10 Keys to the Perfect Social Media Strategy

In my quest to refine Social Media Strategy for business, I came across an interesting presentation by Amber MacArthur in Toronto, Canada. She provided guidelines for using social media at an organization.  I decided to adapt the guidelines to be applicable to business owners and service professionals who are using social media marketing in their business.

1. Create a policy or strategy to follow – Anyone representing your company through social media should understand the organization’s expectations, strategy and objectives for social media marketing and be trained to follow best practices. Create your own social media strategy here.
2. Be authentic – it’s important to be true to who you are when you voice your opinions and ideas through social media. Don’t pretend to be some-one you’re not.
3. Be original – find a unique angle with which to communicate your business values that will make you different from all the other businesses out there.
4. Be consistent – It’s important to have a plan in place, and stick to content production schedules.  This again is where the tactics, identified as part of your strategy, are important.
5. Choose the right tools – Different social networks work for different organizations. Determine where you target audience hangs out, and engage with them where they are.  For example, if your audience is active on Facebook and on YouTube, make sure that you are active on those networks and specialize in becoming good with those social media tools.
6. Listen well – it pays to listen.  Put controls in place to listen to existing conversations, like Google alerts, Twitter alerts, Socialmention or BackType alerts. If you’re using Twitter, use search.twitter.com to find conversations about specific topics or hashtags.
7. Measure – There are applications that let you measure social analytics, such as HootSuite. It’s also important to tailor your content on different social networks to those particular audiences. Don’t, for instance, post as frequently on the business-focused network LinkedIn, as Twitter, where a larger update volume is more tolerated.
8. Blog as your Home base – don’t focus all your efforts on applications or tools. Make sure that all your social networking is bringing people back to your business website or blog, because this belongs to you and it’s your home base where people get to know you.
9. Go Mobile – Make sure that your site displays well on mobile phones and tablets, because more and more people are interacting with online content through mobile devices.  Read this FREE Report: Moving your Business forward with Mobile Marketing to understand the benefits of Mobile Marketing for your business.
10. Watch trends – It’s important to stay up-to-date with current trends like group buying sites like GroupOn or people interacting with applications on their mobile phones/devices, or the local search trend where people perform a search on their mobile phones for something to buy at a local store and once they locate the details, they would go out and buy what they were looking for.

Today it’s more important than ever to move quickly to create strategies that will make organizations relevant to today’s consumers and the young generation, which have been described as “digital natives”. Most importantly, the online world can be a dangerous place where the online savvy have enormous power.  It is better to be prepared than to be afraid!