Teen Social Media Trends that Can Be Applied to Small Business – #1

We know that business is, well, business, and the addition of a social media strategy is likely akin to “work” in your mind, but let’s, for a moment, focus on the word “social” here. Social means having a conversation. Social means interactions. Social means fun. So instead of casting this kind of campaign as a thankless chore, let’s think of social media the same way the younger set does — as a way to connect. Observe, five trends teens and 20somethings dig, recast as business ideas.

Listen to Gossip
When you were a teen, one of the topics that was probably of upmost concern among your social circle was what other people thought about you. Hell, there’s entire controversial websites dedicated to campus gossip and the rumor mill of youth. Well, we’re suggesting that you take this relatively negative juvenile trend and use it to your advantage. The web is basically one big comment card for your business — people have taken the time to fill it out, so you should read it.

“Small businesses are increasing the use of social media monitoring to help understand their own brand, industry, product etc.,” says Mike Rynchek, president of Spyder Trap Online Marketing. “Originally larger brands used social media monitoring as a means of judging engagement, customer service, etc., however smaller brands are learning this can be a great tool to gain a competitive advantage and develop means for differentiation. Now we generally use social media monitoring as a business intelligence tool.”

There are two ways by which you can tap into the consciousness of your customers:
1). By asking them for feedback, and
2). By lurking.

Heidi Carney, vice president of consumer marketing for True Lemon, a crystallized lemon flavoring, puts a lot of stock in customer opinion. “Even though we’re a very small company, we spend a huge amount of time knowing who our customers are,” she says. “We do a lot of customer surveys, we talk to our customers every single day… Almost everything that we’ve done as we’ve grown as a company has been reflective of the feedback that we get from our customers. As we’ve grown we’ve changed our packaging, our customers have always been a part of that process. We’ve changed our messaging, our customers have always been a part of that process. As we’ve introduced new products, they’ve always been a part of that process. Social media gives us a forum to solicit that kind of feedback,” she says. The True Lemon packaging even features Facebook and Twitter “Like” buttons, which encourage customers to go online and weigh in on the product.

Others merely lurk on the Internet, using tools like Tweetdeck and Google alerts to see what consumers are saying about them or to find potential clients. According to Spark, this kind of monitoring is crucial. Let’s say you’re dealing in a market that’s not yet down with social media. “You have the opportunity to be the one guy, the one company that is the most social media savvy,” Spark says. By finding out what people are saying about whatever realm your business falls within, you can then tailor your interactions and business accordingly. You can also drive people to your site or business.

Eliot Sykes, creator of the website MissedConnections.com (which is basically an independent, dedicated version of the the Craigslist version — although it’s not affiliated), uses TweetDeck to follow hashtags and phrases on Twitter to connect with people who are interested in the phenomenon of the Missed Connection. “A popular relevant tweet is ‘Do missed connections actually work?’” he explains. “Which usually gets a response like ‘@Asker: Yep, it’s a long shot, but many people do reconnect, HTH.’” It’s simple actually — Sykes is merely directing a willing audience toward his site.

Twitter and other social platforms should also be used for customer service. Lauren Drell, who runs the social media campaign for the eatery Luke’s Lobster, scours the web for mentions of the eatery. “We repost and retweet every mention and every blog post about us, even if it’s not particularly flattering, because I feel like everyone’s opinion is valid,” she says.