Setting up social media accounts and posting to them occasionally is not a sufficient social media strategy designed for success. You have to have a plan and a way to implement it to find success on social media and to have that success result in positive results to your business success. Here are some tips for formulating a strong social media strategy and how to implement it for success.
1) Know who your audience is, what they want, and what attracts their attention. This takes research and experimentation. Drop ideas that don’t work or get little feedback and keep going with ones that draw attention.
2) Social media is a vehicle of your overall business strategy not the entire strategy. Use it in unison with the overall marketing strategy for your business. Measure your social media results. Experiment with your marketing approach, your social offers, your choice of social platforms. Then measure again.
3) Before you build a profile on yet another social site, make sure that you have the resources (people and time) to post consistently and respond speedily to all customer and prospect activity. Measure the effectiveness of your choices with analytical tools for social media. Don’t start a Pinterest board if you don’t have the time to dedicate to it or it doesn’t fit your brand. Don’t spend too much time on Facebook if the majority of your followers are on Twitter and they continue to expand your reach. Put your resources where the people are.
4) Choose and use a social media management platform like Hootsuite to coordinate all of your social accounts and RSS feeds from one screen, schedule posts. This will make the time spent on social media more organized and efficient and eliminate wasting your time.
5) Have one employee dedicated to the job of social media. This will streamline the message, give your brand a familiar voice, and will keep things simple and less confusing. Having someone posting to social media for your business who doesn’t know the answers to the questions in #1 above will be worse than having no social media presence at all.
6) Be helpful, while promoting your business. Share useful information. Don’t small talk and don’t clutter people’s lives and social media streams with information that doesn’t help them or you. As with any marketing effort, your social media postings must have the ultimate goal of gaining and retaining customers and increasing sales.
Does this sound confusing or overwhelming? How can we help you understand social media better? Give us a call or email us today! Call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us today!