Social Media Planning

Social media is a tremendously beautiful thing that happened to the internet marketing world. The rise of social media means that as a marketer our reach to the people around the world is broadened. With the power of social media ‘bad quality’ products and services will die out because people will start taking care of each other, and they will spread bad news about spammy products to protect one and another.

As a business owner, you can approach social media for the purpose of branding, or you can approach social media to acquire more qualified leads. Whatever your reason be to start moving your business into social media, you can use these splendid steps to set up a tangible and actionable plan for your social media ventures.

Know your business goals with social media.

When you are planning your steps for social media, you should be crystal clear of what you hope to achieve with the use of social media. Are you going to use social media for branding? Or are you using it for more sales and leads. The thing about social media is that you can even use them for building a stronger relationship with your clients, to get a better understanding of your potential prospects.

You can even use social media to improve on your customer service and get a better search engine ranking. When you have a clear goal of what you hope to achieve for your social media penetration, you can be sure that you will be able to clearly plot out your next steps that move towards the goals that you have listed out.

It is important that your goals are somewhat measurable and attainable. This is so that you do not set an unrealistic goal and give up on it too soon. Set a certain time frame to achieve your goals to motivate yourself to start getting things done.

Time can be your ally.

Money loves speed, so the faster you reach your goals, the better. However many people misunderstand the equation of time and soon they are left with nothing but despair. As any passionate entrepreneur, you should learn to treasure time and turn it into your ally.
In order to make the best use of your time (and not losing too much time), try to be organized and get things done in proper steps.

You can list out all the actions steps that you need to take and try to work out how much time you will need to get the things done. Here is a quick step by step list that you can use to organize your plans.

1) Learn social media.
2) Setting up accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and etc.)
3) Find out where are your clients and prospects on social media sites.
4) Setting up a blog.
5) Market research via Social Media and online communities.
6) Building actual followings on your social media accounts.
7) Creating worthy content, for your social media sites.
8) Use social media tools (RSS feeds, Technorati, Hootsuite, Bitly)
Not that this is not a complete list and that is much more you can do to improve your social media marketing efforts.

Taking actions.

When you have everything planned out, you should make sure to take actions. It is particularly important to take focused actions and not to spread your efforts on too many social media platforms at a time. Let’s say, for example, you wish to start with Facebook. Be sure to work on Facebook first before jumping in on Twitter or more unless you wish to get overwhelmed and fail. At most you can only take on two social media platforms at a time unless you have a team that can delegate all the work to.

Learn to use some of the automated social media tools so that you can save a lot of time every day to get more productive work done. The most important thing you can do when you have a strong network in social media is that you need to be able to monitor and tend to all the communications that is going on. This can be quite time-consuming and hence we recommend this tedious work to be outsourced if possible.
Never leave your social media platform without any proper facilitation because you might get a lot of spammers and things might get ugly from there. With people constantly monitoring clearing out all the issues you should be able to continuously grow your social media network to great heights. One trick that marketers use now is to appoint a leader or admin to active members of your social media networks. These people who love your work will often volunteer to help you administer your pages and sites.

This way, you can save on the cost of outsourcing and your greatest fan will feel important and continue to help you spread the good words about your company (this method is usually seen on forums as well).

All in all, social media can help your business reach a brand new level, and the traffic and profit that you will earn from it will be exceptionally rewarding.