Identifying The Most Relevant Social Media for Our Business Strategies

This week we are finally starting to wrap up our fall semester classes at MCC. It has been a long 15 weeks of school for me. And I am now ready to turn my main focus onto my job search for a marketing internship, and hopefully finding some gainful employment. Not to mention prepare for the coming Christmas Holiday.

We have learned a lot about several different social media engagement platforms in my Social Media for Business class; as well as some of the other types of online analytics and marketing tools for complementing our Business and Marketing Strategies.

Now it is time to review some of those social media platforms that we think are going to be the most effective or sustainable for our business, such as with the Sabrina Keller Foundation; and which ones will be the most useful for integrating over the short and/or the long term to meet our business and social marketing goals.

Facebook is probably one of the best social media platforms for The Sabrina Keller Foundation to use on a weekly basis if not daily.  The foundation director and some of the other SKF board members have already had some experience with using the website. Although we as a group (the board members with Fb authorization), need to be better organized into acting as one voice when we use the page for Marketing or Social Content Management purposes.

Facebook has the potential to be our most effective social marketing tool. Our Facebook Page consists of our largest social fan base, but most of them are not very socially active with our content at this point. The director of the SKF foundation is already fairly comfortable with using Facebook/social media on a personal basis. So I think if we start to use some of the Facebook Insight tools for gaining more knowledge about our followers, we will be able to better see what is working with our content.  Then with the help of our SKF director’s social savviness, we might try a more organized marketing campaign to increase our fans social engagement.  

Personally I think I enjoyed using and learning about the Facebook platform the most during this class, with Pinterest following in a close second.  

Pinterest was not being used by the Sabrina Keller Foundation prior to my arrival earlier this year. So I was the one who actually created the new account, and started making some strategies for gaining followers, by making pin boards that were related to our brand; Having Family Fun while raising funds for Girl Scout College Scholarships and promoting SADS Education.  

Pinterest is probably one of those social websites which we would manage on a less frequent basis than with our Facebook page. All of us are new to most of these visual social media tools and learning how to use them effectively will take some time. Although I am proud to say we have gained ten (10) new followers since I started the Pinterest account last month.

I found Pinterest can fit in well (integrate to help meet our goals) with the Sabrina Keller Foundations key social demographics – women ages 25 to 65 – those who are moms and parents who are active, and concerned with their families welfare. I made several pin boards about SADS Education, Health & Food, Family Fun, and one especially For Kids; filling them with visual content that is related to their themes. I have already attracted several followers with these pins - mostly women but also a couple of men, including one Pinterest follower who seems to be more of a business professional, who provides literature about heart health and educational material for medical professionals.  

Twitter is probably the second most integrative social marketing tool for reaching the Sabrina Keller Foundations goals after using the Facebook Page; as we can pair them (with tweets) while sending out our Facebook posts simultaneously.  Also if we decided to create even the smallest of marketing budgets; Twitter would be a good tool to use to find some new prospects (Fb Followers: Sponsors/Volunteers & Donors) and to drive new traffic to our main website or Facebook page.   

I still have yet to create a LinkedIn Non Profit Page for The Sabrina Keller Foundation. But it is at the top of the priority list for my ongoing projects as SKF’s new volunteer marketing director. I think LinkedIn will make a good nonprofit social media tool for SKF to reach out to San Diego Business people, and to find some event sponsors; as well as maybe seek advisors or volunteers that can help us grow our brand as a new nonprofit foundation.

I think after Pinterest some of the other visual social websites we had covered over the semester would be less adaptive for the Sabrina Keller Foundation’s needs at this time (Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram.).

Although I think maybe after we have mastered using some of the new social marketing strategies we learned this semester with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest; we might want to explore using Instagram or Tumblr on occasions in the future, to highlight our pictures of fund raising events etc.  I would imagine as we became more creative with using Pinterest we might find the other visual sites more attractive to use in the future.

Email blasts, and an occasional newsletter or announcement, through an email program like Constant Contact (or others), is a good way to keep our true followers informed about the organization.   We have currently been using a general Yahoo email account to send them out as a group to our fans and it has (unbeknownst to some) compromised our fans security.  This problem needs to be brought up, and we need to discuss this at a general board meeting to find some low cost but safer alternatives.   

I have created a Google+ account for my personal use and I have already linked it to this class blog (which can help your page with (SEO) search engine rankings), but I have yet to make a page for the Sabrina Keller Foundation. I think it might be a good idea to create a Google+ account for SKF soon; if not for expanding and increasing our social media presence then definitely for our gaining access to the Google Analytics, which we can use to help better determine our marketing strategies. But maintaining too many social media websites right now might become a bit difficult for many of the SKF volunteers who are working in regular jobs.

Groupon and Living Social are probably the last and way down on our list for SKF to adopt as social media marketing tools; as we are not in the business of making any commerce or seeking any profits to be discounted. Although as I had proposed in an earlier blog about these tools, we might want to approach the management, and try to utilize them for some kind of pre-paid ticketing program to our fund raising events.