Launching Your First Social Media Campaign
(This post is the fourth and final installment of an ongoing series on what to do before launching a social media marketing campaign. This post reviews how to get underway with social media.)
For the ROI conscious business-heads out there, we’ve already made sure your website (your moneymaker) was up to par, assessed your overall goals, and configured all of your tracking and analytics properly. At the surface, it looks like you’re ready to dive in to social media marketing. Before you do, however, it’s important to establish strategies and an all-encompassing plan on how your social media campaigns and management is going to function. There are a lot more variables to consider than you probably think.
1. What Will Fulfill Your Goals?
In the second post in this series which I wrote a few weeks back, I talked about assessing your online goals and making sure you stay focused on them. Too many brands get lost in the social media chaos and end up wasting time on efforts that don’t align with what they are trying to accomplish. From the get-go, you need to identify some of these “social traps” and pinpoint your desires.
Some of these goals are as follows, followed by how you might approach social media campaigns for each:
- Branding: Sometimes a branding initiative can stop at just being present on social media networks, but don’t let that be enough. Although it’s comforting to consumers to see that you are trustworthy enough to be available in multiple locations online, branding really branches off into creating good content. Make sure your posts/tweets align with your company culture and gets as personal and “behind the scenes” as possible. Even content that is uninteresting to most can relate to other potential new customers you didn’t even know about.
- Customer Service: This is the #1 purpose for a lot of the largest brands in the world. A Facebook page and Twitter account is the new customer service phone number. If a customer knows they can tweet you in real-time, you better be monitoring activity and responding as soon as humanly possible. That sort of engagement is still surprising and effective. That might not be the case in 2012, however.
- Encouraging Sharing: If your goal is to create awareness about a product, it’s time to get creative. Basic content isn’t going to be enough. Come up with a funny video, informative infographic, useful widget, or some other creative resource that people will want to distribute. This is the core value that all social media brings to brands – and most often, the main goal that everyone is constantly chasing online.
- Generating Leads: For the more aggressive brands, there are proactive ways for a brand to create awareness about their product(s) or service. I won’t go too far into the tactics, but just know that search.twitter.com should become your new best friend.
2. What Does the Corporate Voice Sound Like?
A lot of companies haven’t found their persona yet. It’s not because they’re lacking in talent and substance, it’s because they haven’t had to yet. Social Media is forcing brands to scramble to find their message and philosophy in order to create a cohesive understanding of their corporate makeup that their customers can appreciate. One of the major hurdles with this goal is that bigger companies need to delegate social media management to more than one team member, or often times, smaller companies outsource their social media. This puts the corporate voice in danger and creates unfollowable mixed messages throughout your online profiles. If possible, have only one person manage each account and/or conduct weekly social media meetings that review some of the corporate messages that should be aggregated throughout the week.
3. How Much Can You Do?
It’s no surprise that smaller companies don’t have the resources to monitor their online profiles 24/7. That’s fine. Don’t force it. Unless you’re in the urgent support business, a 24 hour response time is accepted by even the most advanced online socialites. Don’t kill yourself trying to appease everybody. They’ll understand that you are a small company doing your best.
4. Who Will Manage the Campaigns?
This is somewhat similar to finding the corporate voice of the company. Mismanagement can occur all too often if you aren’t harnessing a social media management tool of some kind. It’s easier if only one person is managing the accounts. But, if there are multiple users, which is often the case, using Hootsuite or some other platform that “checks off” which questions were responded to ensures that there aren’t multiple messages being sent out.
5. Getting Creative
Being successful in social media is a lot like being successful in general marketing or advertising. The more creative you can be, the more attention you will get. That said, we encourage any company that can afford to do so to outsource their social media efforts to a creative agency, much like you would do for an advertising campaign. There are ways to strategize a social media timeline in order to leverage it as if it is a television commercial. If you’re not the creative type, leave it to the experts.
In Conclusion
With all of these components in place, you should be ready to start posting and tweeting everyday. Remember, social media is not a one-way conversation. Try to listen and consume more than you push send and talk about yourself. Just like anything else in life, the more you give to others (your attention, in this case), the more you will get back (sales).
