Communicating on Social Media for Software Development Service Providers
If your business isn’t on social media, your potential clients might not know you exist. Social media marketing creates brand awareness, generates traffic to your website, and leverages earned media to help your brand spread like wildfire.
The purpose of social media marketing is not to sell, but rather to let more people know about your brand, which translates into more clients over time.
The most common and effective social media websites that software development service providers can use to spread their marketing messages include:
- Quora
- Medium
- Dribbble
- Behance
- GitHub
We could also add to this list websites such as Hacker News, Dzone, Coderwall, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. Our social media marketing outlets are almost limitless!
Each of the social networks mentioned above has its own rules and requires a separate strategy.
Some networks — like Facebook — are better for targeting potential employees, while others — like Twitter — work best for public relations and influencer marketing. Quora can drive motivated traffic to your website, and GitHub is where you earn a reputation as a programming expert.
Working with social networks is not a trivial task. We could write a whole book explaining the particularities of each network and how to use it effectively. And we might, actually. One day.
In this guide, however, we will share certain tactics that are applicable to nearly all social networks.
How to work with social networks
1. Study the competition
If you don’t study your competition, you don’t do marketing. The whole point of marketing is to prove your leadership and rise above the competition.
Software development companies compete with thousands of others around the world for clients, as well as for potential and existing employees. But while figuring out your competition on the local market isn’t that hard, getting a full list of global competitors is almost impossible.
Most entrepreneurs audit several software development service providers in different locations before they decide which one to work with. These locations may include Eastern Europe, China, India, South America, and Western Europe as well as their own local market. To say that the competition among software development companies is tough is to call a glacier an ice cube.
But we aren’t here to bitch about having to compete with the whole world. We’re here to help you do something about it!
We recommend that you make a list of competitors with the following characteristics:
- Similar technology stack
- Same business model (e.g. outsourcing, staff augmentation, project-based)
- Similar target audience (e.g. startups, enterprises, SMBs)
- Similar positioning (or similar to what you would like your positioning to be)
- Similar selling points (e.g. technical skills, industry expertise, reputable clients)
Pick out those competitors who seem to do better business than you. There’s no point competing with weaklings.
And don’t only look at companies in your area. You need to take a broader world-wide look at the existing market players and benchmark your company against them.
Ultimately, you should have at least ten local companies and about twenty to thirty foreign companies in your list of competitors. Look for these companies on Google, through service provider directories such as Clutch, and on social networks.
Once you have your list, it’s time to do your social media marketing research!
Find out which social media networks each company uses, and check out their accounts:
- Pay attention to their positioning on each social network
- Check out their posts and note those that receive the most reactions
- See how often they publish
Very few software development companies do excellent social media marketing. I’d highly recommend that, in addition to your competitors, you also check out the social accounts of technology blogs and media sources. This is where you’ll find the best social media marketing practices.
Your list of competitors will be useful for all your marketing activities, not only your social media marketing. You need to come back to it over and over again to monitor how the companies on your list evolve, and thereby to stay ahead of the competition.
2. Know what makes you different
After you’ve evaluated your competitors — their strengths and weaknesses, specifically their social media marketing strengths and weaknesses — you should start thinking about what makes you different. Your competitive advantage will dictate your communication strategy.
Answer these questions:
- What am I going to say through social networks that my competitors aren’t saying?
- How can I amuse visitors to my social media pages? What can I do to stand out?
- What is my competitive advantage?
3. Define your target audience for each social network
Social networks are great for marketing because of the audiences that use them. Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub and others have already done the job for you: they’ve gathered an audience with certain interests who come to the social network with a specific intention.
People go to Instagram to see pretty pictures, to LinkedIn to make connections and find a job, to Quora to get answers, and to GitHub to look for software libraries. Social networks provide invaluable opportunities to study your target audience and to share content that resonates with them.
All you need to do is some research. While researching your target audience, ask yourself the following questions to understand what your audience wants to talk about:
- What is my target audience interested in?
- What other accounts do they follow?
- What do they do for fun? What do they do for work?
- When do they visit the given social network?
- What do they visit the given social network for?
- What content do they like, share, and comment on most frequently?
After you answer these questions, you can segment your target audience by dividing it into portraits. Describe why each of these portraits (hypothetical people) might be interested in your company and in your social account. What factors influence their choice? What sorts of content do they expect on social networks?
The VALS (values and lifestyles) method, developed by SRI, is one way to segment consumers. It’s based on two criteria: purchasing motive and exhibited character traits. VALS identifies eight consumer segments:
- Innovators
- Thinkers
- Believers
- Achievers
- Strivers
- Experiencers
- Makers
- Survivors
In my humble opinion, this method of segmentation works great for social networks because most social networks are a form of entertainment, and people choose them because they suit their lifestyle.
Kind in mind that your target audience on social networks won’t necessarily be the people you directly sell your services to. They might be developers, designers, journalists, opinion leaders or anybody else who can help you achieve your marketing goals (we’ll talk about KPIs a bit later).
4. Define your positioning on each social network
Let me tell you a few words about positioning. There is only one brand positioning. In positioning statements, companies emphasize their unique selling proposition and competitive advantage and create an image of themselves that resonates with their target audience.
But since each social network attracts a different audience, you need a unique positioning on each of these networks that tells a bigger story about your brand.
For example, if you use GitHub as a social media marketing tool, you should position your account to attract developers. In your positioning for GitHub, you can explain why you contribute to the open source community. If you use Facebook for marketing your brand to potential employees, your positioning there needs to reflect your company’s values in a way that makes people want to work for your company. On LinkedIn, you need to be precise about what you offer, who you work with, what services you provide, and why clients should choose your company.
The key to positioning is consistency. Your activities across social networks need to be consistent with your overall brand positioning. Social networks just help you show off different sides of the same brand.
5. Create a weekly editorial plan
If your positioning is clear, you should have no problem figuring out what to share on social networks. To prepare your editorial plan, answer these questions:
- What types of content will I share and from what sources?
- How will I alternate different types of content so people don’t get bored?
Here is an example of an editorial calendar:
6. Define promotion methods
If you’re going to launch advertising campaigns, you need to make calculated investments and define the following:
- Goals
- Ad content
- KPIs that you will measure
Think about what other methods of promotion you will use on social networks. These can be mass following, mass liking, influencer outreach, and contests.
7. Define and measure KPIs
As I’ve already mentioned, the main goal of your activities on social networks is to increase brand awareness. Your KPIs for social networks include:
1. Number of followers
Calculate each week how many followers you have and compare this number to the previous week. Analyze how your activities influence your follower count.
2. Click-through with bounce rate
Click-through rates indicate whether or not your social media messaging is compelling enough to spark your audience’s interest. If your bounce rate is low, it means you’re targeting the right people on social networks and the traffic you’re driving is valuable. Compare the quality of traffic you attract from social networks with the quality of traffic that comes from other sources, such as Google.
3. Share of traffic driven to the website from a given social network
The share of traffic driven from social networks is usually lower than traffic driven from organic search or direct traffic (if you do content marketing). But if you target the right audience on social networks, your quality of traffic can be much higher than from these other sources. You can use Google Analytics to compare sessions driven by each channel. Pay attention to metrics such as session length, number of pages per visit, bounce rate, and exit rate to evaluate the quality of traffic.
4. The number of mentions
The number of mentions your brand receives on social media tells you about the effectiveness of your marketing activities.
5. Conversion rate
Your conversation rate on social media is the ratio of comments per post to your number of overall followers (or page likes). The more people are compelled to add their voice to the content you post on social channels, the better you are at social media marketing. Comments are the best possible reaction to your posts.
conversion rate(%) = (number of comments / total number of followers) X 100
6. Shares
The more people share your content, the larger the audience your brand is exposed to. Don’t only track the number of times your content is shared on social media. Measure the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers (or page likes).
share rate(%) = (number of times your content was shared (or retweeted, or repinned) / total number of followers) X 100
7. Likes
As with the two previous formulas, your like rate is calculated as follows:
like rate(%) = (number of likes for all posts / total number of followers) X 100
Though we like when people like our posts, this metric doesn’t mean much. Compared to shares and comments, likes are the least valuable of the reactions you’re hoping to get.
8. Leads
Leads is the most important metric for all marketing activities, not only social media marketing. You can create a report in Google Analytics that measures the number of leads by tracking “sent form” events from different channels.
On top of measuring metrics and comparing the results with the previous reporting period, you should also pay attention to which posts are most successful. They are the ones that reached the largest audience and had the highest engagement rates. These posts will help you understand what kind of messages to share in future to improve your social media marketing results.
Who works with social networks?
Social media management might be the responsibility of one dedicated person (a communications manager), a group of people (writers, for example), each of whom are responsible for a particular social network, or even a whole department (the design team might regularly post shots on Dribbble, while developers contribute to GitHub and answer questions on Stack Overflow).
If you lay the responsibility for social media management on a dedicated person, her or his typical responsibilities will include:
- Creating content for Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, etc.
- Communicating with online communities
- Communicating with thought leaders
- Launching advertising campaigns
- Reporting to the team leader
The marketing team leader, director, or CMO is the one who oversees all matters related to marketing and communications, including social media. He or she is the one who creates a strategy for each social network and monitors the results.
Recommended tools for managing social network accounts
There are tons of tools that help communications managers work with social media. This list is not nearly complete, but it includes some tools that you’ll find invaluable:
- Buffer for scheduling posts (and they have a great blog about social media marketing)
- Buzzstream for public relations
- Klout for finding thought leaders on social networks
- JustReachOut for finding journalists
- Crowdfire app for managing followers
- StatusBrew for managing followers
- AllTop for news search
- Index for news search
- Visage for creating visual content
- Canva for creating visual content
- Hashtags for hashtag search
- Hashtagify for hashtag search
- Hashtags for hashtag search
- Mention for tracking brand mentions
- EmailHunter, Name2email, Pipetop for email search
Useful resources
To learn more about social media marketing, consult the following resources:
- Ultimate Guide to Mobile Social Media: Phone and Tablet Strategies for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+
- How To Promote Your Blog With Social Media
- 7 Experts Tell You How To Generate Leads With Social Media
- Your social media strategy plan: Where do you START?
- Which Social Media Accounts Really Matter and Why
Here are some books you might want to read as well:
- The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More
- B2B A To Z: Marketing Tools and Strategies That Generate Leads For Business-To-Business Companies
- The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing: New Tactics, Tools, and Techniques to Compete in the Digital Economy
- Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
