10 Ways To Build an Effective Social Media Strategy

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If you’ve decided that you want to get serious about using social media to market your business, it’s important to take the time to develop a social media strategy. Creating and executing a strategy will ensure you’re getting the best return out of the time and resources you invest into social. So if you want to craft a strategy that’s going to help you succeed, here’s what you need to do:

Understand Who You’re Targeting
Just because there are over a billion people on Facebook doesn’t mean you should try to connect with all of them. The best way to use social media is to narrow your scope and only focus on users who are actually in your target demographic.

Put Time Into Creating Great Content
When it comes to social marketing, content plays a key role. However, simply pumping out lots of content isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you need to make it a priority to create awesome content that people will find interesting and engaging.

Utilize Multiple Platforms
There’s a lot of value in creating a presence on multiple social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have proven track records of helping businesses grow. While it’s easy to understand that different platforms allow you to connect with different audiences, plenty of businesses get overwhelmed by the thought of managing multiple social media accounts. Fortunately, a social media dashboard can make it much easier to track and manage more than one account.

Use the Same Branding Elements
Although you may share different content through your various social platforms, it’s a good idea to keep elements like profile pictures and tag lines consistent. This will make it easy for people to identify your brand regardless of where they encounter you online.

Get Creative
While there are plenty of best practices, don’t be afraid to experiment with different approaches to sharing to see how well they perform.

Focus on Engagement
Make it a priority to actually connect with your followers on a regular basis. This will remind them that there is a real person behind your business.

Stick with 70-30
A big part of an effective social media strategy is to find the right balance between keeping people interested and promoting your business. The best way to strike this balance is with the 70-30 rule. By limiting your self-promotion to 30% of your updates and using the rest to share things that are genuinely fun or interesting, you’ll get far better results than if all you did was promote your business.

Review Your Social Media Analytics
Looking at your social media analytics data on a regular basis will do a lot for helping you to guide all of your marketing efforts.

Stay on Top of Your Industry
There are a lot of social media monitoring tools that can help you keep an eye out for trends within your industry. By staying on top of those things, you’ll be able to position yourself as an authority figure within your industry.

Don’t Be Afraid to Change
If something in your strategy isn’t working as well as you would like, don’t be afraid to try a new approach. Consistently reviewing and revising will allow you to keep your efforts moving in the right direction.

If you put everything we covered above into action, you’ll be very happy with the social media strategy you’re able to develop and the positive impact that it has on your business.

Social Media Are Not Just For Giddy Teenagers!

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You may have heard about Myspace, the News Corp.-owned social networking powerhouse. Or Facebook, the rapidly growing network which is presently independent but might one day be owned by Google, Yahoo!, NBC, Tribune Co., or any other media company which recognizes the site’s massive potential for consumer leverage.

In a sense, marketing on the internet uses high technology to advance a very low-tech agenda. Like any offline marketing campaign from years ago, generating business demand online still boils down to an objective understanding of your product or service’s utility. You still need an informed and unbiased view of your target market. Effective and efficient use of the marketing mix (price, product, placement, promotion) is as important today as it was decades ago. None of this has changed.

But the dawn of the internet introduced a new variable: a breadth of consumer touch points previously unfathomable to most marketers. Social media are among the most promising channels; according to Nielsen/NetRatings, the top ten social networking sites grew 47% in 2006.

Now a company has a variety of ways to appear in front of its audience. Take Jalima Coffee as an example. This manufacturer of organic Mexican coffee differentiates itself from competitors with a strong prosocial mission, and hired Clicksharp Marketing to inject this brand image into new channels. One of the co-owners used LinkedIn to introduce the business community to her background in non-profit and international development. The company posted a video on YouTube documenting the manufacturing process and sharing a unique slice of culture with its viewers. Jalima’s Myspace profile is linked to over 500 friends: mainly coffee lovers and advocates of sustainable agriculture. Whenever the company’s marketing department chooses, they have an immediate channel with which to communicate news and events, product introductions, or just to say hello.

Moral of the story – forget what you may have heard about the typical user of any of these sites. Their convergence is taking place rapidly and ubiquitously. The sooner you join the network, the sooner you can forge meaningful connections with the stakeholders that are key to your business!

For more, I highly recommend reading Michelle MacPhearson’s Social Media Marketing Guide.