5 Steps in Launching Your Social Media Marketing Campaign
Filed under: Social Media Marketing —
Doug Williams @
6:43 am
This blog entry was posted on November 15, 2009.
Social Media Marketing is used to influence perception of your company or your brand. It is used to interact with people who could be interested in your products or services. Use social media to bring traffic to your website and through links and to gain better search engine rankings. You can use social media to do some or all of these.
Before you jump into using Facebook or Twitter, you should take some time to plan what it is you want to accomplish. How should you launch your social media initiative?
- Purpose: What is your topic? What are you trying to accomplish? Get inbound links? Sign-up subscribers? Improve brand perception? Settle on one primary purpose and 2-3 secondary ones. Now firm these into measurable goals such as attract 500 links to your company blog within 6 months.
- Audience: What do you know about the people most interested in what you have to offer? This goes well beyond age, education level and income bracket. What interests them? What are their passions? Where do they spend their time reading, learning and discussing?
- Where: Start by being a detective. Track down where the conversations are happening. Are they on blogs? In forums? Are discussions happening on social networks? Are answers being sought on YouTube or perhaps LinkedIn Answers? These locations are where you will want to start your campaign.
- Participate: Each day join the dialog and become part of the community. The amount of influence you exert will be based on how actively you join in the conversations and contribute. Comment on blogs, join in the forum discussions, follow and Tweet on Twitter and be active in the social networks. Set-up your own pages, blog marketing and YouTube channels.
- Monitoring: Set-up your own listening or monitoring system. Use Google Alerts (free) or some of the more sophisticated paid tools to track brand mentions, blog conversations, social media or tweets. If your goals are around SEO, measure and monitor links and rankings. What you measure and monitor will be based on you purpose and goals. Measure your progress toward your goals.
Good tips. I would add another one:
6) Approach
Have a scaled approach. You don’t want to start following 500 people in less than 24 hours with one tweet for your account. For example, I got a notification that some dog community website is following me on Twitter this morning. Great. Except I own two cats and zero dogs and have made zero mentions of ever owning a dog or otherwise. I go to their twitter account page and see they’re following 700 people, have like followers, and two tweets with one that states something along the lines of “taking care of my dogs!” This is a prime example of a rushed social media marketing campaign.
Good stuff…
Comment by Christian — November 16, 2009 @ 10:32 am
Christian,
I agree. Any major initiative should begin with a pilot to work out your process. Then begin scaling it up.
Comment by Doug Williams — November 16, 2009 @ 12:46 pm