5. Planning Your Social Media Brand Presence

It’s very tempting, now that you’ve seen all the social media platforms out there, to just jump on and start tweeting, friending, and liking everyone in sight. Spread the word about your business and the customers will start flocking in, right?

Well, don’t be so quick on the draw, pardner. Leaping into social media without a plan or strategy is about as smart as running into a crowded room and yelling aloud about your business or organization to everyone in the room. Yes, you will definitely get their attention, but it may not be the kind of attention you want.

The Whys of Strategy

There are three major reasons why you shouldn’t start broadcasting information about you and your organization willy-nilly on the various social media platforms.

The first, which was hinted at in the chapter introduction, is that it would be silly—to the point of being embarrassing. Your parents’ advice about thinking before you speak definitely holds true in social media, because, in general, what you say in cyberspace can and will be remembered (and recalled) for a long time.

Thinking before you speak or otherwise engage people on the Internet is also important because it takes a long time to build good relationships, but just a few ill-chosen words to damage a relationship irreparably. This is reason number one why you should have a strategy in place for social media.

If this sounds a bit calculating, let’s put it in another perspective. You would not walk into a preschool class, for instance, and start talking about particle physics, would you? The same thing holds true for speaking to your social media audience; you need to have a plan in place that at least figures out the parameters of what you will say and how you will say it.

Secondly, you need to know what your overall message will be. This is just business common sense—if you have a marketing and advertisement strategy in place already, you don’t want to throw a wrench into it and start delivering another message entirely. The strongest message is the most coordinated message.

Finally, it’s very important to recognize that like most technology, tools will change, and often very quickly. All of the tools highlighted in Chapter 4, “Mapping the Social Media Landscape and Key Websites,” could very well be obsolete in a year’s time, or even less. That’s the nature of technology. So, if you make your plan around one or two platforms (“We’re going to launch a Twitter-only campaign.”), you may be in for a rude surprise if Twitter were ever to close down. There are a lot of tools out there, as seen in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 The current state of social media reveals a lot of complexity.

COURTESY ETHORITY

Better, then, to craft a plan that delivers a message or set of messages that you want to convey and then push those messages out on the platforms where your customers are. If that happens to be only Twitter, then fine. But you need to bring the conversation to your customers on whatever site or sites they are using.

Setting Goals

The very first item on your agenda is to set the goals for your social media strategy. Without goals, not only will your message be all over the map, but you will also find it difficult to measure success if you have no idea what it is you want to achieve in the first place.

What’s Your Message?

This question may seem blatantly obvious, but it’s key for getting started with any social media plan. What is the message of your company? What is its story? Believe it or not, people will be interested because they like a good story.

Think about what your company does and how it got to this point. You may think it was all one gigantic mess—a series of accidental good and bad breaks that somehow led you to where you are. But try to put aside your self-consciousness and look at your company objectively. You may find that how others see your company is different than how you see it.

You may find that your customers are impressed with what you’ve accomplished, so you can share what you’ve done with pride. Or you could discover the reverse: customers have an opposite perception of your company than you do, and it’s not a pleasant perception.

Don’t be discouraged; it just means you have more work to do getting out the message of your company. It also means you will need to retool the aspects in your business that are causing the negative reactions, and quickly. It does little good to set up customers’ expectations in social media messaging and then fail to deliver on those expectations when they actually step inside your doors. In fact, it would quickly cause them to lose their trust, which is something you don’t want, ever.

Why Are You Doing This?

This may seem to be the same question as determining the goals, but actually it involves a more specific focus of the question: What is the immediate goal of what you want to achieve with your social media messaging? Is it to drive more sales? Strengthen more loyalty among your current customers? Or is this going to be a flat-out marketing campaign?

You could say “all of the above,” but to have a more focused message, you should think about choosing just one goal. It will help you measure your results later.

How’s Your Relationship?

Don’t worry, we’re not trying to get personal here. What you need to ask is: How is your relationship with your social network? And by this, we mean your existing customers and the potential customers you are trying to reach.

Have they ever heard of you? Have they been in your store but just the one time? Are they repeat customers? If you’re a start-up, who is it you’re trying to reach?

Knowing who the members of the network are that you’re trying to reach is a very key step in determining your goals. A loyalty program should be aimed at repeat customers, not people who have never heard of your business.

Where Is Your Network?

To reach out to your network, it’s important to know where they are in the wilds of the Internet. Are they a younger, more tech-savvy crowd? Then it’s likely they’re pretty much everywhere that early technology adopters can be found.

If that’s the case, then you can try cutting-edge promotions, like photo and video contests, because that crowd will have the knowledge and desire to participate in such events.

If your network is older, then you may need to stick with the platforms that are more contained, such as Facebook, which has an ease-of-use and self-contained quality that currently attracts older adults.

How Will You Tell Your Stories?

To connect with people the best way possible, you will need to have genuine conversations with them. This means dropping the corporate-speak and talking to people. Don’t just try to protect your company’s image, or put spin on events. Put your best face forward, and make it an honest face.

It won’t be easy; you’ll be drawn to staying professional and will come off as stiff. Or you’ll go too far and reveal too much information. A balance will have to be achieved to make this work. A great example was Old Spice’s 2010 social media campaign, which created over 180 video responses to Twitter comments and garnered 22,500 comments and 5.9 million views—in the first 48 hours (http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-stats/).

That kind of campaign is beyond most companies’ budgets, but you can achieve real connections with your audience with some creativity and thought.

And patience will need to be a big part of your interactions, because not every conversation you have with your network will be pleasant. Don’t try to spin your way out of a jam—be honest and own up to any mistakes you might have made. Offer ways for customers to interact with you, don’t just shut them down. People will appreciate honesty.

How Will You Succeed?

Before starting your social media plan, you will need to know how you’ll ultimately define success. This means taking quantitative measurements of the impact of your messaging, a process known as analytics.

Analytics will enable you to measure, for instance, how many people viewed your latest blog post on your website or clicked on that link to a coupon in your Facebook page.

There are many analytics tools out there, such as Google Analytics and SugarCRM, that we’ll examine in Chapter 11, “Evaluating Your Social Media Success.” It’s important that you settle on the right tools before you begin your social media efforts so you can measure your success once the plan is implemented.

Do the Legwork

After you have done the strategic planning of getting your goals and audience ascertained, now it’s time to start thinking tactics. Here, finally, is where you should start figuring out which social media platforms to use.

Presumably, you have discovered who your primary audience is and have a good idea of what technology they are using or could be using. Put together a list of social media outlets where you believe you can best connect with people. It can be any number of outlets—blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google+—but if there are a lot on your list, you may need to whittle the list down to something more manageable.

Once the list is put together, do your legwork by going out to the social media networks and reading. And then read some more. Find out if and how people are talking about you on those networks. What are they saying? Is it good or bad? What are they saying about your competition?

Start-ups can also approach this task with their own goals in mind. Even if you don’t have customers yet, you know who your customers should be, and also whom your competitors’ customers are. You just need to apply these principles to them.

This is equivalent to listening to a conversation at a party first before jumping in. Doing this will give you an idea of how to fine-tune your message, and give you possible opening lines in the conversation you will eventually be starting with these people.

Bootstrap the Conversation

While you are examining the conversation that’s going on in these social media sites, look for people who seem well versed in your business and its interests. If you run a non-profit food bank, for instance, look for key conversationalists around the topics of hunger and poverty. They’re out there, for any topic. Just find the people to whom everyone else seems to be listening.

Once you find them, seek what these people have to say. It will give you talking points on what’s of interest in your field so you can deliver your own content later. It will also give you insight into who’s who in your industry, and perhaps even connect you with influencers who can talk up your organization and help spread the word faster.

Join Conversations

Now it’s time to join the conversation. At first, you might be tempted to simply broadcast all that you think is cool about your organization—its product, its people, its brand—all the things you love about your company. That’s a common place to start, but understand that if you keep doing that, the novelty will wear off quickly.

Remember, this is always a conversation, no matter what type of social media platform you’re working with. That means it can’t be a one-way broadcast of just the aspects of your business you find interesting. Be prepared to engage your audience, just as you would if they were in your store.

When you do this, you’ll tap into what’s cool about social media: you’re holding a conversation with someone, but everyone else can listen in. If the conversation ends well, people will look at this and think that you must have a business that’s interested in the needs of its customers.

Meanwhile, you will need to offer compelling points of interest so people will seek to converse with you. This might be content on your blog or other social outlet, but it won’t be a broadcast, because that would be counter-productive. You will need to strike a balance between talking and listening, with the understanding that people will mostly want to learn from and listen to you, but they will expect to be heard when they do have something to tell you.

Reach Out Beyond Social

“Beyond social,” in this case, means beyond the monitor screen you use when conducting social media conversations. In other words, get out there and meet people.

If they don’t come to your store (or website or app), go see them. If there are local interest groups that pertain to your organization in any way, attend their meetings. Look for events both locally and out of town, particularly ones where industry influencers might be attending. Seek out such events and put faces with names.

Letting people put a face with your name goes a long way toward building stronger relationships.

Get the Metrics

When you were setting goals, you were also deciding on how you would measure your success. Now that your plan is in action, start measuring. Keep track of your site traffic, Twitter retweets, and Facebook activity—with an eye on all the goals you decided you would need to make this social media outreach a success.

As you go, analyze your metrics. Where did things succeed, and where did they flop? You will soon learn to keep going on the ideas that worked, and you can drop those that failed.

You should never set a plan in motion and then stick to the plan blindly. Be ready to adapt to new and unforeseen circumstances. They will crop up, and if you’re ready to roll with them, you’ll come out in great shape.

The Last Word

In this chapter, you learned some of the key points in planning a social media presence for your organization. We only scratched the surface of what a good social media plan should be.

Starting in Chapter 6, “Connecting with Social Media Customers,” we’ll discuss the actual tactics mentioned in this chapter, beginning with a look at how to find out who your customers are and where they might be engaged in social media.