Social Media Strategy Steps For Business

Tuesday 19 March, 2013

by Catriona Pollard

Are you using social media already for your business or thinking about using it? A social media strategy will help you define your purpose for using social media for your business. This will help you to communicate with your followers effectively and position your brand on social media appropriately.

Here are a few key steps to creating your social media strategy:

• Set objectives
  
  Think about why you want your business to use social media. Are you joining to make more contacts within your industry? Do you want to build relationships using an online medium? Would you like more engagement from your current customers? Once you determine your purpose for using social media you can set your goals and objectives for what you want to achieve. These will also help to measure your success and plan more effective ongoing strategies.
  
• Create a bio for your business
  
  On most social media sites there is an option to include a short description about your business. This is so that other users can find you and understand who you are straight away. Write two or three sentences describing your business and the value you can offer and don't forget to add your web address.
  
• Choose a social media site
  
  There are many different social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs and YouTube. Examine the characteristics of each site to determine which one best suits your goals and business values. For example, if your goal was to make new business contacts, perhaps LinkedIn would be best.
  
• What content will you share?
  
  Sharing interesting and valuable information will get you more followers and prompt engagement. Your objectives provide a good guide for what information to share. For instance, if you are aiming to be seen as an industry expert, your posts should relate to your industry and be highly useful and informative.
  
• How will you engage your followers?
  
  Think about how you can get your followers to participate in a conversation with you. This could be by posting valuable content, asking questions or commenting on their posts. Engagement and communication is a two-way street, if you make the effort your customers will too, thus building stronger relationships.
  
• How will you measure success?
  
  By measuring your success you'll discover which actions get the best results, so you can quickly change tactics to get better outcomes. You could use a paid or free social media monitoring service or develop your own system. For example, Social Sprout is a paid service and monitors your followers, influence, engagement, clicks and more.
  
• Who will manage your social media accounts?
  
  Social media management is a PR and communications discipline, so if you don't have a qualified person within your organisation, think about outsourcing it to a reputable agency.

Source: ceoonline.com