Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

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Social media has made a tremendous impact on your business and now you need to come up with ways that you can improve your strategy to make social media even more effective for you. A checklist can help tremendously.

A wonderful way to get organized and to stay organized when it comes to your social media interactions for business is to develop a checklist. Checklists are a wonderful tool when it comes to many things. It is a really sensible idea never to commit anything to memory. Of course, there will be details that you do remember on a consistent basis; however, if you have everything written down, you will have a guarantee of never allowing anything to fall through the cracks.

An effective checklist for your social media marketing efforts should look something like this:

  • Organizing your social media strategy: Evaluate the structure of your business organization and determine if it is set up in a manner that is conducive to achieving great success in your business. You should ask yourself:
    • Who (or what) supports your efforts?
       
    • How will your staff benefit from your use of social media and is it being shared in a way that will be of great use to everyone with whom you work?
       
    • Is the structure of your social media team solid and does it do what it is supposed to do?
       
    • What proportion of your staff is already working with social media in your business?
       
    • Among your staff, which people are helping your social media marketing efforts and which people are hindering them?
       
  • Listen carefully: Listening is one of the most important skills to have in business. You can’t do anything unless you have learned how to listen.
    • A part of listening is thinking long and hard about your company branding, products and services, and people who you want associated with your business. Whatever you choose to put in place will be a result of listening to what other people need from you in the way of offerings. 
       
    • Send out surveys to your prospective customers and existing customers. When you have received the responses to the surveys, really listen to what they are saying and adjust your approach accordingly.
       
    • Listen to what your competition is saying. Watch what they are doing and how they are approaching other people in an effort to sell their products and services.
      • Set up goals and objectives for your business: An extremely important part of listening and learning from other people is the interactions that you have with those people as a result. When it comes to your staff and how they interact online, it is critical that what and how they interact is appropriate and follows the set of ethics and etiquette that has already been established.
         
      • Establish your target audience: Before you make any effort at all to reach out to your target audience, you need to identify who they are and how they feel.
         
    • Understand their needs and try to come up with solutions to their problems before you interact with them.
       
    • Identify which social media channels they prefer to frequent and interact through those channels.
       
    • Identify the behaviors of your target audience. Figure out if they like to create content, share other people’s content, or just silently read other people’s interactions.
       
    • Figure out which methods of communication are preferred by your customers and use those methods consistently.
       
  • Have your strategy buttoned up: Write down whatever your established social media marketing strategy happens to be. 
     

    • Engage your audience. Exactly how you begin to approach this is up to you. You can take on an active or a more passive role, depending on what works for you and your business.
       
    • Use analytics tools to help you to understand how you are doing with your social media involvement and how you can improve upon what you are already doing.
       
  • Use the tools and tactics that are available to you: You have already committed to publishing a certain volume and frequency of content. The next thing that you need to do is to commit to using the various social media channels and tools on a very regular basis. The more you use them, the more skillful you will become. Use those tools to their full potential for increased success in your business.
    • Find social networks that are most appropriate for you and your business. Jump in immediately and start to interact. Write training materials for your staff so that they can become as adept at using social media as you have become. Interact as much as possible.
       
    • Blog as often as you can. Blogging is effective for so many reasons. One of them is the fact that blogs are made for social interaction on many social media channels at once. All social media marketing campaigns should include a blog. If they are used correctly, they will drive a high volume of traffic to your website.
       
    • Share as much media with others as possible. One of your purposes when it comes to social interaction is to share as much as possible of your knowledge and expertise with others.

Conclusion

Having a checklist to keep all of the details of your social media involvement in order is an excellent idea and now is the best time to start fresh with bringing your social media interactions to the next level. The more organized you become, the easier and more fluid your online work will be. Always bear in mind that you will succeed in business through hard work, perseverance, and consistency.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

Author

  • Michael Cohn

    Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has decades of experience in IT and web technologies. Michael founded CompuKol Communications to help small businesses and entrepreneurs increase their visibility and reputation. CompuKol consults, creates, and implements communication strategies for small businesses to monopolize their markets with a unique business voice, vision, and visibility. Mr. Cohn earned a Master’s degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master’s degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

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6 Responses

  1. Krissy Brady | Sell Crazy Someplace Else says:

    What a great post!  I am a big fan of checklists, and honestly wouldn't function without them.  Not only is it a great way to stay on top of your social networking strategies, it's a great way to remind yourself to look behind your social networking where your statistics lie–to ensure that you look over your strategies periodicially to figure out what works, what doesn't, what to keep doing and what to drop.

  2. Shashank Jain says:

     

    Via LinkedIn Groups

    Group: CMS User Group
    Discussion: Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

    Yes michael its true.Effective planning will supply postive results.After all it's a man made tool 🙂
    Posted by Shashank Jain

  3. Brianna Alexander says:

     

    Via LinkedIn Groups

    Group: The Social Media Marketing Group
    Discussion: Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

    Great post, especially the part about listening. I've read many articles that say listening is important, but I appreciate that you went beyond that and pointed out specific things to listen for. I will definitely keep this in mind as I'm listening to our clients on Facebook
    Posted by Brianna Alexander

  4. Louise DiSclafani says:

     

    Via LinkedIn Groups

    Group: NJ Association of Women Business Owners (NJAWBO)
    Discussion: Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

    Great article. You have truly mentioned all the right points we need to remember. We all know the value of the checklist but often forget to set it up.
    Posted by Louise DiSclafani

  5. Paul Guerette says:

     

    Via LinkedIn Groups

    Group: Social Media & SEO
    Discussion: Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

    Michael, thanks so much for the great article.. nicely done. Coincidentally, I just blogged about how important creating a listening strategy, and the tools to help you do it.

    Again, thank you.. good article.

    Paul
    Posted by Paul Guerette

  6. Gary Scarano says:

     

    Via LinkedIn Groups

    Group: MyVerizon
    Discussion: Organizing Your Social Media Strategy

    Social Media cuts across traditional boundaries in a hierarchical organization. Top management needs to understand and allow a "controlled freedom" to exist that benefits the corporation as a whole, in addition to the individual departments.
    Posted by Gary Scarano