Creating a Social Media Business Plan

Creating a Social Media Business Plan

Lack of a Social Media Business Plan is the FASTEST Way to FAIL in Social Media!

Creating a Social Media Business Plan

When looking at social media as a way to grow your business you have to follow a few rule to make sure that you will be successful at leveraging your time and effort and provide an ROI.

Too many people don’t think that you can measure social media and therefore they don’t. Big Mistake.

  1. Start with the End in Mind
    What are you actually trying to achieve. More Fans, more visitors, more time on facebook, frustrating hours spent writing, arguing with follower? No probably not, if you are in business you want one of two things, to spread your message and/or to get more customers.
  2. Choose the right Social Media Sites
    Don’t look East hoping to see a sunset! The only reason you should be using one site over another is because your customers are there. Facebook is great for companies targeting a broad range of consumers, LinkedIn is perfect for businesses targeting other businesses. Pinterest has women who like fashion, fitness, cooking and lifestyle categories. If you don’t know where your target market is…survey your existing customer base to find out what sites they are on.
  3. Develop Your Social Media Business Plan
    Now that you have a clear idea of where you are going and what sites you are going to be on, you can finalize your social media plan. This will be a rough content calendar of what you are going to post about and when, this should have time constraints on the amount of time you will commit and spend there. It should also me a minimum amount of time that you will be spending there. Your plan should also have a clear funnel of how you are going to reach your target market, gain their attention, get them interested in learning more about you and your company and a way for them to take action. This could be getting on your email list, watching a video of you targeting their problems or interests with a call to action at the end… “For more information on… visit my website at www…” Here is where many people fail beyond trying too many things. They believe you can’t sell in social media so they don’t even give people enough information to move forward. People understand that you are not giving away everything for free and that you have more information on your website. Your website is the center of your marketing universe, move interested people in social media to you website, that is where leads live and die. Make sure they live on your site, get more information and become a lead for you.
  4. Commit, Stay Consistent & Persistent
    If you are not ready to move forward with your social media business plan…DON’T! You need the time and/or resources to post and interact in social media on a consistent and persistent basis. Dead social media profiles are surging everyday, businesses say social media doesn’t work…more likely because the business didn’t commit and have a clear understanding of where it was going and what it was going to take to get there.
  5. Measure Your Social Media Progress
    This more than just seeing how many fans, followers and comments you have. But understanding that if this is to drive business down the road, measure each part of the marketing funnel. From Fans to email subscribers to contact form requests, calls and ultimately sales. Without this part of measurement of the complete funnel your social media plan is destroyed.

Here are some additional resources to carve out your Social Media Business Plan:

  1. SocialMediaExaminer.com – 7 Tips for Creating a Social Media Plan for Your Business
    In this article Jim Belosic, the CEO of ShortStack, a self-service custom app design tool used to create Facebook apps for Facebook Pages, shares with us how to create a solid social media plan and why it is crucial to stay committed in social media.
  2. SBA.gov – How to Make a Social Media Plan for Your Business
    Here Tim Berry, Founder and Chairman of bplans.com, focuses his ideas on one social media outlet, Twitter. The key here again is to FOCUS your efforts, spreading your time over to many social media sites is a failure.
  3. Entrepreneur.com – 5 Fundamentals of a Social-Media Action Plan
    Also by Tim Berry – follows very much the advice in this article of having clear goals, taking consistent action, measuring progress, committing resources and following up.

The Lost Book of Social Media

Leverage the Power of Facebook…Get More Followers on Twitter…Influence More People on YouTube!

Too many people jump on the social media bandwagon and instantly barrage you with sales messages, and advertisements. They think that Twitter and Facebook are advertising platforms, they’re NOT! They are a place where people go to make connections and find like-minded people ultimately, to build relationships with those people.

People in general do not go online to look for ads… unless of course, it’s a hysterical commercial from the Super Bowl.

When you first meet a person do you immediately jump into explaining what you do and talking about the services or products they can buy from you? Of Corse NOT…or at least I hope not! You would look like a jerk.

There are thousands of so called Social Media Experts out there, all preaching how to get 19,523 followers in one week, but what they all seem to be missing is the relationship side of social media. They seem to be taking the direct marketing approach to social media, and sure you can get a certain number of customers doing this, but you will not build loyal customers.

Here are the real facts; people buy from people they KNOW, LIKE and TRUST. The big question is how do you accomplish that when you have never met the person face to face? Think about it, how many times have you seen a person and then met with them before you felt you knew, liked and, most importantly, trusted them? It takes a while, right? So why do we lose this thought process online?

The only “guru” you truly need to follow is a guy that was born in 1888…yes that would make him over 121 years old. And he wrote a little book out there that I am re-naming, “The Lost Book on Social Media”. This book covers everything you need to know about making better connections on Facebook, gaining more followers on Twitter and how to win with YouTube.  The crazy part about this book is that it was written over 70 years ago, well before social networking, the internet, and even before the first real television broadcast of the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin.

The book I’m referring to is Dale Carnegie’s classic, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.

This classic, read by millions of people is the official guide to Social Media. You can get it on Amazon, or in Barnes & Noble, go out and get a copy now.

Some of the highlights that you can use in Social Media immediately are principals like, “Give Honest and Sincere Appreciation,” “Become Genuinely Interested in Other People,” and my favorite, “Smile.” These are just three of the principles outlined in the book but are truly at the heart of social media, it is about building relationships, not about blasting out your advertisement.

Maybe I should start a series called  “How to Win Followers and Influence Tweeple.”