If you are interested in a social media marketing campaign for your business, the first thing you should do is to draw up a social media marketing strategy. This strategy should be an extension of your overall marketing campaign. It should be integrated with your business and the market you are targeting. With a proper social media marketing strategy that ties in and supports your digital marketing strategy, it will keep your brand identity unified across the board.
The only question many people have is how to make money from your campaign and how you are going to use all the available social media channels to integrate ways of communicating and selling to your network. To begin you may want to focus on only a few of your marketing goals such as building brand authority, lead generation, customer retention, or just increasing brand awareness. Depending on your goals, you may want to choose different social media channels that will best suit your purpose like using facebook for business.
When you are finished with your strategy, communicate it to your entire organization and involve everyone. To help you with your strategy, get everyone onboard and actively participate in tweeting, blogging and engaging with consumers on your chosen social media channels.
Research, research, research
It is always important to invest some time on research to find out where the audience you want to target spends their time online. There’s an increase in users across all age demographics from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and even Foursquare.
When you have identified the social media channels that your audience spends their time on, it is very important to start a listening process to find out what kind of conversations that particular audience are having about your brand or anything relating to your business. There are many free tools available online that can help you with this such as Google Alerts and Social Mention.
These services let you listen in on the conversation by using the search integrated on their platform.
Listening with your social media strategy
By analyzing and listening to these conversations you will be able to learn and identify if your brand perception is as good as that of your competitors. This will also help you identify where you can grow and improve your brand perception. By listening to your customers and being critical in your analysis of the conversations going on, you can give your organization an immediate advantage because you can leverage the positive communications and work on what your consumers perceive to be the negatives of your brand.
By researching the conversations about your brand will definitely help you identify detractors and evangelists and see how influential they are based on their reader base.
