In Part I and 2 of this series, we looked at ways to market and grow your business by developing a social media presence.
In order to set up an effective social media marketing campaign, your social media marketing checklist should incorporate the following items:
Step 1:
Review your business’ goals and prioritize them.
Step 2:
Develop demographic criteria that you’ll use for targeting specific types of individuals that you can begin to build relationships with.
Step 3:
Investigate Your Competition
Step 4:
Determine What Social Media Platform(s) are Right for Your Business
Two additional steps to add that are equally important:
Step 5:
Develop a Content Management Plan
In the previous sections, I discussed the importance of getting your foundational work out of the way so you can continue building on each area of your business.
Just like you schedule time for meetings, calls, webinars, etc., you need to set up a working schedule of posting to your blog and/or social media accounts.
Obviously, you need to have some latitude with this as your business may run daily specials or offers that need to be communicated in addition to your regular posts.
For example, let’s say you have a Facebook and Twitter account, post videos to YouTube and belong to two or three different forum groups that you’re trying to develop a presence in.
If you wear all the hats in your business, keeping up with your social media efforts can prove to be a very time consuming endeavor. You may begin to feel as if you have little time for anything else other than writing, posting and creating videos.
The best way around this, in my opinion, is to start out slow and begin to build a library of content that you can draw from so you can work more efficiently. Most likely, you won’t have a group of writers at your beck and call, so you’ll probably be doing the bulk of the writing yourself.
Content that is fresh, interesting and engaging is something you’ll always be looking at developing. This is extremely important while you’re working on building your company’s reputation and branding yourself on the various sites and forums that you’ve chosen to be active in.
I’ll delve deeper into content in an upcoming post, as there is much to learn about it.
Step 6:
Plan Your Budget
As you continue to develop your social media campaign, you’ll want to review your goals again.
I highly recommend that you start out slowly, testing the waters on one social media platform and one forum site before adding others so you don’t get so overwhelmed and frustrated that you don’t know which end is up.
If this is your first venture into the social media arena, you’ll need to get your feet wet first and get through the learning curve.
If your budget allows, there are companies out there that will manage your social media campaign for you but be aware that if you don’t have any idea of what this encompasses, you could end up spending a lot of money needlessly and not really get results any different than if you did the work yourself.
Like any other service you pay for, there are reputable companies who will do a good job for you and other companies that will take advantage of your ignorance and make very little effort to propel your business forward.
Be sure to do your due diligence before selecting a company and ask for references so you can speak to others who have used them for their social media needs.
It’s a good idea to build some time into your schedule for research and development – searching the web to find out what others in your field are using social media for, where they post, what kind of results they’re getting, etc.
This way, you’ll have a much better handle on what aspects of your social media campaign you’d be willing to hand off to someone else and what you’ll want to keep in-house, budget permitting.
I hope you’ve found these tips to be both informative and useful as you develop and grow your business’ social media presence.
