7 Tips for Creating a Social Media Plan for Your Business
Do you have social media plan?
Are you looking for an easy to follow guide to formulate a plan for your business?
Keep reading for seven tips to help your business develop a social plan…
Why Businesses Fail With Social Media
Businesses often fail in their social media efforts for the same reason New Year’s resolutions fail: It’s a good idea, but there’s no structure or commitment.
Then, when there are no immediate results, or the goal ends up being more difficult to attain than previously thought, it goes by the wayside.
Has this happened to your business’s social media presence? You aren’t alone. Very few people can simply choose to be active in social media and stick with it.
For the rest of us, we need something to keep us honest. That’s why I advocate you create a social media plan—a checklist, if you will—complete with daily maintenance, recurring tasks and milestone projects.
These seven tips will help you design a social media plan that will keep you on track, active and moving forward.
Can Social Media Actually Make You Money?
If you’ve ever asked the question, “Can I make money with social media?“, you might have heard a variety of answers such as, “No!”, “Maybe” or “It depends.”
Rarely (if at all) have you heard the confident and unwavering response, “Yes, you can!”
In their book, How to Make Money with Social Media—An Insider’s Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business, Jamie Turner and Reshma Shah explain that there’s a big difference between people who make money with social media and people who don’t.
4 Steps to Selling With Social Media
Are you wondering why your social media efforts aren’t working?
Social media success sometimes appears arbitrary.
Perhaps you’ve wondered, “Why does company X generate leads and business from their social activity while my company wastes resources on blogs that don’t get read and tweets that go unanswered?”
Social media is so new, sometimes the path to success is unclear and it’s easy to lose your way.
If you want to demystify the experience and improve your ROI (return on investment), you need to make sure that your marketing and campaigns include these four essential components:
6 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results
How much time are you spending on social media? Can you tell if it’s helping sales?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a framework for measuring the impact of your social media efforts?
That’s where Susan Etlinger’s new research for the Altimeter Group comes into play. Susan did qualitative research with 60 social media marketers and vendors to understand how businesses currently measure their social media performance.
Her goal: to develop a framework for tying social media performance to business goals.
NOTE: Because Susan’s original research targeted enterprise-level companies, I interviewed her to add some small business insights. The following comments combine results of the research and that interview.
Is Your Business Ready for the Now Revolution?
I recently interviewed Jay Baer, co-author of the brand-new book The Now Revolution and founder of the popular blog ConvinceandConvert.com.
In this interview, we talk about social media marketing, Jay’s experience writing the book and about where this crazy, fast-moving industry is headed.
Mike: Jay, what’s the single most important thing that marketers or business owners need to know to be successful right now?
Jay: It’s a terrific question. One of the things that we talked about a lot in the book is the fact that you have to act quickly as an organization. The example that we use to kick off the book is if you’re at a hotel and you’re having a bad hotel experience—it’s dirty or gross or whatever—historically, you might go down to the front desk, or call the 1-800 number or write a letter.
How to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy
Do you have a social media strategy? Does it involve content? Should it?
The other day I drove past a local convenience store that makes most of its profit from beer, Slush Puppies and beef jerky (not that there’s anything wrong with that). A big sign out front asked passers-by to Like them on Facebook.
“It’s official,” I thought. “Now every business in America has a Facebook page.”
Unfortunately, few businesses actually have a strategy for their Facebook page, or for the rest of their social media activity. They tweet, blog and set up a Facebook business page out of fear of being left behind, rather than as a way to engage their audience.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Canadian grocery store chain Loblaws knew they had a great BBQ sauce based on customer comments. But they didn’t understand why sales were so dismal.
Until they invited customers to post product reviews on their website. Only then did they discover the problem was the bottle – it was too tall to fit in refrigerator doors! They redesigned the bottle and their sales immediately increased.
That’s user-generated content directly leading to an increase in sales. That’s the power of social media marketing.
Are you still sitting on the sidelines when it comes to social media marketing because you know you can’t control the conversations about your company, your products and your services? And because you have no idea how to respond to negative comments?
