Social Media Strategy

 


Social Media Strategy




Kabani, who founded and runs the social media agency The Marketing Zen

Group, developed an “ACT” framework for a successful online and social media

strategy. The acronym stands for “Attract, Convert, and Transform” and I find

it a useful framework for positioning an online business. To paraphrase Kabani:

Attract: To attract likely prospects, you must stand out from a crowded

field with a clear and unique brand, a strong value proposition, worthwhile

content, social proof (testimonials and an active, emotionally engaged

community), and an appealing incentive for individuals to sign up for

emails or fill out an inquiry form.

Convert: Optimize the design and user experience on your social platforms

and your website, so you successfully convert browsers to buyers.

Transform: Build a bona fide personal and emotional connection with your

customers or clients. Doing business with you should be no mere

transaction. It becomes a relationship with your brand, one that inspires and

rewards a passionate following, loyalty, and brand advocacy.

That’s a good way to view your overall business plan, your web presence, and

your social media program. Social media marketing is a strategic effort to

continually deepen the relationship between your business and its audience.

You’re constantly nurturing your audience, encouraging them to graduate from

prospects to buyers to loyalists.

One Channel, Many Functions

Virtually anything your business or organization attempts to do today—be it a

promotion, a market research project, a human resources initiative, customer

service, investor relations—deserves the amplification and reach of social media.

For businesses, social media serves as a channel for several different functions:


°Customer service


°Customer engagement and brand-equity-building


°Promotion and customer retention


In my work at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, my fellow marketers and I

frequently discuss where social belongs in our integrated promotions calendar.

The calendar outlines our entire year’s major promotional events, seasonal

holidays, and new product or category launches. Each promotional campaign

merits a concerted push from multiple marketing channels: e-mail, catalog or

other direct mail, paid search ads and online banners, affiliate marketing, press

releases, and on-website promotional messaging.

Social also belongs in that marketing mix. Today we message any major

promotion or product launch on Facebook, Twitter, and our blog. Depending on

the promotion, you might also amplify the message on other networks or niche

platforms: YouTube, Groupon, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others.

Any business that has or aspires to have a strong personal connection to its

audience must establish a robust presence in social media. There it must commit

to four things:


1. A customer-oriented culture that combines responsiveness, personality,

and authenticity. The aim is to respond to customer comments, questions,

and complaints immediately, just as you would in your inbound customer

service e-mail and call center.

Your customer orientation will also help you

find the “influentials”—your most active brand loyalists, who serve as self-

appointed ambassadors and help you in a multitude of ways, doing the vast

majority of posting in your community, blogging to their own large circle of

influence, making referrals to friends, offering helpful consumer feedback

and testimonials, and so on.

 


2. Content planning, just as a periodical publisher would do. When you’re

active in social media, you need a posting schedule for Facebook, Twitter,

and your blog that keeps your page fresh and your brand front and center in

the activity feeds of your fans and followers. (Remember, 90% of your fans

will never return to your page, so they’ll only see your posts in their feed.)

Content plans encompass what you’ll say in your social spaces, as well as

multichannel promotions and events to which you’ll invite your community.

3. Promotion of your social space. If you build it, they won’t come—unless

you invest thought, time, and some money in promotion. 


4. A retention plan to keep community members coming back. The biggest

boon of the social media revolution—its massive and exponentially

growing scale—is also its Achilles heel. The sheer number of people,

messages, and fan pages makes for massive overload. It guarantees that

most of your fans will have only a fleeting engagement with you online,

then move on to other things. For most organizations, Facebook and the

other social media platforms are a customer engagement opportunity, not a

place to troll for prospective customers or hit them with a sales pitch. For

that reason, you’ll want to use social media to get to know your existing

customers better, thank them and reward them for their patronage, and give

them a unique window into the inner workings and culture of your business.

Make them feel special, appreciated, and part of something important—a

business or brand that stands for something.


Listening


But enough about you. Yes, before you dive into social media, you have to know

what your business stands for and how it will translate its value and identity into

the social media realm. But the process will also depend on an outward focus,

and this means a listening ear directed at your consumers.

The best thing you can do for your corporate social media program is be a great

listener. Employ social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or

SocialMention—or simply perform regular Twitter searches—to stay abreast of

social media conversations about your brand, industry, and competitors. You’ll

learn the hot-button topics on the minds of your audience, and start to identify

the most active and influential people inside your community and in the social

sphere at large.


Planning


High-impact social media campaigns involve many moving parts, both within

the social media landscape and in traditional media. 


upon players in your marketing, legal, customer service, and operations

departments. They require technology development and a number of weeks or

months of lead time.

As a result, a social media program requires disciplined planning in advance.

You’ll need to employ some of the following processes:

Daily community management staffing plan

Monthly publishing schedules

Research, survey, and customer insights projects

Promotions and campaign strategy briefs

Creative design briefs and production

Technology requirements: writing, vendor selection or inhouse

development, user-experience testing, user acceptance testing (UAT)

testing/debugging

Budgeting and reporting

Community Management

Facebook would be the first to tell you that merely having a brand page won’t

guarantee traffic to it. It takes daily posting of engaging content that inspires

interactions. Here are Facebook’s suggestions for winning posting practices:


1. Post once a day to maximize reach. Posting too frequently reduces the

amount of time needed to distribute each Page post to your audience.


2. Express your core message within the first 90 characters of your post to

ensure your audience sees it when your Page post becomes an ad or

sponsored story. Longer messages will be truncated.


3. Post at the optimal time. Only you know what’s right for your business, and

you can use your Page Insights to figure out what’s working. Many

restaurants find that posting between 7 am and 12 pm is ideal, while

retailers find that posting between 8 am and 2 pm works best. People

engage with Pages the most between 9 pm and 10 pm, and the 18-24 age

demographic is the most engaged during this time.

It’s important to digest this information, because as businesspeople, we have

attention spans that are often biased toward what occurs during the workweek

and during business hours. With social, you need to adopt an always-on, 24/7


365 mindset, and, to some degree, you need to staff to support it by monitoring

your social media community off hours and on weekends, with either internal. 


You can use a social publishing tool so you can write posts ahead of time and

schedule them to be published to Facebook, Twitter, your blog, and so forth

during off hours. But to be quickly responsive to comments and questions—and

to any potential social media crises that might emerge—you’ll need to staff to

support a nontraditional schedule.

Everything about Facebook is huge: it is a deluge of postings scrolling

constantly at a billion or so people, worldwide, 24 hours a day. Every new

message in the activity feed is quickly scrolled offscreen by a parade of

subsequent messages. For your company’s updates to stand out from the crowd

and appear on your fans’ radar, you must strive for high interactivity—the more

people are commenting on and “liking” your posts, the better. Each comment

and “like” amplifies your reach.

Compare these two scenarios for two equally popular brands, each with 10,000

Facebook fans:

Both brands post to their pages, and their stories are seen by 15% of fans =

1,500 people.

Brand X gets a post response rate, or “virality,” of 0.75%, while brand Y’s

more fun, useful, or provocative post stimulates a 2.5% response.

Each brand’s fans have 350 friends apiece, roughly the Facebook average.

Brand X inspires 11 fans to create 3,800 new stories across Facebook.

Brand Y inspires 38 fans to create 13,300 new stories across Facebook.

The same principles hold true for Twitter. Two Twitter accounts can have an

equal number of followers and even generate the same number of tweets, but the

one that inspires the most retweets, direct replies, and use of its hashtag will

generate far more impressions.

When you do post to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn—even when you upload a

video to YouTube—you should invite interaction. Ask what your fans and

followers think. Solicit feedback. When community members post to your

Facebook wall, listen carefully to what they say, and respond to them with

answers or gratitude.


Important to notice:

When you post to your social media hot-spots, invite interaction. It will

multiply the reach of your story, engaging your existing fans and helping to

attract new ones.

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