Having a Social Media Strategy for your small business will help you stay on track with whatever social media channels you choose to use. It is all to easy to become distracted flitting from one avenue to other without a clear direction of what is best for your business.
Here are 3 points from an 8 step plan from Richard Mullins on his recommendations for a social media strategy.
A social media strategy for your small business
1. Investigate
Start out by investigating the social space and trying to work out how it could add value to your business. Listen to what people are saying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and perhaps even put a basic listening tool in place to see what it can do for you.
2. Implement and integrate
Now that you have a rough feel for what is happening in the social world, you can begin thinking about the software tool set. If you’re running a bigger business, you’ll need something far more robust than a basic tool like Tweetdeck. You should be looking for a single tool that allows you to listen to social conversations, take part in the conversation, measure your results, and manage the workflow (for example, the content approval process) across your team. Ideally, the tool you use should support integration across your social tools and data, as well as with other customer communication channels, such as email and mobile marketing. It should also be able to grow along with your needs. For example, Co-Tweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyse conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities.
3. Listen and measure
You need to decide who and what you will listen out for. This can include multiple objectives – from hearing what the market is saying about you and competitors, to what the community is interested in. You also need to turn these factors into quantifiable metrics. To prove the value of social media marketing, you have to compare it to other channels. This means that you will need standardised key performance indicators (KPIs) – such as frequency of mentions, sentiment allocation, traffic, reach or influence (friends, fans etc.) – to make it easy to compare social media channels with each other and with other channels. There are tools such as Social Analytics from Adobe that allow marketers to start measuring social media, sentiment and it’s relationship and impact on a business’s broader online environment.
Check out the rest of Richards steps for more detail on his social media strategy. If this is to hard for you to implement at this time, simply take note and revisit when it suits you. The more you read and digest on social media, the more it will become second nature rather than completely overwhelming.
Let us know how you aregoing, do you have any tips to share?
