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What is the single most important action you can take to improve your chances of success in implementing a social media campaign?
Arguably, leveraging a well-researched and carefully thought out social media marketing process, which lays the foundation for executing a social media campaign. Although there is many social media process maps floating around in the Internet, few provide for an effective social media marketing strategy and guidance on execution combined with optimization & measurement.
In this post, I put forward a social media marketing process that outlines a number of key steps and points that should be considered in any social media campaign.
Step 1. Insights
Social Media Marketing = Medium + Message. The basic difference lies in the fact that traditional online marketing is you bringing customers to your site and SMM is going where your customers are. So without trying to seem like I am just trying to sell our social media monitoring platform, SinoBuzz I would suggest that social media analytics is becoming critical in planning, monitoring and measuring social media campaigns.
Step 2. Social Media Strategy
Select the optimal to social media platforms to reach your target market. Then, construct a specialized strategy for each social media platform to achieve the tailored goals for each platform. Each social media medium has distinctive features and means of communication. For example, a corporate blog strategy will differ markedly from the strategy you use to achieve your goals on social network like LinkedIn or Ushi.cn. In other words, a one-sized strategy doesn’t fit all.
Hence, you must adjust the following 8 C’s of the Social Media Marketing Mix for each social media platform. Here are some suggestions from Social Media Jam on how to accomplish this feat:
• Categorize social media platforms by target market relevancy(i.e., the ones where your target audience resides)
• Comprehend the “rules of the road” on the platform by listening and learning how to behave, successfully spark conversation, and engage and energize the participants
• Converse by acknowledging and responding to other users of the platform, always remembering to be a contributor, not a promoter
• Collaborate with platform members as a means of establishing a mutually beneficial relationships with the platform participants
• Contribute contentto build your reputation and become a valued member, helping to build the community
• Connect with the influencers, so you can enlist them to help shape opinions about your product or service
• Conversion of strategy execution into desired outcomes (e.g., increased brand awareness, website traffic, sales, etc.)
Step 3. Social Media Execution
Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you'll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas.
Feeding. Whether it's a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you've put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.
Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this--but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive.
Step 4. Measurement and Optimization
Social media marketing goals include, improving brand awareness, search engine rankings, relevant site traffic, and conversions performance (e.g., sales for a product or service), as well as reputation management and engaging with consumers.
The challenge for some of these goals, such as engaging with consumers, is to make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART). In addition, objectives must be established for each type of social media platform in order to maximize results. The following are examples of SMART goals for four popular social media platforms: blogs, microblogs (Sina/Twitter), social networking sites, as well as image and video sharing sites.
Accessing your progress, then tune your marketing plan based on the feedback to optimize goal achievement. Reevaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan to account for the ever changing nature of consumer tastes and the social Web.
Written on Monday, 09 August 2010 22:33 by Matt McDougall