According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Report , 67% of marketers plan to increase their use of social media channels including blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.

As more companies integrate social media into their marketing and communications plans, emphasis needs to be on creating a social media strategy.  Without a strategy, you’ll undoubtedly be sucked into a social media time sink.

So how exactly do you develop this strategy?

It’s easy.  Here’s a practical approach to developing a social media strategy for your business.

The Prerequisite

Do you work for a large company? Before you develop your strategy, make sure your upper-management team believes in social media and that the first goal is not to sell, sell, sell.  In other words, if your business is jumping into social media because “everyone else is doing it” or because you want to sell product rather than to build relationships, please step away from social media.  Social media is a long-term commitment and not a marketing gimmick.

If you’re having a tough time convincing your team that social media needs to be integrated into your marketing plan, then counter any concerns with these responses to common social media objections.

It’s important for the organization to understand that testing and experimentation are keys to success.  This comes naturally to an organization whose culture embraces being proactive and open.  The reason why all businesses need to have a social media strategy is because it prevents any misunderstandings and emphasizes why social media is relevant to your business’ overall goals.

Now let's develop your social media business strategy, shall we?

Here are seven key points to consider…

#1: Determine Your Goals and Objectives

Determine who owns social media.  Whether it’s marketing, PR, or communications is irrelevant.  In a perfect social media world for businesses, social media instills a collaborative approach and breaks down silos.

What’s important is to understand your social media goals and objectives and how they tie into your overall company goals.

Keep it Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant, and Timely (aka be SMART!).

#2: Research, Research, and Research Some More

Rather than jumping into the social media pool with both feet, do the equivalent of the “splash-water-on-self” maneuver so you know what to expect.  Step two of creating an effective social media strategy is research.

• Develop a list of social media sites where you can potentially engage with people.  The list will most likely start off with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few select blogs and forums.
• Check out each of the social media sites on your list and do additional research to determine relevancy by searching for your brand name, your competitors, and your target keywords.  Listen to what’s out there, identify, and understand your target audience.

#3: Create a Digital Rolodex of Contacts and Content

When social media is done correctly, relationships will build naturally.  Begin making connections by following the conversation.  You can do this by subscribing to blogs in your industry and by making a list of influencers who are relevant to your business.

This becomes handy when it’s time to provide content on your social networks.  Read Emily Proctor’s article in which she provides some excellent pointers on a social media content strategy.

#4: Join the Conversation to Develop Relationships

Now it’s time to start making use of all the research you’ve done.  You can start joining the conversation by posting comments on blogs and forums, answering questions on Yahoo! and LinkedIn, joining groups related to your industry and joining Twitter chats.

Begin developing relationships by following and friending influencers and those in your industry.  Don’t just look for people with thousands of followers; you’ll be surprised by the value that someone with only a couple of hundred followers provides.  Here’s an article on how to network on Twitter.

#5: Strengthen Relationships

It’s easy to hide behind your avatar or profile picture, but face-to-face is incredibly powerful.  I think more people are now realizing how underrated the in-person interaction really is because of how far social media has come, allowing so many people to “hide.”

Attend offline events related to your industry—not only to strengthen your knowledge base but also to network and strengthen relationships with those you might have conversed with via social media but never met in person.  A popular offline event is known as a tweetup.

#6: Measure Results

You have goals and objectives, right?  That means you should be able to measure  your success.

Remember, what you measure will tie into the goals and objectives of your social media strategy.

Let’s take the four commonly used objectives:

• Improve brand presence across social channels—The measurement goal here is an increase in the number of followers on Twitter, number of fans on Facebook, number of comments, number of times your brand is mentioned in blogs and forums and so on.
• Increase positive sentiment about your brand—The goal here is to convert the number of positive mentions while taking note of negative mentions.  Has the ratio of positive to negative comments improved?  With the good comes the bad in social media. Get used to it!
• Develop relationships for future partnership opportunities—This goal is to keep track of those with whom you’ve connected.  For example, if you met a potential speaker for your webinar, include that person into your digital Rolodex.  If a vendor contacts you through your blog, capture that lead and take note.
• Increase traffic to your website—Keep track of visitors to your website who come from each of your social media sites.  If you’re promoting an event using social media, consider using a unique code to track the campaign.

Measuring social media is a never-ending debate.  What metrics do you use to measure social media?  What objective are you measuring those metrics for?

When it comes to measuring social media, it takes a multitude of metrics as well as trending reports to get a sense of what to improve.

#7: Analyze, Adapt, and Improve

Your social media strategy doesn’t end with measurement; it goes beyond that.  You need to analyze your social media campaigns, adapt any new findings into your current processes, and improve your efforts.

Testing and experimentation will perfect your social media efforts.

As you dive deeper into the never-ending pool of social media, you’ll quickly understand what works and what doesn’t.

More specifically, you’ll develop favorite tools to use, realize that there are certain days and times where it doesn’t pay to be active in social media, and come to the conclusion that you still have lots to learn.  It’s a wonderful new world and I hope many of you are as thrilled to be part of it as I am.

Conclusion

Social media strategies will vary for each business and for each industry.  However, one thing is clear: social media needs to have “all hands on deck” in order to be successfully integrated into your company’s goals and objectives.

In general, I view social media as a strategy, not a tactic. I consider the social media platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., as tactics that tie into the social media strategy.  In other words, outline your social media strategy and support your strategy with tactics.  Without a carefully thought-out plan, you’ll eventually be overwhelmed with social media and even worse, get burnt out by it.  Use this guide as a stepping-stone to your social media success.  Cheers!

What are your thoughts about strategy versus tactics? Do you have any tips from your own experience developing a social media plan?  Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.

Image sources:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/intersectionconsulting/4044928121/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/3290848259/in/photostream/

Let’s face it—we’re all looking for shortcuts to help manage our businesses and social media interactions more efficiently and effectively.  One of the best ways to make your social media activities run more smoothly is outsourcing—having someone manage certain tasks for you.

But when it comes right down to it, there are certain things that shouldn’t be outsourced, and there are really good reasons why “you” need to be a part of your social media strategy.

In fact, if you’re thinking of hiring someone to manage your social media accounts and handle your online networking, you may want to think again, because you might end up with exactly the opposite of what you’re after.

This article will look at social media tasks and what should and shouldn’t be outsourced, to see maximum results for your small business.

What Should You Outsource?

The short answer to this question is: You should outsource anything technical that doesn’t require your personality or involvement. Let’s look at some specifics:

Profile Setup:

Your profiles across social media platforms generally include the same standard details.  Your name, a short bio, web address and a standard-size photo. Provide your assistant with a short bio and a picture of you, and he or she can edit your image to the right size for each platform and set up your profiles pretty easily.

Twitter Background and Facebook Programming:

Twitter allows you to set up a background image on your profile (like the @smexaminer one shown here). This background image is valuable real estate for branding and traffic generation.

Facebook allows you to set up custom programming in FBML on fan pages, giving you the opportunity to share more about your business, express your branding, draw more traffic to your website and increase your subscriber list.

This is something you can easily outsource, and if you’ve got a solid team in place, it shouldn’t be too challenging for your designer and web developer to whip up something that expresses your branding, coordinates across your website and all of your social media profiles and captures leads.

Getting Listed:

There are several online Twitter directories where you’ll want to be listed to maximize visibility. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll want to find groups that align with your business interests and the interests of your target market. Your assistant should be able to find these groups and sites, know which ones make sense for you and set up your listings.

Automated Status Updates:

There are some status updates you want automated, and others you don’t. You definitely want your blog updates automatically submitted to social media sites. It just makes good sense to automate your blog RSS feed, so each time you add a post to your blog, it gets fed into your social media accounts.

As long as you’re providing valuable, authentic blog posts (versus salesy junk), broadcasting your blog will be seen as sharing interesting and useful content.

I’ve also had my assistant set up automated status updates and tweets for specific purposes. For example, during a product launch, we’ll schedule two or three automated posts at strategic times throughout the day to direct folks to the product site. We’ll include some other scheduled tweets with relevant, useful information that’s of interest to my followers.

But since this represents “broadcasting” (sending information into the Twittersphere and other social media without actually engaging), these automated tweets do not represent a substantial percentage of my overall tweets or status updates.

Automated Tasks:

Specifically related to Twitter, some third-party applications like TweetAdder allow me to research my target market, locate them on Twitter and automatically follow and unfollow various people.

Even though this is a relatively easy automated process, I don’t really want to let it run on its own, which means that I would normally have to check in now and again and tell the application to start and stop these processes. This is certainly something my assistant can handle.

So What Shouldn’t You Outsource?

There’s no big list here. The bottom line is that social media networking is about the conversation—so don’t outsource that!

The best way to build your social media networking strategy is to connect and engage. And you just can’t do that with by broadcasting an “I want to hire someone to do it all for me” mentality.

As Al Ferretti and Skeeter Hansen (of TwitterWatchdog.com and TweetFormula.com) (and similarly, Jason Falls in this interview) suggest, the benefit of Twitter (and likewise, of social media in general) is in the conversation, and if you simply broadcast without interacting, you’ll blend into the noise and lose followers when they get the feeling that you just don’t care about them.

Your followers and fans aren’t doing business with a computer or a feed, and you don’t want them to get the sense that you’re not really even there.

If you’re looking to economize your time, make your social media activities more efficient and see real results in the form of increased web traffic, brand visibility and lead generation, then automate everything but the part where you interact and engage with people.

It’s actually quite simple—automate the impersonal technical tasks, but spend 10-15 minutes two to three times throughout the day checking your Twitter and Facebook feeds, retweeting, sharing, replying to what people are putting out there and having conversations.

Share your followers and fans with other people and connect your followers to each other. Get involved and engaged, and get to know the people who are following you.  It’s all about the interactive experience, the conversation and engagement.

So when you look at your social media strategy, before you decide to hire someone to manage your social media accounts for you, remember that people do business with people they know, like and trust.

What are your experiences with outsourcing and automating social media? Have you tried having your tweets and status updates outsourced? What was the result?

For the first time in history, the Internet is focusing in on local business in a major way. And Foursquare is leading the trend.

Instead of competing in a “global marketplace,” local business owners now have access to geotagging, local search, and location-based services. All of which make the Internet more useful to small business than it has ever been before.

Imagine being a hotel owner with several rooms available at 8 o’clock one evening. You know there are a couple of big events happening in town and people are going to be looking for rooms to “sleep it off.” Because of location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, you can now advertise a special for those rooms to people who are close enough to take advantage of it.

Would you like to offer a loyalty program to customers without having to print those annoying punch-cards? How about Foursquare for Business… Their free business program keeps track of all the stats for you and even sends you messages to tell you who your most loyal customers are!

New possibilities are being explored every day. But before you jump in and start geotagging, here’s what you need to know.

What Is Geotagging?

It’s a good question because there are really two answers.

First Answer: Geotagging is an added feature for Twitter (and other social media sites) that lets you identify your tweet location by town, neighborhood or precise location.

Second Answer: Geotagging is also an element of mobile applications (Foursquare, Gowalla) that enables real-time sharing of your activities, and promotion of real-time location-based rewards and specials offered by merchants.

Basically, geotagging takes advantage of the GPS technology that’s built into smartphones to build community at the street level instead of just at a global level.

Getting Started

The great thing about a service like Foursquare is that you can’t cheat. It operates based on the physical location of your phone, so you—or at least your phone—has to be where you say it is.

To use any of the location-based services, the first step is to download an application to your smartphone. For example, Facebook is introducing a location-based feature for the approximately 25% of users who post updates using smartphones.

Those people using older cell phones will need to update to an iPhone, Android, Palm or Blackberry before they can join this newest game. But a business owner can join the fun at any time.

For The Business Owner

Yes, even as a business owner, location-based services are going to be easier to use with a smartphone, but you can get started without one. For example, Foursquare is walking business owners through the free signup process and giving them advice for setting up a reward program.

Business owners already using Foursquare can go straight to the venue signup page to get started. All Foursquare is asking right now is that business owners limit themselves to places where people tend to gather; i.e., coffee shops, restaurants, cafés and bars. Other storefronts (hardware stores, salons, etc.) will be able to join and participate as they develop their capacity to handle more traffic.

How it Works for Consumers

Naturally you start by getting a location-based app account. There are lots of apps to choose from:

• Yelp has added a check-in feature.
• Google has added a location widget to Latitude.
• Apple is developing an app for the iPhone.
• Facebook is ready to make geotagging available to mobile users.
• Twitter has geotagging in place.
• Gowalla is running on the iPhone and Android.
• Foursquare is on all the smartphones and connects to Facebook and Twitter.

Once a geo-based application is downloaded to your smartphone, most of the work is already done. For example, all you do is login to Foursquare and the application tells you what businesses close to you are registered.

Foursquare also tells you what rewards or specials each business offers to Foursquare users who check in. For example, 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea in Seattle offers $1 macchiatos before 4pm and $2 off beer and wine after 4pm. The Mayor gets a free pastry! (“The Mayor” is an automatic designation Foursquare gives to the person who checks in to a specific location the most often each day.)

MSNBC’s Today says Foursquare just might be the new Facebook.

To make it more fun, Foursquare also offers badges based on how often and in how many places you login. For example, you can be a Super Mayor by achieving Mayor status in 10 or more venues at once. You get your first badge—the Noob—for making your first check-in, and there are badges to show your progress all the way up to 50 check-ins.

There are even corporate badges and badges based on conferences (SxSW and CES).  You can see a (mostly) complete list of Foursquare badges at IWasAround. It’s a little hard to keep any list like this complete because it’s always being added to. Foursquare is even looking at allowing business owners to develop their own badges.

Why Be Involved?

Let’s start this by pointing at a great article Clement Yeung wrote that’s all about Foursquare. Clement gives a 5-point action plan for using Foursquare and makes some sensible suggestions for ways businesses can partner to be more attractive to customers.

The main reason to get involved is this: The cell phone is the point of convergence for technology.

Things that are happening right now are:

• Websites being optimized for mobile display
• Foursquare and other location-based services becoming popular
• Location and activity-based advertising
• Real-time, local search capacity for consumers

And all these things revolve around smartphones.

AdMob Mobile Metrics is a business dedicated to tracking how people are using their smartphones. Interestingly, their January 2010 metrics report says:

• Almost twice as many iPhone and iPod Touch users regularly download paid apps as Android and webOS users.
• Men are the biggest users of smartphones (but only by 10-15%).
• Smartphone users are evenly split across age groups.
• The vast majority of smartphone users are happy with their toy and iPhone leads the satisfaction pack.

Foursquare and Gowalla connect to Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is also launching a location-based widget! So everything you’re doing with social media is easily applicable to location-based marketing.

In fact, my assertion is that the “big players” have finally woken up to the untapped market of small business owners. This is why location-based services are being developed.  Location-based services make it possible for you and me to make meaningful online connections with the audience that lives within 10, 20 or 50 miles of us.

And I have a special assignment for your local business: Watch your customers today, and tell me how many walk in with a smartphone. Even better, tell me how many are using that smartphone while they stand in line! They are your captive audience.

What do you think about Foursquare? Have you put a reward program in place for your loyal, local, online customers? Are you just finding out about this stuff and have questions? Go ahead and share what you know in the comment box below.

By now, you have probably heard the success stories of companies like Dell and Starbucks, which have created hugely successful social media presences that serve millions of fans and generate millions of dollars of revenue.  The only problem is, your small business doesn’t have 1/1000^th of the brand recognition these companies have.  You run a solid small business that is well known in your niche or your region, but not beyond.

How can social networks become useful marketing and operations tools for smaller businesses that don’t have a large customer base?

This question has kept many small businesses from interacting on social networks, as a recent study showed that only 24 percent of small businesses had begun social media marketing.

Here are five tips to optimize your small business’ social networks to attract more customers online.  Small business owners and marketers do not have the luxury of lots of free time to monitor social networks, so these tips are intended to help you be as efficient as possible.

#1: Make Your Profiles About More Than Just Your Industry

While you should be demonstrating expertise on your Facebook fan page and your blog, you should also be adding local context to this information.  What does the information you are providing mean for your specific region?

If you are selling homes, provide information and links about the local area, as well as the real estate you are offering.  As a small business, you are competing against large national news sources, so provide something the big guys can’t afford to give—local perspective.  The Wydler Brothers Realty Team does just that, offering insights on the Washington, D.C. market as well as homes they are offering in the area.

On their blog, Wydler Brothers Realty offers advice on the general DC area, in addition to their expertise in the real estate industry.

#2: Offer Value

By far the most important tip to getting value from social media for your business is offering value to the customers you want to interact with.  First, make sure your social media presences contain all the information a customer needs to find you on and offline, and provide a clear idea of what your business offers.

Second, define what you’ll be offering your potential customers in return for their attention and time.  You can offer promotions or discounts specifically for fans of your Facebook page, for instance. 

If you do not have the budget for special offers, make sure the content you are offering is valuable to the potential customers you are trying to reach.  Envision the need you are filling for the target customer and serve the customer with useful information related to your business or industry.

Rackspace sees high interaction from polls. Smaller hosting companies could learn from what the market leader is doing, and replicate the types of activities that drive engagement.

#3: Show Consistency

Nothing is more likely to reduce the effectiveness of small business social media outreach than inconsistency and spotty participation.  You can’t expect potential customers to revisit your Facebook profile if it is hasn’t been updated in the two weeks since they first visited, or expect them to make a purchase from your Twitter outreach if you only post 2 updates per month.

For example, Naked Pizza, based in New Orleans, messages its followers on Twitter 1 to 15 times per day.  It is now receiving 20 percent of its total revenue from these interactions.

#4: Diversify and Connect

It takes some time investment on the front end, but reaching out on multiple social platforms—then connecting the different presences with the same themes and message—is crucial to reaching the most possible customers on social networks.   You don’t want to replicate the same message on every platform, either.  Though services like ping.fm are great for simplifying content posting, try to add something unique to each social media presence you maintain.

#5: Be Competitive

Observe your competition and their social media activity.  If your business is the only one in your industry and region interacting on social networks, congrats, you’re ahead of the curve.  But more likely than not, your competitors are experimenting on social networks, too.  Observe what they are doing to grow their base.  Which tactics are working?  Which are not?  This is exactly what you’d do in a competitive assessment offline, looking for ways to improve your process by evaluating your competitors.

Remember to stay persistent, as it takes time to establish robust presences on social media sites.  If you act on these five tips in your social media outreach, you will leverage your time effectively, and see improved results from promoting your small business on social networks.

What techniques have been most successful for you on your business’ social media presences?  Which of these tips do you see the most/least potential in?  Let us know by commenting in the box below!

A lot is happening in the world of social media. Here’s a quick summary of recent major research findings:

#1: By 2010, 26 Million (1 in 7) U.S. Adults Will Use Twitter Monthly

A new study by eMarketer surpasses their previous estimates of Twitter usage. The study, conducted just last month, found the following: “In 2009, there will be 18 million U.S. adults who access Twitter on any platform at least monthly. That represents a 200% increase over 2008 levels. Usage will reach 26 million U.S. adults in 2010, a further 44.4% climb.”

Earlier this year, eMarketer reported more conservative usage numbers, stating that there were indications of large numbers of users abandoning the site shortly after signing up and many others only using it sporadically. However, they recently revised their estimates because “recent data shows healthy—and growing—percentages of U.S. Internet users adopting the popular microblogging platform,” according to eMarketer senior analyst, Paul Verna.

Twitter is not the only social networking site to report record usage numbers. In September, Facebook officially hit the 300 million-user mark, making the social networking site nearly as large as the U.S. population.

#2: Americans Spend 17% of Online Time on Social Media Sites

As popular social media platforms continue to grow their numbers of users, it is logical to conclude that Americans are spending more time on social networking sites. According to a recent study by The Nielsen Company, 17% of the time spent online was at social networking sites (an increase from 6% in August 2008).

Among those paying the most attention to this recent trend are advertisers. Online ad spending increased by 119% to $108 million in August 2009.

#3: In 2010, Over 50% of Marketers Will Be Using Social Media

Marketers are becoming even more aware that social media marketing must be a key component of their media buy strategy. This was recently affirmed in the findings of the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” by the Center for Media Research, which examined the likelihood of marketers including social media in their 2010 marketing plan. Over half (56.3%) of marketers stated that social media would “realistically” be part of that mix.

The top 5 most popular media for the 2010 marketing spend were as follows:

• Email (56.8%)
• Social networks (56.3%)
• Keyword search (49.7%)
• Radio (42.2%)
• Magazines (42.1%)

In addition, 57% of media buyers reported they will buy non-traditional media, including online, display video, search, mobile and event sponsorships, while 43% reported they will buy the more traditional media, including TV, print and radio.

#4: Blogs Most Useful Social Media Tool, Say 51% of Businesses

McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey” examined companies’ overall assessment of the value of different social media technologies. As reviewed by eMarketer, “When it came to customer-related benefits, blogs were the most useful tool, bringing measurable benefits to 51% of responding companies worldwide. That was followed by video-sharing and social networking at 48% each, and RSS feeds at 45%.”

In addition to these findings, the top three reported benefits of Web 2.0 marketing included:

• Increased marketing effectiveness (52%)
• Higher customer satisfaction (43%)
• Reduced marketing costs (38%)

#5: 75% of Marketers Plan to Increase Social Media Use in 2010

According to a recent survey by virtual events provider Unisfair, marketers are most focused on attracting and keeping customers in 2010 and they plan to use social media to make this happen. A few interesting factoids from the Unisfair findings:

The 3 leading marketing priorities in 2010 according to U.S. marketers:

• New customer acquisition (60%)
• Customer retention and engagement (48%)
• Thought leadership (45%)

The top 5 marketing tactics U.S. marketers planned to increase in their 2010 marketing mix:

• Social media (75%)
• Web search/SEO (51%)
• Email campaigns (49%)
• Virtual events (48%)
• Online advertising (28%)

The study also asked marketers to rank the value of social media platforms. LinkedIn came in on top at 26%, Facebook at 23% and Twitter at 17%.

What are your thoughts? How might these study findings impact your future social media activities? I’d love to hear from you.