I’ve always been a proponent that email marketing and social media go hand-in-hand. In the world we live in today, it’s all about communication & relationship building, and both email marketing & social media act as different channels for engaging in conversation. All organizations should not be playing in just one of these sandboxes, but should be actively involved in all of them to ensure their brand runs the gauntlet of where customers might be looking for them.
I remember a time not too long ago when a “tweet” meant nothing at all and no one had heard of this thing called Twitter. Now Twitter has announced that half-way through 2011, Twitter users are sending 200 million tweets per day. That is written as 200,000,000… that’s a lot of Tweets! Assuming everyone is maxing out their 140 characters, that means that over the Twitter-sphere is about 28 billion characters per day.
Just to give context to the growth of Twitter, in January 2009, there was about 2 million tweets per day. Now, according to Twitter’s blog post, with this 200 million milestone, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets every single day!
Is your organization actively tweeting? Do you have a Facebook page where your customers can connect with you?
I know it can sometimes be difficult to find something to say, but did you know that you can easily share your email newsletters from Elite Email on Twitter, Facebook and any other social network?
Right after you send your email, it can be published to the web using the Email-2-Web feature in your account. This gives you a dedicated URL for your email. Many people use this to link to past emails from their website, or link to last month’s newsletter in this month’s newsletter, but you can also use it to feed content into your social networks.
[Tip: If you are sending private content, you can deactivate the Email-2-Web feature so it is not published online.]
All you have to do is grab the URL to your email from the Email-2-Web page and then post it right to Twitter, Facebook or any other social network.
Any interactions that occur on the web-version of your email will still track in your reports. But, unlike with email contacts, you won’t be able to see the detailed information about who is clicking because once it’s in the social network universe, it really could be anyone.
When someone visits the web version of your email, it can easily be re-shared using the social sharing links that are automatically added to the bottom for you.
I strongly suggest you get in the habit of sending your email to your mailing list and then sharing it on the various social networks.
This isn’t to say your email content will go viral, since it might not be as captivating as that “Friday” song we’ve all come to love (hehe), but it will definitely extend your reach beyond the inbox.