say--give them something valuable in return. Create awesome content worth sharing. Be helpful. Be consistent. Set high, but achievable goals and measure your results. Then, learn from it. Don't be afraid to take risks, but also don't jump blindly into a decision without data to back up it up. Measurement will prove exactly what content does well for your company, and analysis will prove why it does well. Social media doesn't have to be this big, blurry cluster of confusion; use data as your new pair of eyes."

Brittany Leaning
Inbound Marketer at Hubspot

Lifeway Foods

"Our approach varies from source to source. For example, Twitter gives us the opportunity to share with greater frequency without annoying our community. Twitter users are accustomed to a continuous stream of content. Facebook is a different animal. We’ve found that engagement is highest when we keep it to about one post per day. That’s what we try and shoot for, but sometimes there’s just too much exciting Lifeway news to contain in a single 24 hour period.

We use Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare and many other social media sites when applicable. We blog on our main site and we work with other bloggers for giveaways, recipes, interviews and more. Basically, we try to keep our social media presences fresh and exciting. We’re always looking to provide helpful social CRM, as well as get information back from our customers. What are their favorite stores? What new flavor and product ideas do they have? What events would they like to see us sponsor? We get as much as we give, and we give a lot. Because we love our customers so much.

People who follow us on all of the different social media channels will always be the first to know about our latest offerings and are likely to be rewarded with money-saving coupons and chances to win free products, tickets to concerts and awesome Lifeway promo gear."

Derek Miller
Director of Digital Marketing at Lifeway Foods

Lumosity

"One of the main benefits of social media is that it allows companies to interact with people on a personal level. Since companies aren't people, the best way for them to interact with people in a consistent, strategic and authentic way is to identify their own "personalities." Ideally a company's personality will be as individual as a person's and be congruent with the the strengths and goals of the company.

For instance, Lumosity is a brain training website designed by neuroscientists to improve core cognitive abilities. As a company we're experts and thought leaders in brain training and neuroscience, and that's part of our social media personality as well. We use our expertise to make neuroscience relevant, accessible and interesting to everyone. Because one of our goals as a company is to help people reach their full potential, our personality is optimistic and encouraging. Our company personality informs every part of our social media strategy, from the kind of content we create and share to the contests we run and even the social media channels we participate in."

Hallie Fryd
Social Media Manager at Lumosity

Naturebox

"At NatureBox, we’re about more than just the healthy snacks that we send out once a month. We believe in helping people discover how nutritious, wholesome snacks are not only a better alternative to artificial, processed foods but are also delicious, affordable, and accessible. We spend a lot of time listening to our members and the greater community of healthy snackers across various social media channels to learn what it is that they’re interested in and what they’re talking about. While our members’ lifestyles are spread across a wide spectrum of health and wellness, we want to be able to provide them with delicious food and helpful information and ideas to fuel their own individual wellness journeys.

We approach social media not just as a way to bring attention and traffic to our own site and products but also as a way to contribute to the greater healthy living discussion – our goal is that when people hear “NatureBox”, they associate our name and our brand with a credible and genuine approach to living a healthier life that they can apply to their own lives. Using social media as a channel to solely promote and sell your products can be a real turn-off for potential customers and will also cause your current customers to tune you out if they see your message as nothing more than an advertisement. Instead, we use social media to keep our members interested and engaged in our daily conversation. Whether it’s a recipe, a green cleaning tip, a newsworthy story about the food system, or a tutorial for how to pack a better school lunch, we strive to maintain a genuine and engaged community of people who love NatureBox snacks and the lifestyle that we stand for."

Gautam Gupta
Co-Founder and CEO at Naturebox

Olark

"At Olark, social media is a huge part of providing great customer service and helping to cement the bond between our customers and the company. We respond to every Tweet about Olark with a thank you and/or a re-tweet and monitor our @olark twitter feed obsessively looking for people with questions or needing help. We often send our Olark T-shirts to people who post extraordinarily positive tweets -- which we then require a photo of said person in your new Olark duds to put on our Facebook page in our Happy Customer Gallery.

Our Facebook presence is a place to find Olark articles, links to our blog posts, photos of Olark fun team activities and the aforementioned Happy user in their swank T-shirts. It's a critical part of connecting with and bonding with our friends and customers. And our customers DO become friends sometimes stopping by our office to give us cookies or bottles of Scotch or home made beer.

We certainly recommend that everyone adopt a hands-on, extremely personal approach to social media. It's the best way possible (after having a great product to offer) to keep your customers coming back and telling their friends about you."

Bill Thompson
Social Media Manager at Olark

Rackspace Hosting

"Our approach to Social Media is pretty simple – our entire Social Media Plan is, 'Be Helpful". We want to be recognized as one of the world's leading service companies – and that includes Social Media. We currently have 6 engineers manning Social Media 24/7. Why engineers? Because engineers know our products and they can effect change quickly. Each of us has come from within a business unit, so we each have unique skills.

I'm not sure this approach is right for every company, but if you are a service company – if you really care about customer support, and if your tagline is Fanatical Support™ then I can't think of a better way to do SM."

Rob La Gesse
Chief Disruption Officer at Rackspace Hosting

Shareaholic

"As an internet startup that powers tools for social content sharing and discovery, social media is clearly a huge part of our community building and marketing plan. I would say that we do follow one of the biggest pieces of advice I could give, which would be that you should try to use each platform a little differently. It's more work, but you get better results - more engagement and click-throughs. Our blog is our central hub for all community building and social activities, so much of what we do is about driving traffic to the blog. And because we've invested a lot of time in good content with the right CTAs, we're seeing more and more of that traffic come to our main site and driving downloads. Traffic from the blog to the main website is up more than 200% since January actually.

On Facebook we post links to articles, but we try to always upload a picture when we do because we've seen a much higher CTR. We're also trying to do more sharing of pictures of the team. Judging by the engagement on those posts, the Facebook community really likes the "behind the scenes" look at the team. Twitter is a support platform for us. We get a lot of questions and support inquiries. We try to drive those conversations offline as much as possible just because it's difficult to troubleshoot a technical issue in 140 characters. We have our Twitter hooked to Desk.com to keep track of our user conversations and make sure everyone receives a response. Twitter is also a traffic building tool for the blog, and we have determined that it's worth the effort to schedule Tweets to our posts because we put UTM parameters on all of our links. So we can tell that Traffic is not only coming from Twitter in general, but specifically from the clicks on shares from the @Shareaholic account. We use YouTube to post screencasts and "how tos" for our users. Those videos always make for great blog content as well. For fun, I've created a couple of Tumblrs just to make something fun, delightful and shareable for the community. Blogging Ryan Gosling is a play on the "Hey Girl" meme and Blogging a Blog is our take on the What Should You Call Me gif trend. Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn are three platforms that we haven't invested a ton of effort in quite yet, but that will certainly come when the time is right."

Janet Aronica
Head of Marketing at Shareaholic

Ginny Soskey
Marketing Manager at Shareaholic

Target

"While we don’t have tips and tricks to share, I can pass along some points about Target’s general approach to social media that I hope will be helpful:

- An integrated approach; we have dedicated teams across the company involved in making the social experience relevant for guests.

- Social media is an extension of our business—allowing us to reach our guests where they’re at and communicate in real time.

- We strive to maintain Target’s vibrant spirit and voice, and our drive for innovation (this can be seen with new and evolving online/social endeavors such as A Bullseye View, our new, behind-the-scenes online magazine)."

Erin Madsen
Social Media PR at Target

Thumbtack

"Thumbtack doesn't specifically target social media as a marketing channel. Rather, we do our best to produce great content that is interesting to a lot of people. We've found that if we produce great content, we receive positive attention - not just in social media, but also in news articles, blogs, and virality.

For example, we conducted a survey about how friendly San Francisco and Dallas are to small businesses. This survey got a huge amount of news media attention in those cities - and it also got great pickup in social media.

We recommend producing great content that people find useful. If you do that, you will get noticed not only in social media but also in all other marketing channels!"

Sander Daniels
Director of Business Development at Thumbtack

Virgin America

"Our approach to social media is to first and foremost, listen to what our fans and flyers have to say. We jump in when we think we can help answer a question or address an issue, and do our best to build a lasting relationship with our guests. We try to keep our content relevant, interesting and fun, but at the same time, we're also still looking for opportunities to showcase our product/service and spur trial. Social media is a great outlet for us to do that while opening up a two-way dialogue with our most loyal fan base."

Jill Fletcher
Director of Social Media at Virgin America

Waste Management

"Most people don’t see the need for digital communications in our industry. We do. It’s important to serve our customers and employees, who are very active online. At Waste Management, we’ve integrated social media into our daily operations across many verticals – marketing, customer service, PR, etc. Not only do we focus on connecting directly with customers, employees and other stakeholders to understand their needs and feedback, but also we want to be a leader on the issues that impact our business and the communities we serve. These channels also help us to tell the story of waste and recycling in an engaging way that helps people understand the services we provide.

To other companies considering social media, I say be transparent and be proactive. People are talking about you online no matter what and will make decisions about your company based on what their peers say. You can’t say “it’s only garbage.” To your customers it is THEIR garbage. Finding a strategic way to join the conversation with a human voice and interact directly with your stakeholders will give you ample opportunities to build a name for your brand and gain key insights that impact your business."

Lynn Brown
VP Corporate Communications
& Community Relations at Waste Management

Whole Foods

"We approach social media from a "customer first" perspective. Our goal is to provide the information, resources, and service our customers want and need before we consider what brand stories we have to tell. As part of this approach we try to be expert curators with a focus on finding the best and most useful resources for our customers which includes but is not limited to our own content. Providing content that resonates with our customers is our guiding principal. Because the end game of social media for brands is ultimately deep engagement with customers we believe all companies should start first by asking themselves what matters most to their customers and how they can provide that through the different social channels."

Natanya Anderson
Senior Social Media Manager at Whole Foods

Wildfire

"Wildfire's approach to social media is that we want to build an active and engaged community of fans across every social platform. We want to unite a community of users under the common theme of an interest in social media, in marketing, and in building up a social business. We have profiles on every network, and maintain conversations with the users that engage with us at each social property in real or near-real time. While our fan and follower communities share many common interests, the tone and attitudes of the users across each platform can vary slightly, and we address these differences in the content that we post and the interactions that we have. Above all, we maintain a very open position— our fans and followers are encouraged to reach out, to ask for help, to leave us a message, drop us a note, at any time. We do our best to respond to every single post, even if its just to thank a fan for sharing something we'd posted to a company profile. This gives us a very close rapport with our community, and has activated many advocates among our users."

Maya Grinberg
Social Media Manager at Wildfire

Yesware

"We focus our social strategy where our customers (salespeople and entrepreneurs) are currently engaging- Twitter and Linkedin. As a startup with limited resources we aren't as active on Facebook or G+ unless there's a campaign effort that warrants it. We use Twitter for customer support, finding trending articles and connecting with influencers. We're active in Linkedin groups to open discussions with customers and to act as thought leaders. Earlier this summer we created a closed Linkedin group called the 'Yesware Founder's Club' and only invited the first 1000 most active users. We use this group to maintain relationships with our early adopters and get feedback on product development. As we continue to grow we'll experiment with other channels and hone our engagement where our customers live because that's what matters to us."

Paul Hlatky
Marketing at Yesware

Zappos

"Zappos.com is a service company that just happens to sell shoes, clothes, housewares and more. We take the same approach to serving our customers over social channels as we do on the phone, email and live chat. Our customers appreciate real human interaction so we don't automate anything in the social space to deliver WOW through service. We have a small team that serves customers on Twitter and on Facebook and our stylist experts answer customer style questions directly on Twitter as well. You can find boards that we have curated around numerous topics on Pinterest but we haven't found that customers request service there. The Zappos Family uses videos produced by our in-house A/V Team and blogs written by copywriters in the visual merchandising department to spread our culture, clothing selection, customer service and our community efforts. Zappos Labs has also created some fun social experiences for our customers such as TweetWall, our post-purchase sharing (and Eye For Style on Facebook. You can see all of their creations at the Expo."

Graham Kahr
Product Manager, Social Commerce at Zappos

Zoho

"Social Media is about real people and real conversations. And that's what we focus on. The first part of our social media approach involves being constantly tuned in and participating actively in conversations around us. We get to learn what people are saying about us as well as an opportunity to engage with them and gather more insights. The second part focuses on creating more such conversations: sometimes via content, stories, pictures and questions. We're a B2B company and our core audience is businesses. However, we believe that people do business with people and that the value of engaging in real conversations with real people over social platforms is immense. We also look at social media as another platform where our customers expect support and that's why we even have a dedicated twitter channel (@zohocares) for real-time support.

There is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to social media. Each brand should first try to understand who their audience is, which social media channels they like to frequent and how they are using these channels. Brands can then use this understanding to decide how they want to reach and engage with their audience. Listening and storytelling are two key elements around which brands can build engagement."

Meera Sapra
Social Media Ambassador at Zoho

I would like to thank all the companies that took the time and gave us their input.

Now on to you...

How does your company approach social media? What lessons have you learned? Let us know in the comments!

About the Authors: Zach Bulygo is a blogger for KISSmetrics, you can find him on Twitter here.

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