Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 209

The Social Success Cycle
Most businesses treat social media marketing as a single discipline, but it’s actually
composed of four equally important parts:
Social listening: Monitoring and responding to customer service and reputation
management issues on the social web
Social influencing: Establishing authority on the social web, often through distributing
and sharing valuable content
Social networking: Finding and associating with authoritative and influential
individuals and brands on the social web
Social selling: Generating leads and sales from existing customers and prospects on
the social web
Understanding why and how to employ each component of the social success cycle is the
key to making sense of what can look like chaos on the social web.
As a marketer, it’s hard to know where to start with all the different avenues you can take
with social media. The good news is that all major social media channels fall into only two
categories — and recognizing these categories is key to effectively harnessing social
media channels as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Seeker channels are social media platforms that users go to when seeking specific content.
Think of these channels as modified search engines like Bing or Google. Users generally
go to the channel to search for and discover content, and they consume that content on that
channel. The two big players in this category are YouTube and Pinterest. When users visit
YouTube, they are generally in “seeker” mode. They use YouTube’s search bar for a
specific inquiry and consume the video right on the platform. Similarly, people use the
Pinterest search bar to get specific information on topics like recipes, crafts, or fashion.
Though it’s image-based, Pinterest also operates like a search engine.
These seeker channels are perfect for social influencing. Strategically placing content on
these sites provides a way to share valuable information with your target audience and
works to build authority and trust with your brand. Seeker channels are also perfect for
social selling. You can optimize videos on YouTube or images on Pinterest with calls to
action that serve to transform leads into customers — or at the very least, encourage your
prospect to consume even more content on your website. Figure 9-1 shows a GoPro
YouTube video with a clear call to action at the end of the video to submit images and
videos to GoPro.