Be clear about your objectives
What do you want your marketing and communications to accomplish? Is it to boost sales, launch a new product, strengthen your brand or increase market share? It can be tempting to go into social media to keep up with others, but ultimately, social media tools are only as good as those who use them. Success only comes when you align the utility of these tools to your business goals.
Explore and understand platforms
As popular as facebook or pinterest are, they are not suitable for every business. Perhaps your company is better suited to using Linked in or having a company blog. Research and investigate your social media options as you would if you were shopping around for any other commodity or service; are your customers using this platform in a way that you can consistently and intelligently contact them? Does it translate well for your product or service? Can you use it to cultivate a following and start conversations? Look at what successful companies are doing for ideas, but research best practices and interrogate how these options will benefit your business.
Consider your resources
Social media platforms are mostly free to join and utliise, but they are very time and labour intensive. If you have limited resources, take a more cautious approach. Considering your resources is a key element in ultimately executing a successful strategy. Rather than creating profiles in ten different platforms at once, perhaps start with one or two, which you can maintain successfully.
Create a plan
Just as you would schedule the publishing of a newsletter or print article, take the same approach with social media. Posting spontaneously works for some, but if they aren’t part of your daily operations, your social media activities can fall to the way side. Create a content plan outlining the sort of information you wish to share, identify the type of conversations you can give input or comment in, and also set a minimum frequency for communicating. Keeping in mind that the cycle is shorter online than in other mediums, you may want to post something more frequently; either every day, every few hours or whatever is feasible.
Social media provides exciting opportunities for businesses to communicate like never before. The ever growing array of platforms means that there creative and innovate ways to utlilise the medium. Successfully integrating it into your strategy could be a key success factor for your business.
This article was previoulsy published in the February 2013 issue ofThe SA Leader magazine.
