Marketing Automation Consultant
16/3/2017
Firstly, let’s start with the importance of being on social media. What started as a way to communicate with your peers has become a marketing channel for many businesses and a revenue source for others. Some businesses have also found that the majority of their customer service has taken to social media too.
While SEO has been a huge focus for many companies, search engines have adapted their algorithms to better use social media to determine your organic search rankings. They are looking at social values such as tweets, re-tweets, Facebook likes and shares as well as Google +1s.
When you put it that way, can you afford not to have a presence on social media?
1. DETERMINE YOUR PURPOSE FOR USING SOCIAL MEDIA
If you got in a state of panic from the introduction, take a step back. Firstly, are your customers there? Or are you just assuming? Do some research, this is like every other investment you make. Is it right for your business? How much should you invest? How much time will it take? It’s important to understand how you will measure the success of your investment too – is it the number of followers that you have acquired on social media or is it something more meaningful like driving revenue?
2. UNDERSTAND IT’S NOT JUST A ONE-OFF INVESTMENT
Time and time again I speak with clients who think social media is just about getting profiles into social media and you let your followers do the rest, sadly not – it’s an ongoing investment that your company has to make – that’s time and money. So ask yourself the key question – do you have the time to manage it? Or do you need to find someone who does?
3. “SKILL UP” OR HIRE THE SKILLS.
Social media is a specialist area, it’s not like traditional marketing where you buy names and phone numbers and you can just call them up and ask them if they want to buy something. Social media is a journey from building awareness, to engagement, to co-creation and further building a revenue stream. I have seen many companies try to execute social strategies with in-house resources and fail. On the other side of the coin, some clients, who embrace social in every aspect of their business, have executed strategies extremely well and got results.
4. CHOOSE YOUR CHANNELS
Often businesses make the assumption they must be on every channel that is available – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Quora, Vine, Snapchat, the list goes on. There are lots of networks and it takes time and budges to develop all of those networks at once. Believe it or not, this is my favourite discussion with clients, because we delve into their business, really understand their audience and then do some research to discuss where those targets actually are. Talk to a sample of your customers, do some researching, build some analysis and determine your network choices from there. If you so happen to have a list of five networks at the end of that research, prioritise, which one has the most of your current user base, and stagger the introduction of new channels one by one.
5. CREATE THE ACCOUNTS
This is a nice simple step. Once you’ve chosen your networks, go and create accounts. The name is THE most important part. Choose an account name that is short and concise, try to avoid numbers unless they are essential to your branding.
6. START BUILDING YOUR AUDIENCE
The quickest way to build your audience is to talk to your existing customers and get them to engage with you on social media. You can do this en mass by emailing them, or you can search manually name by name – that’s painful but if they follow you, they’re interested in hearing more. You can use other tactics too to gain more followers, for example, add your social media account names to any marketing materials, business cards, websites, add posters up around your clinic. Social media also has advertising that is one of the fastest ways to build your likes, followers, fans etc. It’s not expensive either which means you can make numbers quickly – but just before you go running to spend some advertising money to “buy” followers, think about our next point.
7. CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.
While content is a huge part of social media, you don’t need to create lots to get engagement. We use a 3-1-1 rule to generate engagement. The rule is simple – share three pieces of new content, for everyone you create and share someone else’s giving them credit. Why does this work? If you’re actively engaged in your market and giving your fans and followers content they’re interested in, you give value, and build trust. Creating your own content might be self-promotion, it might be new insights, it might even be a promotional offer you’re decided to push. Sharing someone else’s content isn’t necessarily a competitor but it might be a press article, or an industry blogger, or something not that serious and just fun. One thing to mention on content is that social media is highly visual- graphics, videos and images engaged far higher, its psychology not social media, so make sure you have lots of different content to share.
8. PLAN AHEAD
My final comment for building a social presence is simply, plan ahead. Like any part of your business you need to plan how you will use the channels going forward – is it just to push out content, and what content, what’s happening in your business that you may use social media to enhance/provide additional insight to? Plan basic conversational pieces ahead of time – we recommend a week to keep you dynamic and nimble.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to tweet us over at @JTFMarketing and I’ll be happy to help.