Best Practice Advice

It's time to get social! 7 key tips to optimise your social media strategy

According to the 2011 Social Media Marketing Report, a significant 90% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business. As more and more companies are integrating social media into their marketing and communications plans, the focus needs to be on creating an effective social strategy.  Without a strategy your brand will be undoubtedly lost in the wider social media scenario and therefore in this month’s best practice article, our experts show you how to optimise your social media strategy, enabling you to be successful on Facebook, Twitter & Co.

The pre-requisite for an effective social media strategy is to believe in the power of social media and understand how it will benefit your business. If your company is jumping into social media because “everyone else is doing it” or because you just want to sell more products this will not work. Social media is a long-term commitment and is all about building relationships that are relevant to your company’s overall goals.

Please find below our experts’ 7 key tips to develop a strong social media strategy:

1) Build your company/brand identity on social media

Social media can undoubtedly offer a great way to build brand and company image. If your target is young and fun-loving, then this is a good opportunity to break away from formal corporate language and  use colloquial speech and perhaps some jokey tweets? On the other hand, if you’re talking to a B2B target make sure you always use an appropriate tone of voice and provide them with quality content. Never forget that your personality on the web is a reflection of your business’ personality!

2) Engage with your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is vital to understanding what their preferred social network is or how you can interact with them. Is your target audience more on Facebook and Twitter or LinkedIn? What are they interested in (i.e. special offers, product information, apps/games or downloadable brochures)? Answering these questions can help you to tailor your social media presence according to your customers’ preferences.

3) Determine Goals and Objectives of your Strategy

Firstly define which department in your company is responsible for the development of your social media strategy and never forget that an effective social media strategy requires the involvement and the cooperation of various members of your staff, from product development to marketing and sales. When you’re setting your objectives make sure that they are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely! Some of the most commonly used objectives are improving the brand presence across social channels, increasing positive sentiments about your brand, developing relationships and engagement, increasing traffic to your website etc…

4) Think before you Post: Content Matters!

Always pay attention to the content of your posts and tweets before publishing them, to make sure that they read correctly and appeal to your target audience. Give them the information that they are looking for and can use,  have fun and share information with friends and followers.  When tweeting, try and use a relevant hashtag which will help generate more followers. 

5) Interact: don’t Just Talk, Listen

Free resources like Google alerts or professional social media management tools (like eCircle’s new social media platform eC-social) allow you to listen to what people are saying about you on the net and react or communicate back to these people. Take their feedback and implement it into your marketing strategy but also make sure that you promptly respond to people who post on your fan page or twitter account to meet their expectations and make them feel like an integral part of your business community.

6) Never stop the Conversation

Never abandon your social media accounts once you’ve started. There is nothing worse for your brand image than leaving your Facebook wall empty or not tweeting for a long period of time. Your target audience is waiting to receive information and feedback from you on your fan page or twitter account, and you role is to always keep them up-to-date, monitor them and give your customers more material to interact with.

7) Measure the Results of your Efforts

You have goals and objectives set, right?  That means you should be able to measure your success and optimise your social media strategy accordingly. Measuring social media is an open debate and experts are questioning themselves on what metrics have to be used to measure social success or what objective can be measured with one specific metric.

For example, if you want to measure the improvements in terms of brand presence you can consider the increase in the number of fan/followers, the number of comments, “Likes” or number of times your brand/product is mentioned on the internet. If you instead want to measure the sentiment about your brand you have to compare the number of positive and negative comments to get a ratio; if you’re getting too many negative comments than it’s time to react and see what’s wrong with your brand or product.

Conclusion

Social media strategies differ greatly for each business and for each industry.  However, all companies need to understand the amount of effort that social media marketing involves to be successful. Social media needs to have an “all hands on deck” approach in order to be successfully integrated into your company’s goals and objectives. The brand presence on social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs is only one part of the social strategy; the social strategy is in fact built on smart goals/objectives and  on good interactions with customers based on the talk/listen ratio.  

This article is a summary of eCircle’s newsletter "Inside Digital Marketing". If you wish to receive further news from the email and social media marketing sector please subscribe here