One of the questions that I hear asked a lot when it comes to social media is: How does my business create a social media strategy? This is an important question to ask.
As I currently see it there are six steps you should take in order to come up with a winning social strategy that your organization can follow to find success.
1. Determine why you want to use social media as part of your marketing strategy
Are you jumping into social because you feel you should? To connect with your customers? Grow your brand? Or even reach a new audience? Are you wanting to get social because your competitors are? You need to know and understand your own reasons for wanting to use social media. If you're only going social because you hear that's the popular thing to do right now, you may be setting yourself up to quickly fail. I know that bungee jumping is pretty popular with many people but you sure as hell won't catch me doing it because it's simply not for me. Get into social only if you feel it's right for you and your business.
2. Determine how you fit into social
Now that you have your reasons for getting involved in social media, you can determine how you fit. Do you sell or produces a visual product? An informational product? What types of content are you willing to produce. This type of information can help you determine the social networks you wish to start using. The goal here is to find a good fit or two for your business and not to spread yourself overly thin. There is no law stating you have to be on every single social network.
3. Find your customers
Where are your customers currently in social media? You can save a lot of time in trying to attract an audience by going to where they are already. Tools such as mention, Hootsuite and looking at referrals in your analytics can help you determine where traffic is coming from and where people are already talking about you.
4. Set measurable goals
What are your goals? Are you looking to increase newsletter subscribers? Increase sales? More traffic to a landing page? More social mentions? Regardless your goals, they should (a) be something that adds value to your business and (b) be measurable. It's no good having a goal to achieve if you can't measure how well or poorly you are doing to achieve it.
5. Determine the strategy and tactics you will use to achieve each goal
Here is where you will create a strategy for each of your goals and then determine the tactics you will use to achieve each of those goals. Your goal may be more email subscribers, the strategy will be to increase the subscriber list by 10% and the tactic may be to offer a free ebook. You can read more about this in my article Strategy Vs Tactics
6. Analyze your results and adjust as necessary
This is one of the most important steps and one most often overlooked. After creating, defining and following your strategy you need to keep measuring, analyzing and adjusting to ensure that you keep moving towards your goals. If you don't look at what is or is not working and adjust to keep on track there is a good chance all your hard work planning and creating a strategy will be for nothing.
This is a basic layout that you can follow to help you create a successful strategy, feel free to tweak it to suit your organizations needs. The important thing to remember about this is that you need to have a strategy in place if you want to be successful in social with your business.
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