7 Steps to a Social Media Strategy for your Business

Virtual Project Consulting has been advising clients about social media as a marketing tool since 2009. Social Media is part of Web 2.0 creating an interactive, dynamic environment where individuals, consumers and business collaborate, communicate, and share.  It is viral by nature.

When starting out with social media marketing, you need a strategic approach and your results will be directly related to the amount of dedicated effort you put in. It is worthwhile investing some time in planning your social media campaign, just like you would for any other marketing campaign.

Now allow me to explain why your business needs a strategy for social media marketing. It is presented as a series of 7 steps. Every step will contain some action steps your need to take. The steps will be spread across several posts.

Try to move swiftly through the action steps over a few days. To assist you with the creation of a social media strategy, try using this free Social Media Strategy template (Microsoft Word document).

Step 1: How an effective Social Media strategy will help you

Social Media is basically a conversation. This conversation is taking place online using networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, wikis and many more.

The most important thing to remember is that this conversation is taking place whether you’re part of it or not. Your business, products and services are more than likely being discussed online. You can either choose to ignore it or choose to take part and influence the discussion.

ACTION: Do a Google search for your company, your products or a specific service you offer. Type in your name and company name  (with inverted commas: “Virtual Project Consulting”) to see what is being said about you. This will also give a good indication of how visible you are right now. Do the same for your competitors to monitor what is being said about them.

Having an effective Social Media Strategy will help to increase brand awareness, promote products and services, get indexed by the search engines quickly.

Step 2: Social Media Sites

Many of the platforms can be targeted as marketing tools to increase exposure to your business and grow your business through more sales and strategic partnerships.

We can basically define ten broad categories of Social Media sites. They are:

• Social Networks – Facebook, MySpace
• Blogs – They can either be personal or corporate blogs
• Micro Blogging – Twitter
• Niche networks – LinkedIn
• Wikis – The best example being Wikipedia
• Podcasts – Check out iTunes for free podcasts on any number of subjects
• Forums
• Content communities – YouTube, flickr etc
• Social Bookmarking – Delicious
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – RSS “feeds” allow people to subscribe to the various websites, blogs or sections of websites that are of interest to them, like subscribing to this blog.

The rest of Step 2, “Exploring social meida” and the next Steps,  “Setting up your objectives” will be covered in the next post. Please subscribe to the RSS not to miss the future posts on why your business needs a social media strategy.