In the prior lesson, I focused on the types of things you need to do to build relationships and to build your audience at the same time. In this lesson, I plan to close out the social media module with two case studies of companies and their social media efforts. So, I'd like to start you off with this fantastic engagement example from Hilton Hotels. They open up this Twitter account called, Hilton Suggests. And what they were doing is, they were listening to social media and noticing when people ask open ended questions. Like maybe, where is a great restaurant near the Eiffel Tower? And they would actually respond to the question and provide some suggestions to those people. It had nothing to do with whether they were staying at a Hilton hotel or not. It was completely independent of that. What a fantastic way to build relationships with people, really engage and be proactive and actually get mentioned by a lot of people in social media. Sadly though, the last tweet they did was on February 20th of 2015. And the reason why that happened is not that the campaign wasn't a great idea. It was. But the issue was, it wasn't meeting the business goals they had set forth. And this is just a reminder to you, how important it is to make sure that you've set forth specific business goals and that you measure against it and then if it isn't working, that you have the courage to pull the plug and stop investing in that area. So, actually, kudos to Hilton, first of all, for the idea and then for recognizing that when the goals weren't being met and then backing off. Now, I want to give you a second case study and this is Copyblogger media. And very well-known guy and actually a good friend of mine, Brian Clark, who is CEO of Copyblogger. And so, they have a strong Twitter presence over 180,000 followers. That's pretty good. And then they're very strong on Google Plus too, where they have over 78,000 followers between their two Google Plus profiles, the one for the company and the one for Brian Clark. So very strong social presences in both those places. And then you can see how this plays out. These are posts on Copyblogger site, how to create an influencer plan that drive your content marketing, 544 tweets, 82 LinkedIn shares and good Google plus shares and linked in shares. So, they're getting really good engagement from their content. And this is partially true because of their strong social media presence. Here's another post from someone else as second example, again really strong social sharing metrics, and then you have another one here again, very strong social media sharing metrics. Almost everything they post, gets a very very good yield on their site. And clearly, it's partly because they really produce excellent content. But the support that they have on the social side of things is integral to their overall success. Think of it this way, a strong social media presence is kind of like your own built-in PR channel, completely under your control. That's a wonderful thing. And here's the story from a traffic perspective. Total traffic up and to the right. How sweet it is, right? This is what you're looking for, increase in unique visitors. And then here's the organic search traffic point of view, this is after all the SEO specialization we're in. And you can see that they've gotten very strong results for their overall SEO traffic as well. So in this lesson, I walked you through two case studies, I find both of them very compelling. I really applaud the efforts of Hilton with their Hilton Suggests program. But it does serve as a reminder that your social media efforts need to serve a specific purpose and if they don't, then you need to rethink those efforts and try something else. And then we have Copyblogger that actually produce great content but they supported it with strong social media programs. And this appears to result in very strong sharing for every piece of content they put out there. This is the last lesson for this module and I hope that you've gained some perspective on how social media can play a big role as part of a larger Content Marketing Strategy. Remember, social media can help drive your SEO but it is not a direct ranking factor. Affective involvement in social media also includes cultivating your relationships online, the same way you would off line and also requires that you identify which platforms your target audiences are on and where they are most active. In the next module, we'll talk about influencers and how to cultivate those relationships. Thanks for watching.
