Every once in a while ‘ actually, it’s more often than you’d think ‘ we see a brand teetering on the edge of adopting a new marketing approach. There’s cutting edge technology involved, really cool features to incorporate and a huge audience segment gathered in a single space. That’s beginning to sound an awful lot like Social Media marketing.
The really cool thing about Social Media is also the biggest challenge with Social Media. There are so many options to choose from with a little bit for everybody to partake in, it’s really easy to get lost with finding focus.
However, find the focus you must. Because without a well-defined, streamlined plan of action, after a while, all you’ll be doing is bouncing around in cyberspace with no real value for your clients existing or potential.
And so, as always, we’ve compiled a checklist for you to follow, and we begin with going back to the basics.
- Define Your Objectives: We can’t overstate how critical it is to define your objectives. You MUST have a goal in mind before you figure out the direction you want to head towards, which requires understanding your brand’s presence, influence and value.New brands with no presence will need to spend a lot of time in creating awareness, interest and conversations related to their products as opposed to market leaders who need to maintain their market share.
- Understand Your Audience: Again, it’s one of those things that seems too obvious to be true, but gets overlooked entirely too frequently. Before you begin to disseminate your message, you need to understand what your audience wants to hear. Understand how you’re going to connect with them and how you’re going to sustain that conversation.
- Tailor Your Message for Your Medium: The way you speak to people on Facebook will differ vastly with the way you will need to address them on LinkedIn, and certainly will be very different from the way you engage on Twitter.For instance, the shelf-life of every Tweet is only 5 minutes, which means attention spans on Twitter are extremely limited. On every network, the challenge with every post is to share valuable and relevant information that engages the audience.
- Don’t Delete or Ignore Criticism: This is a big no with Social Media marketing. No one enjoys receiving negative feedback or being in the middle of a public argument, but the way to deal with criticism is to view it as an opportunity to increase your transparency.Don’t delete the negative comment; acknowledge it publicly and offer a redress for the grievance. This way, you’ll become a much more reliable and trustworthy organization that isn’t afraid to take ownership of its actions.
- Stay Visible: Remember to post frequently. There’s really no magic number of posts that can be applied as a formula, but you can’t be memorable if you’re not visible.
- Keep the Social in Social Media: After all the messages have been posted and the promotions been talked about and the deals have been advertised, all that matters at the end of the day is that social media is about connecting with people. Encourage two-way conversations with your audience and create messages that connect with them. This is going to require a lot of listening, testing and evaluating.
Although Social Media channels have been around for a while, marketing on them is still a new and constantly evolving process. It’ll take a while for all of us to figure out what the rules are, but until we do, the only other constant is that people are at the heart of marketing. People matter and the way we connect with them matters.
