When a person deals in social media strategies, he has to keep in mind certain things so that failure doesn’t take over his excitement. Until you start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media. A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire. In simple terms everyone must work together as a team. Secondly, if the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo. The plans and policies made by employees should get a yes from the management & is very much essential. Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.
The key points to be remembered while integrating social media for your firm could be as under:
First of all you need to determine the goals and objectives which is very much essential to determine the further course of action. Say for example you want to increase the views to your page or any other content you need to do rigorous sharing of the content on various social networking sites and many other strategies to be implemented. Another point that comes into existence is that you need to research, which is very essential which can provide you with a background as in what efforts can provide you what results. You need to create a list of social media sites where you can potentially engage with people. You can also do additional survey to determine relevancy, identify your target audience as well as understand their expectations. Develop contacts in bulk as well as the content. Developing relations isn’t easy you need to get into the conversation to develop and nurture them. Attend offline events related to your industry—not only to strengthen your knowledge base but also to network and strengthen relationships with those you might have conversed with via social media but never met in person. Once your plan is implemented you also need to measure your performance. Say for example your objective is to improve brand presence across social channels – is it being delivered or not. If you have planned to increase positive sentiment about your brand among audience has it being accomplished or not. If you keenly evaluate the performance you will get to know about the analysis and according to which you can improve and adapt to new things in plan.
Answering the below questions can help you evaluate your thoughts and can also help you in setting your goals and targets:
What are you trying to accomplish?
Why social media?
What kind of social media will help to achieve goals in best manner?
Who will manage the social media presence?
Do you have sufficient resources?
How can manage the budget if you have fewer resources?
The biggest and most confusing area in digital marketing is social media and the social networks. So why should you be involved with social media. Branding is what differentiates a corporate company from a small company and the number one reason many of the corporate companies such as Nike, Apple and Google etc. spend money on marketing.
Listen to others in your area of expertise. Learn from them.
Listen to thought leaders in other areas, and see how their ideas apply to you.
Track things like audience/community sentiment (positive/negative) if you want to map effort to results.
Make sure it’s easy to comment on your site.
Make sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your site’s content.
A site laden with ads is a site that doesn’t cherish its audience. Be thoughtful.
Pay attention to which widgets you use in your sidebar. Don’t be frivolous.
Build a similar outpost on MySpace, if your audience might be there.
Make sure your social media is listed in your LinkedIn profile.
Add a link to your blog to your email signature file.
Make sure your passport accounts point to your blog and sites.
Use social networks respectfully to share the best of your content, in a community-appropriate setting.
Email newsletters with some links to your blog makes for an effective outpost, especially if your audience isn’t especially blog savvy.
Commenting on other people’s blogs builds awareness fast.
The more valuable your comments, the more it reflects on your ability and your character.
Use your listening tools to stay active in pertinent discussions.
Try not to brag, ever. Be humble. Not falsely so, but truly, because a lot of what we do isn’t as important as saving lives.
Ask questions with your blog posts. Defer to experts. Learn from the conversation.
Be confident. Asking for external validation often is a sign of weakness.
Good conversations can be across many blogs with links to show the way.
Try never to be too defensive. Don’t be a pushover, but be aware of how you present yourself when defending.
Disclose anything that might be questionable. Anything, and quickly!
Remember that community and marketplace are two different things.
Make your site and your efforts heavily about other people. It comes back.
Make it easy for your community to reach you.
Contribute to your community’s blogs and projects.
Thank people often for their time and attention.
Celebrate important information in your community (like birthdays).
Your community knows more than you. Ask them questions often.
Apologize when you mess up. Be very sincere.
Treat your community like gold. Never subject them to a third party of any kind without their consent.
Don’t seek business relationships right off. Instead, seek areas of shared interest.
Know when to walk away politely.
Don’t try to meet everyone in a room. Meet a half dozen or more great new people.
Use Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Google Reader to drive awareness.
Promote others even more than you promote yourself
Bragging isn’t useful to anyone besides your own ego
Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
Don’t digg/stumble/link every single post. Save it for your very best
Another promotional tool: guest blog on other sites
Another promotion tool: use the status section of LinkedIn and Facebook
Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it.