How To Develop A Social Media Plan

Social media can be an incredible tool for you or your business. It can provide you with more fan and customer insight, direct communication channels and the ability to measure the effectiveness of these conversations very closely.


But as the proliferation of social media platforms grow, participating can turn into little more than a giant time suck without some sort of structure behind it. With that in mind, here's a basic 5 step plan for kickstarting your company's social media strategy.

Step 1: Listen

Social media is a term we use to to discuss the online tools that help facilitate conversations. Before you or your company can be a part of those conversations, you need to know what people are already talking about so you can determine how you can best contribute. Setting up some tools to monitor conversations is easy. The difficult part is choosing the keywords that will return the most usable results.

Step 2: Prepare & Identify

Social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, not companies. Once you have a sense of what people are talking about, it's time to identify the appropriate people inside your organization to and prepare a strategy that fits you or your company's marketing needs.

Find the People
People want to have conversations with individuals or companies that are experts in their area, who are passionate about their work and who are empowered to act on the feedback they receive from the social community.

Set Rules of Engagement
Make sure you or your company has a social media policy in place that offers guidelines on the appropriate way to engage with your fans or customers in online conversations.

Define Your Strategy
Social media is comprised of many different platforms. Rather than trying to participate in all of them, target one or two that seem to make the most sense. Having an engagement strategy will help to determine how much time is devoted to social media campaigns, communications, what will be the focus areas for engagement and of course, it will help to measure success.

Step 3: Engage & Execution

This is the fun part! Create several different social media campaigns and start leaving comments on blogs, uploading images to Flickr, building a community on Twitter and Facebook or FriendFeed and any other communities you would like to target. Implement the social media strategy  to help generate discussions, interest and customer and fan loyalty. It might also be useful for you to create a social media editorial calendar so that it's easier to structure time to participate.

Step 4: Go Offline

As stated in step one, social media is a group of online tools that help facilitate conversations and increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. However, there's really no replacement for face-to-face interaction. Use trade shows and other events as opportunities to build even stronger relationships with the members of your online community. This could be in the form of an exclusive session, an informal breakfast or even a group picture on the event floor.

Step 5: Measure Success

Unlike other campaigns, measuring social media success begins by asking more questions:

1. Did we learn something about our current fans/customers that we didn't know before?
2. Did we acquire new customer and fans and increase loyalty?
3. Did we raise the level of our online visibility and increase brand awareness?
4. Did our efforts generate more interest and traffic to our website (s)
5. Did our fans and customers learn something about us?
6. Were we able to engage our fans and customers in new conversations?
7. Do you or your company now have an effective new tool for feedback and reputation management?
   

It's recommended that you use online tracking tools to monitor the conversations and interest of you or your company. Use blog search engines to track and graph topics as well as compare terms- to help benchmark you or your company against your competitors.

Conclusion

The potential payoff for  social media participation and development is enormous! Any individual, business, company, artist or entrepreneur using social media and social media tools will have a better sense of how they are perceived by their target audiences, they will establish a two way dialog with key stakeholders and they will empower their fans and customers to speak with them, not at them.

To achieve the highest level of success with your online marketing and social media marketing efforts, it's important that you develop a "strategic approach to social media". Developing your social media plan is key before you start participating in this new growing medium.

If you have any comments on this article feel free to contact Social Media Circle here.