Explore Social Media by asking 7 Questions

As part of the series on “Why your business needs a strategy for social media marketing”, today will give you two more steps to follow. It is all about experiencing social media and defining your business objectives.

Step 2: Experience Social Media

Before you set up a Social Media campaign you need to experience Social Media first hand.

ACTION: Familiarize yourself with what others are doing, what information is out there and how the different Social Media tools work.

While you’re exploring ask yourself the following questions:

1.   What is the topic or central theme of the specific blog, wiki etc?

2.   Who are the people that read this content on a regular basis and why?

3.   Is this person a customer of my business or industry?

4.   If not could they potentially be a customer? If so, what other Social Media do they read?

5.   What information could you add to the conversation?

6.   How could you use this in your business?

7.   What does this service provide and what content could you provide?

The goal of the survey is to get a sense for the content and how people use these tools for sharing content and opinions. Social Media was made popular by the way in which content is connected and shared rather than just what the content is.

The focus of Social Media is on sharing rather than the information. These “social connections” are most important and will be central in building your Social Media Marketing Campaign.

Step 3: Define your business objectives

The next important thing to do is to define your business objectives regarding social media. This will determine what tools and channels you’ll use in your marketing efforts.

There are basically two approaches you can follow namely a listening approach with the idea of understanding why certain conversations about you are taking place, or to use a broadcast approach where you use social media to accomplish awareness of a new service. Or use a combination of both.

ACTION: Answer the following questions to define your goals more clearly:

1.   What product or service are you promoting?

2.   What are the objectives of this promotion? Are you for example building awareness for a new product or service, or are you looking for customer feedback on an existing product?

3.   Define how you’ll measure the results of the campaign.

4.   What would need to happen for you to move ahead with a new product launch for example?

Next you need to write down a brief description of what success looks like.

Make sure your objectives are specific and quantifiable, for example “to increase sales of product xyz, by 20% over the next six months”.

I cannot overstate the importance of having defined measurable objectives. This is something that many people struggle with and then it is very difficult to measure your success with social media.

The next two steps are about “Engaging your audience” and “Follow up and feedback”.  Please subscribe to the RSS not to miss the future posts on why your business needs a social media strategy.