Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business

The third step in effectively integrating social media into your business is to design a strategy. Social media is a long term commitment, not a quick fix or a jump-on-the-bandwagon strategy. Try to avoid the impulse to rush to use the tools without designing a formal social media strategy. 

Thoughtful planning and analysis is needed to create a social media strategy which can then be used to guide you and your organization in the ongoing use of social media tools – whether you choose to implement a few key tools or expand to include a broad array of tools. By formalizing your social media strategy – including gaining buy-in from your management team – you can prevent misunderstandings about social media’s purpose and what it can and cannot do for your business. There is a definite experimental nature to social media and making everyone clear on that fact is important to the long-term success of your strategy.

One of my favorite social media blogs, Social Media Examiner, offers seven key points to consider when designing a social media strategy:

1. Determine your goals and objectives: How do your social media goals and objectives fit within your overall business goals?
   Here are four common objectives, but there are many more:
   a. Improve brand presence across social channels
   b. Increase positive sentiment about your brand
   c. Develop relationships for future partnership opportunities 
   d. Increase traffic to your website
2. Research, research, research: Test the waters. Start by developing a list of social media sites where you can potentially engage with relevant people. Check out each of the social media sites on your list and search for your brand name, your competitors and your target keywords.  This research helps us determine how relevant each site is to our objectives.  By listening (hmm, I seem to remember a helpful blog post about listening ), we get a sense of who our target audience is, where they are and what is important to them.
3. Create a Digital Rolodex of Contacts and Content: Get to know the influencers who are relevant to your business.
4. Join the conversation and develop relationships: Post comments on blogs and forums, answer questions on Yahoo! and LinkedIn, join groups related to your industry and join Twitter chats. Begin fostering relationships by following influencers and others in your industry.
5. Strengthen relationships, when possible, with face-to-face interaction at industry events. While so much can be done with a keyboard, nothing beats the offline, in person conversation.
6. Measure results: Constantly return to your objectives. Choose the metrics that make the most sense, but stay open to considering others as your use of social media evolves. You may find, down the road, that different metrics help assess your success even better than the first few you chose. For example, measuring the increase in your followers and fans may take a back seat to measuring your brand’s positive mention ratio, as your brand emerges and grows.
7. Analyze, Adapt and Improve: Analyze your social media campaigns, adapt any new findings into your current processes and improve your efforts. Returning to what was mentioned in the introduction to this post – testing and experimentation are ongoing and help you fine tune your social media efforts.

Thank you Nick Shin, author at Social Media Examiner, for your guidance.

Relationship building is the overall purpose of social media. Be patient as your social media efforts gain traction. You are in it for the long haul! Use your well-designed, unanimously accepted social media strategy to help guide you as opportunities emerge and to ground you when it gets overwhelming.

What have you found helpful or difficult when creating your social media strategy?

Fear of Listening

It’s all about the listening. In school; in friendship; in relationships; in parenting; in business. But just because we can easily identify what we need to do, doesn’t mean we do it effortlessly. Far from it. Listening is a ton of work, we might not have the time for it and we might not always like what we hear.

In business, the benefits of virtual communities -- a business' online earpiece -- have been proven repeatedly: examples include Chick-fil-A, Intuit and Starbucks, to name three. Virtually connecting employees with customers can help promote a brand and can harness the customers’ creativity to improve the business’ product line. Utilizing a virtual community, Starbucks developed “My Starbucks Idea” where Starbucks employees introduced themselves with website profiles and visitors were asked to suggest products they would like to see introduced at Starbucks stores.

A big hurdle in developing a virtual community initiative or implementing a basic social media strategy is the fear of negative publicity. We have all witnessed, directly or indirectly, the power of the viral complaint. We know we are not perfect and businesses make mistakes just as people do. So why go out of our way to draw attention to a difficult situation or to give complainers a platform? The answer is: we want to connect with our customers to build a loyal customer base and gain insight into their thinking. Social media gives us the tools we have been wishing for to take some of the guesswork out of buyer behavior. 

Those tools come with planning and effort attached to them. “Most companies don’t have a strategy for what they’re trying to accomplish with their virtual communities,” says Constance Porter, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame. “They put up a website and a forum, but don’t plan for what they should do after that. They think consumers’ activity will emerge organically. Sometimes it does, but if the marketer isn’t playing a role, then they’re missing out on value.” The opportunity costs of ignoring the online conversation can be large.

We have to listen. Companies must be carefully monitoring online mentions. To negative mentions, we need quick and proper responses. Quick is easily understood. Proper responses involve using the right, thankful, polite tone, careful word choice and lack of idle promises. Negative mentions, handled properly, can turn into the best PR we never planned – as the virtual community sees and respects how we handle the delicate situations. Ignoring the negative, in hopes that it disappears in time, is taking an unnecessary risk when we have the power to steer the conversation toward a fruitful or at least conciliatory end. 

Two important lessons to keep in mind as we plan how to listen, engage and respond:

• Participating in a conversation changes that conversation. 

• Social media backlashes are not created by the initial trigger event, but are created by how the company responds.

(Many thanks to Mack Collier for his insightful blog post on Social Media Crisis Management)

Now, for that Chai Tea Latte that is on the Starbucks menu purely as a result of the “My Starbucks Idea” initiative.

Locate Your Customer

Identifying customers is sometimes an overlooked step in designing a social media strategy. Established businesses can fall into the routine of targeting the same groups or making marketing decisions based on past successes. It is important to perform a bit of self-inquiry to keep up with shifting customer behaviors and the changes which have occurred in how potential customers look for products and services.

I like to compare the customer identification process to my experience of defining a target market for the potential publisher I hope will consider my book draft for publishing:

Who is my target audience? Well, how about “people who read?!” Hmm, too broad. Okay, “adults interested in stories of women who came of age in the Great Depression.” Oh, specifically Midwestern women. And don’t forget young adults who want to learn about a period of American culture that is so different from today that it seems also to have occurred in a foreign land: Mapping change through one woman’s personal journey. The more I think about it, the more sharply I can define the target.

The same holds true for business. Whether you are a yoga studio seeking to pinpoint your student’s demographics; a water filtration company trying to reach new customers through new channels; or a new social media consulting business looking for clients: The questions to ask ourselves are the same. 

Who do you serve now?

Yoga Studio	Middle-age, Senior, young adult, suburban
Water Filtration	New home buyers and sellers
Social Media Business	Small businesses lacking social media strategy

Why do customers/clients come? 

Yoga Studio	Exercise, stress relief, build self-esteem, mindfulness
Water Filtration	Long-term cost savings, reduce waste
Social Media Business	Seek to expand customer base

How do customers in your market find their new products and services? 

Yoga Studio	Word of mouth, search engines, signage, promotions
Water Filtration	Search engines, trip to hardware store
Social Media Business	Search engines, social media, industry associations

The more we analyze, the more we can pinpoint the behaviors and demographics that will help us paint a picture of our target customers and how to best reach them. In the process, we learn about the marketplace in which we compete, discover groups we are not serving, find needs to be filled and learn from our competition. We may find surprises along the way – traits and trends we hadn’t anticipated.

With people heading first to the Internet to find what they are seeking, a business’ web presence is critical to its continued success. Through effective use of keywords and links in websites and blogs, businesses can achieve the page rank that gets them noticed. Through ongoing Facebook and Twitter activity, businesses expand their reach as their engaging content gets passed through the social network. Through targeted Facebook and Google ads, businesses pop into the view of exactly the potential customers they hope to reach.

Traditional methods such as local newspaper ads and mailings don’t have the tailored reach or the breadth of the Internet. Now if we do our homework and learn the specific type of consumer we are trying to reach, social media enable us to appear on their proverbial doorstep.

Ready For The First Step

Have you ever been with a person at the precise instant they realized a dream?  It just happened to me on Monday night and I am so privileged to have been sitting exactly where I was sitting at that special moment.

My yoga teacher, Margaret, owns her own studio which she has nurtured with loving kindness for over three years, maybe four.  Pipal Leaf Yoga Studio was about the size of a modest dining room, always filled with mindfulness and peace.  So popular are the evening classes that sometimes the students have to set up in the hallway outside.  When the absentee tenant next door continued to neglect his space, Margaret began inquiring about renting that space and breaking down the dividing wall to expand her studio.

Well, this Monday evening was the grand re-opening after weeks of sledgehammers, plaster and paint.  It is now twice the size, still intimate, glowing with candles and warmed by the honey-colored floors and earth-toned walls.  As I sat in front of Margaret as she gently brought the class to a close, I felt the extra warmth of a dream realized, in a single tear and an intense feeling of gratitude.

Now we have to fill it!  My first step in bringing Margaret’s business to the next level is to develop a social media strategy.  For a small yoga practice (and for many businesses, for that matter) we need to cut through the business-speak and raise the social media comfort level of Margaret and her team of instructors.  

A recommended first step is Understand what is involved, secure internal buy-in, and forecast required resources and costs. The best way to understand what is involved, without actually doing it, is by reading case studies -- look on popular social media websites such as Social Media Examiner for some great examples.  These sites also offer tools in the form of ebooks, podcasts, archived webinars, and blog posts by topic that can provide a crash-course in understanding how social media fits in small businesses.

Secure internal buy-in can seem like a mouthful.  But for many small businesses, this may be a non-issue.  As in Margaret’s case, she is totally on-board and now it is a matter of figuring out whether the other instructors want to participate and to what extent.  We might discover a closet blogger in the bunch; or a great photographer who can help dress up the website, blog and Facebook page.  The minimum buy-in we need is their understanding of Pipal Leaf Yoga’s web presence and having them talk it up with their students.

Forecast required resources and costs means how much time and money will it take to expand the website with a blog, create a business Facebook page and set up a Twitter account.  Then the fun begins!  It is important to be able to define how much time it will take to maintain this new web presence – posting blogs, inviting, responding to and engaging followers on Facebook, keeping up with Tweets and building a community around the things Pipal Leaf Yoga loves. It is evolving work whose demands will be more visible over time.  But once the mechanics are in place, the passion of the people behind the posts and entries will help grow the community.

That is step one!  More to come.  Namaste.