Social Media Marketing Strategy: A Guide

Social Media Marketing Strategy: A Guide (or 'How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media')

Everybody’s doing social media now. Literally everyone. If you haven’t started yet you may as well give up; you’ll never understand it now so don’t bother. It’s far too late. You’ve missed too much already. Shut up shop. Hand your keys to the bank manager. Go home.

If that’s the kind of thing you’re hearing from the little voice in the back of your mind, don’t worry. Most people feel the same way about social media marketing. The incredible growth in the use of social media in the last few years; all the new jargon that’s been introduced into the common lexicon; the fact that it’s dominated by the ‘youth’ - all this contributes to the feeling that social media marketing is an impenetrable and confusing world that’s best left alone if you’re to avoid embarrassing yourself horribly through ignorance and naivety.

Luckily this Buyer’s Guide is here to tell you to stop worrying. It’s all really rather straightforward. There are plenty of companies out there who can help you build a social media presence and develop a solid social media marketing strategy to finally yank your business into the new millennia. So take a few deep breaths, stop hugging yourself so tightly, and read on…

Social Media Marketing: What Is It?!

No need to shout, granddad. Before we can define social media marketing we need to define social media which we will describe thus: the entire collection of applications and tools that allow users to generate and exchange content on the internet. What kind of content? Pictures, text, links, videos, articles, whatever you like. What applications and tools? Well, there’s websites, social networks, video sharing sites, mobile apps, blogs, Wikis and others; the list keeps growing. So in a nutshell, social media is people making stuff, putting it on the internet and sharing it with their network of contacts.

Social media marketing isn’t any more complicated. It’s simply brands and businesses acting like users within the social media landscape, trying to ensure that as much of the content as possible that’s being shared is their content or is linked to them in some way for the purposes of self promotion. There are other benefits too and we’ll come to those soon, but what’s important to remember is that there’s no trick. In hiring a company to come up with a social media marketing strategy for you, you’re essentially paying for their expertise and insight into how best to use all those applications and tools (i.e. websites) to get the right message out to the right audience.

Social Media Marketing Channels

The following are a few of the main social media outlets which a social media marketing strategy will target:

• Twitter – Microblogging site where users Tweet messages of 140 characters or less which appear on their ‘followers’ home page. When someone passes your message on to their followers it’s called ‘Re-Tweeting’. 200 million plus users.
• Facebook – Largest social network ahead of MySpace, Google+ and Bebo. Users maintain a personal profile to share information with their ‘Friends’. They share third party content by ‘Liking’ it. More than 800 million active users.
• YouTube – Video sharing website where users can create and upload videos to their ‘channel’ and show approval of other content with ‘Likes’. 790 million unique monthly visitors.
• LinkedIn – Social network aimed at business users. Users maintain a CV-like profile and build ‘connections’. 116 million users.
• Blogs – Personal or company self-publishing websites where users update content frequently by adding articles. The most popular blogging platform is Blogspot with 370 milllion unique visitors per month.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

By now you’re probably asking what, if it’s that simple, is so special about social media marketing. What can be achieved by marketing through social media that you can’t get through traditional channels? Good questions both.

The primary reason that everyone’s clamouring to get a piece of the social media pie is that with SMM, your message isn’t filtered through the lens of an advertising slot or brochure, poster or email. The message isn’t coming via an establishment channel or one that you’ve paid for – it’s coming from other users. Other users that the recipient of the message has added to their network and therefore, to some degree, trusts. This dramatically increases the impact of content distributed in this way and is much harder to ignore than traditional marketing. (It also presents the challenge: you have to come up with content that people actually want to share, but more on that later). Other benefits include:

• Cost effectiveness – It costs nothing when a user decides to share some of your content with the people on their network. So if you’re inventive and interesting social media marketing can be relatively cheap.
• Improved public relations – You don’t just get to put content out there; with social media you have the ability to enter a two-way conversation with your public, responding to their responses to you etc, etc. This can be a powerful customer service tool and shows a cynical modern audience that you’re ‘real’.
• Massive audience – Look at those user figures above. Can you afford not to get your brand in front of all those people?
• Responsiveness – Deal with image management problems swiftly by dealing directly with your audience rather than having to wait for usual PR channels.
• Tracking – A whole host of tools are available to see exactly how your message is propagating through the online sphere and how people react to it. Sometimes you can see results instantly.

Hiring a Social Media Marketing Company

Hopefully by now you’ve been convinced that social media marketing is not only worthwhile but accessible too. Wasn’t that complicated, was it? Told you. So what’s the next step? Since you have no prior experience you’ll probably be looking to hire a company to come up with, and perhaps implement, a social media marketing strategy for you. Choosing the right company is essential – they should have an ethos and way of doing things that matches your own organisation’s aims and objectives. In short, they should ‘get’ you. Follow the hints and tips below to maximise your chances of picking a winner:

• First of all, become a social media user. It’s critical to everything that follows. Sign up to some of the websites listed above and explore. This is the only way you’ll really get to understand what it is a social media agency is doing for you. It will also give you the opportunity to find other companies with a strong presence and who are doing the kind of thing you want to do. Find out who runs their social media and put them on a list of potential candidates. Also, ask business acquaintances who you trust for recommendations (see the power of the third-party recommendation?).
• Investigate the list of potentials. Look on their websites for evidence of previous campaigns and suitability to your brand image. Look at their own social media presence – is it well done? Do people respond well to it? Are they trusted? If you like what you see, invite them to pitch.



Questions to ask social media marketing companies:



• How do you track your success – what metrics do you use? Do they track sentiment i.e. whether users are mentioning you in a positive or negative way?
• Will the company actually execute the campaign for you or just provide a strategy?
• If they’re just providing a strategy will they provide guidance on how to use the tools involved and how to do it in a consistent, non-spammy way? Will they teach you how to best respond to users who want to interact?
• What channels do they specialise in? How are those relevant to your audience?
• How long will it take to see results?
• Don’t be afraid to demand specificity. This is a new industry and as such it’s full of companies who are still just finding their way. If the pitch is vague and low on detail it may be that they’re just blagging it.
• Above all, you’ll want to find an agency that fits with your own company’s ethos and way of doing things. Social media is all about communication so you should find your agency easy to talk to and easy to get on with.

Once you’ve found the right social media team you’ll want to draw up a contract that is agreeable to both parties and discuss fees. The strategy should set out clear goals and objectives to which you can link the payment schedule.

So what are you waiting for? A brave new world of millions of social media users is waiting for you to add your voice to the throng. The longer you sit on the sidelines the harder it’s going to be to join in – that little voice in the back of your mind will talk you out of it again soon enough – so get involved.

Get Quotes from Social Media Marketing Providers