Getting Started with a Social Media Strategy.

Last updated 2 years ago

Social Media Strategy – Where Do You Begin?

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Right? Everybody knows that. And here we are, an Internet marketing global leader based out of Las Vegas, helping businesses and organizations every day to get the word out! All over Las Vegas and across America and around the world! Every client we work with wants to communicate with their target audience, build brand awareness, fuel engagement and drive conversion.

So what’s the #1 tool for better quality engagement with qualified prospects and customers? Social media. No surprises here. What is surprising is that many companies are involved with social media activities with no strategy or direction. More than once, when we have broached the subject about a social media strategy, we get responses like:

“Oh, we have a Facebook Fan Page.” (Great, how often do you update it? How many fans do you have and do they matter; i.e. are they true leads or referrals?)
“We ask our website visitors to follow us on Twitter.” (Terrific. Now when did you send the last Twitter update? What was your latest Tweet about? Did anyone ReTweet it?)
“Our YouTube videos are really cool!” (Really? How many views do they get? Who shares them? Do they boost your demand generation efforts?)

The point we’re trying to make is that you can’t hope to leverage social networks without a well-defined social media strategy. Social Media Optimization (SMO) or Social Media Marketing (SMM) is all about engagement.

Planning a social media strategy is critical to an organization’s success with social media. A well-oiled SMO machine delivers greater engagement.

So we tell our clients, it’s time to turn that old saying on its head...what happens in Vegas should not stay in Vegas. It should travel far and wide with your social media conversations and fans!

We advise businesses of all sizes and types to ensure their social media optimization strategy starts with 3 critical components:

A social media conversation calendar. Try to align this with your organization’s overall business calendar. For example, if your business has seasonal peaks and dips for certain products and services, your social conversations can follow these patterns to step up lead generation and maximise sales.
Keep the content buckets full. Make sure you have these content buckets first! Very simply, this means having specific categories / themes under which your social media activities are conducted. Whether it is your Facebook updates, Tweets, blog posts or LinkedIn pages, you can divvy up all the things you want to communicate into distinct idea buckets.
Have an identifiable voice. So often we find that in trying to remain neutral or third party, businesses end up having no distinguishable voice. Or their social media image is a blur. The result is a lack of engagement a.k.a. poor or no conversion.

It doesn’t matter whether your business is small, medium or large; whether your brand is well-known or unheard of, having a social media strategy will help you stay competitive.

Stay tuned for more on GivemeSMO!