The Marketing Bureau

First Published on business.govt.nz

Social media has been adopted by enough people to impact the way the world communicates. It has become an accepted means of communication for both individuals and businesses, and customers increasingly expect to be able to interact with businesses over their preferred social media networks. This article outlines how to get the most out of social media for your business.

Why You Need A Social Media Strategy

Because it’s quick, easy and relatively inexpensive to set up a social media presence, businesses often make the mistake of assuming they don’t need to plan how they’re going to use social media. They set up a few random accounts and send out the occasional arbitrary message without any planning, thought or purpose... and after a few weeks, they start to suspect that social media is not doing too much for their business.

They also tend to lay the blame for this squarely on the apparent ineffectiveness of social media rather than their lack of strategising and planning.

To use social media effectively, you should sit down with your staff and draw up a social media strategy. You’ll need to decide how social media can be used to the best effect for your type of business, and the most efficient way to achieve this. You’ll need to set objectives and measure whether the time and effort spent on social media is worth it.

This means that you’ll need to do your homework and research how other businesses are using the various social media networks. Once you have a good idea of how your competitors and other businesses are using the various networks, you can draw up a strategy for your business.

Securing Your Brand On The Social Networks

The first part of your strategy should involve securing your brand across the various social media networks. Ideally you’d want to use the same easily identifiable name on each of the networks so that people can readily find and make contact with your business.

Unless you acted early and have already secured your preferred name on each network, this might be hard to achieve. You can check the availability of usernames across the social media networks by using  knowem.com and decide on the best name available over the most important networks for your business (which will be the networks your customers use most).

Popular user names are often reserved early, so it’s a good idea to open accounts on all the popular networks, even if you don’t plan to use them straight away. That way, you’ll reserve your username for when you’re ready to use it.

Depending on your social media strategy, you might decide to set up multiple accounts on some network platforms, each serving a different purpose or market segment. A growing number of companies have more than one Twitter account or run several blogs, each for a particular purpose or business objective.

Your Objectives, Metrics And Return On Investment

The next step is to decide what you want to achieve using social media. It could be one or a number of the following.

To provide a customer service hotline to deal with problems.
To monitor what is said about your company on social media networks and influence the conversation by taking part.
To drive traffic to your website or blog.
To reinforce your brand by providing useful information, or offering giveaways and competitions.
To promote special events, or limited offers.

You’ll also need to put numbers to your objectives. If you want to increase traffic to your website, you’ll need to decide how you’re going to measure this and decide on realistic unique visitor numbers or hits so you can measure how successful your social media strategy is.

Although some of the benefit from your social media campaigns will be more intangible, like the goodwill generated by running competitions or solving a customer’s problem, you’ll need to find some way to measure this. The idea is to put a value on the number of people you’re connected to over these social media platforms to evaluate whether the hours and cost of your social media strategy provide a reasonable return on investment.
Some of the metrics you can consider include:

Number of followers, fans or connections.
Number of retweets, likes, responses or comments.
Number of views or the number of people who click on links or respond to your messages.
Your  Klout score or other ways of measuring your influence on these social networks.
The demographics of your connections on your networks and whether they are based in the country or countries where you do business.

There are a growing number of programs that measure different social media metrics. A little research and you’ll surely find a program or two to measure the social media information you want to track.

Your social media metrics are important. Use them to monitor your social media strategy. The results on a daily, weekly and monthly basis will give you an indication of what works and what doesn’t for your business and your set of customers.

If you get a sudden spike in followers or comments – or a sudden drop-off – this should give you an indication of something that worked, or didn’t. Use this feedback to tweak your social media input and develop a strategy that works for you.

Some Basic Dos And Don’ts

There are a few points you should bear in mind when planning your social media strategy.

Don’t:

Plan your social media strategy in isolation – integrate social media into your overall marketing plan.

Forget to allow a budget for social media. The set-up costs aren’t high, but it might soon gobble up quite a bit of your time, and time costs money!

Use social media as a traditional marketing outlet. People will stop following your messages if you’re constantly pushing for sales. Find ways to provide valuable information or engage in conversation with your customers. The trick with social media is to keep your business top of mind, without pushing the sales angle too hard.

Assume that the same people follow you across all networks – some will, some won’t.

Do

Use your various social media networks to support each other. Use the various platforms to cross-link and support each other.

Include links to your social media accounts on your webpage. Add them to your email signature and other relevant advertising material. You can use  QR barcodes to record these as well as your business contact details.

Provide your staff with guidelines on your social media goals and your company’s rules of engagement over the various networking platforms.

Research your customers to find out which networks they use the most. This will help you focus your efforts to the best effect

Research the various programs and applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite. They make managing social media accounts over a number of networks a lot easier.

Deep Link http://www.business.govt.nz/managing/the-web/getting-the-most-out-of-social-media