Social Media Strategy

 
Times have changed – years ago, when we first started working with businesses who were creating websites and an online presence, it was usually because they felt like that’s what they should be doing rather than a strategic marketing move, and as a result, brochure websites sprang up all over the place (let’s face it, many remain!) and, much like what people are doing now with social media, there was little strategy, adherence to best practice (what is that anyway when it comes to social media?) , and very little chance of identifying whether marketing via online channels was working in any meaningful way.
 

Social media content

Since then we’ve all learnt a lot more about websites – we understand the importance of a call to action. Now, however, we have social media content to think about. As a result, for many busy business owners, marketing and sales people, there can be a tendency to chuck out as much information as possible via a social stream (social diarrhoea not to put too fine a point on it) because “people” will just get it, they’ll take the time to syphon out the things they want –  won’t they?
That doesn’t work in our experience – that way lies wasted hours, wasted resource and failure when it comes to real measurable results. Even worse, it can turn your prospects and customers off so that they block you and start ignoring what you’re saying. If it’s not useful and relevant to them, why would they keep listening?
 

Goals and conversion tracking

We have no excuses for not knowing what’s going on – the plethora of tools like Google Analytics & gazillions of others at our fingertips mean we can know as much as we want to. We know what people are clicking on (or we should do), what they are not clicking on and how much time they spend on each page of our website or blog for instance. We know what links they like us to post on Twitter & Facebook because we can count the click-throughs – more importantly, if we use goals and conversion tracking, we know how good our website, landing pages and online assets are at bringing in leads or enquiries or sales (or whatever else our business model determines we need, in order to turn a profit).
 

Who cares?

Our website visitors & our social followers don’t care about every last detail about our companies – we don’t need them to. We only need them to know enough to make a decision to find out more, and to move a little further towards our sales funnel – ah, there you go… they’re in! And once they’re in, we can woo, educate, inform, interest them with our ongoing nurturing marketing. Gotta get them in there the first place though. How?
Social media has changed the way we consume. We want to get our information as quickly as possible – we are NOT interested in reading long winded paragraphs of jargon-filled text. How many times do you make decision to buy, based on a company’s mission statement? We’ve got to present ourselves differently to cut through the digital noise. We’ve got to offer snippets of interesting (to your prospect) stuff that will entice them to ask for more. Try marketing by answering your customers most frequently asked questions – it works.
 

What business personality??

Your website visitor or social follower wants to know who you are, what you do, how you can help them and how they can contact you – they’d also like to know whether or not you have a Personality. One that they like and that fits with their business and their aspirations at that time. How will you show your business personality?
Your blog and your Twitter feed will showcase some of that personality if it’s done right and uses the right tone. Forget stiff business talk here. Save that for your LinkedIn posts.  You need to be useful and relevant enough to encourage the visitor to your blog, or your social media follower, to want to click on the link to your website or to the sign up for your business list.
Video is the most effective way to present a business personality – whatever it is. Video is also ultimately shareable on the social platforms and if properly optimised on Youtube, can improve your search rankings and therefore your traffic. Video also makes the most effective conversion tool on websites and landing pages. How are you using video online in your current marketing?