Social media is becoming a popular platform for helping brands meet their marketing, advertising and public relations goals. However, each brand should come up with a unique strategy in order to achieve its competitive edge.
The following are tips on how to create an effective social media strategy for your brand.
1. Define Your Goals
When you are creating social media strategies for your company, you need to determine the goals you are aiming at. The most popular goals include for marketing, advertising and public relations. You need to sit down with the rest of the management team and come up with realistic, attainable, clear, measurable and timely objectives.
2. Invest In Research
It is important to note that different social networking sites target different types of users. Carry out thorough research on all the social media sites in order to determine the right platform for your campaigns. Analyze the past and current trends in that site, and see if it is the most ideal network for your needs. Ensure that you can collect feedback from the users, and that the feedback you collect is relevant for your business. If the users cannot give relevant feedback, then you are on the wrong site. Use a site that can help you meet all your goals. This is the only way to benefit from social media.
3. Build Relationships
Social media is chiefly meant for networking, and the best way to achieve this goal is by building quality relationships. If you are on Facebook, you need to establish a strong bond with your fans. If you are on Twitter, you need to impress your followers. If you are on LinkedIn, ensure that you are in touch with your connections. To build relationships with the people within your network, you need to post regularly, reply to comments and queries from users, and read their posts too. Building of quality relationships ensures that you establish credibility and trust with your followers.
4. Create Awareness
Create awareness of your strategies among the employees. You cannot implement your social media strategy alone. It is your employees who will implement your strategy, and so it is essential to familiarize them with your strategy. Teach them the goals you intent to meet and the strategies you want to utilize in order to meet the goals. Give them a blueprint of your social media strategies and tell them their roles in the implementation process. Ask for their contributions in order to make your strategy as participatory as possible.
5. Establish Standards
It is highly likely that you will use various social media networks to implement your strategy. It is important for you to create a standard on how to interact with your clients in each of these social networks. Train the people involved in implementing your strategy to adapt a standard tone when posting or replying to posts from users. Ethics and professionalism are desirable in this front.
6. Assign Tasks
You need to teach each employee about their respective roles in the implementation of your strategy.
7. Measure The Results
Finally, you need to determine the results of your strategy. Check whether the strategy you are using is meeting the goals for which it was created. Measurement is done by checking the number of followers, traffic to your home page and number of sales.
[This has been a guest post by media specialist Ludwing Hernandez. Join his project Mezee where you can create free chat rooms about social media strategies. Follow @Mezeeme]
If you have any tips of your own, please share.
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.
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