How to Create a Social Media Strategy
Social media, when used properly, can be a very useful tool to grow your business and increase sales. The key to social media success: Align the proper tools and strategies with the right goals.
Before you start building a strategy and creating goals it’s important to make note of a few social media guideline for success.
- Social media is about organic sharing of content and a 2-way conversation. Do not push out one-way, self-serving content.
- To earn a credible reputation and popularity which the social media realm, focus on creating and maintaining a credible content
- Treat your audience with respect. People are sick of advertisements and blatant attempts at manipulating their psyches, instead look to provide new, fresh content, participate in conversations with genuine intentions and be respectful and considerate of opposing opinions.
- Become part of an online community as trusted peer, not a sales person.
- Be helpful, give back, and become a resource, others will repay the favor.
Step 1: Set Goals.
Whatever your goals may be, make sure they are clearly defined. Without a clear goal of where you want to end up, there is no way to know how to get there.
Examples of goals could include:
- To increase lead generation
- To decrease prospecting by increasing your number of inbound calls
- To become an industry expert
- To create warmer introduction calls
- To never cold call again
- To close more sales
- To shorten the sales cycle
Step 2: Decide which tools you are going to use.
It’s not appropriate or beneficial for every type of business to have a Twitter or Facebook page, just because they are popular social media sites. Consider all SM sites and only join sites that will allow you to share information about your company, product, or service with the right audience.
Sites to explore:
- Slideshare
- YouTube
- Scribd
- PRWeb
3. Set time limits
It’s easy to get lost in the world of social media, one click leads to another and another and before you know you have lost site of your original intent. Social media is a vast virtual world, if you aimlessly venture out you can become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of sites, information, options, and possibilities. Explore with a few clear objectives and set limits on the amount of time you are going to devote to each exploration. The same is true of sharing on SM sites as well as following other entities on SM sites. Start by blocking out two 20-40 minute intervals during your day to dedicate to your social media projects, you can always adjust the time and frequency of the schedule to meet your needs.
4. Measure Your Results
After you have formulated your goals, determined the sites you would like to join and created a schedule, construct a dimension of measurement into your social media strategy. Tracking your results will give you concrete evidence as to which tactics has proven successful as well as aspects that may need to be eliminated or altered. Simple ways to measure your successes come from measuring content reach, interaction, clicks, and of course leads to sales conversions.
There are several free websites out there that can help you measure your social media presence, and allow for a view of growth.
Check out these sites to help you start your measurement:
- Howsociable.com
- Grader.com
- Compete.com
Free tools like Google analytics can measure your site traffic, and url shorteners like bit.ly can keep track of the number of people clicking on your links in social media. Often times SM sites will have some tracking components free to administrators of the account. Check to see if the site(s) you become involved in offer any tracking tools and take the time to properly learn how to use and interpret the metrics.
For more information on Social Media and taking the leap, download the whitepaper below: "Unlimited Lead Creation"
