Staying informed of the latest social media trends will not only help you keep tabs on your old college crowd, it will also help you market your white papers more effectively. We caught up with a social media expert to get tips on the latest marketing tactics.

Give Them Value
“One important trend for 2010 is a focus on value,” says Rob Birgfeld, director of audience development for SmartBrief on Social Media, one of more than 100 daily publications produced by SmartBrief. “There has been a massive blitz by companies clamoring to get involved in social media. Many of them started their Facebook page, their Twitter account and a blog, and they feel that simply providing a constant flow of general information will suffice.”

“But in 2010, consumers will weed out the ‘non-value’ participants—companies that are just broadcasting—and look for those that are putting something valuable into a social media channel, such as an informative white paper that helps them solve a business problem.”

Let Them Share
According to Birgfeld, a key trend is to empower white paper readers. Just as important as sending a white paper into social media channels is giving readers the ability to pass the paper along on their own terms. To achieve this, provide the mechanisms that let readers share, whether it’s via email or posts on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (you can make your PDF file “tweetable”). Ensuring that end users can pass the white paper on avoids the mistake of impressing readers with your brilliant paper and having the marketing “trail” end there.

A Community Effort
Another major trend for 2010, says Birgfeld, is enlisting a community of users to help create your white paper. “Involving people in the overall development of your paper makes it better and helps it reach more people. One way of tapping into your social media community is to send a first draft of your paper to your best customers and ask for their comments. Once you have multiple ‘contributors,’ you also have multiple marketing channels because your community will take pride in the white paper that they helped create and will send it to other people.”

Powerful Endorsements
In the coming year, more marketers will solicit product testimonials from their social media users and publish the comments verbatim in white papers. In addition to providing valuable feedback on a company’s product, user comments market a product in their own words, not with a company sales pitch.

“When members of your social media community who are end users say that your product is good, it’s a much more powerful and credible statement than a sales message that most people won’t even read,” says Birgfeld.

Follow These Tactics in 2010

* Don’t broadcast useless information on social media sites—give your readers value.

* Make it easy for readers to share your white paper and let them collaborate in the creation of your  masterpiece.

* Don’t feed readers a sales pitch—let your user community tell readers how great your product is.

Keep the latest social media trends in mind and soon you’ll be tweeting your old college cronies about your new-found business success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 5:37 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.