More than 70 percent of online adults use a social networking site, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. Of those, 42 percent use multiple social networking sites.
If there was any chance that you still were pondering whether your organization should use social media, read the following words carefully.
Social media marketing is not optional for any organization.
If you aren’t using social media (or aren’t using it well), it’s likely because you’re not sure where to start. It’s time to create a social media marketing plan to detail your organization’s social media goals and the actions necessary to achieve them.
Notice that I didn’t tell you to go open a Facebook account and start spamming everyone with your message? There’s a reason for that. There’s nothing strategic about annoying people. It will not make them customers. In fact, it will turn them against your organization, making it difficult (if not impossible) to win them back.
Social media is not about pummeling your potential audience with your message, it’s about strategically using tools to build a relationship with people who share common traits with your organization.
The best way to get started on a social media marketing plan to consider the social media marketing planning cycle, as identified by Barker, Barker, Bormann, and Neher (2012) in their book Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach.
Social media marketers use the continuous planning cycle to monitor progress of social media elements, to test alternative ideas or approaches, and to help in incorporating feedback to adjust the social media marketing plan over time, according to the authors.
The planning cycle follows these steps, but can begin the place most suitable for your organization’s needs.
Listening
Listen to what people are saying about your organization. This enables you to evaluate the organization’s current social media presence, which guides you in setting social media goals and strategies to achieve them. Listening also helps you better understand what the competition is doing and helps you discover what people are discussing before you join the conversation.
Setting goals
Once you understand your audience’s behavior, location, tastes, and needs, it’s time to focus on what you want to use social media to do for them. Set social media goals that satisfy your audience’s unmet needs and capitalize on your organization’s strengths and the opportunities available to it.
Defining strategies
How do you plan to accomplish your goals? You answer that question generally here by identifying organizational specific methods you will use to accomplish your social media goals.
Identifying the audience
This is where you identify the audience you want to reach with your social media communication. It may be your current audience and people like them or a different group altogether.
Selecting tools
By now you should have determined the social media sites where your target audience resides. You should focus your organization’s social media efforts on those platforms.
Implementing
The real fun begins here! You know what you want to accomplish, you identified your audience and you selected the best tools to reach them. This is when you execute the tactics discovered above.
It seems worthy to note that many organizations don’t do any of the steps above implementing. They just create social media accounts and start slinging hash. This, of course, is a large part of the reason they don’t get the results they want (if any). Their efforts aren’t strategically focused on an audience, using the tools to best reach them with carefully constructed messages. Even worse than risking getting little feedback from their efforts, these organizations are in jeopardy of creating crises with their ill-considered direct communication with their audience.
Monitoring
While the steps above are important, they are not fail safe methods of using social media. It’s important to track, measure and evaluate your organization’s social media marketing initiatives. You may need to tweak your initial methods. You also likely will discover that your organization and your audience change over time, resulting in the need for adjustments.
Tuning
There is nothing stagnant about social media. It is a constantly changing method of engaging directly with your audience. These dynamic platforms result in the need to continuously adjust and improve your social media marketing campaign to maximize its success. You can’t just post a photo on Instagram and sit back and watch your audience (and customer base) flourish. It just doesn’t work that way.
Your organization can’t afford not to communicate with 70 percent of people online. But you also can’t take a chance of communicating the wrong message or wasting your efforts because they’re not strategic. Using this social media planning cycle will help you create and implement a strategic social media marketing plan instead of just adding to the noise and potential creating problems for your organization.
