Whether you run a business employing one person or work for a corporation of 250,000, you’ll need a social media strategy for 2012. As more people embrace Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other networks, it’s time to make social media an integral part of your marketing strategy.
1. Claim Your Name Everywhere
Even if you can’t commit the resources to updating a Google+ or LinkedIn page, at least get them started so that you have the link and more relevant results for your company show up when a potential client is searching for you.
2. Do a Month-By-Month Plan With Clear Goals
3. Find a Way to Measure Results
Planning is futile without a way to measure results. Get familiar with Google Analytics and Hootsuite. Google Analytics lets you track visitors to your site for free. For example, I can see how many visitors came to my site from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Google recently revamped Analytics to include real-time tracking data. Google Analytics let you see how many visitors came to your website from Twitter, but you can’t specifically see which campaigns drove them there (at least not yet; Twitter’s analytics tool isn’t likely to roll out fully until 2012). For beginners, Klout is a good way of measuring how effective your social media efforts are, with a number and practical suggestions for improvement on a week-to-week-basis.
If your company has the budget, Adobe’s SocialAnalytics starts at about $20,000 a year. With this, for example, you can see that 400 people hit your Facebook page, and out of that 120 went on to your website, and that out of that number, 20 made a purchase. Attaching a proper ROI number to your sales is worth the budget spend. Granted, if you spent enough time doing custom reports with Google Analytics, you could approximate these results, but only as percentages rather than as hard numbers.
You could log in to Hootsuite to monitor multiple accounts across various channels, but not with the same level of detail. Adobe’s tool allows for close, top-down monitoring of social media all in one dashboard without the need to produce complex reports for simple inquiries.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Outsource
At a small or midsize business, people power usually comes at a premium. It’s easy to let personnel who should be handling sales or customer service wander off into social media land. However, these people are much better at doing what you hired them to do: sell products or services, and help customers. This is where outsourcing comes in.
5. Add Your Social Media Links to Online and Printed Collateral
In the end, if you are making any kind of an effort on social media where you weren’t making one before, you will see results. Just make sure to measure results so you can evaluate and use the data to plan for 2013.
Angela West dreams of opening a Fallout-themed pub featuring wait staff with Pip-Boys. She’s written for big insurance companies, small wildlife control businesses, gourmet food chains, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @angelawest and Facebook.