social media in a business context

for teachers

Social media in a business context for learners of English

Includes a vocabulary list

and discussion activities

for learners

‘Social Media’. When you hear this phrase, what do you think of? Your first thought is probably Facebook and Twitter: the first to interact with friends and the second to discover interesting content and read comments on the news.

But do you understand the many other roles of ‘social’ (as it is called by professionals), and how it all works as part of a company’s marketing strategy?

This slideshow will help you to understand social media in a business context, and includes discussion topics and some key vocabulary for learners of English at the end.

for teachers for learners

History and Definitions.

Seth Godin, the guru of contemporary marketing and thought leader for start-up entrepreneurs, published Permission Marketing in 1999 (revised 2007).

I recommend his daily blog – short posts about everything from small business marketing to human psychology. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/


Permission Marketing introduction on Amazon:

“Traditional advertising is based on taking our attention away from whatever we are doing. This is Interruption Marketing.Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most precious commodity, time, Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to voluntarily accept advertising. By reaching out to only those individuals who have expressed an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness, and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.”


These ideas were picked up by an internet marketing company called Hubspot.Their CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan, coined another similar term in 2005, Inbound Marketing. This term is now in general use, and the diagram below comes from Hubspot.


SEO – search engine optimization, i.e. getting your website near the top of the first page of Google.

Marketing Analytics e.g. using Google Analytics and data from social media to get a profile of people at every stage of the marketing funnel; using A-B testing (aka split testing).

Marketing automation e.g. sending out a series of targeted emails to people who subscribe to your list, or using data from people’s search results to target them with relevant banner ads on web pages.

Social Media – sharing, discussing, networking and publishing. Across all devices.


SEO – search engine optimization, i.e. getting your website near the top of the first page of Google.

Marketing Analytics e.g. using Google Analytics and data from social media to get a profile of people at every stage of the marketing funnel; using A-B testing (aka split testing).

Social Media – sharing, discussing, networking and publishing. Across all devices.

Email & Lead Nurturing – targeting your email subscribers and SM leads with content and offers to move them down the funnel (from site visitor to repeat visitor to email subscriber to looking at products and offers to customer to repeat customer).

Landing Pages – having specific pages of your website for when people land from specific referring sites (eg you click through to a specific landing page from a particular FB promotion).

Content Creation – blog posts, videos, PDFs (eBooks), webinars, infographics, etc. All free and designed to make you into a repeat visitor, and word-of-mouth referrer, to the company website.

Marketing automation e.g. sending out a series of targeted emails to people who subscribe to your list, or using data from people’s search results to target them with relevant banner ads on web pages.


Let’s look at the areas of Inbound Marketing in the diagram, starting with content creation.

‘Content’ means:

• A blog on your website with regular new posts.

• Longer articles, either to be read on the site or available as a PDF eBook to download.

• Videos: promotional videos that you hope will go viral; videos introducing the product or explaining how to use it; etc.

• Infographics.• Slideshows.• Podcasts.• Funny or interesting images,

photos, cartoons, quotes, etc.• Industry white papers, perhaps

with original research (for B2B).


Having created the content, you have to share it on social media. But what exactly is social media?

Fred Cavazza has a blog (www.fredcavazza.net) where he makes a diagram every year to summarize the current state of social media. He calls it his Social Media Landscape.

We’ll begin with his images for 2008 and 2012, and then look at the most recent image for 2015. The quotes at the side of the images come from his accompanying text.


Social Media Landscape 2008.

“The main characteristic of social media is audience fragmentation. Your brand does not belong to you anymore, it only exists in customers’ minds, which are massively present in blogs, forums, wikis, social networks … That is why it is important to name a social media champion within your organization.”



“Three major players can be found in the central circle. Regarding competition between these three, I don’t believe one can eat the two others, since each one has a distinct orientation: Twitter for content discovery, Google+ to manage your online identity and Facebook to interact with your friends.”



“Out: Google+. They launched their social platform years after Facebook, Twitter and never really caught up. It officially splits into Photos and Streams.

In: Meerkat and Periscope (live video streaming); Imgur and Giphy (images and GIFs); Yammer and Slack (professional social networking for communication and collaboration).”

“Facebook and Twitter allow users to fulfil each of the four main social usages.

At the center we also find mobile applications like WhatsApp, WeChat, Hangouts, Viber, Tango, Kik and Snapchat where ‘simple’ communication tools have evolved to try to be the digital Swiss knife in your pocket. They allow users to do various tasks from ordering a taxi, to playing games, to reading articles, to exchanging money with friends, to shopping online.”


Here’s another way to look at social media, taken from the Hootsuite blog. Can you think of any area that is missing? Maybe instant messaging (Whatsapp)? And video calling (Skype, Hangouts, Facetime)?http://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/


LinkedIn Groups; FB Groups; communities for specific

interests and hobbies

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat

TripAdvisor, Yelp, Airbnb, Uber

Quora, Digg

Tumblr, Wordpress

Pinterest, ScoopIt,StumbleUpon

Buy buttons on platforms like FB, Twitter and Pinterest; specialized sites like Etsy

Now let’s look at a few interesting SM facts and figures. First from Go-Gulf (worldwide figures for 2014).www.go-gulf.ae/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/what-people-share-social-networks.jpg

And now three slides with statistics (U.S. figures for 2015), taken from the Buffer blog.https://blog.bufferapp.com/new-social-media-research

So, picking up the story of Inbound Marketing strategy … we want to post our interesting website CONTENT to SOCIAL MEDIA where it can be shared with others.

How do we actually post? Professional marketers don’t just log in to FB and post. They use tools (such as Hootsuite or Buffer or SocialOomph) that allow you to:

• set up your various SM channels (Twitter, FB, LI, YouTube, Instagram, etc)• schedule posts for particular times and days• get analytics on how well your efforts are being received• monitor streams such as mentions, lists, favourites, hashtags, competitors’ feeds• monitor keywords (such as your brand name - to see what people are saying)• get suggestions for content• find quality people to follow, in the hope that they follow you back


Before continuing we need a new term: CTA, which stands for Call To Action. The CTA is a button that appears on a website or on SM. You click the CTA to take the action you want, which may involve going to a web page first. Here are some examples of CTAs:

There will be a CTA button in our social media post/promotion. On the next slide is an example of how to set up a CTA for Twitter. It is taken from the Twitter account of my site for learners www.BEhereBEthere.com.


Preview of the tweet text here, the image under the tweet here, the CTA here, and a general headline for the card here.

This is the area of Twitter where I can design a Card (i.e. image) to appear under my tweet. Look first at the Preview on the right (how the finished card will look).

for teachers

Now look at the left hand area where I define the various elements of the card.

Here I can change the ‘image’ (in this case an A/B telephone dialogue but usually a photo).

Here I enter the URL that you reach when you click the CTA.

Here I enter the ‘headline’ that appears next to the CTA.

Here I choose a CTA. The pull-down menu gives me other choices like Read More, Shop Now, Play Now, Order Online, etc.

for teachers

Okay. I’ve designed my tweet, and added an image. What do I do next?

Well, if I’m a private individual I just tweet. It will then appear on the screen of any of my followers who happen to be logged in. In their timeline (‘the Twitter firehose’) it whizzes past. A few followers may read it, and a few of those may engage with the tweet by replying, or clicking on a link inside the tweet, or favoriting it, or retweeting it to their followers. Some of the retweets may reach people who are not currently following me, and they will now decide to do so. That’s Twitter (mostly).

For a business, this is completely hopeless. They need as large an audience, and as targeted an audience, as possible. What happens is very simple. The company pays for a ‘promoted tweet’ that stays at the top of the stream of tweets (it doesn’t just whizz by), and reaches people who are not currently followers of the business.


Here is an example of a promoted tweet. It’s a screenshot from my smartphone.

The tweet at the top is a normal (non-promoted) retweet, and will have come initially from someone I follow. Notice that the original tweet was 4 days ago, but Twitter have put it at the top of my timeline because it is popular (see the 115 retweets and 146 favorites). In my timeline it will be replaced with another ‘trending’ tweet.

Below it is a promoted tweet from Amazon. I don’t currently follow Amazon on Twitter, and they want me to. So they try to persuade me. This promoted tweet will stay at the top of my timeline for some time.

Notice the word ‘Promoted’.

The CTA.

for teachers

age of tweet

And now you are going to see the power of social media. Because Amazon (or any company) can target who sees their promoted tweet with extraordinary precision.

As an example, I will show you how I would create a promoted tweet for my own account BEhereBEthere.Here are some screenshots from my Twitter account that show how I can define the audience who will see this tweet …


I can select in whose timeline my promoted tweet appears:

• country, region, metropolitan area

• the person’s gender• their native language• the device or platform

they use to access Twitter


• keywords that appear in the users’ own tweets

• all the people who follow particular @handles (eg those of my competitors, or of a thought leader, etc)

• whether or not I reach people who are already my followers

• suggested people who are like my followers


• people’s interests (clicking ‘Browse categories’ gives a huge number of choices)

• my own uploaded lists of emails, Twitter IDs, etc.

• people who visit my website


• my daily maximum budget

• my total budget for this particular campaign

• my maximum bid (per click) to reach the users I have now defined

My promoted tweet will only appear if I bid more than other advertisers who want to reach the same audience. However I only pay if someone actually clicks on my ad.


And of course Facebook works in the same way, with the same targeting options, if you want your ad to appear on people’s FB pages. Now … the promoted tweet, or FB ad, will have a CTA button. And the web page you reach when you click the CTA button – the URL you go to – is crucial. It’s called the landing page.

Not so long ago, links from SM would click through to your normal homepage. That was fine: on the homepage you had frequently updated content, a chance to join the email subscription list, promotions, offers, etc.

But now the trend is to have people arrive at your website on a specially designed landing page. It maintains the visitor’s focus on the action they want to take.

For example, you have a Facebook promotion offering 20% off a product for a limited time. The FB user sees the ad and clicks the CTA button. They land on a special page of your website with further information about that particular promotion, and they can buy the product by clicking another CTA.


Just for interest, here are some ‘best practices’ for landing pages. This screenshot comes from a blog post from DAYTA marketing.www.daytamarketing.com/dayta-blog/6/4/2015-landing-page-best-practices

for teachers

Now let’s look at the area of marketing analytics. We have seen that there are tools (Hootsuite/Buffer) that make posting to SM automated and easier. These tools provide data on how our posts, tweets, videos, etc are being received and shared. In addition, data is provided by the social media platforms themselves – you get information about followers, level of engagement, how promotions are doing, etc.

But in modern marketing we need EVEN MORE DATA! Remember how inefficient the old ways were? Inbound marketers will never repeat the old cliché:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.

John Wanamaker, store owner and pioneer of advertising, early 1900s


So what other tools are available to give us data?

Top of the list is Google Analytics, which provides data on who is visiting your website and what they do when they get there. GA is free and universally used – you just need a line of code on your site for it to work.

GA is really the starting point for all analytics because the aim of our content creation and SM activity is to get people to visit our website. We want them to read and view content when they get there, subscribe to our newsletter, buy stuff, etc. GA allows us to monitor in extraordinary detail how visitors use our site.

To give a basic idea of GA, I am going to show some screenshots from my site for teachers, www.PaulEmmerson.com. Please ignore the data itself as I have used old, random time periods.


We can see which countries/cities people are from, new vs returning visitors, bounce rates (people who leave after only viewing the home page), pages per session, average session duration, etc.

We can see the devices that people use to view our site, and a further level of breakdown for specific manufacturer’s models.


We can see which social media sites people have come from.


We can see people’s behaviour on the site: which pages they visit after which other pages.

Okay. So far we have seen three examples of marketing analytics:• data from posting tools like Hootsuite and Buffer• data provided by the social media platforms themselves• Google AnalyticsA fourth example of marketing analytics is ‘A/B testing’, also known as ‘split testing’.

This means doing an experiment where you try something out in two slightly different versions, and then measure which one works best.

On the next few slides are some examples, and you can try to guess the answers each time …


Example taken from blog.leadpages.net


Which design increased sign-ups by 80%?

Example taken from blog.kissmetrics.com


Which landing page design increased lead capture by 100%?

Example taken from blog.kissmetrics.com


Which webinar registration page increased response by 102%?

Example taken from leadpages.net


Now we’ll move on to the next area of Inbound Marketing strategy: search.

Here is the Google Analytics for PaulEmmerson.com for a random time period. Look how ‘Organic Search’ is by far the most important channel for people reaching my site.

‘Organic search’ means people who typed a phrase such as paul emmerson (or perhaps the title of one of my slideshows) into the google search box. From the list of results they found my site and clicked to visit it. This is probably what you would do.


With organic search you need SEO (search engine optimization) to make sure your website has a good ranking. You need to be near the top of the first page. Almost no-one looks at page 2 of search results.


‘Direct’ means people who typed the full website name paulemmerson.com into their browser and came directly to my site.

‘Referral’ means a visit from another website – for example from a link in a blog post that someone else wrote, or when someone clicked a banner ad on another site.


‘Social’ are people who clicked a link in FB, Twitter, Instagram, YT, LI, etc.

‘Email’ are people who clicked a link in the subscriber newsletter that I send out.


We saw that SEO is critical – you need a good search ranking (near the top of page 1) for each word or phrase that your potential visitors might type into the search box.

But how does Google decide the search ranking?Let’s take the first answer that people think of: number of visitors to the site.Mmm … that’s no good because it’s easy to cheat. You just pay a company to have people click to visit your site hundreds of times.Facebook has often got into trouble in the past by not spotting the activity of ‘Like farms’. These are just factories for clicking Like buttons.

In fact, Google uses a secret and ever-changing algorithm to decide search rankings. This algorithm uses hundreds of factors. Some of the known factors are:


• if the search term is the same as the site URL (e.g. you search for paul emmerson and there is a site called www.paulemmerson.com)

• if the search term matches the keyword in the ‘title tag’ (a line of html code for each page)

• how often the search term appears on the page (but if it appears too much this is a negative)

• unique and substantive content on the site• how often the site content is updated

• how many other sites, blogs, etc link to the site (called ‘backlinks’)

• ‘quality’ of inbound and outbound links• the degree to which people are talking about

your site on social media• technical issues such as whether the site is

responsive to different screen sizes, how fast the site loads in a browser, etc.


So that’s organic search, which of course is not paid for. You type a term into the search box and various websites appear in the search results.

There is a second, paid dimension to search. This is called PPC (pay-per-click). PPC ads appear on a Google search page, above and to the right of the search results.

With PPC you define a search term (e.g. business english) and bid for this term. Your bid is how much you will pay for each click. If your bid is one of the highest, then your ad will appear next to the organic results, and you pay Google every time someone clicks the link in your ad.

Here is the Google search page I got just now when I entered the term ‘business english’ (red borders added by me) …


for learners

The Ads may be different later on the same day – you can cap the amount you spend per day.

for teachers

So that’s search, and you can see how Google makes its money. It’s an advertising company for the internet age.

In our overview of Inbound Marketing, we have still not mentioned marketing automation.

Let’s look at some examples. The first is email marketing automation, and again I have used myself as an example. The service I use to manage my email subscriber list is MailChimp. The next two slides have screenshots from my MailChimp that show the range of automated emails that are possible.


My second example of marketing automation is targeted banner ads. You must have noticed these. You type a term into the Google search box, or visit a particular website, and (spookily) the internet remembers your interests. For a long time afterwards you get related adverts served up on web pages, apps, YouTube videos, etc.

Here are a couple of screenshots: the one below taken from my PC, and the one on the right from my smartphone.

I looked at this item on Amazon the day before.

I visited the homepage of this company several weeks before.

Here is what Google says about these ads. You can of course block the ads with third party tools like Adblock Plus (although Google will hate you if you do).

Google knows about you because of a) your search history (if you use Google search), b) the websites you visit (if you use their Chrome browser), and c) your Google profile. That’s a lot of data.

But arguably Facebook has even more data about you and your interests – through your FB profile, the content of your FB updates, what you ‘like’ and share, etc.

Ever wondered why Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have such high stock market valuations when their products are free? Now you know. They hold personal data about you that allow advertisers to target you directly with relevant ads. It’s a much better use of a company’s marketing spend than in the old days when a TV commercial was sprayed to everyone, and John Wanamaker’s famous quotation (shown earlier) was true.


Here is an interesting question.This kind of targeted marketing is effective. But is it ethical? Does it follow the principles of Inbound Marketing? Here are both sides of the argument:

It is interruption marketing that annoys me. How dare these people use my personal information to give me ads I didn’t ask for! What else are they going to do with this information?

It is permission marketing – you give your permission when you use Google Search or Facebook or Twitter for free in exchange for non-intrusive, relevant ads.


One person knows which side of the argument he is on: Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Remember that Apple do not play in the search / social media space. They are an upmarket hardware manufacturer. They are a great example of the old phrase “The way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels”. In June 2015 Tim Cook made a speech where he said:

“Some of the most prominent and successful companies in Silicon Valley have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be … We don’t think you should ever have to trade privacy for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices”.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/03/apple-tim-cook-google-facebook-privacyhttp://fortune.com/2015/06/03/tim-cook-attacks-facebook-google-government-privacy-speech/

This was widely interpreted as being a reference to Google, Facebook and Twitter, although he did not name them.


And now that we’re talking about Apple, it’s only fair to mention the other big names.

On the next slide are some interesting questions to consider.


Google missed the move to social. Have they missed the move to apps as well? People are spending more time inside mobile apps and less time on PCs surfing the web. How will this affect Google’s business model of ads next to search results? Will Google be forced to buy Twitter to play catch-up in SM, and if so how will the integration work? Did Google take their eye off the ball when they got interested in driverless cars, Google glasses, etc?

Facebook is still growing strongly. And it has lots of personal data about its users to sell to advertisers. But it too is challenged as the behaviour of people on mobile devices changes and they use many different specialized apps. So far, Facebook has responded by simply buying the other apps (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus). Will people get bored of FB? Will people turn away as it becomes more of an advertising machine and less of a fun networking tool? Will young people still think it’s cool if granny uses it?

Microsoft are looked down on by other tech companies as being hopelessly out of date. Its move into smartphones was a failure. But they have a Trojan horse … their Office suite. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants Office to be used with any combination of apps, platforms, and cloud-based business services. And the new Office comes with Yammer, a best-in-class corporate social network and team collaboration tool. Yammer could take the place of a lot of company email. Will Microsoft continue to do well because of Office?


Let’s finish there.Here is a review of our journey into social media and inbound marketing …


You start with interesting and relevant content, which you promote on social media, hoping that people will talk about it and share it. You also hope that other sites will refer to your content, and link to it.

Social media is one way to drive traffic to your website, another is search. SEO tries to get you near the top of the search results, and PPC ads next to the results can also drive traffic. Once people arrive at your site, you need a landing page that is relevant to the call-to-action they clicked to get there.

You want to convert visitors to your site (‘leads’ in marketing terms) into customers. You need to nurture your leads with more content, targeted emails, offers, etc.

Many marketing activities can be automated, for example scheduling posts on SM, sending a series of emails to subscribers, or having a banner ad appear on a site when the viewer has previously shown an interest in this product.

All this activity can be monitored and measured using various analytics tools.


On the next pages you will find a vocabulary list with words and phrases that appear in this slideshow. Learners of English will find this useful.

After that there are some discussion topics for students working in class.


Vocabulary list (for learners of English)

A-B testing (split testing) both sides of an argument demographics

active user bounce rate develop long-term relationships

algorithm build brand awareness drive traffic to a website

analytics cap your advertising spend email subscriber

audience fragmentation click through to a page engagement

average session duration content go viral

backlinks to a website create trust inbound marketing

banner ads CTA (call to action) interruption marketing


landing page online identity schedule a post

lead capture organic search screenshot

lead nurturing permission marketing search history

level of engagement post a comment search results

marketing funnel PPC (pay-per-click) search term

marketing spend prospect SEO (search engine optimization)

monitor keywords referring site share a link

new vs returning visitors repeat visitor share news clips


sign up to a newsletter URL (the address of a webpage)

social media channels visitor vs active user

start-up entrepreneur white paper

stock market valuation

subscription list

target sb. with an ad

targeted banner ad

trending topic


1. Explain the terms ‘social media’ and ‘inbound marketing’ when used in the context of a business marketing strategy. (do without looking back at the slides)

2. People are spending more time inside apps on mobile devices and less time surfing the web on PCs. From a business point of view, how does this change things? What does it mean for content providers? What does it mean for advertisers? What does it mean for making money on the web?

3. What is happening in the battle between the two big players, Google and Facebook? Are Twitter and LinkedIn catching up? How do these four differentiate themselves in the market? Who are the new players in social media? Will ‘the next Facebook’ ever happen, or is FB now too strong?

Discussion topics


4. Is it okay for companies like Google and Facebook to hold so much personal data about you? Do you agree or disagree with Tim Cook’s comments?

5. Think about the real money that you and your friends spend on the web. Include both spending on physical products that you buy via the web (eg Amazon and other internet shopping) , and also web-based services, games, subscriptions, etc. Give some advice to an inbound marketer on how to get you and your friends to spend more.

6. With a partner, brainstorm and plan how to write a 250 word (one page) text with the title ‘Social Media in the Age of Internet Marketing’. Then work individually in class to write the text. (do without looking back at the slides and use some of your own ideas)

Discussion topics


7. The future of technology is always hard to predict. Here are some trends that looked likely when this slideshow was last updated (July 2015):

• Voice activation to replace touch on smartphones.• Apps linking to each other, so that a user’s experience from app to app is less fragmented.• Apple blocking online advertising in its Safari browser. Google responding with ad formats

that are less annoying and intrusive.• Increasing power of big companies vs small. So Apple/Google/FB will increasingly meet users’

information and entertainment needs ‘in house’.

Are these things happening? What else is coming soon? Do some research by searching for the terms Apple Developer Conference, Google Developer Conference and Facebook Developer Conference. Reports from the most recent conferences will show you where these three companies are going.

Discussion topics


social media in a business context

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