5 Keys to Social Media Success

As I get more involved in social media for business, I see more each day of the changing social media scene and its frustrations in keeping up and mastering it.  With all the constant changes on Facebook and Twitter, new social media moguls like Google + and Pinterest, it's no wonder there seems to be no real direction in planning a social media campaign and working it with success.  It seems an even greater need with so much change, for planning and follow-up to succeed. 

With that in mind, here are a few steps that should help you with your social-media action plan:

1. Goals

What's the problem? What are you trying to achieve? Start by stating that out loud, defining it, and writing it down. It may seem too obvious but real business happens over time, with actions, not just in meetings. Setting the context correctly matters.

For example, social media for your business might be a matter of generating and publishing content to attract visitors to your website where they buy services. It might also be about publishing information, like the whereabouts of the taco truck. Or it might be to deal with complaints, like bad reviews. Maybe it's serving as a type of sales collateral, helping to close sales by positioning the business and its expertise. Start your plan by stating the goal of your social media campaign.

2. Actions

Having defined the goals, how are you going to achieve them? What specifically do you want to do?  An action plan must have specific concrete steps that need to be taken.  For social media, that would be actions like setting up accounts, developing graphics for the different pages, defining what kinds of updates should be done, on which platform, and others.  How many tweets are required?  How many are too many?  Do you post the same thing exactly on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn?  What kind of content gets liked or retweeted?  What's supposed to happen?

3. Measurement

As the plan gets going, and business gets going, how will you know if your plan is even working?  How will you judge performance?  How will you compare your plan to your actual results in order to review and revise your plan?

All of that takes establishing the measurement -- the numbers -- as you develop your plan.  Don't worry about guessing the future correctly, because nobody does.  Just make the assumptions logical and the guesses numerical, so you can test them when you're underway, and revise them as results come.  Standard numbers for measuring social media could be traffic generated, tweets, updates, likes, retweets, increase in sales, orders for special deals, or even the interesting social-media measurements like Klout or Peer Index that combine numbers into theoretical measurement of influence or impact.

 

4. Committing the people

Committees, groups, and meetings don't actually do anything for a real business.  It takes people, so an action plan includes very clearly defined tasks and responsibilities. Who does what?  Make that explicit.  Beware of the dangers of having multiple people involved in a solution, without any one person committed to doing something.

Develop commitment, not just involvement.  Compare the role of the pig to the role of the chicken in the classic bacon-and-egg breakfast:  The chicken is involved, the pig is committed.

The social-media action plan should define who's doing what.  Is it one person on Twitter and another on Facebook?  Is one gathering and curating content and another watching complaints?  Who does the messaging?  Who develops blog posts?  Spell it out.

5. Tracking and following up

Like everything in planning for business, the social-media action plan is only as good as the actions it causes.  Goals, actions, tracking, and people lead to a review-and-revise session scheduled in advance on a regular basis, maybe once a month or every other month, depending on your volume of business.  Look at the plan, compare it to actual results, discuss the reasons for the difference between plan and actual, and revise the plan.  This also includes reviewing performance of the individuals and specific tasks against their numeric measurement.  This is simply called good management.

I hope this has aided in your development of a social media plan for your business.  I would love to hear about your challenges, what you have to share or your questions in the Comments section below…

To your Success,

         Thea