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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