Creating a Suitable Social Media Strategy for Your Business

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Strategy is the reason behind all of your social media activity. Strategy seems abstract and that is why people often go directly to tactics. Tactics feels more like real work. hold your urge to go for the up-to-dated tools and make some plans first. Very much like building a house, you shouldn’t buy materials before you have the blueprints of what you want to build.

First of all, let’s get the same mindset. Using social media means long term commitment. You can’t work it with four weeks and get the maximum result instantly. You have to be there for the long effort. It also means that you will not get results to boast about in the first day (or week).

The following step by step overview will help you get a measurable social media strategy. What needs to be done and why you want to do it. How to measure results and determine ROI. You should have clear understanding what resources you have at your disposal. If you get all this done, execution should be a piece of cake.

1. What Do You Do?

Describe what your company does in a single sentence. Make it Twitter short – not more than 140 characters. Make it simple. It should be clear, even to a five-year old. Measure conversations and your marketing messages to maintain focus.

2. Listen to the Conversations

When you know what you are doing, find out who’s talking about it. Find all the conversations that mention your brand directly or related to you in general. Consider these points:

  • who is talking about your brand
  • what they are the talking about (positive or negative)
  • what content gets the most reactions
  • what channels are used
  • what are the most important social media channels for your brand
  • what is the volume of conversations
  • who are the major influencers in each channel
  • now repeat that for your major competitor

For example, find out how many mentions of your field are there in the social media channels and how many are about your brand. One of your goals might be to increase that ratio (share of voice).

3. Set up a Goal

Why are you doing it? In the end, you have to produce results and this is where you should write it down. There are a lot of different goals. What has to happen so you would say it’s working? Select the one that makes most sense in your business:

  • Sales
  • Brand awareness
  • Brand reputation
  • Share of voice
  • Customer loyalty
  • Lower support cost
  • Reduce R&D spend

For the first time, select just one of these and build your strategy to achieve that. After you have made some progress with your initial goal and have real measurable results that reflect on your bottom line, then you can select another goal from the list.

Measure your goals. Put a number on them. This number should be as easy to measure as possible. For instance, brand awareness is not easily measurable and hard to attribute. Try to measure the increase in awareness to social media only, if you are using other channels as well.

Sales and lowering the support cost should be the easiest goals to measure. These are also the goals that have most direct impact on the bottom line and should get your support from top management.

4. Find Influencers and Communities

Go over the results you got from listening to the conversations and find who are talking about your brand. Always notice on who are having a following that might include your clients or prospects. Are there advocates who are really into your brand? Select the ones that you feel are the best match for your business and start monitoring them.

Set up a Google Alert for your brand names and industry terms. Scan the Facebook and Twitter to find who is actively talking about your brand and industry. Find out if there are any smaller social networks specialize on related topics. Also start tracking social bookmarking and news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Measuring influence seems an easy task, but all the information might not be available. The numbers that are usually easier to get to are:

  • Number of comments should give pretty good understanding how engaged the readers are. Comments per post might be a good indicator.
  • Blogs usually show the number of RSS subscribers, use it as a gauge to measure influence.
  • Similar metrics to RSS subscribers are friends an followers on social networking sites.
  • Find out from your analytics how much traffic do they send to your site.
  • Inbound links are a good predictor of a sites importance but you have to check if the links are from topically related sites otherwise it might just be spam.
  • Mentions in other sites: Twitter, social bookmarking and news sites.

5. Who is Your Audience?

Select the target group that is most likely to be persuaded by your message. Choose the group to whom you can provide most value. Your targets are people who have most to gain by what do you do (step 1). Don’t try to please everyone at the same time with the same message. This will lead to mediocre results. If you have many different audiences, start with the one that is most likely to engage in social media and add other after you have got some measurable results.

This brings you to the question how do they use social media. What channels are they using? What are they doing there? One important thing to remember is the 1-9-90 rule. Only about 1 percent of people participate actively, 9 percent comment and interact occasionally and 90% are lurkers who do not contribute anything to the conversations. If you are trying to create a thriving community, then the number of active contributors should be high enough to make it sustainable. Many studies show that younger audiences are usually more active than older people and men seem to be more active than women.

6. Do They Know You?

What do the know about you? Have you ever interacted with your target? The following list is in order of importance and you should choose one from the list:

  • Fans/Brand advocates
  • Loyal, repeat actions
  • They have interacted with you
  • They know your name
  • Never heard of you

Start from the Fan/Brand advocates. These are the people you can engage most easily. You can recruit them to spread the word and bring others over to their way of thinking. If you are just starting out, then this might be a small group but it’s more important who you are talking to than how many.

7. Turn What You Do into a Simple Message

 

This message should make your fans happy. and most likely the reason why people buy from you. One way to find out would be to go to your fans and ask why are you buying from you? Hopefully it  suits with your own vision. It’s more than just the unique selling proposition or a pragmatic reason to buy. It should move your target audience emotionally, be meaningful for them.

8. Plan Your Content

You know who you are talking to and what is the core of your message. Now it is time to make a schedule: how often are you going to create content. For example, you can decide to write three blog posts per week, make one video and update your status every working day on selected social networks.

Make sure you have the time for those activities. Don’t forget that you are trying to start a conversations so plan some time for answering comments and feedback. Creating content takes time so get help from others from your organization.

After you have made a schedule for content delivery, start pumping out ideas what to talk about. Brainstorm within your company or with friends. Ask your audience what they want to know. Check if any comments need a longer reply. Generate a long list (25+) headlines for your content.

What to write about? This kind of question is the number one excuse for not getting started. So, here are some of the topics you could cover:

  • industry trends
  • top 10
  • advice about x
  • news
  • interview with a specialist
  • industry events
  • ask questions
  • review products
  • find a quest blogger
  • pros and cons of x
  • important people in the industry
  • helpful books
  • really long list of industry resources
  • answer comments
  • series of posts
  • list of best posts
  • explain the complicated
  • a picture
  • x for beginners
  • industry statistics
  • survey the audience
  • how-to
  • list of web based tools
  • legislation
  • myth buster
  • rewrite old posts
  • case studies and best customers
  • issues in your industry that need attention

Style is important. Write and talk as you would with a friend. Don’t try to make yourself important by using big words. Just relax and act normally. Put some passion into it. Be excited but don’t hype.

For search engine visibility, you will need keyword research. Ask yourself, what are the search queries that your site has to have an answer for. Use keywords in your articles and in some cases keyword or phrase may trigger an article idea.

But content is not just text or video. You can create web based tools that make your audience’s life easier. For example a loan calculator is a must have tool for financial institutions. When you create a useful tool it might become a leading industry resource, binging in traffic and links. Examples of tools include:

  • Search engine rank checkers
  • Price estimators
  • Shipment tracking
  • Online quizzes
  • Calorie calculators
  • Expense tracking tools
  • To-Do lists
  • Games

What kind of static content do you put on your pages? About us, people, products and services, terms and conditions, warranty information, manuals, support, frequently asked questions. For most companies this is the only content on the web site. Rewrite the material so that all features are presented as benefits and value for client. Don’t make them think. Consider these questions: what kind of consumer generated content are you going to use on you site? Do you include consumer feedback on products and services, rating systems, recommendations, reviews. In what form, on which parts of the site, are you going to moderate user contributions and how? Most important: Concentrate on the need of your audience, keep yourself in the background.

9. Channels, Tools and Distribution

Now you have to find the ways to get your content to your audience. The result of this step is a list of tools and channels you start using. You know what channels your audience uses – go there. You know what type of content makes your audience act – create and distribute.

Nobody is going to hang around in your site. There may be a few people who visit regularly, but don’t sit and wait. Go to where the people are.

  • Articles and press releases. Optimize for search. Add links to videos and relevant material on your site and distribute to selected channels. There is a huge difference in traffic between just waiting for them to come and actively seeking out your audience and bringing content to them.
  • News feeds. Make all your content available via RSS feeds. Posts, comments, web pages… everything. Enable sharing let others do the distribution. Share buttons to add your content to social bookmarking and news sites. (Twitter, Digg, StumbeUpon, Facebook, etc). Don’t over do it. You know what channels are important for you audience use these. Check your statistics and remove the sites that do not generate traffic.
  • Industry blogs. Don’t spam. Participate in conversations and when appropriate add links to your content. Establish a meaningful relationship with the bloggers and it will really work for you.
  • Images, video, podcasts. Use the appropriate services to host the materials but always post the material on your site too. Even if the video or image is located somewhere else your website should have a post or article that points to that content.
  • Widgets and tools. Put them on your site and let people know. In the selected channels find where people are looking for solutions that your tools can provide. Join the conversations and share the value.
  • Social networks and news sites. In general all information you release should reflect on your social media profiles. Status updates on Facebook, Twitter and other networks are the hooks that bring people to your content and give them the opportunity to share it with their friends. If you add content more than once a day then you should experiment with the frequency of updates so that followers wouldn’t perceive you as a spammer. Don’t forget to distribute your content to news sites. StumbleUpon and Digg are probably most important of those but you niche might have other special news sites.

Call me old fashioned but ownership of content is important. Your website is your marketing foundation and everything you create should also find a place on your website. Link your site to social networks and give people an easy way to share you content.

I do not recommend automatically linking all the social media channels so that Twitter and blog post to Facebook and Facebook updates go to Twitter. This will make it easy to loose track what has been posted and where should you participate in conversations.

10. Conversations

The main goal of your social media activities is to get people talking to you and each other. Interaction. You want to open two way communication and form communities around your brand. The content you are creating should make it easy to start and maintain conversations.

Participate in conversations about your field of activity. Ask questions and provide answers. On you own site and social media accounts, keep the conversation going by replying and commenting.

To boost the conversations, be personal and identifiable. Social media is for people and people don’t want to talk to faceless brands. Don’t participate just as “support person” or “sales representative“, John and Mary work a lot better. Be transparent! Don’t use fake names. Spread openness throughout organization, let more people talk to the world. Smaller companies have an advantage here as they are more personal to begin with. Our survey showed that in smaller organizations the social media leadership comes from the CEO and in larger businesses it’s lead by marketing.

Put the social media activities in you calendar and decide how much time are you going to spend listening, posting and replying. If you don’t know how long it will take, make a guess and you can adjust the estimates later. Answer quickly, set a standard how fast an update in a conversation should be answered.

You can exceed the time you have allocated but always make note how much time you spend on social media, this is part of your ROI calculation.

Do not censor criticism. Answer all critical comments openly and honestly. Friendly voice. Neutral position, like “we understand you and we want to help you with that” will be very delightful. Concentrate on the problem, not people or communications. Being open about negative aspects of the social media builds trust and makes you more believable.

11. Results and ROI

How do you know it’s working? What does success look like? In the end, ROI is about the money. Do you get more value out of the social media activities than you put in? Step 3 suggested that you have to set a highly measurable goal such as sales or support cost reduction. If you did that, it’s pretty straightforward to calculate if you are in the black. However, if you have more complicated sales process, then you need to set some key performance indicators that represent visitor’s non-financial activities.

  • Website visitors
  • Conversion rate
  • Leads
  • Brand awareness
  • Newsletter sign-ups
  • Facebook fans
  • Blog comments
  • Social mentions
  • Visitor satisfaction index

Now, you need to figure out the connections between these results and dollars earned. Start with the simplest of correlations. Here are just a few examples:

How is the number of your monthly website visitors related to revenue? Segment that and tie website visits to revenue from online and offline segments. Segment yet again and find the most effective online revenue drivers. What you want to know is if site traffic increases X% then revenue goes up how much?

Find out if the customers who are your Facebook fans make purchases more often. Check if the Facebook fans are making larger transactions than average. What you want to know is if your Facebook’s fan-base grows X% then what’s the corresponding increase in frequency of transactions.

Start monitoring the social chatter and tie the number of mentions to changes in sales volume. Segment that and find out what channels have the most impact on the bottom line. On the other hand you have to keep track of all your spending. Social media expenditures can be any of the following:

  • Your time
  • Advertising
  • Content creation
  • IT
  • Public relations
  • Discounts
  • Call center
  • Payroll
  • R&D

Be consistent eliminate money loosing instruments and persist. Social media is a long term activity. Six months is just getting your feet wet. A year is a long enough period to start seeing real results. Don’t be afraid of not achieving your goals immediately. Review, adjust and improve.

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