Social Strategies - Before you begin…
Before you head down the path of implementing your own social media marketing strategy, there are numerous items to consider. Here is a list of things to check off your list as you move forward:
Demographics/Audience - who would you benefit from networking with? Industry veterans, customers, consumers? The better you understand who you are going after the better you can focus your efforts.
Scope/Size - Are you going to launch full steam, or just add a few sites at a time? How many people in your organization can participate and contribute? Much of the scope/size depends on your goals for adding this marketing channel.
Goals - Of course! If you’re planning on measuring it and improving it, setting goals is a critical step. Are your goals sales oriented, traffic related, based on network size, SEO?
Research/Planning - Before you launch a Facebook profile and build a group, is that even the right place for you based on these other items? Doing your research ahead of time will help keep the project tightly focused and keep planning on task.
Budget - Besides the time investment, are you prepared to invest in media to help boost your participation and network-ability?
Branded or Personal - One of the biggest decisions for business oriented social media marketing is whether this is a branded endeavor or one from a personal direction. Some firms (like Zappos) who can have their CEO participate can combine these efforts, but other firms have to draw a clear distinction.
It’s seems obvious, but having a strong plan is critical to being able to execute, measure and optimize your social media strategy. Twitter and FriendFeed may seem like easy fun, but the difference between them being a fun thing to do with your Blackberry or a business marketing strategy lies in these questions.
Tags: Blog Marketing, Social Media Marketing, social-networking
July 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
OK, I can see the huge planning meeting working out the details of the CEO’s myspace page … but most of us run small businesses. All I use social media for currently is build links to my web site. To the extent I plan, it is to blog on topic related to whatever web site I am promoting or even to build an entire blog around keywords I wish to build links for. Maybe I am still not all the way out of the box yet because I cannot yet see what sort of details beyond the foregoing a small business should take into account.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Joe - I hear what you’re saying, but links are only a small part of the value social media provides. Especially for a small business, time is money - which makes understanding WHERE you’re spending your time that much more important. With a limited number of people to dedicate to projects, you can’t spin your wheels on things that don’t work. Eventually, Google is going to catch up to the use of social media for link farming.