What should you be doing now with social media? Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. This is my list of 10 – how many are you doing?
This list is composed from my experience from the past nine years as a social media manager plus some insights gained during my own personal social media activities during that time.
Here is my list of ten social media essential activities for companies and in no particular order…
Create a social media strategy
Do you have a social media strategy aligned to your business goals? This is essential to track your progress along the path to become a social media proficient company. I use these valuable documents as a filter to decide what activities add value and those that do not.
Learn how to craft an effective social media strategy. The strategy can contain pointers about the maturity path. Consequently you can devise metrics that can define how successful you are compared to your own path or benchmarked with competitors.
I measure the maturity of my current company in an annual assessment. The maturity assessment takes the form of an independent interview, and covers various topics from training, adoption and C-suite involvement. The gap analysis from the maturity assessment is used to create tactical tasks to overcome within the following year.
Competitive intelligence
Are you tracking what your competitors post about or what your customers are saying and doing with your competitors? There are techniques available to dig deeper and discover your competitor tactics.
Create a crisis plan
Many years ago crisis situations found a new home in social media. With the right cocktail of elements, a crisis can run wild in social media in a matter of hours. The Fyre festival fiasco from April 2017 certainly had the right mix. I saw this happening from a long way off and was lucky not to be one of the 100s experiencing it first hand.
You might be unlucky and be the social media manager who has to manage a crisis. I have been there and have the T-Shirt. Nice to know that there are some preventative measures. I recently heard from an expert at Dell how they use social listening to avoid a crisis. So it is possible in some circumstances! Furthermore, learn how to listen better (and maybe even prevent a crisis)
Learn what customers think of you
A helicopter view on what customers think about your brand is valuable. In social media terms, it can be measured in many ways. The most used words is often used. However, what about measuring the most used action words, most talked about product or service, etc? An interesting new option is the most expressed “emotion category” over time and per market.
Uncover important trends
First movers taking advantage of what is trending with their target audience will gain a valuable lead on their competitors. Social listening is a valuable tool to discover social media trends. It can be used to learn about where in the world the trend is starting, the demographics of the audience and the platforms, hashtags, etc.
In my work I have enabled email notification from my social listening tool whenever there is an increase in the rate of mentions about a trend line above a norm that I have selected. I also use this feature to give me an email alert when an issue is starting to develop into a possible crisis.
Chart your thought leadership
Do you consider yourself to be a thought leader? Social media can be an enabler for success. The key is to use content marketing in a focused way towards your target group. Therefore, post about actionable advice that your target group can use. In addition post about what is coming up in your industry and invite discussion. Plan for the future as you get more successful; webinars, blogs, Tweet chats and thought leadership portals.
Social media listening is used to discover new trends and topics that you can put into your content calendar.
Key metrics to track are Share of voice with your competitors, and share of conversation in general about your thought leadership area. Furthermore, supporting metrics are engagement, reach, and the number and category of key influencers interacting and following you. Include how to track the effect of being a thought leader onto your business results.
Customer acquisition
“Today, you can add a lead gen form to LinkedIn sponsored content campaigns. These forms have shown to increase both lead volume and quality, making it easier for marketers like you to prove the ROI of your LinkedIn marketing campaigns” – LinkedIn
Add to the bottom line with social commerce
What is social commerce? Social commerce enables shoppers to use social networks to make eCommerce transactions. The number of networks entering this area is growing and they are enabling fresh new ways for the shopping experience to happen.
Launch social media paid promotion campaigns
How many social media paid promotion campaigns have you done so far? If the answer to that question is zero you are missing out on a huge opportunity. You can get started for very little cost using a credit card. There is a vast array of options to target or re-target based on customer behaviour, interests, or job role etc. Here is some information to get started with Facebook social media advertising.
There are many helpful guides and blogs. I have over 200 saved in my pocket application about social media advertising ranging from Snapchat through to Pinterest.
Discover valuable influencers
There are many specialist social media programs for influencer discovery. I learnt how to identify and then interact with influencers many years before these programs came onto the market. I started doing community management in forums in 2003. I am convinced that any good community manager working full time for at least three months should be able to list the top three influencers without even having to think about it or use a program to find them. Furthermore, they should be able to list the time of day, day of week they are most active, the type of content they share and on what platforms.
If you do not have existing channels and community managers, then a social listening program or a influencer discovery tool will do the job nicely. There is a difference between influencers and advocates.
Here is the influencer marketing 101 guide to get you started.
Influencers are often tied to one topic, like fashion, or music, or sport etc. I created Twitter lists of influencers, and I manually add to my lists every week. In addition, I made a blog post about lighting influencers, which is the industry I work in.
My tip for you is that influencers come and go and some can even change the scope of what they talk about. This may not be a dramatic change but can be enough of a change that means they are no longer useful for you. Therefore check your influencer lists regularly.
In conclusion
The above ten suggestions are not exhaustive. It might not be a good idea to attempt to start all ten due to a lack of resources or budget or due to a constrained business scope. Let me know how you get on.
Have fun!
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Building genuine bonds with strong influencers took my blog, business and eBook sales up about 50 notches Clive. Smart tips my friend! The key; be authentic. Serve these pros. Help sans asking for anything in return, because top dawgs get begged by folks to do stuff all day long. Be helpful, and be interested in bloggers, not what they can do for you, to stick out in a good way. This leads to beneficial partnerships down the road. Thanks for sharing!
Ryan