MN Interactive

Why Every Business Should Have A Social Media Plan

You’ve heard of some of them- twitter, facebook, MySpace, flickr and LinkedIn, and perhaps wondered about others- Digg, Ning, Friendfeed etc. Social Media has been on the marketing scene for a few years now, and has been touted as a ‘must-have’ communication tool all companies need to invest in. You and your company might even participate in some of them. But unless and until you create a social  media plan, similar to a working marketing plan, you are not maximizing their full potential.

Social media and conversion marketing may be new names to your sales game, but their methodology works like no other communication tool ever has. Using them transforms the fundamental nature of client-brand conversation. While historically, most companies have sought more traditional forms of marketing such as television and print advertising, and direct mailing techniques, social media at its most basic form allows you to target twice or thrice the audience, at a much lower cost. As consumers begin to get more savvy thanks to an influx of online information – for free- more and more businesses see the need to target a wider range of audience. Using social media to leverage this growth allows companies to build newer, tight relationships, and create stronger trust bonds.

At the same time, if your company is new to social media, you might face similar challenges offered by more traditional forms of marketing. For example, how do you know which social media is the correct one for your company? Which networks target your audience most effectively? Which ones offer the maximum bang for your buck? This is one of the key reasons creating a social media plan is not so much an option, but a consideration most net-savvy customers will ensure they enforce.

If you are including social media in your game-plan, and we’ve seen it’s wise to do so, you need to ask yourself –Are you using it as:

• A networking tool?
• To grow your business?
• To sell a product or service?
• As a future investment for growth?

Different sites offer different tools to get the job done correctly, based on what your final outcome aims to be. In order to identify which ones work for you, you’ll need to plan for the following:

Creating brand awareness : One of the first rules to social media networking, is that you need to be consistent with your brand. Your brand could be your company’s name, your name or even a website or blog link. This will be your ‘username’. Decide on what you’ll be promoting and make sure it’s the right one for you- you will invest a lot of time in brand building, so it’s important to get it correct the first time.

Finding reasons for your networking : As mentioned earlier, you need to define the purpose of your networking. Why will you be on the sites you select? The reasons can be numerous: are you building a buzz around a particular product? Building more traffic? Increasing your sales leads?  Also, it’s important to predetermine the time and money you’ll be investing into a campaign. It’s easy to get carried away on social media sites. If you are hiring someone to do the job, be specific in your demands with regards to the time-money correlation. And enforce guidelines on the appropriate way to engage in an online conversation. No one likes pushy or rude salespeople, and the same applies to networking site communications.

Determining your customer base: Most social media sites have a specific user audience. Which one’s you’ll use is decided by who you want your customers to be. Signing up for the wrong ones can cost you a lot in terms of time and effort, and give you poor or no results to show for it. Research ahead of time a few specific sites you think will be worth your while. Remember too that each community operates in a different manner and by a different set of rules.

Measuring your success: No marketing plan would work if you can’t measure and tabulate its success. The same holds true with social media marketing. You need to identify your goals and challenges at the outset, and the means by which you’ll be measuring results. Can this be done by blog comments your posts receive? Conversions? The number of followers gathered? Increasing brand awareness across the web? Did you learn something from potential customers that you didn’t know before? If you can’t measure your goals, there is no specific way to tell if the social media you’ve tapped into is working for you or not. One such site that can help compare topics and track your company against others is www.trendpedia.com

In the end, in order for any marketing plan to succeed, you need to know who you are, what you want and how you are going to achieve it. With social media marketing, the vast options available will render a plan incomplete and useless, if the above criteria are not determined ahead of time. However doing so will allow your company a better sense of how they are perceived by their target audience, and will open a two way dialogue that can be converted into quick sales.