Many businesses consider launching a social media campaign, but they are not sure about how to effectively launch and sustain it. In this post, we are going to outline the five key steps to accomplish this objective.
As an Internet marketing firm, we always recommend, as the first step in setting up a strong social media campaign, to outline your goals and communication strategy. From a goals perspective, there are two different types of metrics: financial and non-financial. Financial goals include metrics such as ROI. Non-financial include metrics such as the number of followers, likes, shares, comments, leads generated, etc. It’s critical to establish goals to determine how your marketing campaign is performing through social media. The next thing you want to establish is your positioning and communication strategy. While social media is a conversational medium in terms of the tone and manner, it’s important to not lose site of your message and how it will support your overall positioning in the market.
Once you goals and communication strategy have been determined, you want perform step two, which is to develop a team and process to manage your communication. This is all about process and quality control. And many companies succeed or fail based on this step. When you look at a social media site that has been set up by a business that is not well maintained, whereby posts and Tweets are infrequent, it’s usually due to a lack of planning and process. Take the time to establish a team, assign responsibilities, and develop a proper workflow to manage and sustain your social networks. It may take some time to establish but it pays off in the long run.
As a marketing professional or business owner, you simply don’t have the time to have daily meetings about social media. You and your team also don’t have the time to manually send out each and every piece of communication. This is where step three comes in – automation. Many out-of-the-box software packages are available that enable you to plan your communication for the week and set it up for deployment as a drip campaign throughout the week.
Since social media is all about having a conversation, you want to ensure that you are monitoring what is being communicated about your company. The best way to do this is through a social media monitoring system, which is step four. Again, many software programs exist to allow you to monitor and respond. It’s important to evaluate the different ones to ensure that you are selecting the solution that is best for your business in terms of market coverage, usability, and value.
The fifth and final step is to respond. An effective response strategy is exactly that, it’s strategic. You want to ensure that you are maintaining a conversation while ensuring that you are aligned to your overall goals and strategy. For example, if one of your goals is to drive traffic and generate leads, you may want to implement a Twitter follow strategy where you give away a free eBook to new followers where they have to complete a Web form to download it. If you have any questions or would like to share your story with us, please feel free to comment.