Planning your Social Media Campaign

Social Media Campaign Planning

There’s no one size fits all approach to a social media marketing plan. It all boils down to a number of factors.

1. Your Goals – You may wish to drive traffic to your website, Improve SEO, Brand Awareness, and Conversions.
2. Your Audience – Where are your target audiences?
3. Your Resources – Are you going to manage it, a staff member or an agency?

What is Social Media

Social media is best viewed as just one area of many online marketing channels. It has the amazing ability to go viral with the added benefit of being able to engage with your audience. This allows you to have meaningful conversations with your audience and show the human side of your brand and company.

Social media covers more than just Facebook, Twitter etc it’s made up of anywhere online that enables discussion and user-generated content.

• Social Media
• Social Music
• Social News
• Social picture / Video
• Consumer review sites
• Blogs / Forums / Discussions Boards

What Social Media can Do

Social media allows you to encourage online conversations and engage with your audience. You can increase your web presence all while expanding brand awareness. It also has the benefit of helping SEO.

• Brand Awareness
• Reputation Management
• Customer Interaction
• Customer Support
• Community Building
• Defensive SEO – (Conceal your bad press with positive user-generated content)

Your Target Audience

You will need to determine where conversations are happening about your brand or product. Do this by joining forums, and events or checking out the competition. Then join the conversation and share your content.  Don’t try to poach the client or sell but be helpful and share the content of interest with them. If they find it of value they’ll share the content or become your follower.

Simplify It – Segment

Create a social media road map before getting too far into your new venture. The map is a view of your social media platforms as it pertains to your business. It’s essentially a list of all the sites that would be of interest to what you have to say.

Then segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and then by target audience and topic of interest.  Once you’ve done that you’ll be clearer about what your campaign strategy and tactics ought to be.

Implementation –I’m going to give some examples

Blogger outreach & engagement

This plan is best if you have a team at hand to help promote the blog issue and engage with it, once implemented.

In order to have a fast and significant impact, you will need to identify the A-list bloggers. Foster a positive relationship with as many as possible. Ask them to blog about your issue or ask them if you can guest blog for them.

Once they have blogged about your issue or you have guest blogged for them your team moves in and promotes the blog by engaging in meaningful conversations about the topic.  Use the conversation to drive people to your call to action, relevant product placement or web resource by adding HTML links with targeted anchor text for an additional SEO lift.

Always be courteous, disclose your identity, informed about the topic/subject or you will be flamed and that will live online forever.

Social Networking – Only Target Communities relevant to your product, issue, or company

You can infiltrate tight-knit interest community groups or you can start your own community.  You will need to drive conversation and awareness although your revenue options are limited.

The best option is to start your own community. That way you can easily drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed ads, calls to action or promotions.