A social media plan includes strategies to achieving specific social media objectives. These include:
- Increasing the amount of inbound leads within a specific budget
- Broadening the reach of content posted online
- Interacting with followers
- Identifying, understanding and interacting with potential clients
- Improving the quality of customer service
- Improving the success of outbound campaigns
Building the brand using social media
Social media is used for three reasons: to build the brand, drive conversions and increase the brand’s online presence. Currently, social media is one of the best ways to market and build a brand. It allows the company to have a direct dialogue with the target market. With all the different companies offering low prices and quick shipping, the challenge is how to make the company stand out from the rest of the crowd and convince people that you offer something better. Through the use of social media, you can by showing people where you are good at. Start a blog and open a Twitter account to start building relationships. Persuade your clients to put in a good word for you by sharing your work with their circles.
Driving conversions
The use of social media makes it easier to see whether or not a particular strategy works at achieving a specific goal. For instance, your business can use social media to increase sales or get people to get familiar about your brand. Before planning your next strategy, take a moment to look at your company or website. Put yourself in another person’s shoes and imagine what he/she would be doing while looking at the website. Other than buying directly from the website or sharing the content, he/she could be downloading media, subscribing to the feed or re-tweeting posts. You can plan a strategy depending on which particular area you wish to improve on.
Increasing online presence
Last but not least is about increasing the brand’s online presence. Social media offers a platform where both the brand and the target market can interact with one another. For companies, one added advantage is that these interactions can be tracked and measured. The data can be used to determine how well the market is receiving a new product or service.
Building foundations/communities
As with entering any endeavor, it is important to have a plan. The same goes with utilizing social media. Social media is useful in communicating with the target market. Start with building relationships. Interact with the community and build rapport before selling your company’s wares. It will make it easier to convince people to speak for you if they trust you.
Securing your brand
Once you build a foundation, it is time to secure your brand. Use the same name regardless of the social media outlet you choose to use. Whether you plan to use the account or not is not important. Using the same name in different social media outlets will make it easier to establish trust with your target market.
Know your niche
Get a better understanding of your target market. Determine whether or not they use social media to communicate with one another. If they are, identify which sites they frequent. You may need to do some research online to find out more. The same goes with entering communities or joining social media groups. Understand how the system works, how they communicate, what type of content they like and so on. Knowing more about how your target market behaves will guide you on how to interact with them properly.
Metrics setting
Define what success means for you. Maybe it is seeing more traffic or adding more subscribers to your feed, getting people to talk about your brand or even just knowing something new about your target market. Next, you will need to determine how you will measure your success. This may mean monitoring the level of activity in your account or counting the number of likes, shares or comments.
Listen, engage and survey
Building relationships is only one part of the plan. There is also the aspect of how to maintain these relationships. Always remember that social media is a means of communication. Talk to people and listen to what they are saying. It can be a happy tale or a sad one. They may even ask for your advice. Lend an ear and a hand if possible. At times, you may need to list links from different sources, including your competitors. Once they begin to trust you as a reliable source of information and help, they will be more willing to get involved in what you are doing.
Assess your success
Once you have implemented your plan, wait for at least two months before deciding on what to do next. This will give enough time for the results to stabilize. You can then decide if wish to continue with the same strategy or do something else. It you cannot figure out what is wrong or how to fix it, consult a specialist or hire someone who can do it for you.
There are many other aspects you may need to consider when it comes to building a social media plan. Always remember to research first before implementing anything. This will help you see and identify gaps or flaws in the plan.
