Jump (Re)Start Your Social Marketing

Spread it!

Email This

Businesses often find themselves needing to jump start their social media marketing programs – either you have a program that has become stagnant or you are looking to start fresh. This outline serves up some things you should look at and how you could potentially structure your recommendations to your management team.

Five things make brands fail in social media -

1 - Communications that promote the brand versus engaging the user in a dialogue
2 - Not joining conversations
3 - Not responding to comments on social media sites
4 - Paying third party advertisers money to drive traffic to social media sites
5 - Creating free offers / coupons all the time

List the key social media channels you should focus on & offer the reason for the social media channel -

Facebook - to build community and foster discussion,
Twitter - to alert followers, follow groups & discussions, & manage discussions,
A Community Blog - This is where fans can provide feedback, content is sorted, and experts answer questions.
Etc., etc., etc.

To make your communiqués even more relevant, you should tie these three social media channels into the email marketing program to capture both consumer provided preferences and reverse preferences. Your goal should be to understand consumer preferences; stay connected, & become relevant in all your conversations.

Here are some specific ideas on how to drive engagement -

'a' - Ask people to answer a question
'b' - Ask people for their opinion through a statement
'c' - Put a picture / video and ask for a caption
'd' - Jump into conversations and keep them going without closing for a 'sale'
'e' - Use a coupon

Recommended frequency formula = (3a + 5b + 2c + 10d + 1e). Keep in mind, free coupons should be used sparingly.

Industry Leaders –
List sites that you think you need to be like and also provide a few sites that you don't want your brand to become.

Brand versus Brand Ambassador -
Many businesses focus on the brand to build up their business. The better approach is to leverage brand ambassadors to build up the brand. Talk about how your brand ambassador will drive your branding.

Resources Required -
Ask for what you will need. Put down money, people, & time. Also list the amount of time before you expect to be evaluated.

Measuring Success -Many brands have experimented with different approaches on social media before settling into their current strategy. They use social media to do the following - increase fan base, get more users to talk about them, & get their followers to promote the brand ambassador (or brand).

To measure success businesses look at very concrete things - increase in revenue (directly through this channel), reduction in costs (cutting specific advertising programs), & absolute growth on email list (as this is the offer vehicle) that can translate to buyers.

Getting Social Media to Succeed at Your Corporation -
The number one reason social media fails in most organizations is because there are a lot of 'volunteers who chip in.' While volunteers can be helpful, they do little to grow your social media program without being held accountable.

Social Media can only succeed if your organization is creative, responsive, and engaging. To meet this requirement, you have to empower an individual giving that person complete program responsibility & accountability. The responsible person can and should seek out opinions from the extended team but should be ultimately responsible (and accountable) for driving the program based on specific metrics of success.