social media marketing plans

As stated in “The Social Media Planning Process (Part 1)”, I typically like to map out a Social Media Marketing Plan that shows how social media will be utilized to build a brand online. The first part of the process is creating and updating social networks profiles, and the second part measures the effectiveness of your Social Media Marketing Campaign by monitoring your Social Media Marketing Analytics by some specific metrics. Namely:

The number of web hits to your company website and/or blog.
The number of emails collected on your company website and/or blog for your email marketing campaign.
The number of Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn Connections, and YouTube Subscribers acquired.
The number of people that attend special events advertised through your social media networks.
The number of referrals from social media fans, followers, connections, and subscribers.
The number of new units sold/leads generated.
The number of units sold/new leads generated from existing customers.

The final component of the Social Media Marketing Plan is monitoring the long-term effectiveness of your company’s social media marketing strategy, as it is key for identifying new customer markets, gaining additional customer feedback, as well as assessing what social media marketing avenues are working best. In this stage, assessing marketing effectiveness occurs by utilizing a collection of online market surveys and/or customer feedback questionnaires, and thoroughly monitoring the analytics of your company’s website, blog, and social media networks, and periodically analyzing the information received for emerging trends and industry shifts.

Social media initiatives can be time consuming, but if done right there can be a great payoff.

So, with that in mind: Where are you in your social media planning process?

Kindra Cotton, Small Business Survival Specialist

The Social Media Planning Process (Part 2)

Typically, what I like to do at SSS for Success is map out a Social Media Marketing Plan that fits squarely within the overall marketing plan of a company. Specifically, the Social Media Marketing Plan highlights how social media outlets will be utilized to:

1) Drive traffic to your company’s website or blog,

2) Generate interest in the site’s content,

3) Generate sales or leads for new customers, and

4) Provide ways of keeping existing customers actively engaged in the company’s brand through its website, blog, or other social media outlets.

In order to accomplish the goals set forth in this Social Media Marketing Strategy, I usually take a company through the process of creating and updating their profiles on various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Then I delve into more specific strategies intent on acquiring more Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans, LinkedIn Connections, and YouTube Subscriptions through a series of mindful updates that are relevant to each of these communities and ultimately help your company build that brand recognition among the users who frequent these communities.

For those that have already created many of these accounts, I step back and analyze the medium in question in relation to the overall marketing goals of the company. Everyone doesn’t need a Twitter account. Now, it is always a good idea to register your brand name just in case you need it for future use, but just having a Twitter account and sending out random, sporadic, or spammy messages every now and again only promoting your brand, doesn’t do you any good. So part of the Social Media Planning Process is accessing which avenues are going to work best for your brand message to reach your core customers. What that means is if you’re using these outlets now, but not using them well, then you may need to discontinue them, or perhaps change the direction so that it fits better into your online marketing strategy.

With this in mind, can you firmly state Why You Need Social Media in your small business?

Kindra Cotton, Small Business Survival Specialist

The Social Media Planning Process (Part 1)