Social Media for Small Business Beginners - Planning Your Social Media Presence
Social media is now an integral part of a brand’s online identity but it is not as simple as creating a Facebook page and expecting a community to form overnight. Before you start building a presence, it is important to ask yourself four key questions to establish your strategy
1) Why do you need Social Media?
It may be stating the obvious but a defining feature of the internet is how it enables people with similar interests to connect. Users will have conversations about everything and anything – including your company.
Having a social media presence enables you to monitor and join in these conversations. By tracking what people are saying about your business, you can establish the sentiment toward your brand – whether people are talking positively or negatively about your brand.
Through joining in these conversations, businesses can improve brand and customer engagement but there are many more ways to measure the effect of social media throughout the sales process. It is important to establish clear KPIs around social media throughout all parts of this process to ensure you can easily identify the benefits when you commence using social media.
2) What platforms should you use?
Not all brands need all platforms – if a particular platform is not relevant to your organisation or you are unable to provide the resources to manage it properly, don’t use it. The main social network platforms available and their respective benefits are:
Facebook: Provides a presence for organisations and brands through status updates, posting photo galleries and managing events relevant to your organisation. Facebook Pages mean multiple people can manage a presence while only having one voice in the market.
Twitter: Provides a more personal presence where you connect directly to your customers on a one-to-one basis. A Twitter account helps a brand build individual relationships with users – as the users can provide feedback, respond to market research or assist in promoting your brand.
LinkedIn: Provides a corporate presence to allow professionals to learn more about your organisation while also allowing you to display current vacancies to people who may be interested in joining your organisation.
Foursquare: This is only relevant for organisations with at least one ‘bricks and mortar’ store. You can use this by providing discounts to users if they check-in (i.e. identify that they are at a location) or become the mayor of a location (user with the most check-ins).
3) Who should manage social media within your organisation?
There is no default answer as to who should manage social media but the consensus is that it should be someone that is genuinely interested in social networks and is happy to take on the extra work required for maintaining a presence. It is also important that there are adequate resources to manage social media – demands on time and resources will increase as your presence grows. Managing your presence may be a full-time job or may be better handled by sharing the work across a team.
4) What’s your style?
It’s important that you think about how you want to be perceived within the social media platform(s) you use. Maintaining a consistent style across all aspects of your web presence will help ensure a consistent brand identity. If you already have created a website and are considering social media as the next step, look at how you ‘talk’ on your website and how you feel when you read content to help you establish your style.
Write the Plan
Apart from answering these questions, make sure you think about the project management side of developing a strategy such as the budgets and timelines for implementation.
But remember... after you’ve written the plan, make sure you execute it! Part 2 of ‘Social Media for Small Business Beginners’ will go through how to launch your social media plan and how to build your online community.