Today's business world is fast, smart and sexy. The real players are kicking ass and taking names all while tweeting and posting onto their numerous profiles. With the mainstream power of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and now Google's Buzz, social media is no longer something that businesses that want to survive can afford to ignore. In this world where content is still king, tomorrow's Web will not only be about what you know, but who you know. It's a reality that you need to not only face but embrace and interestingly enough mimics offline business in a lot of ways.
In this article we are going to go over how the big boys succeed in social media. The tools they use, the ideas behind the messages sent, how they track their success, what to do with the information you collect and more. It's time to put your geek glasses on and show these people that unlike high school, in today's social media world, the tech geeks can rule the halls!
In case you are not convinced with how hot social media is right now, take a look at this:
Follow the 8 strategies below to develop an overall social media strategy for your business.
First Steps - Getting Your Organization on Board
Social media is about building relationships. It's not a gimmick or a platform to shoot out affiliate links in hopes of making a sale. If your business is jumping into social media because everyone else is doing it, please take a step back and reevaluate your plan for social media. Social media is a long-term commitment and it needs proper strategies.
If you're having a tough time convincing your team that social media needs to be integrated into your marketing plan, you can show them these responses to common social media objections. This should help get them on board.
While jumping into social media may come naturally to an organization whose culture embraces being proactive and open, even those whose marketing teams are dragging them into this new era need to embrace the fact that you don't get popular overnight. And even though growing your business socially is serious business, it can be a lot of fun.
Determine Your Social Media Goals and Objectives
Firrst figure out who owns social media within the organization, that is the person or group who is going to spearhead and maintain your presence. Whether it's the marketing, PR, communications or IT department is irrelevant. The important thing is to present a unified front. You can still use many team members in your efforts and even multiple departments, just make sure everyone knows the common goal. In fact, pulling team members from different units to work on this project together is smart. It will break down some of those old jurisdictional walls within the organization and create a long term team building exercise.
Next you need to decide on your goal(s) for the campaign and ojectives along the way you wish to achieve. These can be to bring in more traffic to your site, bring awareness about certain products or lines or even something as simple as keeping good customer service by engaging your clients in more places. It is important you know what you are aiming for so you can determine is you efforts are producing the desired results.
Research. Research. Research.
There are lots of ways to engage your organization in the social media world, and you don't need them all. Before jumping into the social media pool feet first, take some time to do analysis on which social media tools are going to be best for your business or your client's business.
* Develop a list of social media sites where you can potentially engage with people. The list will most likely start off with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare and a few select blogs and forums.
* Check out each of the social media sites on your list and do additional searches for your brand name, competition, industry terms and target keywords. Listen to what's being talked about, identify, and understand your target audience.
Make sure you look at your goals and objectives to see that the sites you are looking at using to engage can help you achieve this. Is your business soley online or does it also have a brick and mortar location as well? Do you have different types of clients you need to reach by using different media? Analyze all this and then make an informed decision which sites to target.
Build Contacts, Relationships and Content
Begin making connections by following the conversation going on pertaining to your industry. You can do this by subscribing to blogs in your industry and making a list of influencers who are relevant to your business. This becomes handy when it's time to provide content on your social networks and you should have already identified many of these while doing your research.
We Follow is a tool you can use to find centers of influence. You can utilize Twitter Lists and follow people individually within your industry that are influential or are leading the social media conversations.
Join the Conversation to Develop Relationships
Social Media is not about return on investment, it's about Return on Engagement or Return on Involvement. How much do you feel a part of your community? It's all about connecting with people.
Now that you have found places to engage with and listen to influential people within your industry, you can start joining the conversation by posting comments on blogs and forums, answering questions on Yahoo! and LinkedIn, joining groups related to your industry and joining Twitter chats. This link is golden for connecting with centers of influence in many industries and in various areas of interest.
The main things here are to keep your conversation relevant and helpful to the people in the community. You want to establish your organization as one of those centers of influence as much as possible. You can also use places like review sites to find areas of your business that need attention. You can even respond, showing potential customers that you are aware of the issues and eager to address them.
Strengthen Relationships by Attending Offline Events
Some people love to hide behind their avatar or profile picture, but face-to-face interaction is incredibly powerful. Make sure to attend offline events related to your industry; not only to strengthen your knowledge base but also to network and strengthen relationships with those you might have conversed with via social media but never met in person. This can also lead to partnerships or other connections for business relationships helpful to your organization.
One popular offline event is known as a tweetup. A tweetup is an event where people who Twitter come together to meet in person. Normally we connect with our friends online after we have met them. At a tweetup you meet the people you might only otherwise know virtually. Like finally putting a name to a face, a tweetup is a great opportunity to really connect with the people in your network and share just a little more than 140 characters at a time.
The local social media club in your city is a great place to connect with others and get first hand tips and tricks. You can find chapters in your area with a site like Social Media Club.
Track and Measure Results
Tracking should already be a strong part of you marketing efforts and it's important for your company or organization to understand that testing and experimentation are the keys to success. Without goals and objectives along with a way to track them, it can be easy to just waste hours and hours within the social media sphere to no avail. Are you just using social media tools with no strategy? If so, then you have no way to really measure results. Here are four of the most commonly used objectives and how they can be tied into a social media tracking strategy:
1. Increase traffic to your Web site. - Keep track of visitors to your Web site who come from each of your social media sites. If you're promoting an event using social media, consider using a unique serial/tracking code to track the campaign. This can be something you include in the URL or a code which is entered during a signup. Keep in mind the less your clients need to actually do will make it easier to get them to take action, so we recommend including this in the URL or form already.
2. Develop relationships for future opportunities. - This goal is to keep track of those you've connected with. For example, if you met a potential speaker for a webinar, include that person in your contacts. If a vendor contacts you through your blog, capture that lead and take note. Having a database of these clients, contacts and leads is essential. Keep notes on where and when you met them and any other related information as well.
3. Improve brand presence across social channels. - Your goal is an increase in the number of followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook, comments, times your brand is mentioned on blogs and forums and so on. You will want to use the tools available to sites like Twitter and Facebook to track these numbers and if possible use a comment system like Disqus to track your comments and the replies/likes you receive along with the stats on your blog if you have one. You can also use a Google search for your business name to find mentions and citations.
4. Increase positive sentiment about your brand. - The goal here is to increase the number of positive mentions while taking note of negative mentions (and addressing issues here as well). Has the ratio of positive to negative comments improved? There are often going to be a few negatives, we mainly want to keep this number as small as possible.
Measuring social media is a never-ending discussion. What works for one industry won't work as well for another one and you will always need to be ready to change. So this brings us to the next point...
Analyze, Adapt, and Improve
Your social media strategy doesn't end with measurement; it goes beyond that. You need to analyze your social media campaigns, adapt any new findings into your current processes, and improve your efforts. Testing and experimentation will perfect your social media efforts. A/B tests are great to indentify if one is better than the other and is also helpful in determining if a prosective change is actually required.
As you dive deeper into the never-ending pool of social media, you'll quickly understand what works and what doesn't.
More specifically, you'll develop favorite tools to use, realize that there are certain days and times where it doesn't pay to be active in social media, and come to the conclusion that you still have lots to learn. It's a wonderful new world and I hope you are as thrilled to be part of it as I am.
In general, social media is a strategy which requires a planned tactical approach to be successful. The social media platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are the tools that you have to make the communication possible. Make sure to outline your social media strategy and support this with these social media tools and tactics.
So to recap:
* Get your business/organization on board and on the same page.
* Establish your goals and objectives.
* Research where to focus your efforts.
* Build contacts, relationships and content.
* Join the conversation.
* Attend offline events.
* Track and measure results.
* Analyze and adapt to improve.
Source from: http://www.searchenginenews.com/
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