How we use Social at nearForm
To some, social media is a buzzword, just something to be seen to do, all the while questioning return on investment. It is in fact quite the opposite and going absolutely nowhere anytime soon!
According to HubSpot [1] 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites.
nearForm have a strong belief in honest, authentic, and valuable content and communication via social platforms. We believe this adds real value in terms of brand awareness, customer and community satisfaction, and of course, solid leads.
Integrating social into our marketing, sales, and open source strategies has helped us to connect, engage, educate, and tell our story to a global audience; additionally providing us with rich data and feedback to advise and influence future decisions.
Our Networks
We use Twitter to announce news or updates and have conversations in real-time. We maintain Twitter accounts for nearForm itself, our kitchen in Tramore, as well as accounts for meetups, events and open source projects we manage. Our accounts for Seneca and Fuge encourage our followers to share ideas and how our products are helping them with their own projects. We also share content generated by our events and meetups and others related to Node and our community.
LinkedIn allows us to maintain a curated stream of in-depth content suited to job seekers and professionals. This includes opinion pieces and technical guides from our blog Nodecrunch as well our free webinars and training materials. LinkedIn is a great way to share longer form content than Twitter and moves at a slightly slower pace.
YouTube
We use YouTube to host content generated from meet-ups we support and events we organise. YouTube also provides the perfect place to add nearFrom created content from webinars and training videos. We currently have over 200 videos on topics ranging from nodebots to extreme performance. Many of our materials feature industry leaders, and characters. They are an enjoyable way to waste an afternoon and learn something new in the process.
Gitter
Gitter is used with our open source projects as a means to communicate with respective communities in real-time. We use it to gain feedback and offer help to people who need to talk through issues. We’ve also had great success using Gitter for real-time communication at our events such as NodeConf London, with speakers popping by to answer questions from various attendees.
Our Tools
We use a surprisingly small amount of tooling. All of the networks we use have adequate tooling on the web and via mobile apps for in the moment interaction. Outside of this HubSpot acts as the central nervous system for social and provides a large array of features to get the most out of our interactions. We use HubSpot to,
- track useful individual metrics for each social network.
- schedule and buffer a steady stream of content for each network.
- filter quality content for sharing across our social streams.
What Social provides
Leads
Social networks provide a great way for leads to naturally find you. Maintaining a valuable presence on relevant networks means customers can seek you out in more informal ways, without worrying about sales pitches. We have had customers enquire about support on Gitter. Training and Workshops queried via LinkedIn and hot leads via Twitter. Having multiple channels available for potential customers to contact you is always smart.
A point of contact for the community
For our nearForm community interaction, meetups, and conferences, social media plays a huge part in not only the day of the event, but the lead up before and after. Earlier this year we hosted NodeConf London with the hashtag #NodeConfLondon reaching over 3.2m Twitter timelines! Our ConfWall at the event showed everyone’s tweets in real-time and anyone who could not attend the event, were able to keep upto date with everything that was going on.
A way to share quality content
Our events feature amazing speakers. Our team produce amazing content and many nearFormers are thought leaders in their respective disciplines. From this comes a wealth of raw content ready to be shared with the world. Our YouTube channel is home to talks, webinars and lots more. Nodecrunch, our blog, is updated weekly with insights from interns, summaries of events and technical posts from our dev team. Social media gives us a way to share this content with people that value it in ways that are familiar to them.
Our Tips
There are many tips and tricks that are equally important for good social interaction. The ones we found most important are,
Be authentic
Regardless of the social network or funny profile picture a real person lives behind every interaction. Sometimes people want a little boost for the pet project, sometimes attendees need support with private or serious issues and other times people just want to chat.
Focus on quality content
People’s timelines are already overloaded, content will only be noticed when it’s valuable period. Focus on providing less frequent updates for content of higher quality. For instance a small amount of tweets with a quality infographic will do far better than a large amount of tweets with just a link.
Keep your workflow simple
Much of our interaction can be considered “in the moment” which is usually done via given networks web or mobile app. Focus on having a pipline of quality content using tools like Buffer or Flipboard to curate content that makes sense for your customers and community. Light scheduling will enable a consistent flow of content and smooth out “dry” periods.
Don’t be everywhere
An all too common mistake for companies is to try maintain accounts for every social network available. Focus on networks where your communities and customers are and only maintain networks where you can provide relevant quality content or interaction.
In Closing
The reality of business today means you are most likely not providing a completely unique product or service. What customers and communities value most, is tangible interaction and the ability to communicate with your business on a more personal level.
By using social networks to engage with our customers, potential clients, communities, and everyone else in our network, we gain a much richer set of information to use to plan how our business moves forward.
nearForm is a local Irish company with a strong global footprint. We support events, large and small and release open source to the benefit of our customers and communities. Social media enables us to do this effectively in an engaging and authentic manner.
[1]; http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-roi-stats#sm.000010h59nhmvbfptpuifo68oc2me
