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Why you need a social media strategy

Anyone can open a Facebook account or Twitter account in a matter of minutes. You can begin posting and wasting inordinate amounts of time using social media. But is there any return on investment for your business to be there? Not without a clear strategy.

An integrated social media strategy – with your marketing strategy – gives you a goal toward which to work. It aligns your business goals with your social media efforts and ensures that you’re staying on message and on track. It streamlines the amount of time you should stay on social media (as a percentage of your day – social media is a great time waster). And it keeps you focused on tracking return on investment.

Social media maturity is moving your firm from the infancy stage of posting whatever comes to mind,  to really using it to drive customers to some action that benefits your business. That’s where a strategy really helps.

So how do you create a strategy for your organization? You can develop one yourself, of course: you can take advantage of the many (free) resources on the web that help inform you of best practices in social media. You can call us to help, too. We have developed simple social media strategy plans for clients that keep them focused on their message and on making sure they are linking social posts to trackable business activities.

Social media takes work, and like any marketing activity, it takes consistent work to see results. A shot in the dark here and there is going to turn off your audience. If they hear from you too much, they’ll tune you out. If they hear the wrong message, it will harm your overall marketing efforts. If it’s not your brand’s personality, your audience will be confused as to what you stand for.

Twitter and Facebook are getting all the hoopla, but there’s a larger scope that encompasses social media marketing – blogs, forums, youtube, flickr and online communities are big players here and deserve equal consideration. Add in game-based social features like Foursquare and review/rating tools like MojoPages or friend-based loyalty programs like Mogl and you have a lot of places to be social. A strategy helps keep you on target by focusing in on what works for your target market.

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NB a friend in social media forwarded this great article to me from Social CMO: Social ROI isn’t just about facebook and twitter – in fact, they aren’t nearly enough. http://www.thesocialcmo.com/blog/2010/11/the-truth-about-social-media-roi-and-why-facebook-isn%E2%80%99t-enough-to-deliver/