Is your social media strategy really a strategy?

The ecommerce industry is aflutter with social media buzz. This is understandable – social media usage has grown faster than the adoption of television. With this in mind, many small online businesses are flocking to social media – in fact, one report states that utilization of social media by small businesses has doubled since 2009. Here’s a few reasons why:

• Social media is a cost-effective way to establish relationships with customers. 
• Social media serves as a great source of open feedback and competitor intelligence.
• Fans/Followers of branded social media pages are more likely to buy from that company and recommend it to friends and family.
• Everyone else is doing it.

Wait, “everyone else is doing it?” That doesn’t seem like a very good reason to start a social media campaign!

Unfortunately this is the rationale many small online business owners use when entering the social space. But the problem with an “everyone else is doing it” approach is it typically leads to a haphazard social presence.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s quite possible that your social media strategy isn’t a strategy at all. Instead, it’s more of a mix of tactics thrown together under the guise of a strategy. But what’s the difference?

A strategy is a comprehensive plan meant to achieve a long-term objective. A tactic, on the other hand, is a specific action within a strategy intended to help reach the designated goal.

Now that you know the distinction, here’s a step by step guide to ensure your social media efforts form an actual strategy:

1. Set your social media objectives.

What do you ultimately want your business to achieve from social media? Some ideas include: brand awareness, thought leadership, networking opportunities and SEO benefits. While it’s tempting to set your strategic objective to “all of the above,” you need to pick one and stick with it – other positive results will coincide with your growing social presence.

2. Choose the right channels to meet your objectives.

Next, take a holistic approach of integrating various social media channels to achieve your set objective. This means that you need to carefully select which tactics to use within your campaign – you can’t be everywhere at once, so choose the channels that will best help reach your goal.

Here’s some aspects of various social tactics to help guide your pairings:

Blog:

• Serves as premier outlet for offering fresh content that’s pertinent to your defined audience
• Lays foundation for spreading unique content across the week

Facebook:

• Establishes a “face” for your brand via addition of photos and personal information
• Facilitates an interactive community with wall posts, discussion boards, fan photos and likes

Twitter:

• Presents chance to expand social network and find influencers in specific industries
• Lets users share your content, including blog posts, articles, etc.

LinkedIn:

• Provides location to establish business credibility and share business information
• Offers place to join relevant groups and make connections with other thought leaders

YouTube:

• Allows for repurposing of customer videos, product tutorials, testimonials, etc.
• Supplies vehicle to comment on others’ videos and reach out to those with similar interests

As an example, if the objective of my social media strategy is to establish thought leadership within my industry, I would start with my blog to create unique, relevant content and use Facebook and Twitter to spread that content. I’d also use YouTube to create educational videos related to my blog. As you can see, by purposefully mixing various tactics, I’ve put together a comprehensive strategy to achieve my thought leadership objective.

3. Establish a timeline for completion.

Another integral part of any strategy is creating a timeline to reach your goal. By setting monthly or quarterly benchmarks, you can objectively gauge your progress. The key to this step is establishing smaller goals within each tactic for measurement against your deadline.

Going back to our thought leadership example, you could set benchmarks of establishing 5 blog relationships and posting 8 articles on your blog by the end of July. And by the end of August you could set a benchmark of making 3 guest blog appearances and posting 2 educational videos on YouTube. Of course the numbers will vary on a case by case basis, but you get the idea.

While creating your benchmarks, it’s advised to dedicate a certain amount of time to executing your strategy. Far too many small online business owners strongly launch a social campaign, only to drop off the face of the earth 6 weeks later. Just like any strategy, social media takes time, so make sure you’re ready to make the long-term investment before diving in the pool.

4. Put together your metrics.

To provide a legitimate strategy, you must establish metrics to gauge your progress. The easiest way to do so is creating key performance indicators, or KPIs, for each of your tactics. Some KPIs include: number of Twitter followers, number of YouTube views, number of blog subscribers and growth patterns for each metric.

It’s easy to fall into a trap of setting arbitrary numbers for your KPIs. Hitting 500 Twitter followers sounds nice, but what does that really mean? Instead, it’s best to base your KPIs on your objectives, so perhaps setting a KPI of adding 50 influential Twitter followers is better aligned with a thought leadership goal.
Whatever the case, be sure to track results against your metrics to see how you’re performing in each of your channels – this will allow you to make proper adjustments.

5. Deploy, measure, adjust.

The entire point of setting objectives and benchmarking them is to make sure that your strategy stays on course. If you’re exceeding your KPIs in one channel and are way behind in another, you have an opportunity to evaluate your execution and make alterations as necessary.

It’s okay to shift course if things aren’t working as planned – the beauty of a true strategy is that you can make changes along the way to better achieve social media success.

And there you have it – a five step plan to legitimize your social media efforts! If you haven’t gone through this process or you identified with the “everybody else is doing it” mentality, it’s a good bet that your social media strategy isn’t really a strategy after all.

Fortunately, in this ever-evolving medium, your online business can quickly adjust to better maximize the bountiful benefits social media has to offer.

Happy selling!
Author: Matt Winn, Marketing Associate, Volusion

A guide: What to Tweet on Twitter

Twitter is an excellent tool that can be used to help your business. I covered how to get followers for your in a previous post. So now that you’ve got some followers, what should you be tweeting? Read on to find out.

What To Tweet.

When you first start on Twitter, it can be hard to know what to tweet about. I knew this was a dilemma for me when I first started. Some people do constant updates of what they are doing, while others spam whatever it is they are trying to market. Obviously I don’t recommend spamming when it comes to Twitter or anything else for that matter. But you want to promote you or your business at some point otherwise you won’t get any traffic from twitter.

Just because you’re in the network marketing business, that doesn’t mean you have to tweet about network marketing exclusively. You will come across as being one dimensional and it will be obvious to everyone that you’re only on Twitter to promote your business. Instead you should tweet about and link to interesting articles, blog posts, videos and even photos you’ve come across. I’m not saying you shouldn’t tweet about network marketing at all, because you should to a degree. But you don’t want to tweet about network marketing and your business and nothing else. You need to mix it up with other generic content that would interest you or other people such as news, gossip, something funny, or something informative. Because they are using Twitter, they will probably also be interested in content about Twitter or other forms of Social media.

In addition to these generic tweets, blend in some promotional tweets. The ratio of regular content to promotional content should not exceed 5:1. In other words you should only do one tweet about promotional content (content that promotes you or your opportunity) per 5 tweets about regular content (interesting articles you’ve come across etc)

The two best types of promotional tweets are either tweets that link to a post on your blog or tweets that link to a webinar. You can also tweet a link to your landing page, but this is more aggressive so caution is advised. If you want to tweet to a landing page, only do it once per day.

Obviously you don’t want to just tweet a link with no text. You need to include some text that tells your followers what they will find if they click on the link. I guess you’re basically creating a headline for the link, so make it catchy so people will want to click on the link.

When To Tweet.

There’s no point doing all these tweets if no one is online to read them. Here are the best times to tweet.

Weekdays are the best days of the week, particularly Tuesday & Wednesday.
Sunday is the worst day to tweet (but the best day to follow). So if you want to take a break from tweeting, then Sunday would be the day to do it.
Afternoon is the best time of day to tweet, from about noon to 3pm.
Night time is also very good for tweeting (approx. 8pm – 11pm)Mornings aren’t as good but are still worthwhile.

You never know when your followers are going to be online so you might as well tweet 7 days a week. It doesn’t take up too much time so there’s no real reason not to. If you are strapped for time, you can also outsource this work as it’s pretty straight forward to do.

Finding Content To Tweet

The two main sources I use for sourcing content are Google Alerts and StuffToTweet.com. Google Alerts basically alerts you about content relating to specific keywords that you want to search for. Google Alerts is good because you can choose the topic that you want to receive content on. Also, it is sent straight to your email, so you don’t have to go looking for it. Go to www.google.com/alerts and type in something that you want to receive content about. So if you wanted to be alerted to content relating to Ferrari, you would put “Ferrari” in the search box and you would receive all the articles, videos, blog posts etc that relate to Ferrari. Below the search box, choose “comprehensive” so you get a mix of media formats and also select to receive the content “once a day”.

www.StuffToTweet.com is also great because it is exactly what you are looking for. As the name suggests, the website shows stuff that would be good to tweet. It shows what’s popular so you don’t have to worry about whether other people will like it or not. Simply go to www.StuffToTweet.com and it’s all there for you to see on one page. It show’s you what’s popular on Digg, Youtube, Mashable, Del.icio.us and even what’s popular on Twitter right now.

To these two sources I mix in any news, gossips or videos that I’ve come across and found interesting. Then if you want, you can mix in some tweets about what you’re up to.

Tweet In Blocks

One tweet on its own is going to have almost no effect as it’s going to get lost amongst the tweets of other people. What you can do to combat this is to tweet in blocks. In other words, you make multiple tweets in a short space of time so that your tweets get noticed more. You should tweet in blocks of 5 – 10 spaced 30 – 60 seconds apart. Every 5 or 6 tweets, do a promotional tweet that links to your blog, webinar or landing page. If you do it this way, people won’t think you’re on Twitter just to sell something because you’re also contributing all these tweets about interesting content.

Taking what was learnt from the When To Tweet section, we can now schedule when to do the blocks of tweets. Do a block of 5 – 10 tweets every morning, afternoon and night and make sure to include a promotional tweet in each block.

Like I said before, you never know when your followers are going to be online, so you might as well be tweeting 7 days a week, but if you want to have a day off, Sunday would be the best day. You could even use Sunday to prepare the week’s tweets in a notepad or word file. Personally, I have a Word template that I use to prepare the day’s tweets which I fill with fresh content everyday (or at least I try to).

Summary

Tweeting on Twitter to promote your BUSINESS doesn’t have to be hard. As shown, you can basically borrow other people’s content and tweet about it to generate interest in what you have to offer. It doesn’t get any easier than that. Mix in some promotional tweets and the leads will start flowing. Keep in mind that you have to have a decent following (2000+) before you will get meaningful results. But keep at it and be consistent and Twitter can be a very powerful way to promote you or your BUSINESS.