How to create a successful social media strategy
October 31, 2011
For many companies it can be difficult to gain a clear view of the bigger strategic picture when it comes to social media. Businesses often make the mistake of trying to build their strategy around platforms instead of their own unique business objectives.
Yet there are fundamental questions that need to be answered before engaging in any form of social media activity: how does social media investment relate to business value? Is an acquisition or retention model the best strategy for your business? How does your social media strategy align with your business and other marketing strategies? And what are the real costs?
It’s vital to come up with clear answers to these questions in order to devise a comprehensive social media strategy that is integrated with your wider marketing approach. There is very little value in starting, for example, a Twitter account and a Facebook Page with no plan in place to measure success or understand what you want to achieve from it.
A social media strategy is the cornerstone of any successful social media campaign – it will help you understand how social media can best help you achieve your unique objectives and ensure you maximise ROI.
Here is our step by step guide to creating a comprehensive and successful strategy:
Set objectives and goals
It’s vital to establish from the outset exactly what your business wants to achieve from any social media activity; who the demographic audience are you are trying to reach and identify a clear way of quantifying your success. When setting your objectives you must always bear in mind that social media is a long-term commitment.
You need to think strategically about what your business and your audience want from social media and set goals accordingly. For instance, do you want to use social media for brand awareness or to help drive more leads? Try to connect social media goals with the wider goals of the organisation – how can social media help drive sales? How can it help you save money? How can it improve internal communication?
In many instances social media is uniquely positioned to help your business achieve these – but it takes careful planning, expertise and experience.
Whatever you want to achieve from social media – whether it’s improving customer service, increasing leads or growing brand awareness – it’s vital to attach KPIs to all activity you are running so that you have a clear understanding of its effectiveness. These can include but are not limited to:
- Twitter followers
- Facebook Likes
- The % of females versus males within your community
By tracking these metrics over time the results can help you understand the true value of social media and the impact it has on your bottom line.
The social media audit
Once you have understood what you want to achieve from social media you must analyse the online space and your brand’s place within it. Use best of breed monitoring tools – together with expert human analysis – to carry out research and understand your brand’s online presence and share of voice.
This requires a social media audit. The audit is a complex and extensive process but it is essential in providing insights into your brand – the volume and sentiment of relevant conversations in social spaces and what action must be taken. This market analysis also allows you to benchmark yourselves against your competitors and understand how you are positioned in your industry.
Platforms must be analysed and conversations tracked in order to identify business relevant topics as well as potential crises and issues. The result will be that your brand is in a position to establish who your audience are, where they are online and define your objectives to maximise engagement with them.
Finding the most relevant platforms
The growth of social media means there are a wealth of social platforms available to your business, each providing different ways to engage with your audience. However, not every platform will be relevant to your brand. When setting out a strategy you must decide on which of them will be most valuable in helping you achieve your objectives.
You must develop an understanding of which social platforms provide the best way to engage with your audience. Monitor these sites to see mentions of your brand name, your competitors and specific keywords in order to identify and understand which ones your target audience use and which offer the greatest opportunities for your business.
Of course this list will include sites such as Twitter and Facebook – however, there will also be specific blogs and forums which will be suited to your business as well as niche sites where passionate fans of your brand congregate.
The global nature of social media also means that you need to be aware of networks in particular territories. For example, in China you will be using Renren instead of Facebook.
Stakeholder buy in and resources
When identifying these platforms, the resources available – both in terms of finance and staff – must be at the front of your mind. Social media requires a lot of time in order to sustain meaningful relationships with your audience across multiple platforms.
You need to get buy in from staff throughout the organisation – from management through to the people who will be involved in the day-to-day implementation of your social media activity. This means demonstrating the impact of the strategy and the tangible ways it will benefit the entire organisation.
Develop a roadmap to social media success
With your priority platforms chosen you can then start to put in place a roadmap for defining and managing the customer experience. This includes clearly outlining how you will engage on each platform that has been selected, what content will be used to populate each site and how you will maximise engagement with your audience.
Central to this is the creation of a content plan. Your content plan will include a content calendar, tone of voice document, brand guidelines and social media guidelines which will encapsulate your brand narrative. This process requires time and resources but these strategies are crucial in helping to create relevant content that you can publish to bridge a connection between your business and ensures you will build an active and engaged community.
Having a comprehensive communication plan in place ensures that you can interact with your audience in a timely and relevant manner and means that you are ready to deal with any potential crises or challenges that occur. It also provides a clear strategy for future social media success.
Continuous optimisation
Having a strategy in place is a crucial foundation for a successful social media programme – but it is just that, a foundation. It is essential to continuously measure and evaluate your social media activity in order to maximise the success of the programme.
You will have already established metrics and baselines that are relevant to your business goals. By tracking the performance of your activity in relation to these KPIs you can gain insights which will be invaluable in fine tuning your social media programme.
The good news is that social media provides the tools to accurately track and monitor your programme – and you must use these findings to optimise the programme and ensure that your social media activity is performing as effectively as it possibly can. This not only leads to social media success but is also vital in contributing to the overall objectives of your business
Facebook rolls out new metrics for Pages
October 13, 2011
Facebook has recently released a new set of tools in order to give marketers deeper insights into how well their Pages are engaging and reaching Facebook users. Facebook have promised that these new analytics will help page owners better understand engagement on their brand pages – and, ultimately, make those Pages more useful to brands.
The Facebook Page Insights tool has now been expanded to provide marketers with additional information about their audience. Now, not only will marketers be able to understand the number and ‘Likes’ and impressions on their Page, but they will also be provided with more detailed information such as Friends of Fans, which is designed to show the maximum reach, and Weekly Total Reach, which combines the total exposure to the brand, either via paid or non-paid activity. Most interestingly to brands could be the ‘People Talking About This’ metric which is designed to show conversations happening about a brand across Facebook.
Are ‘People Talking About’ your brand?
The ‘People Are Talking About This’ metric will perhaps prove the most appealing to brands. This metric is based on the total numbers of ‘Likes’, shares and comments relating to a Page during the previous 7 days.
It takes information including the number of people ‘Liking’ your Page; the volume of people ‘Liking’, commenting on, or sharing, the content you have posted on your wall/Page and how many users answered a question you posted, who have RSVP to your events or checked in at your location.
The most important thing to note about this metric is that it is not only visible to the administrators of the Page – it is also visible to page visitors as a public facing metric.
The number appears on the left hand side of the page under the total number of ‘Likes’ and is calculated through an algorithm which analyses ‘Likes’, comments, shares and other Facebook actions to do with your Page. The aim is to help your fans understand how engaging a Page is, in a way, giving Facebook users a transparent version of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.
It’s all about engagement
These tools and metrics reflect the company’s increasing emphasis on the value of ‘sharing’ and the weight Facebook place on engagement between brands and users. Facebook mark a continuation of their growing belief that the amount people share on Facebook and how much they engage with a brand Page as a stronger indication of the value of the Page than simply the total number of users.
These new metrics will force brands to develop a truly effective engagement strategy in order to leverage the power of sharing and use peer recommendations as a brand marketing tool. Pages have never been just about the number of ‘Likes’ and this metric helps to further reinforce this idea.
By focusing on engaging with your target audience rather than just on volume the end result will be a win-win situation for both brands and users. Users will see the quality and value of Facebook Pages improve, while brands will, ultimately, have a more engaged Facebook community who feel an affinity with the brand.
Storify expands its social media curation offering
October 10, 2011
Back in May we reported about Storify and discussed how it will be extremely interesting to see if social media curation platforms would get adopted by the mainstream in the same way blogs and Twitter have.
It was clear that Storify was an intriguing concept but it needed to ensure it was recognised as the place to go when major ‘events’ occur.
Recent months have shown that Storify and social media curation has grown up. It is becoming recognised as a popular and leading service that a number of brands and publications are using to promote content and tell stories, just like blogging. If you haven’t yet used Storify, it allows you to aggregate social media content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other platforms to quickly and easily build stories.
The White House, The Guardian, Mashable and The New York Times are just some of the prestigious institutions which have used Storify to drag and drop social media content into an attractive and easy to read timelines.
So how has Storify grown up?
- Growth in User Numbers
In the week beginning 5th September 2011 Storify reached a new peak at 46,493 connections and the top story of that week had over 288,000 views. The previous peak was at 43,000 with #ukriots in August 2011.
Some examples of recent popular stories include REM breaking up and streams of photos and updates of events on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
These stories highlight the breadth of topics that Storify can help showcase. Storify provides a resourceful and appealing way to aggregate conversations and content about an ‘event’ that has gained a lot of attention and is a useful way to display the range of opinions and thoughts in one central hub.
- Storify now helps with Search Engine Optimisation
Storify also helps with search engine optimisation. Co-founder Xavier Damman claimed that this has been the company’s most-requested feature from users. Storify now allows their content to be published out onto the servers of the most popular blogging platforms – such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and Drupal – using XML-RPC to push permanent, search engine-friendly HTML.
This change means that content will live there permanently, will be indexed by search engines and will help boost search engine optimisation.
- Slideshow and new offerings
Newspapers and other publications will now be able to use Storify to post the same social media stories in a slideshow format as well. All stories on Storify – there are over 100,000 of them – can now be viewed as a slideshow. You can do this by either adding “/slideshow” to the end of the URL or choosing “slideshow” from a drop-down menu within the embed option.
This option will enable Storify to continue to grow. As Damman states “We are using our own API to do the slideshow,” he says. “Anyone can develop a template for displaying a story, this is something that is really new.” This will be of great interest to brands and publications looking to communicate content in new and interesting ways.
It’s this fluidity, flexibility and willingness to listen to users which will see Storify grow and thrive, offering brands the chance to get involved, optimise content and strongly enhances the storytelling offering that brands can provide to users.
RIP Steve Jobs: 1955-2011
October 6, 2011
‘You’ve got to find what you love.’
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chairman of Apple, died on Wednesday at the age of 56.
He leaves behind a phenomenal legacy, his name synonymous with innovation, inspiration and technology.
He was an icon, a visionary and an innovator whose passion and skill allowed him to take his dreams and make them a reality. He was a doer who had an innate understanding of what the market needed even when the market itself didn’t even realise they needed it.
For that reason he has had a massive impact on the world around us. When he returned to Apple in 1997 (having been forced out of the company in 1985) he oversaw their product development, leading a decade of unparalleled innovation. In this time period we saw the launch of truly iconic products that really have changed the way we live, including the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
The exceptional success of these products took Apple from near-bankruptcy to the world’s second most valuable company. It was not just financial success: these products have redefined the music, mobile and personal computing industries – and Jobs also transformed the film industry with his animation studio Pixar.
Few entrepreneurs have had as much impact as Steve Jobs. As President Obama stated this morning “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”
He was an inspiration to everyone. As Jobs himself stated: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’.
