Key Steps to Successfully Implement Your Social Media Plan

Your company may have a range of social media accounts, but not an implementation strategy. I think this is one major distinction many businesses fail to make. At best, without a solid, consistent strategy, marketing staff can only post:

1) random and unconnected messages,
2) infrequently,
3) in a haphazard manner that will lose the readers.

Social media postings is a common business routine today, but a strong social media strategy can align with and strengthen the long-term branding of a business. Branding, as we know it, is the solidification of a unique identity in consumers’ mind at both conscious and subconscious levels, so social media postings can be planned ahead in schedule to consistently feed fans and followers, the larger purpose of which is to simply let them know you, in representing your business identity, are here for them.

Establish Your Business Values First And Foremost

If a consistent path is to be made from branding to social media, it starts with establishing the values that form the business identity. Social media is merely the channels that communicate these values to the right audience. With your business values established as a criteria, whatever you say and do on social media becomes a reflection of these underlying values. In fact, it is a lot easier to have a single set of guidelines to adhere, otherwise, if there are more than one staff handling social media, each will speak his/her own mind, thus resulting in conflict.

Know Your Audience

In Sales and Marketing, we had written about knowing who your buyer personas are. Likewise, you need to establish the predominant psychographics of your fans and followers. Psychographics define a person’s motivations, internal values and needs. Knowing these important points can help you formulate topics and themes that get them talking. Leverage on your followers’ active participation to generate content and conversations and extend social media reach.

Most of all, there may be “nothing personal in business” as a saying goes, but your success in social media largely hinges on your level of engagement with your connections. Social media is a people-oriented business, so you can’t do without your supporters.

Provide Great Content

Providing great content becomes easier when great business values are lived out. In my mind, greatness begets greatness. Establish a quality standard by which great content is posted or shared to educate and delight followers, take them to the next level and build better relationships. Plan how long an overarching theme and topic is to be discussed, then determine the number of messages or articles to be published in a series at regular intervals.

Track The Chatter

Sometimes you don’t need to try too hard to think of themes and topics. There are tools available to discover what is trending and other people are talking about.

You can use Google Alerts to track topical keywords. Create a Twitter stream based on a hashtag in Hootsuite. Consolidate all the business news-worthy sites like Forbes, Small Business Trends, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, Business Insider etc. in FeedSpot, which is a popular RSS feed consolidation website, so you read all the latest content in one account.

If you come across any one article of interest, you can then join in the discussion or expand on it by getting your followers involved.

These are the 4 key points to a great social media implementation strategy. Of course, there are a lot more to them in the details which I have not managed to cover. Take your time to research and plan out how to funnel targeted leads from social media.

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