THE social marketing question to ask is: “It’s free, it reaches millions of people, but how do I make it work for me?” The answer is that effective use of social media requires planning, creativity, persistence, and measurement. There are hundreds of ways to participate across the various social media sites.
But like any tool, it takes the right one to do a certain job. For instance if you sell handmade gifts Twitter may not be as useful as Pinterest. Twitter’s platform is more suited to events and unfolding news items. Pinterest might be a perfect medium for showing photos of products you made. My point being, that trying to cover all the social media sites is not an effective strategy for most businesses. The trick to being effective is to choose the right tool for your type of business and one that’s consistent with your marketing goals.
Here are the (much simplified) steps:
- Choose one or two social media tools
- Create a campaign to attract participants & engage them
- Be persistent
- Measure the results & make changes accordingly
Choosing Your Tools
Each social media tool can be characterized by who is using it, and what they are doing with it. Ideally you’ll find at least one tool that connects your business to all the potential customers you’ve been trying to reach. See a break-down and explanation of each social media site.
Create a Campaign
A campaign is designed around encouraging someone (i.e. a customer, a potential customer) to DO something such as leave a product review, make a purchase, post a picture, or join a mailing list. What you ask the participant to do depends on your goal for the campaign. Goals can be short-lived or ongoing. The on-going possibilities are obvious, such as attracting new customers or retaining current customers. Short-term goals tend to be easier to measure and can be stepping stones for larger goals. For instance, if you’re planning to offer special promotions to loyal customers, a campaign centered around gathering customers’ email addresses is a good first step.
Persist
There’s so much interesting content competing for our attention on the Web which is why effective social media networking requires persistence. It takes time to get noticed. Scheduling time each week or each month to manage social media efforts is the way to be successful—and you might even have some fun!
Measure Your Results
I love that social media tools are endlessly flexible. If one campaign doesn’t meet its goal drop it and find a better one. But, to take advantage of this terrific flexibility your campaign has got to be designed in a way that can be measured, and this is another area where I can be very helpful to you.
Web analytics tools should be integrated into your website to count the results of your campaign. Once you have daily, weekly, or monthly numbers (or sales, depending on the type of campaign) to show how much response there’s been to your campaign, you can decide whether to continue it or to switch strategies.