Social media has made a tremendous impact on your business and now
you need to come up with ways that you can improve your strategy to make
social media even more effective for you. A checklist can help
tremendously.
A wonderful way to get organized and to stay
organized when it comes to your social media interactions for business
is to develop a checklist. Checklists are a wonderful tool when it comes
to many things. It is a really sensible idea never to commit anything
to memory. Of course, there will be details that you do remember on a
consistent basis; however, if you have everything written down, you will
have a guarantee of never allowing anything to fall through the cracks.
An effective checklist for your social media marketing efforts should look something like this:
Organizing your social media strategy: Evaluate
the structure of your business organization and determine if it is set
up in a manner that is conducive to achieving great success in your
business. You should ask yourself:
- Who (or what) supports your efforts?
- How will your staff benefit from your use of social media and is it being shared in a way that will be of great use to everyone with whom you work?
- Is the structure of your social media team solid and does it do what it is supposed to do?
- What proportion of your staff is already working with social media in your business?
- Among your staff, which people are helping your social media marketing efforts and which people are hindering them?
Listen carefully: Listening is one of the most important skills to have in business. You can't do anything unless you have learned how to listen.
- A part of listening is thinking long and hard about your company branding, products and services, and people who you want associated with your business. Whatever you choose to put in place will be a result of listening to what other people need from you in the way of offerings.
- Send out surveys to your prospective customers and existing customers. When you have received the responses to the surveys, really listen to what they are saying and adjust your approach accordingly.
- Listen to what your competition is saying. Watch what they are doing and how they are approaching other people in an effort to sell their products and services.
Set up goals and objectives for your business: An
extremely important part of listening and learning from other people is
the interactions that you have with those people as a result. When it
comes to your staff and how they interact online, it is critical that
what and how they interact is appropriate and follows the set of ethics
and etiquette that has already been established.
Establish your target audience: Before you make any effort at all to reach out to your target audience, you need to identify who they are and how they feel.
- Understand their needs and try to come up with solutions to their problems before you interact with them.
- Identify which social media channels they prefer to frequent and interact through those channels.
- Identify the behaviors of your target audience. Figure out if they like to create content, share other people's content, or just silently read other people's interactions.
- Figure out which methods of communication are preferred by your customers and use those methods consistently.
Have your strategy buttoned up: Write down whatever your established social media marketing strategy happens to be.
- Engage your audience. Exactly how you begin to approach this is up to you. You can take on an active or a more passive role, depending on what works for you and your business.
- Use analytics tools to help you to understand how you are doing with your social media involvement and how you can improve upon what you are already doing.
Use the tools and tactics that are available to you: You
have already committed to publishing a certain volume and frequency of
content. The next thing that you need to do is to commit to using the
various social media channels and tools on a very regular basis. The
more you use them, the more skillful you will become. Use those tools to
their full potential for increased success in your business.
- Find social networks that are most appropriate for you and your business. Jump in immediately and start to interact. Write training materials for your staff so that they can become as adept at using social media as you have become. Interact as much as possible.
- Blog as often as you can. Blogging is effective for so many reasons. One of them is the fact that blogs are made for social interaction on many social media channels at once. All social media marketing campaigns should include a blog. If they are used correctly, they will drive a high volume of traffic to your website.
- Share as much media with others as possible. One of your purposes when it comes to social interaction is to share as much as possible of your knowledge and expertise with others.
