Inspiring Success: Intro to Social Media Marketing from Women TIES event

Yesterday, October 15, I attended the Women's TIES Retreat held at the Welch Allyn Lodge in Skaneateles Fall, NY. Women TIES stands for Together Inspiring Entrepreneurial Success and this was the organization’s first annual event themed Inspiring Success.

My good friend and social media partner, Yvonne DiVita, is a member of TIES and was a speaker at the event. She invited me as her guest, so we got up early and made the trip eastbound on the NYS Thruway and then headed south into the village of Skaneateles to arrive at an 8 a.m. registration and breakfast. Yvonne’s topic was Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy which she co-presented with Trisha Torrey, also a TIES member, who is based in Syracuse and writes a Patient Empowerment blog for About.com.

Since there were many women in the audience that have not had much exposure to social media yet Yvonne and Trisha covered the basics. Yvonne started out by saying that social media is “always about the PEOPLE, not the technology”, so not to get hung up by the tools. Social media is important today because it is the most effective form of word of mouth marketing which just happens to be online.

They went through a quick overview of the social media tools including the top social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as well as Twitter and YouTube. They spoke about how to effectively work these into an overall marketing strategy. As with any marketing plan you first need to set your goals. Do you want to increase your brand awareness, build relationships with existing customers, gain new customers, drive traffic to your website, and/or promote new products and services? All this can be done as well as gaining insights and feedback from customers and competitors.

Social media marketing is being promoted as one of the most cost effective tactics in a marketing plan. However, it does take time. The advice was given to the women there to perhaps start to shift some their time and budget from advertising, networking or cold calling to social media initiatives.

There were many questions at the end of the presentation and one woman actually shared a great success story with us. As the owner of a couple of Subway restaurants in the greater Syracuse area, she and her daughter started a Subway Facebook page which now has over 1.2 million fans! Can you believe that? The official Subway Facebook page has just over 300,000. So they are meeting soon with the national Subway marketing team to share with them how they accomplished this. I just became a fan myself and reviewed their page. I can see that they’ve been successful by clearly understanding their audience and posting fun, engaging content, and doing it often.

So remember, social media is all about the people. I met many great women at this event that I now hope to stay connected with through social media. Thanks Yvonne for inviting me and to all the women who worked hard to put on a wonderful, memorable event.

Comments

[Bizstra]

Agree with you. Women can be active even from home through social media.

[Rachat Credit]

Women can do a lot of things in a day. Nice blog!

[Defiscalisation]

I agree with you. Emancipation of women has brought many positive aspects in society.

[Mutuelle]

Women should be given more opportunities to express themselves.