Social Media Webinar Sparks Hundreds of Questions

There was news this week that Pepsi planned to forgo a Super Bowl Ad in favor of investing $2 million into social media marketing.

With so much focus on connecting to customers via social communities, it was little wonder that attendees to the Practical Ecommerce “Social Media 201: How to Use Social Media Sites to Increase Traffic Webinar” on January 12, 2010, asked more than 150 specific questions about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and more.

The webinar discussed four major areas of social media marketing, namely (1) blogs and value content; (2) microblogs like Twitter; (3) social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn; and (4) sharing sites like YouTube.

Jeanne Hopkins of HubSpot, an expert in lead-generating social media marketing campaigns, answered dozens of the questions posed, including describing best practices for many of the topics discussed and providing many examples of how other companies are carrying out successful social media marketing campaigns.

The webinar also provided to-do lists for each type of social media discussed.

Blogging To-Do List

• Get a blog
• Commit to post regularly
• Commit to listen for ten minutes each day
• Commit to respond (comment on other’s posts)
• Commit to measure for one year
• Commit to have more than one blog, if needed

Microblogging To-Do List

• Get a Twitter account
• Follow everyone who follows you
• Use Twitterfeed, Ping.fm, or Facebook to post for you
• Commit to read ten tweets each day
• Retweet and respond for ten minutes each day

Social Networking To-Do List

• Get a Facebook page
• Get a LinkedIn account
• Add an RSS feed from your blog/store
• Connect your Facebook page LinkedIn account to your Twitter account
• Commit to develop at least one simple application this year
• Commit 30 minutes a day to posting and reading on Facebook or LinkedIn

Sharing To-Do Lists

• Get YouTube and Flickr accounts
• Launch a Flickr contest
• Create at least one YouTube video each month
• Post your images and videos
  a. On your blog
  b. On your store
  c. On your Facebook page
  d. In your Twitterfeed