Often when we start out using Social Media to promote our businesses we are stabbing around in the dark, trying things out. There is nothing wrong with this to start with, many of us learn from our experiences but many others end up giving up on their campaign before they’ve had a chance to find their feet.
Whichever of the above categories you fit into having a social media strategy will save you time, energy and give you goals and measurable.
Here are our 4 top tips for creating a Social Media strategy.
1. Your Target Market
Who is your customer? Think about where they hangout online, which sites and blogs do they already follow? who do they listen to online – who are their influencers? what they are interested in and what sort of content you can provide that will draw them in?
Some markets are easy to identify online. Business to consumer businesses can almost be sure that their customer is on Facebook. Those selling predominantly to other businesses are more likely to find their target market on Linkedin.
2. Monitoring
To find out where your target market are hanging out, and to assess what is already being said about your brand and your business it is important to spend some time monitoring social media. There are a number of free tools available, some of which we have showcased here on this blog and in our podcast.
Our current favorite free tools are:
Twitter Advanced Search
How Sociable
and
Addictomatic (for a bit of fun!)
Monitoring will show you who is already in your space and how they are using social media. Your next step is to do something subtly different which will draw attention to your business. As with all marketing it is your USP that will appeal to your audience so it is important to know what it is.
3. Your Goals
What do you want to achieve from your campaign? Obviously brand awareness and sales but how are you going to achieve this?
You need to consider what you are going to measure in order to know if your campaign is successful. Some common measurable metrics are:
Traffic to website: How many unique visits are you getting when you embark on your campaign and how do these figures change throughout your campaign. For this it is important to keep a chart of your social media activities against the traffic you get to your site. (see basic chart below)
Engagement: Engagement is a crucial factor in a social media campaign. The more interaction you achieve on your Social Media pages the further the message spreads and the more your community will feel it has some ownership of your brand. Engagement is easily measured. How many comments do you get on your blog? on your Facebook page? how many @replies on twitter? All these can be charted in a similar way to your webstats above
The size of your community: How many followers do you have on twitter? How many ‘Likes’ on Facebook? How many people read your blog or subscribe to your newsletter. This is the easiest matrix to measure but I often feel these are vanity stats. It’s the quality of your community and how much they are willing to do for you that is important.
Reach: How far is your content being shared, how many RT’s do you get, how often is your content shared on Facebook? Harder to measure but how viral your campaign becomes can be an important sign post as to how well you are doing.
4. Measurement and Review
After a set period of time, we recommend 3 months as this is usually how long it takes for a campaign to start paying off, see how close you are to achieving your goals. If you aren’t quite there try and see what isn’t working and what is.
Spiderworking.com offers a 4 hour Strategy brainstorming session that will take you and your business through the process of creating a strategy leaving you with the tools to implement your campaign to it’s full potential. If you would like us to work with you on your strategy click here.
