Planning your Social Media Marketing

Every business needs a marketing plan and this should also include a Social Media strategy. You will need to think about what you want to achieve from your Social Media Marketing, list your targets and aim for these. You should start your Social Media Marketing plan by doing a SWOT Analysis.

Strengths – what are your businesses strengths? What are you good at? What can you offer your customers that your competitors cannot? Do you have cost advantages over your competitors? Where are your customers most likely to interact with you?

Weaknesses – what does your business need to work on? What do your competitors do that is better – Blogging, Facebook, Twitter?

Opportunities – work on your weaknesses and turn them into strengths, are there any other Social Media channels that you can utilise to gain customer interaction such as Pinterest and Google+?

Threats – are there any obstacles that could potentially get in your way to stop you from turning your weaknesses into strengths? such as time, costs or resources?

The next step is your objectives and what you would like to achieve from your Social Media Marketing plan.

Create interesting content

Give your followers something they cannot get anywhere else and offer tips and advice on your industry. Give away prizes exclusively to your Facebook Fans. Ask questions and engage with your audience, people like to offer their thoughts. The more comments that you get, the more you will succeed at News Feed Optimisation and so will reach a wider audience.
Interact with your fans and keep a conversation going, this will draw attention to content seen in the News Feed. You may not see positive feedback all of the time, but people like to see how you deal with negative comments.
Incorporate a variety of posts from links, videos and images. Most users aren’t interested in reading lengthy posts, instead they like to look at visual content and they are a good way at getting fans excited about new products.
Link back to your website, blog, youtube and Twitter, this is good for SEO and it will remind fans of what products and services you have to offer.
Be explicit in your posts, tell people what you want them to do with a calls to action. Explain to users what you want them to do, for example, “like” this post if….. or “comment” on this post if……

What else do you need to know about Social Media Marketing?

Find out who your audience is, are they B2B or B2C? And what social media channels they are participating in.
What do you want to accomplish? Increase in sales? More likes? More traffic to your website?

Points to remember

Is all your profile complete? Make sure you include your website address, logo and contact details and a bit about what you do. Are all your social profiles on business stationery? People will need to know that you have a Facebook and Twitter presence so make sure you put these on your business cards, leaflets and email signature etc.

If you would like help with your social media, please have a look at the Social Media packages that we offer.