The Questions You Should Be Asking
Social media as a marketing tool is
pretty powerful, but too often do smaller businesses set up accounts because
it’s what expected of them. No matter what the size of the company is, everyone
should have a strategy in place before they begin otherwise their new venture
will lose steam before it even begins. If you’re starting to develop a presence
online, or you just want a checklist, here are a number of questions you should
answer when you’re putting your plan together.
1.What Do I Hope To Achieve?
It’s pointless to be using social media
if you only have it because everybody else does. For any strategy to work,
there must be an overall goal in place. Is it to drive sales, improve customer
service, create new connections and business leads, or just a way to reach out
to customers? If you don’t have an aim, then you won’t be able to formulate a
strategy. And if you don’t have a strategy or commit to one, the enthusiasm you
have at the beginning will wane off and you’ll have nothing to keep you going.
Before you dive in to the social media bandwagon headfirst asking yourself
"What for"- what do you want to achieve out of your efforts! If you
have that set and clearly spelt out; let us move to number two.
2.Who Do I Want To Communicate With?
Linking back to the first point, what
your aims are relate to the type of company you run. Whether your company
focuses on B2B or B2C will help you determine what type of demographic you’re
aiming for. Do you want your audience to be mainly business people, shoppers,
marketers, or smartphone users to name a few? While there’s nothing to say that
you can’t reach out to everyone, it’s better to have a core audience that you
can build upon. You need to know who your target audience will be and in what
platforms as this will guide you when creating the social media content plan
and maintenance schedule in platforms you will be using to achieve your
objectives.
3.Which Platform(s) Should I Use?
Many businesses will set up an account
on Facebook since it’s the most popular, but there are a number of different
ways to connect with your audience and each site or app has its own strengths
you should take into consideration.
Facebook might be the most popular
place and is the easiest to run app competitions, but Twitter offers a quick
and snappy method of communicating, LinkedIn lets you connect directly with
professionals, Foursquare lets you reward people for visiting your outlet and
Instagram & Pinterest is great if you want to show off products and
services. How you’re going to interact with your audience will matter.
One thing you should avoid is adding
too many accounts as you’ll end up being overwhelmed by it. Preferably, you
shouldn’t have more than three accounts if there’s only one person handing
things as adding any more will make the workload unmanageable.
4.How Much Time Can You Commit To This?
The big question for a lot of companies
investing in social media. Work schedules are busier than ever and in the case
of smaller companies, social media may be added on top of existing duties and
increasing the workload. Essentially, if you can’t find the time to properly
engage and do it consistently, you probably shouldn’t be using social media.
Social media is almost a 24/7/365 job so you need to have adequate &
qualified human resource to manage your brand presence in all platforms you are
participating in.
If it’s possible, reduce the workload
by assigning different channels to each of your staff, or assign days to your
staff for when they’re responsible for social media duties. Different companies
require different approaches so find out what works best for you or better
still let me help you with this.
5.How Will This Fit Into Our Schedule?
The last thing any business wants is
for staff to be distracted from their main duties, which is where time
management comes into play. Have you scheduled social media time? In most cases
you might need to keep engaging fans to show you are actually listening. For
the most part, you should be able to take an hour out of your schedule each day
to focus on social media duties, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken in
the one go. Maybe work it so that you dedicate 15 minute segments to social
media during working hours, monitoring and updating when things are less
hectic. If you’re not keeping updating regularly and consistently, you’re not
giving people a reason to follow you. You've got to be PRESENT & let your
presence be felt by your community on social media.
5.What Kind Of Tone Should I Adapt?
How you present yourself is important
and what you say and post will show how you come across. If you’re using socialmedia as customer service, you will need to
adapt a formal tone when communicating, but if you’re promoting yourself,
there’s no harm in trying to inject some humour into your posts. However kindly
ensure the communication is uniform across platforms, the look and feel of your
presence across networks has to be easily recognizable by the public. This is
critical for both personal and corporate brands!
6.How Will I Measure Progress?
The main benefit of social media is
that you can measure just how well your accounts are doing. You need to have
tools or ways of measuring the ROI of your social media efforts. Also, choosing
which metrics to value is important as some can be seen as vanity metrics which
don’t provide a lot of insight.
analytics and insights on the number of
active fans, followers, hits and interaction matrix, fan demographics and
usage breakdown.The metric tools you use should be able
to
look at the overall performance of your business on social media, the success
should not just be determined by how many fans the page attracts & number
of followers on Twitter (although that is a useful benchmark, I feel that it
would be a narrow and specific way to measure success) but I advise you to
measure your success of our social media efforts by looking at:
1.Fan and follower interactions,
level of engagement and feedback received.
2.Reach of message, content, number of engaged users and conversions.
3.Level of influence across the platforms we are participating in.
4.Use the growth of the audience as a key performance indicator.
5.Number of hits on your digital properties and referring URL’s. If much
of the traffic is from social media sites then that shows your presence is
good.
Looking at specific metrics in isolation won’t tell
you much, but taking a few together will give you a clearer picture of what
works.
7.How Does This Tie Into My Overall
Strategy?
While social media is very useful as a
marketing tool, it should be viewed as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Will you be treating it as a separate entity or will you be tying it in with
other campaigns and marketing opportunities. As mentioned earlier, different
social media channels offer different opportunities so when you’re planning a
large-scale campaign, plan with these features as part of the experience
instead of just tacking an obligatory Facebook link to it. You need to ensure
your efforts on social media complements your PR, media and experiential
marketing efforts. You have a customer service charter? How does social media
help you achieve that commitment? You want to reach out to more customers and
grow revenue? then how does social media fit into that strategy? You want to
expand to new markets? how will this work for you?
8.Do I Have Guidelines That Staff Can
Follow?
If you’re allowing staff to run
your social media accounts, it’s a good idea to put together a social media policy so that it’s clear what
acceptable and what isn’t. These guidelines don’t have to be complicated, just
provide a few ground rules that are easy to follow so there’s no confusion.
Furthermore you need to also lay out a maintenance schedule with details of who
and when should be posting and engaging the audience on social media. You need
a team here, creatives to generate sticky visual content, video content is
crucial too not just updates full of text!
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If you would like some help with formulating your social
media strategy, review or audit of your current strategy and analysis do
not hesitate to contact me on 0724215977 or write to me through
(Muthurikinyamu@gmail.com/ Nateford@socialedge.co.ke)
I'd love to be of help to you.
Muthuri Kinyamu