Businesses, especially small businesses, need to develop a successful social media strategy that takes in to account the different social media platform technologies and how each fits into the business-branding process and the goals and mission of the businesses.
Said strategy has to factor in what a business wants to accomplish and what role the strategy itself will play in the overall marketing plan of a business.
If you are skeptical about investing the time it will take to develop a well-planned social media strategy, remember: if a business doesn’t plan, it plans to fail — jumping into social media just because it is hip will not do a business any favors.
Here is what I would suggest as a strategy:
1. Branding
a. Brand Identity: Make sure that whoever is engaging the social media must understand the business goals and messaging.
b. Brand transparency: Social media dictates the authenticity and transparency of any business presence online, if not they will be found out real fast and will lose consumers’ trust may be forever, as most information can be quickly validated via online fact-checking. A brand should add value and relevance to its prospects as well as a commitment to deliver.
c. Maintain brand consistency: A Business should use one username for all their online profiles instead of scattering their brand across the different social networks, these profiles are showing in search results specially the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Having a consistent username is important but not enough, a brand has to keep the same image, theme, and voice across the different social networks even if more than one person speaks on behalf of the business
d. Brand campaign integration: Where the outbound and inbound marketing can feed off each other in the overall business marketing plan
2. Listen & Identify the needs of your audience (businesses need to identify who their audience is, what are their interests, needs and issues, where they hang online, what is said about their brand to interact properly with them)
a. Decide which tools to use for listening: Free tools versus paid tools – some great free tools are: Google alerts, blogPulse, Technorati, RSS feeds, search.twitter.com, Trendrr – some paid tools: Radian6, Trackur, Cymphony
b. Decide where your audience is: Groups, Communities, forums, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or locally as in Yelp, MerchantCircle
c. Identify the influencers of the authority figures writing about the business or its products, services or the industry as a whole
d. Identify what is the audience passionate about, what are their needs, what solutions can the business offer them
3. Engage and build relationships (after properly listening, the next step will be joining the conversation, develop trust and build relationships by providing something of value to the audience)
a. Create remarkable content: The business message has to be consistent across the board; the content must be understandable, useful, relevant and valuable. The content has to be optimized and targeted to the business’ audience
b. Decide which platform to use reaching out to the audience once identified: LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter etc…
c. Decide who will be formulating the content and delivering it
d. Integrate with the overall marketing plan: Offline and online(Search Engines optimization)
e. Build relationships with influencer bloggers by interacting with them, responding or commenting to their blogs/ posts
f. Engage the audience in: groups(LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), Forums (Yahoo Q&A, LinkedIn, Twitter) or communities(Ning, merchantcircle and Yelp)
g. Use tools that help time management and improve the profiles management as: Hootsuite/ Tweetdeck that allow to update the status across different platforms at the same time, Ping.fm is another great tool
In the next post, I will discuss the last steps in a social media strategy:
• Promoting and publishing
• Monitoring
• Measuring results
Till we meet next time, stay well
Cheers,
Sahar Andrade
www.saharconsulting.com
www.linkedin.com/in/saharandrade
www.saharconsulting.wordpress.com
www.twitter.com/saharconsulting
Hi Sahar,
I think your points about determining what an audience is passionate about and spending the time to understand the culture are critical. I’d like to add to this. If every interaction is a sales pitch (especially in groups – members quickly identify those who are always pitching their product or service and tend to blacklist them), you’re doomed. Members recongize those who have a genuine interest in helping them and those that are merely trolling for business. As has been the case for the twenty-plus years I’ve been in the marketing arena, relationships build a business – manipulative or hard-core selling may work in the short-term, but is costly over time.
Nanette:
Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a comment on my post
I couldnt agree more with your comments, I stressed on this in my previous post and would greatly appreciate if you can read it and tell me what you think
http://www.thebloggersbulletin.org/2009/12/31/a-new-marketing-era/
It is about how marketing changed from a push strategy to a pull strategy and how marketing changed from an outbound to an inbound culture
Cheers,
Sahar