The goal of social media marketing should be to engage in conversations with potential customers and drive them to your site where you can collect their email or phone number. Using social media effectively is a skill because you have to be able to engage in conversation that drives traffic without annoying people.
Online conversations should not be very different from in-person conversations. The small talk you would use to build relationships and get to know people at networking events is just as valuable online.
When we consider online relationships, we have to make an extra effort to get to know people and allow them to get to know us. It’s not always easy to judge a person by his/her online activity.
Given the nature of social media, it can be challenging to develop a consistent strategy and measure results. A good social media strategy should include:
- Content strategy
- Blogging – use your blog as your hub and drive traffic to it from social media
- Quality over quantity
- Include human interest stories, client stories, office tour videos, video tutorials, podcasts, etc.
- Consistent frequency
- Include SEO keywords in content
- RSS feeds integrated into social media
- Integrate social tools into website
- Social media channel strategy
- Determine platforms to actively manage
- Regular status updates
- Commenting/Discussions
- Increase followers
- Measurement and Analytics
- Site traffic and sources (Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools)
- Number of Followers
- Number of Shares/Comments
- Number and quality of inbound links
- Google search ranking