Its not just enough to create a Facebook page or Twitter profile and just expect your community will build of its own accord.
Like SEO, providing content is as much about placement and medium as it is about value.
This presentation offers a 6-point need-to-know criteria to creating a results-based Social Media strategy with your audience and brand values at the core.
2. What Social Media can do for your business
• Build communities across multiple platforms (on and offline) turning loyal
customers into fans and brand advocates
• Reach across Global Markets
• Enable personable customer support and invaluable market research and feedback
• Cost-effective skills-based recruitment
• Provide consumer insight and user demographics
• Generate awareness as well as advertising and promotion
• Establish your authority in your area of expertise - thought leadership
• Crisis Management
3.
4. How do you get ‘their’ attention?
• Provide valuable content
• Regularly and actively engage with multiple niche communities
• Ensure the technology is in place and works (share buttons, links, RSS feeds)
• Optimizing media – SMO (Social Media Optimization) Your popularity increases
search ranking results across all community driven sites. (hashtags, SEO, keywords
and back links)
5. Ways a brand can engage and interact with their audience:
• Social Networks (Facebook, • Social bookmarking (Delicious, Digg)
LinkedIn) • News Aggregation (Facebook,
• Niche topic forums (knitting) • Wikis
• Geo mapping (Foursquare, Gowalla)
• Micro-blogging (twitter)
• Audio sharing (Soundcloud, Spotify)
• Blogs and RSS feeds (Wordpress, • Social Gaming (Farmville, World of Warcraft)
Blogger) • Search Engine Recommendations (Google+,
• Brand specific forums (Porsche) SEO)
• Photo sharing (Flickr, Pinterest) • Ebooks and whitepapers (Scribd, Issuu)
• Video sharing (Youtube, Vimeo,
Ustream)
7. 1. Objectives
Start by asking
• Who you are
• why your creating a social business strategy
• And what you want to offer.
Rooted in core brand principles
- Define – your brand identity - brand voice (tonality) – brand personality
- Create brand social Guidelines – what you can and can’t do.
8. 2. Audience
Who are you aiming at?
Who is your audience?
Segment demographics Profiling –keep refining them until you are happy.
Consider Key Industry Influencers: The top 100
9. 3. Concept / Message
Message – brand -> media ->platform -> unique approach
• Consider your content to be used across a range of platforms
• Tailor your message for the medium
• A good concept travels across all different media, threading them together
seamless
Content Curation
• It is about where it is as much as what it is. SMO = SEO + popularity +
community driven site
• Consider keywords, hashtags, repetition, backlinks, SEO, analytics into the mix
• Consider whether you would be interested in your content?
Does it inform? Intrigue? Inspire? Engage ?
10. 4. Tools and Resources
Tools = Online applications and social networks of kinds, physical events, word
of mouth, traditional PR and marketing activity.
• Use and get to know your tools capabilities
Resources = People, time, offline equipment, collective knowledge base
• Understand your limits as well as capabilities
Work within your boundaries. If you over-extend your resources at the
beginning you will let down your community, your network and the trust you
had spent time building up . Be realistic.
11. 5. Metrics
Start by asking what you want to achieve
Know your tools
Where do they offer value? influence and reach?
1 - Divide your tracking into Mentions and sentiment – then
2 - Resonance, sharing (includes retweets), and intent.
Create regular measurement benchmarks to ensure your strategy is working
and if its not you are able to adapt it immediately.
Measure your progress:
Twitter Search https://twitter.com/#!/search-home
Follower Wonk http://followerwonk.com/
Twitter Count http://twittercounter.com/
Board Tracker http://www.boardtracker.com/
Klout & Peer Index
12. 6. Strategy
Putting it all together
• Build the metrics and benchmarks into the strategy
• Communicate the strategy all the stakeholders and team members.
• Create Static Guidelines to be able to adapt and act in real-time.
• It takes time to create content . Factor this in.
Content & Curation:
• Be constructive, informative, supportive, educational, personal and creative
• Create content for many mediums (video, audio, whitepapers, and more), to
be embedded within community driven platforms (with high SEO ranking.)
• Consumers are interested in content, not keywords. Reuse keywords for all
your content to climb to the top of your specialist subject
• Ensure all technology connects (links, buttons , widgets)
13. Remember
DO:
- Start with who, why and what you want to contribute.
- Be an active listener and offer valuable content, don’t project.
- Be realistic and assess your resources and tools before starting anything
- Include SMO into your strategy to support your efforts and increase your
search ranking
- Research , plan and communicate to your entire team. It affects them all.
DON’T
- Add to the noise – be constructive, informative, supportive, educational,
personal
- Don’t - Ignore your audience whatever you do! They’ve invested their
time in you by signing up to your page, or helping retweet your content.
Invest in them back.
15. Next Steps
Create your own strategy
Set up your accounts
Download the apps and start engaging with your audience
Manage the apps (as well as measure)
Tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/
Hootsuite http://hootsuite.com