The "Day 2 Series" - The Big Picture: Hub and Spokes
This social media marketing video follows on the heels of last week's "Day 1" series. In last week's series we ran the gamut of:
In this week's series ("Day 2"), I'll be covering two main topics:
- The Big Picture - Hub and Spokes
- The Big Picture - Lead Generation (tomorrow)
The gist with Hub and Spokes is basically presenting a framework for beginners and organizational departments to think about how to approach a plan for social media marketing.
At the core -- the hub -- is a place to which you'll want to invite visitors where they can have a better sense of what you and/or your business is about. What's your value proposition? What's your expertise? Do the quality of your services and product offerings match the things you speak about?
And, it's for all those reasons is why you want a blog (typically) at the center of your social networking / social media framework. Now, that may not necessarily always be the case. I've actually seen some interesting marketing efforts using Facebook as the hub. It can work. But, for most of us, a blog will offer the most flexibility and Google-juice. (Why give any more of it to Facebook?) With a blog at the center of your hub and spoke framework, it'll make sense to keep the juice for yourself so you can increase revisits to your lead capture form and marketing funnel entry points.
Your Turn
Thoughts? What tactic do you use today? Do you drive traffic towards a central blog? Or, is Facebook or some other platform what you prefer to drive traffic to? And then, when traffic does come, what type of media do you tend to use there? Text? Pictures? Video? Audio?
I talk about a lot of this, too, by the way in my free eBook, the Social Media Marketing Essentials for Small Business Professionals. Feel free to grab it the next time you'r on the eBook's page.
[Video transcript available. Click "Continue..." below.]
Video Transcript for Social Media Marketing Tips - The Big Picture
Okay, welcome to Day 2 of this series.
Mel Aclaro here and today we’ll be talking about the bigger picture with social media engagement, lead generation and relationship building.
What I’ve done here is create a little graphic to show the big picture of what I like to refer to as the hubs-and-spokes model.
And if you look at the middle here, we talk about something I call the hub…. which, typically should be your blog. I’ll talk in a future video about why this should be a blog, but right now let’s just keep it at a high level.
Now your blog is crucial. It’s a source of the information you share with the world about your values, interests and your passions. And, ultimately, everything you publish comes back here as some of your visitors return to inquire more about you or your services.
This is actually a source of your content.
I actually talk about this model in more detail in a book I wrote for real estate professionals last year. It’s called The Social Media Report: A Field Guide for Real Estate Professionals. But, really, the model applies not just for real estate professionals. In fact, you can be just about any professional in any industry and it applies just as well. I actually turned the whole book into a video book, and I’d like to share one section with you now from Chapter 3 of that video book.
Now, I’m gonna play it for you in just a moment, and in parts you’ll hear me refer to Chapter 4 of the book. Don’t worry about that reference too much for purposes of this training session. Remember, you’re getting a snapshot from the whole book…
Okay, so here’s that segment from Chapter 3.
[screencast]
Okay, so the main points to pull away from all of that is that you want to try and fashion the arrangement of your social networks in a sort of outside/inside fashion. The general idea is to manage your social networks outside of your blog, in a way that you make initial contact with people through some of the groups, forums and search filters that these social networks make available to you.
You want to find people in those groups, forums and search filters that represent your target demographic.
Then, using the help of automated searching engines, you can then automate notifications you receive whenever certain words pop up in the social web that might clue you in to conversations that you should join.
I talk about this more in Chapter 4 of my videobook on the topic about Listening Posts... (end of Part 1)
