Getting Set for Social Media Marketing

Making an in-depth, social media strategy with clearly defined goals is as critical as having a solid business plan. I can often gauge when a company has an improvised social media plan. This probably holds true for your potential customers and fans as well. They might even turn away from your brand and start looking at your competitors in that case.

I think there are a few crucial questions you need to ask yourself when you’re building a social marketing plan for your company:

What is the goal my company wishes to achieve with social media?

This depends on the business type. You might want to gain brand exposure, interact directly with customers, or promote your products and services via social media. Once you’ve identified your own goals, try to understand those of your customers and work out how you can use social media to connect both.

Must we cover all well-known social media networks?

I would suggest that for starters, small businesses have a blog and for a few months, be present on a single social network. You can decide on the network to begin with by surveying what platforms your customers mostly use.

A Twitter account is a good idea, whether your company is small or large since it’s an easy to use and learn this platform. Google+ can help boost the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site. B2B firms can benefit from Slideshare and LinkedIn to link within their industry. Being on Pinterest and Facebook is advisable for B2C companies.

How should content be handled on social networks?

It’s a good idea to post 2 to 5 times every day on all your social networks. One post daily might not be enough since followers and fans do not all visit social-media sites at the same time.

We’ve seen that certain kinds of content usually work well for specific social-media platforms. For instance, visual platforms like Pinterest, Google+, Facebook and Instagram can effectively showcase memorable images of your products, events and maybe behind-the-scenes pictures of employees at work. On Facebook, status updates without accompanying links also work well, especially when questions are asked.

Speaking about Twitter, there should a nice balance of tweets related to your company and retweeting posts from business partners and other industry influencers. LinkedIn is a good platform for sharing of productivity tips, company news and leadership articles.

When you use varied content types such as photos, short videos, tips, useful links etc. across platforms, you can make things look fresh and interesting.

How can the success of social-media marketing efforts be measured?

You need to track your social-media marketing performances continually to gauge the tactics and post types that work.

Many social platforms display their own metrics. For example, Facebook allows page administrators free access to Page Insights data which informs you about the number of visitors who interacted with your posts. This data can be used to plan future posts better and decide on more effective methods for connecting with your followers and fans.

LinkedIn offers similar analytics for pages of organizations. Google Analytics can help you see the effectiveness of your social-media efforts towards directing traffic to your online store or main website. If you come across Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or your other social platforms listed as main referrers to your site, you can rest assured your social-media campaigns are not in vain.