Organizing Social Media Strategy

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.

Social Media Myths Debunked

Like many new things, Social Media initially met with a lot of resistance because of misconceptions about what social marketing is and how it can be used by accounting firms. If you are serious about getting into the Social Network circle (or circus) as part of your company's marketing plan, it might be well worth your time to clarify some of these misconceptions before you begin.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A FAD: Sociologists have recognized the paradigm shift in the way we communicate during these times where technology has taken center stage.

Rarely do we send snail mail. We are more preferential to e-mails for many reasons. They reach our audience faster, cost less and save on paper which in turn saves trees. If we can't reach our Accountant on their office phone, what do we do? We call them on their cell phones. We used to get our news by way of the morning paper with a cup of coffee; now, friends and strangers from the opposite side of the globe tweet about the death of Michael Jackson even before CNN can say - "This just in".

Imagine going back to the days when all these did not exist. When internet is "down", almost all businesses come to a screeching halt. Our lives and businesses have become so entwined with technology and with the communication shift that Social networking brought about we are left helpless without it.