There’s a big flurry of action around Social Media in South Africa at the moment.

It seems that Twitter and Facebook has finally become mainstream over the past year, and clients are asking more and more about integrating social media into their existing campaigns. The question that one has to ask however, is “Why would you want to do it?”.

When things become mainstream, it seems everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. Don’t do it because everyone else is doing it. Do it because you’ve done your research and it might be a viable complement to your marketing efforts.

As internet marketing consultants we come across many companies that has given up on social media because they made a miserable failure of trying to do it themselves. They gave up, because it didn’t work and in their minds that’s the end of it. It’s up to online marketers to convince these clients otherwise, but I thought I’d share some insights with you for things to consider when looking at Social Media in South Africa.

Points to consider for companies in South Africa looking to go into Social Media:

1. A small percentage of the market is actually online *

Only about 5-6 million people are actively using the internet through computers in South Africa (according to World Wide Worx). That’s roughly 10% of everyone in South Africa. These users are primarily higher LSM consumers. Also remember that out of this number, not all consumers are using Social Media. What now?

* This doesn’t mean that we don’t have good market penetration, because mobile internet usage is increasing dramatically in South Africa. There are more active mobile phones than people in South Africa and as the roll-out of cheaper smart phones improves, we’re finding that potential customers are jumping straight from no internet to mobile internet. Take note of this and gear your campaigns to mobile browsing and applications as well, whether through mainstream mobile applications like Twitter and Facebook, or custom developed mobile applications.

2. MXit, Facebook and Twitter has the best market penetration

MXit is South Africa’s biggest mobile social network at the moment. It’s a mobile application that allows users to chat on the mobile data networks at the fraction of the cost of a text message. It’s HUGE under the younger generation, but has so far failed to gain real traction market above 25. If you’re aiming for the age bracket of 12-25, it’s a good bet. The network is estimated to have around 15 million users world wide, and around 9 million users in South Africa. More info on MXit here.

Facebook is geared more towards ‘being social’, so if your brand does not lend itself to this you should have sound strategies on how to get traction. In the past year we have however been seeing much better results since there has been more third party applications that talk to Facebook and the ‘like’ buttons which improves social sharing.

Twitter is gaining ground fast as the premium medium for sharing information fast and in real time. The South African media has taken to Twitter in a big way, which was in part the cause of Twitter going mainstream here. The downside? There is a lot of clutter and users get distracted very quickly. If managed right, you can generate big traction for your campaigns and build up a loyal database of customers to talk to on a regular basis.

3. Location is everything!

Location based services is what social media was to blogging (yes I know blogging can be categorised under social media sometimes, but just indulge me here). We’d just about introduced everyone to blogging when we started telling clients ‘social is the next big thing’. Confusing? For sure, but that is the nature of technology and how word of mouth spreads. Generally the local industry is doing a good job of educating the market on new technology, but it does take time to get taken up. A few to look out for would be foursquare, Gowalla, Google Places/Local and now Facebook Places.

Gowalla, Facebook Places and foursquare work on the same principles, where users check in to a location (geo-targeted by their mobile devices). With the service knowing where you are, it can offer you specials that are at locations close to you, tell you whether your friends are nearby or just give you tips about your current location. They do have some distinct differences which I will not go into here, but each provides its own appeal. Gowalla and foursquare run like a game, where you generate points and badges for checking in and you compete against friends that you add on the service.

This has immense value to companies that are geared towards walk in business, especially in the hospitality industry. It also does wonders for bringing social media to the real world (physical in stead of virtual interaction). Facebook Places is not yet available in South Africa, but it probably won’t be long before it reaches our shores. This would be an interesting space to watch over the coming months as Facebook, foursquare and Gowalla battle it out for location supremacy. Gowalla does not seem to have as much traction as foursquare in South Africa at the moment.

4. Have a strategy

If you’re a company looking to enter the social media scene in South Africa, you have to know what you’re letting yourself in for. The reasons why social campaigns fail are not always clear, but it’s mostly because of the wrong strategy, pure ignorance or bad implementation.

Make sure you look at the following:

• Use a reputable company to develop and implement your social media campaigns – anyone can create a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but it’s the experience that counts in pulling off a successful social media campaigns and there are many tricks of the trade that reputable companies have learned through experimentation.
• Join the conversation – Social Media is much more engaging than a normal website, so you will have to keep track of what is going on and what is being said so that you can respond fast. Twitter especially is all about responding fast, so you will have to allocate the time and resources to look after this.
• Manage your reputation – companies are often scared of going into Social Media because it’s an open platform for criticism. Own up and take it on, because it will only improve your own service to your customers and give you insights into your market like never before. Recent happenings like the Gap logo and Woolworths sagas will teach companies that their customers now have a voice in Social Media and it can no longer be ignored. In fact, even if you’re not actively running Social Media campaigns you might still be mentioned, so start listening!
• Keep track – there are various tools that will help you ‘listen’ to what people are saying about your brands and products. A local product called BrandsEye has recently been released which does a pretty good job of automating your Online Reputation Management. Check it out!
• Explore the features – all these different types of services have different advantages. Make sure you use them to your full advantage where applicable. Don’t just create a presence, expand that presence to its full potential!
• Experiment – if you’re new to the game, run some experimental campaigns to test the waters. This can be done with lower budget, but follow the advice from your social media consultant (the one with experience!) as lower budget campaigns might sometimes not have the same reach as less time and effort has been put in. A good social media consultant will however aim for maximum return on investment for your marketing budget.
• Have fun! – Why so serious? Social Media is about being social after all.

Hope you enjoyed the read, looking forward to your comments!

This morning I noticed something new in Gmail – Google Buzz. Think along the lines of your Facebook News Feed. First thing you need to do is look at your privacy settings. By default it seems to share Picasa pics, your shared Google Reader items and status updates from GTalk and it’s linked to your Google Profile.

Your Google Profile has now also been expanded with some additional features that are linked to Buzz. Easy ability to share content, links, interests and a personalised URL. I just don’t like the fact that your static URL is not customisable and it uses your email address (the part before the @ sign) as URL.

It seems like a mixmatch of things that starts to compete with Facebook, but it’s not all available in once place. So you’ll ask, what’s the point? Is it Google trying to increase the amount of information they already have about their users (cue conspiracy theory)? Or are we going to see a Facebook competitor one of these days?

At first I thought Google brought Google Wave into Gmail. It might have been an interesting match by adding some additional features to Gmail, but in my opinion Google Wave is a failure. It might be one of those cases that the average Joe just doesn’t get it, and in cases even tech savvy users, but I have just not seen the value at all.

Google has the money to play around with lots of things and this is probably just another foray into looking at tools that might gain traction (especially when their features are very similar to what users are used to with Facebook). I think small things like these, lead to big things and believe me a lot of analytics will go into these new features to see how people adopt it.

The question is, do we need another Facebook and can Facebook be bettered? Will anyone even care?

I say competition is healthy, let the games begin!

Having done various campaigns for clients, we’re excited about the possibilities that Social Media Marketing offer to our clients. In fact, we’re able to give our clients some control and responsibility in the matter of managing their profiles online. Social Media spaces like FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn are but a few areas where different aspects of your business can be marketed. Not all businesses will benefit from this kind of marketing, but these tools enable a different level of interactivity and social conversation with your target markets that was never before possible.

As a case study we’ve created a Facebook Fan Page for a local Cape Town Catering Company. Having suffered the slowdown in business through the current economic climate, we thought it a sin that food that good go to waste and decided to share. If you’re in the Cape Town area, make sure to book them for your next corporate or private function.

We want to document the case study here, to see what impact each of these has on business for them, without going into detail on how exactly we went about things. For that you’d have to hire us of course

Now we haven’t really touched their website apart from loading some Facebook fan boxes as we want to see what influence each piece of the puzzle will have separately.

Oh yes I forgot to mention, our cashless friend needs to eat, so he’s agreed to help promote them for a delicious vegetarian meal now and then… Will try and link to his feedback through our updates as that will have some impact as well.

Be sure to return soon for Part 2, and if you have tips, comment here! Please ReTweet!

So finally it happened. This is something I wrote about in April and it seemed inevitable that Google would integrate Twitter and now it’s happening (and the same for Bing).

Well an agreement was reached. We don’t see it within results as of yet, but it’s going to be interesting times for SEO and how they would be filtering through a lot of spam (to gain top results) to show ‘legit’ results. In fact how on earth would Google and Bing determine what is spam and what is not?

What if someone wrote a simple little ping API that pushes a tweet on a competitive topic out each few minutes? Sure, I guess Twitter’s spam scripts are improving, but now all of online marketing industry has lots to talk about.

Even though Twitter’s traffic seems to be in a downturn (in the US) at least this would probably breath a lot of new life into them.

Plaxo has slowly been upgrading their network to be more of a social network, and it’s actually growing on me. Plaxo’s been around for ages and at one point it irritated the hell out of me because of their covert tactics to increase their network. It felt as if one didn’t have a choice in the early days and the emails were intrusive, but I think as social media grew, people are more open to share their profiles and business contact information.

And now, it’s quite intriguing to browse through the ‘possible people you might know’ and connect again. The nice thing is that I’m finding people that I have dealt with professionally years ago (because of Plaxo’s age) and linking up again.

In the current economic times, this is great. It will be interesting to see whether they can compete with Linked In over time as I think they are doing something right at the moment…

It has been confirmed that Google is in talks with Twitter about a real time search engine. This would bring about a lot of value to search results, but also some concerns about how it would be managed.

Twitter unfortunately don’t have a current way of deferring spam, except for a subtle reporting of abuse via email or @abuse tweet. What will keep shady marketers from continuously polling twitter on certain topics to increase traffic?

I am however certain of the fact that Google will employ various algorythms to weed out spam, as they’re doing with conventional search results, but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

I don’t think an outright sale is on the cards, but we could well see a live feed being sourced to Google for producing faster results. As mentioned in the Tech Crunch article, if Google doesn’t receive a live feed the feasibility of such a deal will be worse off, as Twitter depend on real time results and that is what will make it most useful to Google Users.

Things to keep in mind on integration:

• Will there be a limit on frequency of Tweets by unique users indexed or frequency on a specific topic/keyword?
• Will users be able to reply/retweet etc directly from Google Results (if they’re logged into Twitter)?
• Will power users have the ability to track topics (this will be great – maybe with Google Alerts)?
• How will the integration impact Twitters current ability to manage traffic / uptime?
• Give me your thoughts!

The Social Media Marketing Industry Report has some very interesting findings on the current status of social media marketing. If you want to find out what’s happening with social media, or you’re just starting out with Social Media and looking to delve deeper, check it out!

Certain social business to business platforms are infamous breeding grounds for what I call ‘social media beggars’. There is absolutely no use in adding friends and then trying to flog your services or latest product without building up a relationship with the person first. Furthermore, ask permission first, before blasting off unwanted, unsolicited invites and sales pitches.

The chance of someone taking up your offer will be much better, if you can first add value by either giving advice or just making friendly contact (also not a generic intro email that you send to everyone).

Yes, business to business networks CAN help you generate leads, but you’ll need to learn how to effectively use them to your advantage.

A good entry point is to monitor, who’s asking questions that relate to what you do, and what you offer. Provide some insights, free of charge, and mention that if the person is interested, to contact you for further discussion.

When adding so call friends or contacts, try and write a meaningful message, giving the person an idea of why you want to add them to your network, or where you found their details, so that it adds context to the request.

Most of us are too busy to accept all friend/contact requests and want to know up front what it’s about.

I recently had someone request to be added as a contact, telling me they have a cool new product that might be of interest. Upon further enquiry, he came back to say that it’s still in development, and a secret, so he couldn’t tell me about it. Now what’s the use of that? Make sure you DO have something of value to add, or don’t make the request.

Your tone of message is also very important. It’s so easy to come across as ‘wanting’. The same applies within real life networking events. If you have the attitude of wanting something when you first meet someone, it creates a negative first impression and it’s all downhill from there. SO, be helpful and don’t ask someone ‘what can you do for me’ or ‘what can I do for you’ if you don’t get the impression that they are in need of using your services. Tell them what you do and that if they’re interested, you’ll contact them with more information.

Apply these techniques and let us know if they worked!

I’ve recently discovered this social network through a friend that does business coaching in the UK.

Click the banner to join and look me up as a contact! Within an hour of joining I have had several requests to join interest groups and make international business contacts.

This looks like a mixture of Facebook and Linked-In and even though the interface is a bit confusing, I think once you get to know the social network there would be a lot of potential.

Let me know what you think!

Ok, so maybe I’m being ignorant, but I don’t yet see the point of listing a business on FaceBook. I thought, maybe there would be some advantages of listing services, but I don’t see any way to add services to my company business listing? Have I missed the plot (could it be I selected the wrong type of business)? Yes, you can build ‘fans’, they can review our company (like testimonials), post something on the discussion board etc.

So do I have to create a video to introduce our services and load it up? Time to play…

Will have to review it some more and give feedback.