A social media strategy is merely a plan to use social media in the most optimal way to promote your business. After all, you wouldn’t pick any other advertising method out of a hat ? you’d carefully plan where to spend your dollars so that they do you the most good. Whether you do your social media marketing in-house or employ a management firm to do it for you, you will want to plan your attack. Too often, a company hears that they need to do social media marketing and they’ve heard of Facebook (who hasn’t?), so they slap up a quick page that tells about the business. Without a social media strategy, that Facebook page is next to useless because no one will ever see it!
Instead, you need to plan out your social media strategy with care. That starts with first knowing your market. Who is it that is the ideal customer? Once you determine that, then it’s a matter of finding out where the majority of those customers and prospects are spending their time. Each social media website has a unique demographic. Sure, they all attract a few people from across the spectrum but each one will be more attractive to a core group. Years ago, MySpace was the dominant player in social media. While they still have a good marketshare, the core userbase tends to be younger and heavily into music. If that’s your target audience, then you should be focusing on that site. If that’s not your core market, your time will be better off spent elsewhere.
Once you’ve determined which sites are the best ones to reach your target market, then you need to plan even more. Your content needs to be focused towards that same core audience in order to attract their attention. Those most likely to be in your customer’s network are also most likely to be in your target market. Most people tend to be friends with people of similar ages and interests. Of course, there is going to be a variety of people in your customer’s following but the majority are most likely to be a part of your market.
Your social media strategy must include a plan for expansion of your network. Once you’ve begun getting people into the network, it will grow exponentially but it’s very important to choose these first people according to your company’s image, values and market. Most sites will have many ways for you to find new people to add to your network, such as search by interest capabilities or groups that you could join.
As you can see, there is a lot of thought that goes into developing a social media strategy. The benefits reaped, however, are well worth the time and effort to do things right.
