Courtesy of Webtreats

Are your social media strategies effective?

Both small and large companies have found that social media marketing has become an important part of their overall marketing campaign. Is it a part of yours? The benefits have become hard to ignore for the small business owner.

If you want to build brand awareness, drive traffic, establish credibility, and develop more customer loyalty social marketing can help.

To often most small business owners approach social media in a haphazard way. The benefits of a successful social media campaign are to important to leave to chance – one needs a good solid action plan – a plan that is analyzed and evaluated on a regular basis.

Here are some essential steps that you should consider when putting your social media marketing plan together:

#1 Determine If You Are Currently Meeting Your Social Media Goals

Are you currently meeting your social media goals?  It’s an obvious question, but one that is often overlooked. Perhaps you heard that Facebook is the “place to be,” but you haven’t yet learned how to effectively use it in your business. The mere act of being where most of the action is does not mean that it is actually being effective. To often people spend hours of wasted time doing ineffective activities. If your current methods are not meeting your goals now is the time to find out. How?

#2 Track the Results of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Are you tracking your results? If not, you should be. You may learn that you are spending most of your time with one social media campaign and getting only a small percentage of new business from it and find that another venue provides a much higher return on your time investment.

Of course, you may not be sure what type of results you’re getting.  You’ll need a way get the information you need to make an informed decision. Tools like Google website analytics can help, because they create a snap shot of your business. But they may not be telling you everything you need to know because you are either using the wrong analytics tool, or simply don’t know how to use how to use website analytics correctly to find the most valuable information.

So ask yourself this as well: Based on your goals, do your analytics help you understand what it is you need to know? If not, determine how can you modify your system or update your analytics to meet your needs?

For example, if driving traffic to your website is your primary social media goal then it should be easy for you to see that in your analytics program  because you can easily see how many visitors come to your site via social media. However, if your social media goal is to increase your profits by 10% and you’re not sending all of your social media traffic to a unique landing page, then it may be tough to tell if you’re achieving success.  You’ll need to set up your analytics to track those type of results.

#3 Use the Right Social Media Sites for You and Your Target Market

Are you using the right social media sites?  One primary reason a lot of people fail to reach their social marketing goals is that they are simply on the wrong social media website for their target market. Another reason is that they fail to interact with their target market. Learn which sites the people who buy your product hang out on.

#4 Spend Time Building Relationships with the Right People

Are You Interacting and Engaging Your Target Market? Once you’ve determined the right social media sites to concentrate on spend time seeking out those people who are interested in what you have to offer and develop a relationship with them.

It’s so easy to simply post comments and links to your online content.  However, to truly achieve your social media goals you probably have to engage your audience. That can be accomplished by being entertaining, asking questions and getting them involved.

If your current social media plan doesn’t incorporate engaging content, questions and interaction, create a new plan to create interaction.  No one wants to hear your regular pitches and no one wants to . Don’t pitch them with your

#5 Provide Content That Attracts Your Target Market

Are you providing the content that attracts your audience? What does your target market want? What do they want to learn? Figure it out and then take a look at your existing content and see what areas you need to  fill in. Take a look at your website analytics and determine what existing content generates the most results and activity and write more of that.

Then take a look at what is being completely ignored. Is it what your market is looking for? If not, don’t add similar content. However, just because it isn’t being accessed doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.  Perhaps they content isn’t being marketing correctly.  Perhaps it doesn’t contain the right combination of keywords to attract search engine traffic. You may need to simply revisit that content and make it more relevant or keyword rich.

Bottom line, create your website content based on your audience. Offer them value. Test and track the results you get. Rinse and repeat.

#6 – Determine If Your Efforts Are Being Spread To Thin

Are you rushing from social media site to social media site? Determine which sites you want to focus on and concentrate your efforts there.

You can certainly use some social media tools to help you develop a presence on may websites, but trying to hop from site to site and develop meaningful relationships with people on all of them will weaken your overall campaign. Focused and concentrated effort on a few select sites will be much more effective in the long run.