8 Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy

Creating your social media strategy can be just as time consuming as creating your inbound marketing plan.

It will entail lengthy research, investigative tactics, and thought.  Below are some steps that you should consider when creating your social media strategy:

1.  Goal.  What is your goal?  Is your goal to obtain brand awareness, create buzz, build your email database, generate more leads, increase your conversions, increase your web traffic, create more inbound links, or something else?  Clearly establish what your goal is and then you can go about strategizing how to obtain that goal.

2.  Market Analysis.  You should know who your target market is and strategize about how to reach this market.  Research your target market’s trends, characteristics, needs, and social activities.  If you have an email database already established you can use tools to help you find your audience, such as Facebook Friend Finder and Twitter’s follower tool.

3.  Foundation.  Lay out the foundation of your campaign.  What type of message do you wish to portray about your company that will appeal to your target audience?  Figure out the type of design you want to implement, color coordinating to your logo to keep in with your company branding.  Define your copyrighting maximizing keyword exposure for your business.

4.  Networks.  Decide which social networks you are going to be active in providing you with the maximum ROI for your goal.  There are a ton of sites out there beyond Facebook and Twitter that might be best for your business.  If you are in the music industry, you might be more suited to Reverbnation.  If you are in the architect industry, you might be more suited for Architizer.  How many social networks do you wish be active in?

5.  Content.  Which content is going to be more appealing to your audience?  Plan whether you are going to use personal text content, questions, trivia, photos, videos, podcasts, blogs, etc.  Decide where and when you will be using each piece of content.  Create an editorial calendar to help you along.

6.  Integration.  How will you be integrating your social media with your current marketing?  It is important to maximize all media outlets to your best potential.  Will you be placing your social media links on your website, in your emails and enewsletters, on your print ads, stating in your on-air advertising?

7.  Management.  Managing your campaign is crucial to its success.  How are you going to manage the campaign?  Who is going to post?  Who is going to blog?  Will it be one person?  Will it be a collaboration of people?  What bookmarking sites are you going to use?  How are you going to measure your stats?  Will you be posting manually or using a tool such as Hootsuite?  These are important questions to ask.

8.  Cost.  What resources are going to be used to implement the social media strategy and how much are they going to cost you?  Although social media is a free tool, there is a cost involved in hiring a professional to handle your social media strategy.  This will be true whether you are handling your social media in-house our outsourcing.  If you are adding social media to your current marketing plan without hiring any new employees, how much time will be involved in executing the social media strategy successfully?  Will you be opting to exclude another form of media that may not be working for your company in order to include time for the social media aspect?

These are major points to consider when developing your social media marketing plan.  Careful consideration should be given to each one.  Taking your time and planning your strategy carefully will bring you the most success and not leave you wondering around the social media networks aimlessly with no goal and with no success.

Photo Credit: pshutterbug

Tags: social media