I am responsible for several social media projects at VOCWOM and I would like to share with you my point of view on the challenges a marketer is facing in the chaos called social media. Given a limited budget, specific objectives, and a time constraint – what should a marketer do and in what order to achieve the company's social media objectives?
The most critical first step is to define the company strategy in Social media. Items like generating leads, boosting web site traffic, brand recognition, becoming a thought leader and pushing marketing messages can be part of the company strategy and goals for social media. Setting the strategy should translate into the tactical actions like pushing content or setting a discussion group. Another important part of the process is to set measurable targets that are frequently checked and benchmarked against the real activity.
There are more 180 millions blogs out there and 1000's of social networks which create a sea of information which can consume all available working hours of endless amount of people. So the first task for the marketers is figuring out from the massive amount of information available, what is really relevant part for his specific product market. In this regard there are a slew of solutions which aid in aggregating, notifying, socializing, and much more. There is no single tool that I can point to as a all in one, comprehensive management solution. Out of the many tools available, you can find one or two of these solutions that might reduce the amount of information needed to be processed.
After selecting the tool, the next mission is to find out the relevant locations for my specific product market. Now is the time to open your eyes to the social media world outside facebook and twitter. Some Alternatives like YouTube and SlideShare are geared to content sharing. Other options are focused on technical discussions like LinkedIn. So do your homework about your specific market and make sure you identify all the relevant locations for your product market. A good practice is to maintain a database of the various information you deem relevant so that you can easily sort and filter the information, and have a central location where everything is stored.
Social media is all about personal connections so another important part of the process is identifying and connecting to the relevant people. In every industry there are several people who are considered thought leaders and getting them aware and even involved in your social media activities is critical. Whoever is posting a relevant content or is a speaker in industry events may be the right person. Remember to get information on industry players from those internally, as they know best and have a wealth of information to share.
Once I've attained some results, how do I properly measure to justify the activities, and to improve upon them? The most important information is to first define a successful action taken on the information you distributed. For example, if I post an article on a blog or discussion group, I might look at unique impressions, talk backs, sent to friends or posted to other social media sites. Once you define these metrics you can keep a spreadsheet for each distribution to a similar type of material and look at percent changes to track progress. It is a best practice to keep a link to each distribution so that you can analyze the content of why something worked and why it didn't to find similarities or trends so you can build on the positive ideas.
In concluding, I'd like to share some tips to get you started with some momentum in your social media management:
- Set your social media strategy first and translate it into specific actions
- Set measurable targets
- Find the right tools for reducing the amount of information
- Find the right locations for your product market
- Get connected with the relevant people
- Store your information in a database for central knowledge sharing