Social media is here to stay. A lot of B2B marketers have pushed away the thought saying that social media is for B2C and it is more for personal networking. Let’s face it, having a strong social media presence today is a must. It helps you reach and influence your target customers in a subtle yet consistent manner. It also helps you gather feedback about your products/services and that too very quickly. How do you go about building a effective social media strategy ?
How do you get started on your social journey, or if you already have a presence, how do you go about consolidating your presence? you might also want to read 8 things to consider while you build a website to generate leads
1) Build social infrastructure
The first step in an effective social media strategy is to identify the forums/channels that you want to be present in. That is partly defined by your target market and the type of products and services that you offer. Having decided on the forums/channels, use best practices to populate your profile in the best possible manner. Remember, what you provide as information is the only way a stranger can get to know you
2) Define your brand positioning & messaging
All communications and messaging that you use on social media should be in line with your branding and positioning strategy. How do you define your positioning strategy?
3) Create a content calendar
What content will you publish, what will be the themes, who will contribute. These are all questions you can start answering, as you start putting together a content calendar. The calendar can define the type of content assets that you will be creating, timelines for creation as well as promotion for the same.
4) Create a content crowd sourcing strategy
A lot of organizations get stuck in the content creation phase. They are not sure if the content they have produced is good enough. They try to generate too much, which starts consuming a lot of time. The key is to generate multiple pieces of content which can be generated at a regular frequency. Content needs to be valuable to your prospects, but it is not a must that each content meet a particular word limit. You can also plan audio/video interactions as content and plan to use that as a part of your strategy.
5) Post regularly, leverage tools
There are a variety of tools available which help you schedule content at different times. So if your target market is the US, then you might want to do twitter posts during the relevant timezone. It will help you achieve higher visibility. Having made posts, make sure that you promote them often through interesting visuals and graphics. Each content post could be promoted multiple times in unique ways, so that it does not appear evident that all the posts are linking back to the same content.
6) Engage on comments
As you track metrics on social media and increase following, make sure that you engage on comments made, whether positive or negative. There is a tendency to ignore the negative comments, but if you have a point of view, use the opportunity to convey it in the most appropriate manner. Also while commenting, instead of making categorical and one-sided comments, solicit responses and get the topic trending. It will help you get your post go viral.
Social media is a revolution and it is here to stay. The sooner you can embrace and leverage it, the sooner we will see the astonishing results that so many organizations have already found. It pays to have an effective social media strategy.
Pretty neat, thanks.
Liked the points made in 6.
How does one relate 4 to crowdsourcing?
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