Developing a Social Media Marketing game plan

Developing a Social Media Marketing game plan

by: Michael Buczek

As consumers move to social media networks to connect with people and brands they purchase, the  industry needs to adapt and move with these customers. When the social media space is entered, there is a difference between just creating profiles and actively engaging in effective Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns.

Step one is establishing goals and a game plan for your company’s social media presence. Which channels will you participate in and what will be the purpose of each channel? Start with the most popular channels to get the most interaction.

Step two is determining how you will execute and manage the strategy in order to ensure it meets your goals.

Create an organizational chart clearly detailing who will be responsible for task and channel management. One person or multiple people can make up a team responsible for social media deployment. You will also need to set a timeframe for posting to each channel, as stagnation can lead to lost interaction and engagement.

One-person manager
A one-person workflow should be organized, based on the amount of time you want to dedicate to each channel, and demonstrate correlations between channels.

For example, blog posts can be fed into Twitter^® and Facebook^®. Press releases should be posted to the website and Tweeted about. YouTube^® video uploads should be embedded in on-site content as well as in blog posts where it’s relevant to do so.

This cross-pollination of materials allows your collateral and promotions to reach a wider audience and serve multiple duties toward engaging prospective customers. Therefore, the workflow should also include regular brainstorming sessions of the marketing campaigns or topics and items not to be repurposed across channels, but rather to be unique to each.

Finally, the schedule should be fluid enough and the point person savvy enough to understand how to vary postings, appear natural and not regimented, and be able to jump on time-sensitive news, updates and the like and present them effectively within the relevant channels.

The pro of having just one person responsible for all the SMM efforts is that it facilitates consistent messaging across channels. The cons center around time and imagination limitations, which may or may not be rectified by removing other job responsibilities.

Multi-person team
With two or more people, the secret to success is to divide and conquer by clearly delineating tasks with constant communication. Unlike with one person, the larger your team, the more likely there will be some disconnect between channels and there will be a need for more frequent and elaborate strategizing to avoid breaks in the marketing message.

Whether each channel is managed by one team member, or a group, the one constant is that the needs of each channel are addressed individually — Twitter^® is not the same as Facebook^®.

In addition, the parameters and technical options for each channel also vary, and having individuals focus on unique channels allows them to be utilized to their fullest. In the one-person-running-all-SMM scenario, it’s far more difficult to learn all the nuances and opportunities for each channel, but when people can really focus and specialize in just one channel, there’s more potential for forward-thinking growth and innovation. A multi-person team should also have more time to interact.

Probably the most important areas to consider with a larger SMM team are: Planning regular meetings to discuss the topics being promoted for the main organizational marketing calendar; sharing materials across channels and/or encouraging all the marketers to read each others’ posts to ensure that everyone is on the same page and capitalizing on all the collateral available to them for the company’s efforts; and being very clear as to who is responsible for what and what the desired time commitment for each is to ensure channels remain up-to-date and relevant to the marketing schedule.

Measuring results
Within the channels, results and success can be monitored, tracked and assessed based on the numbers of fans/followers you attract as well as how those people engage.

In addition, your analytics suite is a good place to learn about how social media engagement transfers from external channels to performance and outcomes on your site. While many businesses have already learned over the past year and a half or so that direct sales are not a regular result of SMM, the value of SMM-inspired referral traffic can be quite high.

Finally, one not-to-be-neglected byproduct of well-managed and optimized SMM is that active, keyword-rich presence and participation in social media channels can lead to your company having more content that appears in the Search Engines’ Natural Search Results Pages (SERPs), thus garnering you more organic presence.

Whether you are participating in daily maintenance or coordinated campaign efforts, you will want to use the various tools discussed herein to track users’ reactions and adjust your messaging accordingly.

With such a variety of channels to select from and so much possible time that could be spent with SMM versus the amount of time that’s actually feasible for your team to spend, your SMM effectiveness will, in large part, depend on your ability to adjust or edit your team’s action plan over time.

If certain content “pulls” with your audience, post more of it. If other types don’t seem to get a response, try different tactics. Continue to test and adjust. In other words, give your content and campaigns sufficient time to be noticed and received, but if they don’t garner the acceptance or attention you deem necessary to warrant the output and resources allocated, then you will need to be open to changing direction.

Ineffective SMM is generally the result of not enough advance strategic planning or insufficient management of the execution. You can’t just “set and forget,” nor can you assume that everyone on your marketing team is on the same page.

Develop a SMM calendar and organizational workflow and be sure that all members of your SMM team understand your expectations and objectives for delivering on it. Finally, keep a secure master list of your activities, channels you are participating in, passwords, tools that are being used, etc. Without easy access to such critical data, a seemingly minor change or oversight can impair the flow of your day-to-day SMM activities.

---

Michael Buczek is a Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist at MoreVisibility, a full service interactive marketing and design firm in Boca Raton, Florida. Mike earned his bachelor’s degree in public relations with a minor in communications from Northern Michigan University.