Your Secret Weapon for Social Media
What is your motivation behind starting a social media campaign?
Social media is all the buzz; it’s unavoidable whether you are at work or play. It is extolled online by bloggers and web writers, and is ballyhooed in traditional learning environments like conferences and seminars.
Not only are we constantly being bombarded by social media, we are being sold on it.
Most of the information serves to hype the various platforms and to illustrate how ‘easy’ it is to get up and running. This hype gets people eager to join in, or feeling like they should join in when they don’t want to. A critical component has been left out. The secret weapon behind a successful foray into social media lies in your answer to one question:
What are you trying to achieve?
Without asking this question first, it is easy to get overwhelmed and confused. Multiple options, peer pressure and media hype can leave you stressed and unsure where or how to begin. You may shut down at this point, or -worse- jump in feet-first, ending up frustrated and entangled in an unproductive task.
Once you know clearly what your goals are, building an effective social media strategy is almost formulaic – just follow the steps to get to your goal. Social media is a tool to help you get where you’re going: it is not an end in itself.
A social media campaign is strategically no different than a traditional marketing campaign: it all begins with specifically identifying what you want to accomplish.
You can’t hit a target you can’t see, and you can’t see a target you do not have. (Zig Ziglar)
This means that before you commit to a social media plan, you need to know what the success measures will be.
- Are you looking for more customers?
- Increased sales from existing customers?
- Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? If so, why?
- Is it a branding exercise? A public relations move?
- Are you trying to build credibility with prospects reached by your sales team?
- Are you trying to find strategic partners to work with?
Know what you want to accomplish, and then check out companies that have successfully done what you want to do, and see how they did it. For example, Blenz Coffee has been extremely successful in getting great PR using social media. They also use it to increase sales to existing customers and to find new customers. Do a simple google search for ‘Blenz Social Media’ for some great examples of ways to get achieve business results.
But before you try to jump in, remember the question – what do you want to accomplish? And if you look at the best ways to accomplish your goal, is social media the right tool for your company?
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