Social Media Marketing Strategy

Lots of companies do social media. Most do it badly. This is great news, because it means that if you do it well by following a few simple rules, then you are likely to do it better than your competitors. This blog is intended to act as a general introduction to social media marketing, and it is mostly aimed at medium-sized business-to-business organisations - though the general rules apply to both smaller enterprises and bigger corporations. There are seven questions you need to answer to develop a decent social media strategy…

The first question is "Which?"Which social media should you use? For most businesses, there are six obvious ones and one less obvious. For audience channels; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For content-sharing; YouTube, Flickr and Blogging. The final one to consider is Google +. Although less relevant today, it is likely to become more important over time, because of the obvious connection to search engine marketing.

The second question is "Why?" Why do you want your company to engage in social media? What do you hope and expect to get out of it? What are your goals? If you do not have a clear idea of what you wish to achieve, then you really should not be spending any time or energy on building a social media presence.

The third question is "Who?" Who do you want to communicate with? For some companies/brands this will be a more obvious question than others. Businesses with multiple audience channels will need to think carefully about to whom they are speaking - and tone of voice is equally important.

The fourth question is "How?" How do you intend to manage communications so that they are genuine, valuable and relevant? The answer to this dilemma is simple. Let your customer service/technical staff be your brand advocates for all social media conversations (rather than your marketing or sales people). Make sure they are trained in how to act.

The fifth question is "What?" What do you want to do to supplement normal communications to achieve your objectives? There are many things you can try - research findings, surveys, feedback; white papers, blogs and reports; prize draws, instant wins, funny stories. We recommend you roll them out slowly, so you can test results.

The sixth question is "When?"How often should you attend to your social media? The simple answer is as often as is practicable. As a rough rule of thumb, you should Twitter every hour, Facebook every day and LinkedIn every week. Social media campaigns can work around this. Two-way communications can be as and when for all social media.

The seventh question is "What else?"What else do you need to do? Well, you should think about how you will cross-reference different social media according to channel and hierarchy. You will need to think about how you build meaningful numbers of followers for each social media. You will need to think about how much resource you are prepared to allocate in terms of time and money. You will need to think about how you manage negative PR. You may need to invest in an integrated platform (such as Hootsuite) to manage all your social media.

Remember, there is a lot of noise out there when it comes to social media. Everybody’s chatting and nobody’s listening. Dare to be different. Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Let go of control. Take a deep breath. Be ready for anything. Enjoy the surprises. Learn from your mistakes. And good luck..!