Social Media Planning

What You Should Consider When Creating Your Social Media Policy

Social media provides powerful communication tools that can have a significant impact on organizations and professional reputations. Thus, creating a Social Media Policy is one of the best ways to protect and enhance personal and professional reputations in the online arena. If you’re a one-person shop, you probably don’t have to spend too much time worrying about Social Media Policy, but if you intend to later employ workers, or outsource your company’s social media to a qualified professional, then here are seven (7) things to consider when crafting your social media policy:

Define the Purpose of Social Media Use in Your Company: Reiterate the goals of your social media marketing effort and what you hope to achieve through your use of new media.
Have a Plan: Consider your message, intended audiences, and the overall goals to be reached through social media, and design a strategy that works to meet those goals.
Introduce the Social Media Policy with Employee-centric Language: Apply the “What’s In It For Me?” Rule when introducing employees to their new Social Media Policy. Focus on the things they can do, rather than what they can’t do, thus shifting the paradigm of compliance.
Outline Responsibilities: Specifically state who provides final approval for the content and who is in charge of managing your social media outlets.
Encourage Employees/Contractors to Exercise Good Judgment and Use Common Sense: Search engines can archive posts and comments for years after they’ve been created, and words can be easily forwarded, mass-produced, and re-broadcast several times over in the realm of new media, thus employees and contractors should be encouraged to be prudent in their actions on social media and exercise good judgment.
Distinguish the “Personal Voice” from the “Institutional Voice”: Specifically state the perimeters upon which employees are allowed to use company-branded social media outlets, and how they may utilize their affiliation with your company in their personal social media space (if at all).
Update Your Policy (as needed): The ever-changing nature of the technology-based mediums of social media means that the tools can and do change frequently. While any Social Media Policy constructed should focus on the principles behind the policy and not one specific platform, periodic review of the policy, along with an annual employee affirmation of your company’s policy, is a good way to ensure that it is relevant and effect in the social networking space.

Do you have any questions about social media policy?

5 Simple Steps to Start Using Social Media Today

By sss4success 1 Comment

social-media-bandwagon — Creative Commons by Matt Hamm

Even with the proliferation of news media outlets reporting record uses of technology and social media and tons of success stories of how smaller organizations are able to use social media to increase their bottom line, there are still some people “on the fence” about whether or not social media will work for them and their company (Check out this cool infographic on How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media).

For those few, still sitting on the sidelines wondering if Social Media will work for them, I propose the following 5 Simple Steps to Get Started Using Social Media Today:

1. Stake Your Claim: Grab your name on all of the social media networks out there (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.). It’s always better to be safe rather than sorry and risk losing your name to someone else who picks it up once you’ve become popular. Also, if you grab a name, like a Twitter account, but don’t intend to use it that often, note that on the profile, and tell your visitors the best place to find you online.

2. Make It Look Professional: If your goal is to lead people to your company’s website or blog, make sure it looks professional and is user-friendly when visitors arrive. You only get one chance to make a first impression. If visitors check out your site once and don’t like it, they likely won’t return again.

3. Try It for Three Months: Start with 3 months of content to give yourself an opportunity to learn the tools and how best to use them, and to figure out some of the better strategies for engaging your audience in the social media space.

4. Review Your Analytics: After the first three months, have a look at your web and social media analytics and decide what they’re telling you. I suggest you only look at your analytics AFTER a few months have passed, because it will drive you crazy to look at them on daily or weekly basis, especially since you likely won’t see much change in the early days.

5. Repeat Step 3 for Another Three Months: Building relationships and capitalizing on the widespread popularity of social interaction for business use is something that takes time. Let your first three months be the “test case” for whether or not you can handle adding a social media marketing strategy to your marketing mix, and finding out of social media venues truly work for your brand and your customers. Also, be prepared to tweak things here and there as the need arises. Now’s the time to ask yourself a few questions: After three months, can you see the potential of where this can lead? Have you uncovered some new information about yourself, your customers, or your competition that can give you the edge for how you market to your customer base? Can your business afford not to be engaging customers in some capacity on social networks, given the millions of people that roam the web every day?

At the end of the day, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to be proactive in marketing your business online. At the very least, give it a six-month concerted effort and see if it’s for you. And don’t, I can help. Feel free to use me as a resource, either for Social Media Training (where I show you how to use these tools for yourself) or Social Media Consulting (where I use these tools on your behalf). Fill out the Contact Us form to get started.

What’s stopping you from using social media in your small business?

Kindra Cotton, Small Business Survival Specialist

5 Strategies for Managing Social Media on a Limited Budget

By sss4success 1 Comment

Time and money are two things that are rarely in infinite supply, thus the following five (5) strategies are provided to show you How to Manage Social Media on a Limited Budget:

Managing Social Media — Image from hotsocialbuzz.com

Step 1: Know Why You’re Using Social Media. It’s best to have a clear vision as to why you’re using social media and know what objectives you hope to achieve in the social networking space (e.g. to listen, participate in, lead, and be guided by the invisible hand of digital social conversation). Step one is a great time to review your Social Media Marketing Plan that lays out exactly how social media outlets will be used to drive traffic to your website/blog, generate interest in your content, produce leads for new customers, and provide ways to keep existing customers actively engaged through your social networking activities. Doing so will ensure that you don’t waste the limited time and resources you do have “barking up the wrong social media tree”.

Step 2: Listen. In real life, you’d rarely jump into a conversation in progress without taking the time to become well-versed in the topic being discussed. The same principle applies when it comes to participating in social media. In order to effectively gauge how you can provide useful content to the already overcrowded social media space, it is important to listen intently and purposefully to what’s been said about your brand, your industry, and your competitors, in addition to keeping up with the latest news and trends that may effect your long and short-term business planning. Subscribe to your favorite publication’s RSS feeds using Google Reader. Better yet, take the time now to review this brief tutorial to learn what RSS feeds are and how you can use them: http://youtu.be/f5lJ-fcDDAI

You can save yourself the time and energy of surfing the web, by bringing the web to use via RSS feeds, which can deliver the top news that you’re actually interested in. The last part of the listening step is to set up Google Alerts and Social Mention for you, your company, and other relevant keywords that can help you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s been said on the web and via social networks.

Step 3: Use Your Tools Wisely. Trying to manage several social media sites as one person or a small department can certainly become a cumbersome chore, especially after you’ve incorporated 2 or more outlets. Great tools like Tweetdeck and HootSuite provide excellent ways to monitor your social networks in a column-based format, which you’ll find particularly helpful for managing multiple streams of information. Tweetdeck is a free application that you can download and install on your computer/mobile device, whereas HootSuite is a web-based application that offers similar functionality through both free and low-cost versions. As with most things, the paid version of HootSuite offers more extras, but you should only consider these extras if you can see where you can derive a direct business utility from them. This blog post talks more about HootSuite Pro (the paid version) and gives a bit more information about it.

Step 4: Learn From the Story Your Analytics Are Telling You. Review the web analytics for your website or blog and look at what they tell you about your content and your site design. Specifically, look at where your traffic is coming from and what keywords and phrases people are searching for to get to your site. Note which pages/posts people visit most often and how much time they spend there. This can help you as you re-design your site, or it can aid when you look for new content to create.

Step 5: Survey Your Customers. At some point, you will want to take a direct assessment of how we’ll you’re doing from your customers. Provide a brief 3-5 question survey to find out how what you’re doing right, where you can make improvements, and what suggestions or questions your customers may have. It’s a great way to get feedback and let your customers know you’re focused on meeting their needs. (Please take a few moments to fill out our brief survey).

Performing each of these tasks takes a dedicated effort, however once you get the hang of how all these steps work in conjunction together and how you can use tech tools available to make your time more productive, you’ll find that managing social media on a limited budget is a lot easier than you think.

What tips or tricks do you have for managing social media on a limited budget?