“Tweet Tweet Tweet, Rockin’ Robbin” – Shake your hips and embrace social networking sites because they’re the new online party. Businesses everywhere are hitting social networking sites in a bid to improve ROI, but let’s face it, if you don’t have a plan of action you may find social media a lot harder than the pros make it look – which is why you may need this helpful guide.
What Do You Want to Achieve?
If you’ve ever developed a strategy before you’ll understand the importance of identifying your aims; and this is exactly the same with social media. You need to sit down and think long and hard about what it is you want from your campaign. Once you have done this you are in a better position to identify the measures to take in order to achieve your new goals.
Some common aims include:
- Build online brand
- Divert more traffic to your website
- Target a different market
- Improve customer service
Which Platforms Complements Your Business?
Social networking sites are springing up all over the place, and you can now take your pick from the following:
- YouTube
- Google+
- Flicker
Understandably the type of social networking site you opt for needs to complement your business, so if you design jewellery you’ll want to take advantage of Pinterest and Instagram as they are a lot more visual. However if you deal with finances you may want to stick with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – however, on principal Facebook and Twitter are usually the foundation of any social media campaign.
Also Read : How to create effective Social Media strategy?
Build an Online Brand & Personality
It’s important to be professional in how you operate your business and present your website; but social media is different and this is where the difficulty arises. How do you create an online personality for your business which is fun and approachable, but at the end of the day, still professional? It’s a fine line – but one that you need to tread in order to succeed.
To do this you need think about your business and your target audience. What age range do you want to target, what are their interests and what motivates them? By researching your target market you can design your social media plan to reflect this and appeal directly to them.
Some useful tips:
- Don’t plug lots of products or info about your services; it looks spammy
- Do interact with users and respond quickly
- Do share, even if they’re your direct competitor
- Don’t be too professional
- Do uploads lots of photos/images/videos
- Do make your social media platforms a useful resource
Market Your Social Media Pages
It may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people fail to market their social media platforms and still expect them to perform.
Below you will find an essential checklist:
- Place social media icons on your website
- Place social media icons/links on your email signature
- Place ‘Like’ ‘Tweet’ and ‘+ 1′ icons next to all of your products
- Prompt people to ‘Like’ and ‘Tweet’ before or after checkout
- Upload a new blog announcing the new social media sites, with links to them.
- Send a newsletter to existing customers promoting the new social media sites
- Market social networking pages on leaflets and in brochures
- Offer incentives for people to interact with your new social networking sites (coupons, promotions and competitions)
It may seem like a lot of work and in the beginning it will seem slow, but if you are proactive and stay with it you can succeed. I hope this has helped, and let me know how you get on.
