Six steps to successful social media campaigns

Social media is an essential part of marketing your business. If you’re looking to start posting, where do you start? And if you’re already using social media, how can you do it better?

Use these six simple steps as a guide.

1. Determine your objectives

Start by deciding which of your organization’s objectives you want to address with social media. Then determine who you need to reach to make that happen. What’s important to those people? Which social media channels are they most likely to use? You don’t have to be everywhere. In fact, it’s smarter to focus your efforts on the channels where you’re most likely to reach the right people. 

2. Establish a clear identity

To get the most value from social media, you may need to split your efforts among several social media sites – such as Twitter for customer service and YouTube for recruiting. You may even need to have more than one “handle” (account name) on a social media site – such as a “help” handle for customer service and a “gives back” handle related to charitable pursuits. If you do that, be sure to establish a clear identity for each social media account you operate.

3. Aim at the right targets

Many companies judge success simply by how many likes or followers they have. But followers don’t necessarily equal a return on investment – especially if those followers aren’t engaging with you regularly. From the outset, establish metrics that truly tie back to your objectives, such as average time to respond to customer service inquiries.

4. Get buy-in from the top

After developing your objectives, identity, and metrics, you have one more step before you tweet your first tweet or post your first video: getting buy-in. To make social media work, it must have internal advocates. In particular, communicators need to get buy-in from top levels of the company, key content contributors, and key reviewers. (FYI – I’ll talk more about reviewers in my next post, which is about dealing with negative comments.) Getting buy-in also means getting a budget. Although you can post on Twitter or Facebook at no cost, social media isn’t free.

5. Develop a plan

Social media must be part of an integrated communications plan. Here at OSD, we consider it just one part of the “inbound marketing funnel.” As explained in our free e-book, Introduction to Inbound Marketing, this funnel helps you build relationships (and traffic, sales, etc.) by providing content that engages, educates and answers questions. When you’re planning, don’t just think about what your tweet will say. Ask “where do they go from there?” And so on and so on …

6. Learn, improve, repeat

Finally, and most important: Don’t just talk. Listen. Your social media content should involve users in a conversation. If all you do is post news releases and other self-promotional content, they will tune out. Use social media as an opportunity to listen to your customers. Think of it as a low-cost research method.

Social media has revolutionized the way companies communicate with consumers. But in the end, it’s just another channel. Just like with any other form of marketing, the most important thing is to align goals with audiences with actions.

-Paige