Just like businesses have a strategy when going into a meeting, they should also have a strategy when it comes to their social media. You wouldn’t go into a meeting with one client unprepared, so why would you regularly address all of your clients unprepared? To not carefully set up your social media would do just that. Take a look at these six steps to put you and your company on the correct social media track.
1. Tactics: First and foremost you need to decide who is the audience you are targeting. As in any aspect of business, it’s important to know who you are talking to. Once you know your audience and what they like, you can chose which social media websites would best reach them. Are your customers LinkedIn people, or are would they be more likely to use Twitter? Choosing the correct platforms will directly correlate with how effective your social media campaign is. Additionally, it’s a good idea to buy the URL or reserve the names for your different pages. Other companies may have the same name as you and it would be a shame to lose a domain name to them!
2. Objectives & Accomplishments: Figure out what you want to gain from using social media. Do you want to reach your consumers on a more intimate level? Do you want to change your companies image? Perhaps you just want to sell more products. Once you define your objectives you can figure out how you want to measure your success. Set up a timeline in which you would like to see your goals achieved and reevaluate what you need once you hit your deadline.
3. Check the response: Once you set up your social media, sit back and watch for a few things. Are you getting any response? Is the campaign reaching everyone you want it to reach? If so, how well and if not, what do you think is going wrong? Use programs like Google Analytics and Hootsuite to track your process as well as schedule your posts. This can make it much easier to see retweets, mentions, and how many of your posts are reaching your customers.
4. Emergency Plan: What are you going to do if someone leaves a negative comment? What will you do if someone sends you a negative tweet? What if a crisis occurs that you don’t know how to deal with? You need to know who is going to deal with situations before they happen. If someone says something negative about your company or product, for the most part it is not a good idea to get rid of the comment. People need to see the good and the bad in order to trust a company. Respond to the issue with dignity and move on. If a crisis occurs with your company in the press, be sure to have someone ready to deal with the problem accordingly. Social media is the best way to directly speak to your consumers so having good tweets is just as important as having a good press release.
5. Employees: It’s important to designate people in your company to set up and run the social media accounts. It may seem like a simple job, but it depending on what you plan on doing it could actually take a lot of work. The number of people you will need depends on the size of the company.
6. Scheduling: Set up a schedule for all of your social media sites. It is so much easier to have all of the posts done in advance instead of doing them the day of. Scheduling also allows you to have a predetermined amount of content for each of your platforms, making it easier for your employees while setting daily goals for them to achieve.
A social media strategy can make or break a business. Be sure to set up a strategy rather than just winging it. While social media may seem very casual to use from a personal standpoint, it is definitely more than tweeting to your favorite celebrity in business. If you would take a marketing strategy seriously you should do the same with your social media.
If you find that you do not have the resources to create a social media marketing campaign for your business, do not hesitate to contact Progressive Media Concepts today!