“If you remember just one thing about social media this year, let it be this: you can’t just ‘wing it’ anymore. When so much of your business is now influenced, even dependent, on your social media success, having a plan is essential. “

Those are key words from Evan LePage of HootSuite.

Moving forward into your strategic business plan for Q4, you need to:

  1. Clarify your business’ social media goals
  2. Audit your current social media status
  3. Develop your content strategy
  4. Use analytics to track progress
  5. Adjust your strategy as needed

With help from NY Times best selling author and marketing consultant Jay Baer, here is a list of what you should keep in mind when creating a social media strategy:

  • Create a cross-functional team with accountability to help conceive of and operate your the strategy. Include:

o   Social media posts: Engage with your customers/clients and potential customers in the social media venues most appropriate for your target market.

o   Eblasts: “Touch” your customers with an e-communication at least once a month so they know what you are up to.

o   Social comments: Make your opinions known to your customers, potential customers and the media on topics key to your business my adding comments to on-line articles.

o   Blogs: Increase your SEO, create your own PR platform, become a resource to the community and the media by writing about issues key to your business.

  • Broaden your social listening beyond your brand name. Your customers (and competitors) will give you a good guide to where and how you should be active in social media. Listen to them.
  • What are the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your current or prospective customers? In other words, who’s your audience and how does that impact what you can and should attempt in social media?
  • Decide why you are involved in social media and go forth with that reason in mind. Pick one: You will primarily use social for, awareness, sales, loyalty and retention?
  • Figure out the one thing you are about. For example, Disney is about movies. /’sas∙s’ē/ agency is about helping businesses redefine what matters.
  • Choose measures to evaluate if your strategy is making a difference in your business. Do “likes” and engagement on FB translate into sales or is a better time investment engagement with other business leaders through LinkedIn?
  • Create a strategy that makes your business human. Make sure you come across as more than just a logo and not as an entity.
  • Schedule your social media in advance. Your Monday content should be written on Friday to avoid a dreaded first day of the week, early morning start that includes blog, tweet, FB, LinkedIn and Google+ post writing.

I cannot underscore enough the importance of a good social media presence, especially on Twitter, FB and LinkedIn. A social media strategy is important for every brand—from the social media savvy to the tech newbies. To impress upon you that social media is not going away, here’s an updated forecast on the social media landscape for Q4 and 2015.

  • Show, Not Just Tell: Visual content will dominate so social media content strategy need to creatively incorporate images and videos. Stats from early 2014 to back this up:

o   Photos on Facebook receive 53 percent more likes than posts without.

o   Tweets with images receive 18 percent more clicks than those without, 89 percent more favorites, and 150 percent more retweets.

  • Instagram and Snapchat will be major players. Current stats:

o   In 2013, Instagram was the fast growing network with 150 million users and 40 million photos being uploaded each day.

o   71 percent of top brands are now on Instagram.

o   Entanglement metrics on Instagram (likes and comments) have jumped 350 percent since last year.

o   As of this writing, Snapchat is the 4th most popular free iPhone app on the iTunes Charts.

o   Snapchat is the 9th most popular iPhone app in terms of usage. 18.6 percent of iPhone users currently use the SnapChat app which can be used to send photos or videos that are only available to be viewed for a set amount of time (generally 1-10 seconds). Once time is up, the image or video is hidden from users and deleted from Snapchat’s servers.

o   One of the most interesting uses of both SnapChat and Instagram that we should be keeping an eye on is for reaching consumers via coupons. While quite a few businesses are already taking advantage of Instagram for offering coupons, deals and discounts, it will be interesting to see what comes of Snapchat’s ‘exploding coupons’. These coupons will only be available to users for several seconds, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘flash sales’!

  • A Mobile strategy will be compulsory. With reports of mobile overtaking desktop usage somewhere between 2014/2015, businesses who want to keep up need to get serious about integrating mobile into all aspects of their business. Simply having a mobile-friendly website will not be enough. Businesses will need to consider:

o   How their website is accessible via mobile: responsive design, mobile-version, or app.

o   How their overall marketing strategy works with mobile: With 84 percent of smartphone shoppers using their phones while in stores, businesses need to figure out how to integrate the virtual and ‘real life’ experiences of their customers (coupons, product reviews, mobile checkout systems, etc.).

o   How their content strategy works with mobile: Offering short, actionable pieces of content to mobile-users, determining when their target market is accessing content via mobile (see infographic below), using segmentation to offer the right type of content to the right people, etc.

  • More Brands are Going to Get Serious About Social: While an estimated 93 percent of marketers already use social media for business, brands are going to need to take their social media marketing strategies to the next level. Smart businesses will get serious about social by integrating it into every aspect of the business from marketing to product development to customer service and retention. As digital analyst Brian Solis points out, “While creating a social brand is a necessary endeavor, building a social business is an investment…”
  • Google Plus FINALLY Hits the Tipping Point: Up from 190 million users in May, Google Plus’s current active monthly users at 300 million trouncing Twitter’s 230 million with Facebook the next logical target, threating Facebook’s dominance by 2015.

The goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business because of social media. Never forget that!

For more hands on information, please join us for our social media tutorial. Info below:

L & L invitation for BCC – 08.27.14

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