We can’t really listen or watch any media without getting news as to the exponential growth of social media. We certainly can’t visit many sites without seeing social media call to action messages – Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn… you pick… they are all there, constantly and everywhere.
Given this social media overload it would appear that each and every company should be active in social media. Well… yes and no which makes it no easier for you to decide when, how and where to dip into the social media world.
This article should however make you start to think about social media and help you formulate any plans.
As with any plan, this guide to social media marketing will have clearly defined action points for you to follow.
Research Who Your Social Media Audience Is
In contrast to traditional marketing, social media marketing has taken some of the control away from the marketer. Social media is just that… opinion, trends, insight and communication driven by the public and much less so by the marketer.
Fundamental to success in social media marketing will be identifying who your audience is… what they like, where they go, what they do, what they talk about… social media is much more about conversations and interaction and not just hard sales and promotion.
A good starting point would be to look at setting up a Twitter account and trying to follow and be followed by as many people as possible.
To gain Twitter followers we advise you to look develop your social media audience by looking at wefollow, Twitscoop and Technorati.
Social Media Research – Gardening Case Study
In our case we used the above sites to drill down to social media sites dealing with gardening. At Technorati we searched for the keyword gardening and drilled down further to look at sites that had “a lot of authority”. This gave us a huge starting point to see what people were talking about and followed. Wefollow was also queried and found to have 828 Twitter accounts related to gardening and Twitscoop also brought back a very good insight to social media.
From the above research we determined that Twitter as a social media channel would work effectively for a gardening related company. The best approach we saw was to develop website content through the creation of good, strong content and then to announce these updates via Twitter to followers
Plan Your Social Media Marketing Contribution
Research phase started, though not concluded, as social media is a very fluid environment and change is constant, the next stage involved is to plan your strategy.
Because social media marketing is much more about collaboration, conversation and interaction it is imperative to identify and understand your own and your audience’s expectations and potential offering. Having found out who they are where they go, try and find where you can naturally fit in and what you are going to contribute to the social media circle.
In our case study we felt that a gardening Twitter with links to our website for blog, resource updates would be the best path.
Which Social Media Channel? – Endless Choice
This guide to using social media as a marketing tool has barely scratched the surface of all the channels available. We’ve covered Twitter but still need to look at Facebook and LinkedIn, hopefully that will come in subsequent articles. In the interim the same approach could be applied to these two sites. Again we would suggest research and planning phases.
Get Ready To Launch Into Social Media
Okay so you know who your audience is and what you can offer them. Now would be a good time to get ready launch.
All systems are ready to go… one final thing in addition to research and planning your offering/contribution to social media would be to measure. No point launching without being able to analyse the impact.
More on that in How To Get Started in Social Media Marketing – Part 2 coming soon.
