Social Media Game Plan

SocialMedia7Scott MacFarland | December 2013YourBrandExposed.com - Original Content Series

Marketing Tactics Your Competitors Don’t Want You To Know

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Media7The number 7 usually is associated with the word lucky and football. If you feel lucky and want to continue to perform your social media without some guidance, go ahead, you’re on your own. The number 7 is also entrenched in football. Every team wants to put seven points on the scoreboard every time they drive down the field. With that being said, here’s a social media game plan that when executed correctly, will put fear in your competitors. -- Game on!

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#1 Know Your Audience (Personas)

As a marketer, you’re probably always thinking about your audience – or at least you should be. By knowing whom your most important target audience (personas) are, you will be able to more effectively create social media goals for your company and also be more effective when you create tactical goals. Defining your personas comes down to identifying in detail who are the most important people most likely to purchase from you. Be as specific as possible. The more you know about your persona, the easier it is to communicate with them.

Here’s the tricky part. Your personas are not all using social media channels, and some of them are a better fit for some social channels and not others. Here’s how I started to get a better handle on what social channels my personas are most likely to use most.

• Define your personas. Depending on your company, you could possibly have several.

• Do some web research to discover what audience groups social media channels cater to the most.

• Example: Pinterest is clearly focusing on females, mostly young adults. Twitter is more of a younger person social channel (under 30). Facebook has a wide range of ages, although, has become more popular with the 30+ crowd.

• Match your personas with the right social channel. Then you will then be able to more effectively create the right message, for the right person, on the right channel.

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#2 Develop Social Media Goals For The Company

• Start by thinking about social as a whole (Big Picture). Do not include any social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…etc.) while developing the reason why you want to use social media for your brand.

• Your stated goal should be simply understood. Make sure your goals are obtainable and actionable. The goal that you write should be short, 1-2 sentences. This sounds short. It is. If you cannot recite it to everyone in your company off the tip of your tongue, it’s too long.

• The challenging part here is to think big picture. Think about what your key reasons are for using social media. You must also think about your corporate resources for performing social media.

• Sample: To communicate our brand story through multiple social media channels that drive our target audience to a deeper connection with the company.

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2It’s critical for you to know and understand your social media goals. Without goals, you will never produce content that will help you use social media so that it can benefit your brand. Goals help to create a framework and process for all things social.

This is not another consultative exercise to get you to do something just for the sake of doing it. There is a method to the madness. Here’s how I started this process.

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#3 Tactical Goals

• Know the audience before you post

• Have a key message in mind

• Determine a call to action

• Drive customer to website

• Link customer to homepage

• Link customer to landing page, product page, blog

• Attach media if applicable (photo, video, URL)

• To elicit a social media response (engagement)

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Now that you know your company social media goals, you need to go deeper. I know this hurts your brain, but it is a must. Here we talk about just a few tactical goals, however yours may be completely different based on your specific corporate goals. Tactical goals are designed to be a checklist that your team memorizes and executes. Before a post is submitted, filter these through your brain first. This is a must.

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#4 Know The Strengths Of Each Social Channel

• Linkedin is the only professional social network that is exclusive to businesses, professionals, consultants and people that are trying to enter that network of pros.

• Vine is the only network that allows you to record a maximum of a 6-second video and send it out to your select network.

• Instagram uses the power of photos better than anyone else to energize users to use it more.

tips4All social media channels are not created equal. Each one is designed for a particular reason and has a strength that separates them from the other channels. Find out what that strength is and how to apply it to your brand’s goals. By doing this, you will soon leverage the power of social media and how it can work best for you. In reality, the strength of a social channel will usually be a feature, functional toolset or user experience that is unique to that channel. Here are just a few examples of strengths that are unique.

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#5 Think Keywords

Every business has words that are unique to their industry. Get to know them, use them and incorporate them into each social media post, tweet, hashtag, photo and video. Here’s why this is beneficial. Social media curates conversations and media wrapped around user profiles, strings of text, visual content and hashtags. When you add high-profile keywords to your social posts, you instantly boost your ability to be seen by more people, not only on social media, but also on search engines. Here’s a few examples.

• On Twitter you can conduct a search for a term that is important to you. For instance, if you insert #education

in your Tweet, you will be grouped into a feed that will show you what conversations have that hashtag in it.

• Examples of Keywords: Let’s say you are a retailer that sells smartphones. If you type smartphone into Google you will see the most popular terms that come up. Smartphone reviews and smartphone plans are among the top listed. This simple exercise gives you a deeper understanding of what is trending and more likely to show up in front of your customers.

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#6 Write Content That Is Targeted And Purposeful

• Know your audience before you write.

• Make sure your writing fits within your social media plan.

• Go through the tactical checklist and incorporate as many as possible.

• Don’t forget that each social media channel is different. The message you post on one may not work on another based on their strengths and who you want to reach.

• Add keywords and #hashtags to your posts.

• Link your posts to your website, landing pages, videos or wherever you want to user to go to engage with your brand. Links are a must.

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6The five things we just discussed are prior to #6 for a reason. It is best if you know and perform all of them before you start writing content and clicking submit. The objectives here are quite simple: Follow the tips, they are not confusing and are designed to make it easy for you to get started. Make sure that when you write for social media, write conversationally, with a targeted message and not with marketing-speak. Social media users are very savvy and don’t want to be sold, they want to engage with your brand on their level, and on their time in a way that is relevant for them.

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#7 What Do You Want Your Customers To Do When They Receive Your Social Post?

• Click on the social post and start a dialogue with your company (introduction).

• Visit your website homepage.

• Click on the post to send them to a company product or blog page or page with a simple form.

• View the product photo and caption.

• Watch the video.

• Feel an emotional response.

• Share their experience with others.

• Help create brand buzz with use of a #hashtag

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If you were a marketer, you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t think about the call-to-action (CTA). Social media reach and frequency is obviously important, or you wouldn’t use social media. So, ask yourself this simple question each time you post. What do you want your customer to do when they receive your social post? Understanding the importance of the CTA helps you think about the customer’s perspective which is a key ingredient of how a CTA works. Here are a few common answers to this question. These are applicable to pretty much any brand in any industry.

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Scott MacFarlandYourBrandExposed - Orginal Content Serieswww.yourbrandexposed.comTwitter: @scmacfarlandLinkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/scottmacfarland/Email: scmacfarland@yahoo.com

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