Every day brings with it the opportunity to learn new things. Sometimes, just when you think you have things all figured out, you discover your first thoughts were wrong. One day in early November, I noticed I was being followed on Twitter by @MarkFranzoso, owner of Franzoso Contracting. I was not motivated to follow Mark back right away, because I didn’t happen to be in the market for any home improvements at the time, and I didn’t see how his tweets would be of interest to me.
Then I saw a post made by Walter Olson’s @Midwestchester account, and I was intrigued. It read:
RT @MarkFranzoso Time lapse video of our crews putting on a new roof in Westchester: http://tinyurl.com/yhejfoa
The link led to a YouTube video that Franzoso had made of one of his roofing crews doing a complete roofing job — but by speeding up the video, Franzoso managed to condense the entire process to a mere 5 minutes and 13 seconds.
The video was one of the best pieces of social media marketing I saw from a Westchester-area company during the 2009 calendar year. Unfortunately, the effort did not achieve the results it should have. The video had only received about 60 views as of December 31, mainly because it never got much of a launch.
I predict that this video will achieve 10 times that number of views in the first month of 2010, possibly much more. Furthermore, this is exactly the type of low-cost marketing that businesses should be looking for as they attempt to leverage social media to promote theiir businesses.
What was the best piece of social media marketing you saw from a Westchester-area business in 2009? Enter your thoughts in the comments section and let the dialog begin.
I think this video was a great idea. You mentioned it didn’t get many hits, one reason being didn’t get much of a launch. What would be a good launch?
Great question. The business owner, in this case Mark Franzoso, probably would like this video to be viewed by as many potential clients as possible. He could accomplish that by sending the video as part of an e-mail to his customer list, making posts on Facebook and Twitter, and by including it in his own blog. When posting on Twitter — the area where I’ve been doing a lot of my research and experimenting — it is helpful to send @messages directly to people you think might be able to help you spread the word. Twitter users with a good number of local followers should be targeted, especially those who know you and are likely to help you out. Keep in mind that this is a good, entertaining and informative piece of content, so it is likely to be retweeted and forwarded to others. There would be nothing wrong with sending a link like this out more than once, because not everyone sees everything the first time. When sending out a link a second time, you could craft a different headline, and see which received more attention. Since there are many factors at work here, it is useful to study which strategies seem to produce the best results and which ones fall flat. This is still a new field, so your own research is often as good as anyone else’s.