Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media [Paperback]

Liana Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0789742845 | ISBN-13: 978-0789742841 | Edition: 1

Profit Big from Social Media: Strategies and Solutions That Work!

 

Using new social media marketing techniques, you can deepen relationships with your most passionate, profitable customers--and create more of them than ever before! In this 100% practical book, world-renowned expert Li Evans shows exactly how to make the most of social media--in any company, in any industry. You’ll discover exactly how to customize your best social networking strategy…then staff it, organize it, manage its risks, and execute it successfully! Evans shows how to understand your audience, enter the conversation, build trust, protect your brand, integrate social media into existing marketing programs, measure your results…and profit big from today’s hottest new social media sites and platforms!

 

Topics include

• Make the most of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, and more

• Define goals and customize strategy to maximize Return on Conversation (ROC)

• Understand the whole conversation about you and all the communities you serve

• Manage legal, compliance, and ethical challenges

• Plan social media policies for your company’s employees

• Extend customer service into social media

• Maintain consistent branding and messaging

• Complement your SEO, PPC, offline marketing, and PR efforts

• Learn how to integrate traditional marketing tactics (TV, radio, print) with your social media marketing strategy

 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Since 1999, Liana "Li" Evans has been active full-time in the search marketing arena, becoming well-versed in all avenues of social media and search marketing. Li runs the Search Marketing Gurus blog and is the director of social media for Serengeti Communications, a Washington, DC-based online marketing firm that focuses on building social media strategies for companies and training companies to bring online marketing in-house.

 

Li has led the SEO strategy for an Internet Retailer 500 company, and was the SEO and social media architect for a Fortune 500 multi-million page entertainment Web site. As a database designer and programmer since 1992, Liana has developed technical expertise in dealing with large-scale retail sites and their dynamic natures.

 

She holds degrees in both public relations and information technology, which lend well to working with client strategies in social media and search marketing. Li speaks and trains social media and SEO at Search Engine Strategies and other industry conferences.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I believe that social media is changing the way that companies need to interact with both their audiences and customers by listening and directly engaging with them. I’m Liana “Li” Evans, and I am the author of Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.

I’ve written this book to give any marketer, novice, or expert a deeper look into the realm of social media marketing. So much has been touted, preached, and hoisted up on a pedestal as things marketers or companies should be doing, it’s hard to believe what’s true and what isn’t. This book can be your guide from beginning to end in understanding what’s hype and what’s not. From making the case of whether or not you should be actively engaging in social media, to putting the pieces together to plan a successful social media marketing strategy, I hope you will put this book to good use.

There’s a lot to digest when it comes to learning the different facets that comprise the world of social media. It isn’t simply just Facebook or Twitter—there’s a much bigger world out there than most marketers or company CEOs or CMOs are even aware of. Understanding that your audience and customers might not be where the media thinks they are (Twitter and Facebook, for example) is an important concept to grasp if you want to be successful.

Social media is also constantly changing. The Facebooks of today will be the Friendsters and MySpaces of tomorrow. Communities ebb and flow. They depend highly on engagement and members giving their time. When members cease to find reasons to share and leave the communities, those communities can go through low periods. Some recover, some don’t. For this reason, you have to be flexible with your social media strategies and constantly be monitoring and researching the conversations and where they’re happening.

Throughout the book, you’ll find several themes:

• Research—You need to research your audience and customers thoroughly. Without the research, you are only guessing at where to start. Without the research, you will be wasting a lot of valuable time and resources in areas that most likely won’t help you attain the goals you want to reach with your social media marketing plan.
• Strategy—Social media marketing is a lot more than just a laundry list of items that a company prints out on a marketing slick. Social media marketing, just like any other form of traditional or online marketing, needs a strategy. You need a well-thought-out plan with goals set in place so that you know where you want to be and how to get there.
• Involvement—It’s not just your social media marketing team that’s involved in engaging and participating in social media communities. Just about everyone in your company has some sort of stake—whether it’s the stories your customer service reps hear on the phone, or it’s people totally removed from marketing (your accounts payable department, for example) who have Facebook pages stating they work for you. Everyone in your company has some sort of involvement in your social media marketing strategy. Understanding that different levels of involvement all have differing affects is key to making sure you plan the right strategy for everyone in your company.
• Measurement—One of the biggest questions I hear when it comes to implementing a social media marketing strategy is, “How will I know if it’s successful?” I also like to put the questions out there of “How do you know if what you are doing is not successful and when do you know when to stop doing it?” Your social media marketing strategy needs to be measured. Measurement comes in many different forms, from website traffic to the number of retweets your content is getting. No two companies will measure the same things the same way. Success or failure is different for everyone.

Social media is my passion. I have found companies that understand how to harness the power that social media communities offer and have become extremely successful and usually have a loyal band of brand evangelists ready to promote them at a moments’ notice. Helping companies and marketers understand how to reach and engage their audiences through the power of social media is something I love to do, and I cringe when I see or hear so-called consultants selling social media services as if it were the next gimmick they need to get into.

Social media marketing isn’t a gimmick—it’s hard work that can be extremely engaging when implemented in the right way. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for companies to be where the questions and conversations are going on that affect their bottom line. Social media is the perfect way to do that.

My hope is that you find this book to be your guide to help you become successful in your social media marketing efforts and that it gives you both the foundation and roadmap to help you along the way to that goal. Thanks for reading!

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Que Publishing; 1 edition (June 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789742845
• ISBN-13: 978-0789742841
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Management > Social Media for Business

More About the Author

Liana Evans, or "Li" as she is commonly known, is an online marketing professional and the author of Social Media Marketing: Engaging Strategies for Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.

Since 1999, Liana "Li" Evans has been active full-time in the search marketing arena, becoming well versed in all avenues of social media and search marketing. Li runs the Search Marketing Gurus blog and is Co-Founder & CEO of LiBeck Integrated Marketing, LLC a digital marketing firm that focuses on building Integrated Marketing Strategies for companies that use Social Media, SEO, PPC, Analytics as well as providing training to companies in this area, too.

Li has led the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for an Internet Retailer 500 company, and was the SEO and Social Media architect for a Fortune 500's multi-million page entertainment Web site. As a database designer and programmer since 1992, Liana has developed technical expertise in dealing with large-scale retail sites and their dynamic natures.

She holds degrees in both Public Relations and Information Technology which lend well to working with client strategies in Social Media and Search Marketing. She speaks and trains attendees about Social Media and SEO at Search Engine Strategies and other industry conferences.

Contact information:
Website: www.smmarketingbook.com
Email: [e-mail]

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not quite... October 2, 2010

By Jan Walther

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

With the 5 stars, I thought this would be just what I was looking for. The book got off to a good start but then it became so repetitive that I stopped on page 215. Written simply for novices to understand, I'm not sure where the earlier reviewers found the expert guidance on strategy development and said it was for experts - now really?? This book is a great overview of social media and aligning it with goals and audiences but if I didn't already have some background in managing this as part of our organization's marketing communications strategy, this book would still leave me needing much more info. I may use it as an intro to several staff members but then, it's loaded with typos and missing words that really surprised me. I like the short chapters and assume the author expected people to jump around and that's why so much content is repeated throughout. I'm looking for a true guide for strategy development and integration? Anyone have suggestions?

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Repetitive as can get! October 11, 2010

By Sally MC

Format:Paperback

I truly regret spending [...] Bucks on this Book. It is incredibly repetitive. What is actually written on over 315 pages could have been said on maybe 50 pages. It's the same blabla over and over again. "you should listen to the community first" is probably mentioned 100 times in this book. Although repeating things is a great means to make important things stick to the readers, Li Evans manages to bore you to death by saying the same things over and over again.
Furthermore, hardly any useful links are provided, and those in there are from Forrester Research Group (some of them don't work anymore e.g. the greatly appraised Groundswell Profile Tool. One of the "cited" articles was up for purchase for 500 Dollars from Forrester. "Wow" that is what sharing is all about. From someone claiming to be a social media guru I would have expected more.
In general, references are not properly laid out, which makes them hard to find anyways (basically she doesn't cite a lot because she prefers to draw from her very rich (warning: irony) experience, which results in 30x pages repeating stuff.) There are sooooo many useful websites out there that can help you understand, track, and plan a strategy for social media. She ignores most of them.
The only useful chapter to me was "goals need to be defined". Since it is at the beginning of the book, read the intro and you are fine. All other chapters are more or less common sense.
Not worth your money....Did I mention that she doesn't provide any useful "hand on tools" or strategies how to actually PLAN, IMPLEMENT, MONITOR & ADJUST your social media strategy in your company? - The title of the book claims to provide "strategies" for engaging in Facebook - I've never read a book with less practical use than this (even Marketing 101 - today helps me more at my job....)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Elitist and Arrogant Take on Social Media Marketing September 28, 2010

By Mike Finn

Format:Paperback

I approached this book with an open mind, but I was completely turned off by the condescension and arrogance of its author. She seems to believe that since she comes from a technical background, EVERY practitioner of Social Media must have a background identical to hers - or else they are just fakes and charlatans.

For example, in the section on How to Choose a Consultant, she suggests that you judge a consultant by his or her website and then goes into a long harangue about how if their website is designed entirely in Flash, you should think twice before hiring them.

Well, so I went on HER website, and, guess what, it describes her as a columnist on social media and as writing a book on it as well. When was THAT written? Apparently, in 2009, LONG BEFORE her book was published. You mean to say she hasn't updated her website in OVER A YEAR? Why should I hire HER? [Upon reading this, she will probably freak out and update her website!]

Just because some people are strong in one area and some in others, that's no reason to put them down. Isn't Social Media about BUILDING COMMUNITY? Everyone comes to Social Media from a different vantage point and with a different skill set. Ms. Evans may be good with the technical stuff whereas someone else has better people skills (which is not at all hard to imagine!). No one can know every aspect of Social Media, but we can all keep learning and improve our knowledge base.

She has some good information, but no better or worse than any of the other social media marketing books. I think you could choose from any of the hundreds of titles out there at random and you'd come out just as well. And I see no reason to reward someone for being obnoxious.

P.S. When I read reviews of the various books on Social Media, I am highly suspect of many (not all!) of the 5-star reviews, as they appear to come from close friends and colleagues of the author. I suspect that is the case with many of the 5-star reviews here.