Critical Steps that Lead to a Successful Social Media Strategy

As a company that provides a social media dashboard, we’re in a unique position to interact with businesses from many different industries. Since we want to provide the best social media management tool possible, we spend a lot of time talking with business owners about the challenges they face in regards to social media.One of the topics that comes up again and again is that business owners struggle with creating a consistent plan for social media posting and other forms of marketing through social media. While the specific reasons that business owners encounter this obstacle may not be exactly the same, it’s a pattern social media marketing plan template that we see a lot.Since there are so many businesses that want to use social media but aren’t 100% sure how to do so, we thought it would be very beneficial to put together a guide to help businesses get on the right track with social media. While social media has definitely created a new paradigm, that doesn’t mean it’s something that’s completely foreign. At the end of the day, social media simply provides another marketing channel for businesses. Because that’s the bottom line of social networks, it’s important to use the same type of accountability that would for any other marketing efforts.Specifically, social media marketing world businesses need to know what their business goals are, and then how social media can help them reach those goals. While it will probably take some trial and error to figure out which social channels work best, the important thing is that having a clear plan will allow you to do things like collect social media analytics and then analyze different efforts for their overall effectiveness.

Cleaning Up Your Social Media Presence

Many industrial companies got started with social media by having dedicated employees with social media skills experiment with various platforms—LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. There might not have been an overall strategy or vision attached to social media efforts. Some social media accounts may have languished, while others stayed active. In addition, other people in your company might have opened new accounts: customer service social media marketing tips started their own, an executive or two took to Twitter, human resources began recruiting on LinkedIn. You can see how easy it might be to end up spread out on social media, with no centralized control or guiding strategy. It’s time to change that. With social media having established itself in the industrial sector, your company needs a unified social media strategy, a consistent brand and a relevant message. Here’s how you can clean up your social media accounts and get social media marketing tools the most out of your social media efforts. The easy ones to find are your official company page on Facebook or LinkedIn. But did you try out Instagram once and never return? Start a YouTube channel and then forgot about it? Look also for unofficial accounts by performing a general search for your brand on all the major social networks. You might find accounts that have been set up by well-meaning employees or even by rogues and spammers.

Understand How Your Audience Values Social Media

How does your social media presence align with the way your customers and prospects use social media? For example, LinkedIn is the most popular social media outlet with 66 percent of engineers and technical professionals maintaining an account the platform, marketing social media according to the IHS Engineering360 research report, “Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector.” For technical professionals researching a work-related purchase, Google+ and LinkedIn ranked highest in value of all social media platforms. Facebook, SlideShare and Twitter have the least value. Based on steps 1-3 above, you can decide which social media profiles you should keep active and which you should close down. If you have followers for some of the accounts being closed, you will need to notify them and ask them to follow a different account. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, offer the ability to merge accounts benefits of social media marketing and pages that you manage. Depending on the size of your company and available resources, your social media team might be one person or it might be a cross-functional team of people. You’ll need to know who’s on the team and what role each person will play. It’s also a good time to determine login credentials and permission levels for the various social media accounts. You probably don’t want a free-for-all when it comes to posting social media updates. If you don’t have a set of guidelines for social media publishing, now is the time to create one, to help ensure inappropriate content is not publicly posted and that all published content is aligned with your social media goals.