Any serious digital marketing strategy will include a plan for creating or growing your business presence in Social Media. What are some of the top suggestions from digital marketing consultants? Let’s go to the Top 10 list:
- Know Your Brand
Before wading into the waters of social media it is vital that you know yourself. Digital marketing agencies will emphasize that you really need to understand your values, strengths and weaknesses in all aspects of your business. From that self understanding it will be important for you to clearly define your goals and intentions for social media. By melding a clear self understanding with a clear sense of what you want to accomplish through social media you will establish a firm foundation for the rest of your social media business structure.
- Listen
Before you draw your full blueprints for all that you hope to achieve with social media you will greatly benefit from carefully listening to your audience. What do they want? What do they care about? To discover these things you can go to their websites and read their content. You can weigh in on their discussion groups. By listening more than speaking you will find out what is important to them.
- Focus on Your Specialty
As your own values and the values of your audience become clear to you a blueprint will begin to take shape. Still your overall design will need to focus on what you do best. What is your speciality? What can you offer your audience that most obviously benefits them and most closely hits your sweet spot? That convergence area will become your focus.
- Quality Connections
Although quantity of connections is often a big goal for social media, most digital marketing consultants agree that it is actually the quality of business connections that will pay you the greatest dividends. In the long run it will likely be best for you if you have 100 connections with online customers who read, share and discuss your content than 1000 connections who just move on to the next shiny object and forget about you. Building and nurturing relationships with quality connections will be absolutely essential to your success.
- Provide Value
Ultimately you can do all the first four recommendations listed but if you don’t offer quality content that provides value to your customers then your social media presence will dwindle or vanish. If you have done all of the hard work to understand your own values and brand, your client, your specialty and fostered quality connections then you have the structure built. Now it is about furnishing that structure with content that is relevant, interesting, valuable to your clientele. One of the best ways to assure you do this is to build a thorough annual plan of your content (with an eye to trends that may require some changes) so that you continually provide value to your customers.
If it feels a little scary to get started with any of these first steps you will find that a great digital marketing agency will help you with any of
- Be Responsive
When people comment on your Facebook posts or Tweet you, be responsive. Social media is just that, social. Meaningful interactions with your followers will help you build relationships and connections and will increase the likelihood they will share your branding, message and content with others. Being responsive will take some extra time, effort and creativity but finding ways to make quality connections with your followers can have big payoffs.
- Reciprocate
When you find great content or products somewhere and you ask questions or comment on social media you hope to get a quick and helpful response. Part of being in a community, even a social media community, is having access and being acknowledged. It is vital that you reciprocate this wish with your own followers. Be responsive, acknowledge everyone who shows genuine interest. Be available to your audience so that they don’t go find someone else who is more accessible.
- Connect with Influencers
With every business there are online influencers. These are the people who have quality audiences of businesses and individuals who are likely to want and need what you have to offer. Making connections with these people and particularly providing them with interesting, authoritative and useful content can get your content out to large audiences of like minded people.
- Stay the Course
We all love instant success. However, we all know that all true success is the result of a lot of hard work and patience. You must stay the course with your social media strategy if you want to see your vision to fruition. Most results worth achieving are earned through the long haul so stay the course.
- Track your successes
By keeping track of what things work well (and what don’t), you will get a clearer view of how to plan for the future. Build on your successes but don’t rest on them. When you know what content is working well and which posts generated the best results or discussions or contacts, then you can get a better idea of what is working with your target audience and offer them more of what they want. And offer less of what they don’t want. Either way you will make better decisions when you make your annual digital marketing strategy plan.
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