Social Media Marketing Plan: 10 Steps, Tips & Simple Solutions

Define Why You Are Doing Social Media: What do you want to get from your social media efforts? More conversions? Ability to market to new group(s) of people? More sales leads? Business intelligence to fuel your overall marketing strategy? Deeper and broader brand awareness?

Define How Success Will Be Measured: Remember, this is not traditional marketing or advertising and Return on Investment can not necessarily be measured in the same way. So how will you measure success (or failure)? Number of visits to your primary domain? Number of conversions? Number of views on specific pieces of social media content? Number of friends/followers? Number of comments? Number of subscribers?

Build A Realistic Game Plan: Which social media environments are you going to leverage and to what degree? Facebook? Twitter? Industry specific niche environments? How is Social Media going to integrate into your overall corporate marketing plan? Set measurable 3 month, 6 month and 1 year goals that you can realistically achieve.

Make The Time: Don’t make the mistake of putting an existing employee with limited internet marketing skills and limited time in charge of your Social Media Marketing. Don’t think that “Social Media Marketing” can be done effectively by “doing it here and there when you have time.”

Choose Your “Voice” Carefully: Empower and appoint the right people. Some people are “social” by nature and others are not.  Don’t make your “IT wizard” or your “print marketing guru” the voice of your company unless that person also has the necessary social marketing skillsets. Remember, this person is representing your company and your brand and everything they do will reflect on the reputation of the organization. The “voice” should be someone who is “social” by nature. The “voice” you choose, should also intimately understand how to effectively leverage and bring their “off-line” social nature and skill sets to fruition “on-line.” It makes sense to invest in a professional social media consultant to help coach, train, and even help your “voice.”

Audit & Assess Your Content: Content is king. Actually a better way to say this is, “Quality Content Is King.” How much and what types of content do you have? There are really only four types of content: text, images, video, and audio. Analyze and assess your landscape of content. You should have equal amounts of value driven and sales driven quality content. Quality content in “social media” is not just about highly optimized product pages that are fine tuned to sell product. It is also about supplying your audience and “friends” and “followers” with value added content. This blog post that you are reading right now is a good example of value driven quality content. Yes, this content resides on a business domain that is clearly in the business of selling products/services related to social, search, and internet marketing. However, the content within this blog post is first and foremost created to provide value to our existing customer base and any person or company that is searching for a “simple solution” to implementing social media marketing. Getting a “sale” or “lead” or a “new customer” as a result of this piece of content would be a nice by-product, but it is definitely not the sole purpose for creating it. Notice, the lack of ‘hard selling’ and commercial intent within this content. The authenticity and objective of this blog post would dramatically change if we were to pollute this content (eg. Click here to hire Simple Solutions) with “hard selling” calls to action. Ultimately, producing quality, viral information for the purpose of social media marketing is often an exercise in being willing to give in order to receive.

Define & Implement Consistent Processes: Right now, everyone is high on social media. It’s all the rage and all the buzz. It’s easy to get started with big plans and all sorts of enthusiasm. This is a good thing! In fact, it’s a must! However, it is important to balance that enthusiastic fire with reality. In two years, the things you implement today will be “work.” What happens when the enthusiasm and buzz dies off (and it will)? You need to have measurable and consistent processes in place (eg. How many Facebook posts per day/week? How many tweets per day/week? How many updates to our blog per day/week? Are we sill uploading all of our videos to youtube.com? etc.)

Automate Tactfully & Carefully: It’s human nature to always look for “the easy way.” But the reality of the situation is that there is no “easy” way. There is no robot, software, or magic widget that can replace the need for people, good quality content, and hard work. This is social media and the core value is interaction amongst people. Imagine walking into a party and on one side of the room a group of 5 people are talking, laughing, interacting, exchanging business cards, etc. On the other side of the room there are 5 kiosk type machines with a welcome screen that say “Joe could not make it to the party. Simply touch the screen to begin learning all about Joe and the things he is doing and selling.” Clearly, you would be drawn to the people. The same is true within social media environments and automation is acceptable in certain instances and totally unacceptable in others. Know when to use automated tools and when not to.

Be Transparent & Bring Your “Friends” To The Party: SEO, Product Feed Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. don’t require a whole lot of transparency, at least not to the degree that social media marketing does. For example, optimizing a product page on an e-commerce domain for search marketing purposes is, for the most part, “behind the scenes” manipulation of code and content. Social Media is everything but that. Everyone asks, “How do we get more fans, followers, etc.?” Unless you’re Ashton Kutcher, you don’t get those things by simply “slapping up” a Twitter page or Facebook fan page and waiting for your hordes of “fans” to “follow” you. If you are a typical person with a typical business model, you build your network of friends and followers in the same way you do off-line.

1. Value each and every friend.
2. Don’t just talk, listen.
3. Say thank you, a lot.
4. Say please, a lot.
5. Don’t just tell people things, try asking questions.
6. Constantly “invite” everyone you already know to your “party.” Every friend you bring to the “party” is going to bring a few friends with them! Here are a couple of ideas to get you thinking of ways to “constantly be inviting” friends to your party:
   1. Put links to Facebook/Twitter on every page of your site.
   2. Put links on your Facebook fan page to your Twitter page.
   3. Have employees include links to your Facebook and Twitter pages in their email signatures.
   4. Market your Facebook/Twitter presence through your print mediums.
   5. Provide incentives for “friends” that you don’t know (yet) to “come to the party” (have contests and offer real prizes like cash and valuable high profile products, etc.). The “big savings” and % based discounts on product are saturating the market and these incentives are OK for marketing to your existing fans/followers but not so effective for attracting new fans/followers.
   6. Include links and a consistent message to “become a fan” or “follow us on Twitter” on virtually every form of outbound marketing and communication.

“This Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True”: It would be foolish to not understand, know, and track what your competitors are doing. However, don’t make the mistake of trying to be just like them. Be true to your organization’s brand. Social media aside, “you” already have lots of “friends” and “followers” and they value “you” for who “you” are and not who “you” try to be. The best thing “you” can be within the landscape of social media environments is “yourself.”