It’s the time of year when college graduation is rapidly approaching. However, fans of college music and radio stations can stay connected to the music played on-campus long after they graduate thanks to CMJ, a network connecting fans and music industry professionals with the best in music through interactive media, live events, and print with a focus on non-commercial and college radio stations. Postling sat down with its Marketing Director, Amy Hintz to learn more about how she utilizes social media to build CMJ’s brand.

 
How do you use Social Media to interact with fans?
Social media bridges the events and editorial sides of CMJ’s fans. “There was a division between those who attended shows and those who read about bands,” Amy explained. “Facebook and Twitter brought those sides together. If fans came in October to our concerts and enjoyed it, now they can spend all year doing virtually what they like to do at festival – hear new bands, and vice versa.”

What is your favorite social media tool and why?
Twitter enables CMJ to really get to know their fans beyond a show. “With Twitter, we are able to interface with people coming to an event, get back to people who have questions, and get to know the audience,” Amy explains. It has broadened and deepened their audience at the same time.

How does Postling help you with your social media?
CMJ publishes numerous news stories on its website daily. CMJ want to get those pieces out to fans in as many ways, and as quickly, as possible while tracking the results. “With Postling, I can take a look at what our schedule is going to be like for the day, queue everything up, and not sign into three different accounts,” Amy shares how Postling offered the tools they needed, “We can also see when people are talking about CMJ across many different platforms.”

Julia Levy

Want to get more customers and earn more loyal fans? You need social media. This method of marketing can help you promote your solutions to your ideal customers. Using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and other social media sites allows you to interact with and build a relationship with your audience in real time. You can take communication between individuals and turn it into an interactive, community experience.

Social media builds trust – and it can build it faster than traditional forms of media. For example, you may be familiar with email marketing, email newsletters and different types of broadcasts that are sent via email. It can take you weeks, months or even longer to develop relationships with those people using email marketing. Although the relationship develops over time, it can be a little slower than you anticipate.

Social media allows you to build relationships very quickly and give a boost to your business. You can interact with your audience on a very regular basis and build trust rapidly and reliably.

Why is trust so important? When your target market trusts you, they’ll be more likely to buy from you. You’ll become the relied upon expert that they come to when they need the solutions that you offer. You’re the first person they think of when someone in their network needs your services. In short, trust is the foundation of a successful service practice.

Social media allows you to create a personal connection with your customers. You can incorporate them into the process of planning new products and new services. By looking to your social networks for ideas, feedback and market research you can tap into the exact problems and frustrations that your market is facing – and become the problem solver that they are looking for.

Using social media regularly puts you at the heart of where your ideal customers are hanging out. More people than ever are using social media, and in addition to using it to connect with people they are using it to find solutions to their problems. When you are looking for a resource or a solution, what do you do? Chances are you ask your friends, colleagues, your social network, etc. You ask “Do you know anybody who does this?” or “Have you heard of anything that can help with this specific problem?”

Having a strong presence on social media can encourage people to keep talking about you, which is great for visibility and great for your business. You’ll become the answer to the question “Do you know anybody who does this?”

Through social media, you’re going to build strong relationships with your ideal clients. Your customers are going to become your advocates. They’ll do marketing for you as they spread the word about your expertise and your solutions. You’ll end up having an influx of customers due to your great relationships.

In order to get more business, you need to build trust with your ideal clients and social media is a terrific, easy and cost-effective way to do that.

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Sydni Craig-Hart, The Smart Simple Marketing Coach, is founder of SmartSimpleMarketing.com. She is known for teaching her clients step-by-step how to fill their practice with ideal clients and create more money in their business. Check out www.SmartSimpleMarketing.com for your free marketing tools and to schedule your own “Profit Breakthrough” session with Sydni!

When we started Postling, one comment we heard from small business owners was, “I’m using social media, but it’s taking up way too much of my time.” As a result, we purpose-built Postling to allow small business owners, who have 100 other things to do each day, to manage their social media in 5 minutes a day. Another common comment we heard was, “I want to use social media, but I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do next.”

Today, we are proud to launch the Postling Suggestion Engine and our first three Suggestions to help small business owners get smarter and more effective at social media.

The three Suggestions we are launching with are:

1. Monitoring your Twitter account for new influential followers.
2. Alerting you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp & CitySearch.
3. Showing you popular posts by other Postling members in your industry.

Our vision is to provide dozens of Suggestions, driving by algorithms or heuristics, that each have a recommended action tied to them, so that one day marketing with social media is as easy as running through the day’s Suggestions and triggering the ones that work for you.

Winning with Klout

For our first Suggestion, we’ve partnered with our friends at Klout to monitor who your new Twitter followers are and alert you when any of them are influential, according to Klout’s influence score. We then suggest that you reach out to this new follower and optionally follow them back. While it’d be ideal if you could say hi to every new follower, we know that you’re too busy. The smart compromise is to focus on the ones who carry the most influence, because those people are the ones who can make the most impact if you can convert them into vocal supporters.

Spread the love

There is a concept amongst social psychologists called social proof, which is the idea that people value something that is valued by other people. For example, crowded restaurants get more crowded and businesses thrive when celebrities endorse their products. With our second Suggestion, we’ll tell you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp or CitySearch and encourage you to share that review on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The idea is that a business should highlight the positive review to all of their fans as a form of social proof - if this person likes you so much, maybe others will as well!

Inspiration without perspiration

Ever sit down, stare at a blank screen, and suffer from writer’s block? To give you ideas, we’ve mined our database of 15 million blog posts, tweets, and FB messages to find the most popular posts by other Postling members in your industry. Maybe you get inspired to run a contest or share what your special of the day is. Whatever it may be, learn from the best! 

The future of social media tools

After years of using tools that seem to just give you an overwhelming (and unnecessary) amount of data, reports, and graphs, it’s time that social media tools actually start helping you get smarter and more effective. We believe Postling with Suggestions is the first in the industry to do so. While we are launching with three Suggestions, stay tuned for Suggestions specific to an industry, a geography, a media format, or even a time of day. With 15 million posts in our database and growing quickly, we have an incredible amount of data we can aggregate and mine to answer questions like “What’s the best time of day to publish a post for real estate agents vs. restaurants?” The future of social media tools is using collective intelligence, data mining, and disparate APIs to help everyday people get results they couldn’t get by using Facebook or Twitter or Wordpress alone.