Like Me? Follow Me.
At I-COM, we constantly assess the value of the work we are doing for our clients – and in no activity is this more relevant than social media marketing.
It is still hard to quantify the value of social media marketing; reports tend to include a combination of stats gathered together from a diverse array of tracking and brand monitoring tools. The results can be illuminating, but as yet they’re a long way from the comparative sureties of an SEO report.
That’s why, when results do come along, they’re all the more gratifying. Take, for example, the following SERP. The search is for ‘IL2L’, an I-COM social media and SEO client.
Click the image to open in a new window.
Nine out of the top 10 results are IL2L, and if you browse pages 2 and 3 the trend continues. Many of these listings are the direct result of social media activity, whilst others have been secured via SEO and offline marketing and PR (handled by Conker Communications).
However, regardless of the reason these results are there, it’s a good example of how reputation management via social media can benefit your business.
How is this good for IL2L?
Imagine if a person was considering making a purchase from IL2L, but had never bought anything from them before, or even heard of them before they saw one of their jackets in Google’s shopping results. So they decide to type in the brand name and see what other information they can find online.
In this case, they’ll see realtime results from the IL2L Twitter account:
And if they click through from the link in that particular tweet, they’ll see the gallery of images from the IL2L sponsored Manchester blogmeet.
They’ll also find IL2L’s Facebook page, full of positive information about the brand and links to their blog posts.
They’ll also find a series of blog posts from influential fashion bloggers like FashionBite and Sara Luxe extolling the virtues, not only of the company’s products, but also their customer service (at least in the latter case).
Not to mention press releases about former offers and discounts, like the Valentine’s Day gift bag deal.
They’ll also notice that there are no negative comments or bad reviews anywhere to be seen – the result of both I-COM’s social media efforts in ensuring customer enquiries on social media are responded to promptly, and IL2L’s own commitment to respond to ALL customer enquiries made over the phone and via e-mail.
Encouraging signs make the sale
All these signs are very encouraging for the consumer – how many times have you been put off a foreign hotel by a host of bad reviews and negative comments on forums and social media? The same goes for an online retailer. At the moment, IL2L’s brand related search results are clean as a whistle.
Of course, they are still a relatively small company when compared with the big players in the industry, and can therefore be expected to attract less positive and negative feedback.
However, even small retailers can get it wrong – thanks to social media reputation management on the part of I-COM and a commitment to providing excellent customer service on behalf of IL2L, the firm’s brand-related searches are looking pretty rosy!
