On A Mission

The final assignment in Social Media Analytics (ICM 524): You are an online marketer. You mainly rely on email marketing and social media. A new prospect reaches out to hire you for her online consulting business. She uses her name for her branding. However, she is very much concerned about privacy issues in social media. She is overwhelmed with the idea of using her pictures or videos. Write an email to convince her that it is essential to effectively use social media as a marketing channel especially if someone has an online business. Suggest best practices for using social media safely. 

If this is an online consulting business, I am going to assume that the prospect is a technologist who advises small business owners on how to protect their business hardware and client information against unwanted cyber-attacks. Let us say the business is called Heidi Sanders Data Shield, LLC. Heidi has been in business since 2020 and wants to acquire ten new clients in 2024. She currently has a business page profile on LinkedIn and she occasionally posts to Facebook. 

Dear Heidi,

It was a pleasure to speak with you this morning. I was so impressed to learn about your online data protection consulting practice, your customer retention and strength in protecting their business data.

During our conversation you shared some powerful customer testimonials, in addition to data scenarios that can be turned into convincing online content. Understanding that you are looking to grow without sacrificing the services you provide to existing customers, there are ways to safely expand awareness and consideration, through social media.

• Building from where you are: you are already on LinkedIn that is a great place for sharing updates with your business contacts, in addition to joining Groups where you can converse within a focused professional community (e.g. information security and small business & independent consultant network.). There are a number of business products on LinkedIn to expand your company page and expand your followers through dynamic advertising.  
• Twitter is another channel for reaching your audience by posting your views and resharing news stories, along with your opinion. We can @connect with influencers and journalists who cover data protection, and participate in the conversation so they will follow you.
• Information protection is at the center of your business so we will find and create relevant keywordsincluding a shortlist of hashtags that speak to what matters most to your small business clients. This will help in making your business more discoverable.  
• Photography and video of select customer testimonials told through their stories or compelling infographics is one way we can engage small business owners. 
• Geotargeting and other forms of audience targeting will allow us to selectively expand reach with small business prospects. 
• Measuring social media impressions, engagement and click-through-rates will be a good starting point for us to tell which content is working best. 

I know that many of your small business clients wouldn’t survive without strong data protection and many of the top threats of social media will be familiar to you in your line of work.

My aim is I’ve given you some food for thought in how we can work together to safely expand your online presence through social media. I am confident we can work together to communicate in line with each channel’s social media guidelines. 

Look forward to discussing next steps.

Warm wishes,

Julia Casey