How can you use email to increase your brand presence on social networking sites?

When I first threw the term ‘social media’ at the Commercial Director of Pure360, I didn’t expect him to open his arms wide and welcome it into my online marketing plan without a certain amount of justification. I was right, he batted the words ‘lead gen’ right back at me and so our debate began.

You see I’m a new world marketing gal and believe that we have to engage our audience these days before they will want to make a purchase from us, we can’t just talk at them – they’ll be yawning and switching to their Twitter feed in seconds. Not that I’m saying it should replace any of the lovely traditional or tradigital marketing channels that we are already using, no it should sit hand in hand – happily whistling a tune as the pied piper did whilst he was avidly followed by his audience from place to place.

So I looked into how a social media proposition could be strengthened by the use of other marketing channels and found that email marketing was a strong contender for partnership, as it is growing up into becoming a form of dialogue as opposed to the historical one way spamfest of old days.

If you already have your own social networking groups and are looking to promote them or want to spread your marketing messages across these sites, you might find the following a handy read.

What are the benefits of using email to support social media?

To be successful, your presence on a social networking site needs to be supported by other marketing activity such as PR, newsletters and email communications. Email is a low cost and proven channel that will give prominence to your presence and help support the success of your marketing efforts in this fast-growing space.

A major benefit of encouraging your email database to join your social networking groups is that you can then keep them updated in real time.

How can email leverage your social network marketing?

By incorporating links to social sites in your email, it could enable you recipients to:

• Join your social networks.
• Invite multiple members of their communities to join your social networking groups.
• Bookmark your promotional messages.

How will you encourage your recipients to join/share?

Offer a proposition to your mailing list such as a discount for joining/sharing your promotion across their communities.

Don't limit your offering, extend it to any other contacts that your recipients recommend. There should be no barriers to word of mouth; it's a marketer's most powerful tool.

Ignore the subtle approach! Appeal to recipients with an eye catching and creative email design, but keep your messages clear and don't try to be too clever.

Why should your recipients promote your brand?

By sharing your messages or recommending you, recipients are personally referring your offer or social group to multiple contacts and need assurance that what is on offer will not disappoint.

Inviting recipients to join groups or to promote messages is comparable to recommending a builder or a restaurant to your friends and family, and you wouldn't recommend just any old company or promotion, would you? Be mindful of this and always remember to offer value to your recipients and be totally transparent about any conditions that apply to it.

Don't ignore the importance of Social Networking

The use of social networking has increased dramatically in the last 3 years, with Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg and StumbleUpon amongst the most popular, and Facebook currently leading the pack with over 132 million unique visitors in June 2009. (comscore.com)

Email can be a powerful tool in promoting your presence on these social networking sites, and providing your offering is attractive enough to this audience, you are then in a position to communicate with more frequency, and with the strong prospect of being introduced to a wider network of contacts.