Developing a Social Media Strategy
As social media popularity grows, more and more businesses are entering the market. Your first impulse may be to jump into every social media site and create an account for your business, publish your contact information and links to your website, then wait for the people to line up at your door. However, breaking into social media is not as easy as creating a few accounts and pitching your product. You need to understand your medium and plan accordingly.
If you’ve been in social media any amount of time, you’ll realize that you don’t gain influence overnight. You can’t successfully buy followers and hope to get effective responses. You need a plan to be successful. The points below will help you outline for your social media campaign.
Provide Content, Not Commercials
Social media is different from traditional marketing mediums in that social media users are highly intolerant to in your face advertising. Social media users are part of communities where they can connect and share information. When a marketer comes into their forum and begins pitching their product or service, they leave the room.
The only way to break into this medium is to provide something of value to the community of users. To do this, you must first understand your audience. This is done by engaging with the audience, listening and asking questions. Find out the needs of the community and provide content that is useful.
Sharing relevant information is critical. As you observe the information that is being shared in your community, begin to contribute to that stream. Share resources, links to relevant blogs and articles and share your own insights. One of the most powerful ways to provide information directly is to start a blog. Sharing links to your blog in social media is a powerful way to begin to gain influence and connect more directly with your audience. But again, the key here is providing useful information, not making a sales pitch. When your audience seeing that your motives are to share information, they are more receptive to your message.
Become An Expert
Influence is the biggest commodity online. You command influence and reputation by being known as an expert in your field. Your goal is to become a resource of information about the field of your product or service. Online users don’t want to hear your marketing spiel. Many in your community will be resourceful and can find out where to buy a product or service like yours. Break apart from your competition by positioning yourself as an expert with all the answers. Your expertise will establish yours as a trusted voice to which your audience will return to for information.
Educate People – How To Solve Problems
As you begin to establish yourself as an expert in your field and share information with your community, make it practical. Don’t just provide information, provide practical steps on how people can solve problems with your product or service. At the end of the day, people are most concerned with themselves and their lives, not your product or service. If you teach people how to solve a problem, they will be more receptive to using your product or service to solve those problems.
Engage Your Audience
This is one of the biggest pitfalls companies run into with social media. Traditional marketing pays very little attention to direct interaction with their customer base. The reason social media can be successful is that it can put a face to your company.
I’ll say it again; social media users do not want to be sold to. They want to have a conversation, and share information. If you are talking at people and never responding or engaging, you will get filtered out of the conversation. In this medium, you have to make the effort to engage.
If your Twitter stream has hundreds of auto-scheduled tweets with nothing but marketing for your product or service, nobody will care. Before people follow you on Twitter, they will check your stream to see if you are interacting. If you do not have any @ replies or retweets, they will know immediately that your accounts is simply a feed. They are not going to get any authentic communication with you. Unless you are a highly established brand, the chances are that you are not going to get many followers. The same is true for your Facebook fan page. If you are doing nothing but sending posts trying to get people to buy your product/service, they will leave your community.
If people comment on your blog, reply to their comments. Show that you are listening and engaging with them. Listen to feedback and show that you are taking it all into consideration. Thank people for commenting on your blog, retweeting your posts in Twitter and being active in your online communities.
Engaging your audience is one of the most important parts of social media, but also one of the most overlooked. If you are not engaging your audience, replying to messages, and helping people find information, you will not be successful. This is a huge time investment, but as you grow your community you will find that it is well worth your time.
Build Trust
All these previous points lead to the holy grail of social media. Once you establish trust, you gain influence. Once you have an audience that is behind you and your brand, you will be able to leverage that in many respects. Your audience becomes your unpaid marketing team. You will see a huge increase in referrals by your community just because of the nature of social media. People in social media want to share the best information with each other. As you establish your brand as a thought leader in your field, the audience will flock to you. Word of mouth is absolutely viral in social media communities. The potential for growth and exposure is limitless.
Conclusion
Social media is fast becoming a critical part of business marketing plans. Just like any other form of marketing, there are specific aspects that are critical to understand to achieve maximum effectiveness. Use these tips to formulate the foundation of your social media strategy and you will see great results.
