Strategy & Foundations #SocialMedia

Over the next couple of weeks we thought we would put all of our thoughts together to create an online social media masterclass inspired by the Jason Squires workshop I attended at the end of October.

We have split the masterclass in to three sections to help build your strategy step-by-step:

1. Strategy and Foundations: The who, what, where and why of social media.
2. Optimising Your Profiles & Content: Top tips for your account & content strategy.
3. Build an Audience & Convert: The content is there, how to get it out there & convert.

So, keep an eye out for the posts as they come out… as promised, we are starting on this post with the strategy and foundations to follow when it comes to starting out or starting fresh.

Strategy and Foundations

Why should you join social media?

This is probably the first question you’re asking yourself. If social media is done correctly it can work absolute magic for your company!

1. To build a targeted following of potential customers
2. Engage with your audience
3. Convert your audience into customers
4. Convert customers in to new and ongoing revenue

What goal are you looking to achieve from social media?

Are you trying to generate more interest? More leads? More sales? Set yourself a goal you would like to achieve each month (‘x’ number of sales for instance) and work towards that. Once you are reaching the goals, you know the work you are putting in is successful and worth your time and perhaps more investment.

What’s your plan?

There’s a few factors you need to consider in this:

• Who’s responsible? Decide who will have the time to be able to invest and commit to the plan or share the responsibility and create a schedule.
• Which platform? You need to ensure the time you are investing will be worth the effort. If you’re at the starting blocks for social media, we would suggest that B2B opt for Twitter and LinkedIn to start and B2C go for Facebook and Twitter. It’s best to start by optimising totally relevant platforms and see how you go before spreading your efforts too far and missing the point on all the platforms.
• What content? It would be good before you start out to research some content you want to cover. Perhaps relevant stories in your industry to share, share some of your blogs, interesting goings on in the office or events… the list goes on! It is worth getting an idea of this so when you sit down to start posting, you have a starting point for content.
• When/how often? You will need to invest time in to the platforms to make sure it is ticking over and not going stale. For Twitter, you can sign up to Manage Flitter with your existing account to work out when best to be posting.

How will you convert?

From the platform, what do you want the friend/follower/link to do next? You need to know what end point you want so that you can target your profiles and conversations around those topics. Do you want contact details to then make a lead? Do you want to direct them to a certain product? Do you want their feedback and interaction to improve future service?

Measuring Success

Once set up, how will you monitor the success of your campaigns and individual posts? Keeping track of your analytics will really help. Twitter has its own Twitter Analytics to monitor your account, Facebook has Page Insights for pages and LinkedIn has an Analytics Tab for company pages. See which posts work and get the most interaction to know how to plan content from there. Post it, check it, tweak it, improve it.

Plenty to be thinking about when building your strategy! Take each of these points and make a plan for each. The more organised you get with your approach to social media, the more successful it will be. Keep an eye out next week for our blog on how to optimise your accounts and content once you get started.