Social Machinery

Maybe you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur interested on using Social media as a way to promote your business or ideas, engage with potential customers and create more traction around your business. Probably you already have a Facebook account and you Tweet regularly about your products and services. But do you have a plan?

Creating a Social media plan will help you to clarify what are your objectives and what you want to get from the web 2.0. Based on those objectives you can determine in a better way which channels and tools fits better you strategy. Finally, having objectives helps you to have some baseline to measure your results, and more important, achieve improvements.

Here I share some ten tips for creating a first social media plan

1. Define your objectives – What do you want to get from Social media

Not having a good idea on why you are entering the social media space is suicidal. Basically is like driving a car without knowing where you want to go. You can waste a lot of time, effort and money onboarding Social media without knowing what you want to get out of it. So first, define your objectives:

• Create awareness about your company or services?
• Building conversation with customers or prospects?
• Drive traffic to your web site?
• Call for action (Increase leads, subscriptions, sales)?
• Get more customer engagement (Feedback, ideas from the crowd)?

In this initial phase you should also try to align your objectives with your overall strategic plan by defining areas were you can complement your strategy and defining roles and responsibilities for this new channel. (Strategy, Processes, People, Time)

2. Define Key success indicators

After you define which are the main drivers for your social media adventure (It may be more than one) you need to figure out how you’re going to measure it.

Try to think on easy parameters to measure your objectives like blog comments, buzz about your brand or products on the internet, traffic increase in your web site, conversation rate, new e-newsletter subscriptions, more customers in your restaurants, etc.

Try to define simple metrics that are relatively easy to follow for each objective you define. Some examples:

• Rankings increased based on traffic and links.
• Social media users who are engaging with your content and discussion
• Increase awareness about your products that lead into sales.

3. Take control of your brand in the web 2.0

Do you know if your brand belongs to you? You need to take control of your identity fast. You can use tools like Knowem for tracking more than 340 social media sites and secure your name. Also try to be consistent across different sites by using the same brand, username. This will make life easier for people to identify you.

4. Listen what online users are saying

Your first job in social media is to listen and begin forming a platform for people to openly talk and engage with you. Listen what they’re saying, what’s bothering them, what makes them happy and what type of things could be related to your brand mission.  Understanding what your target audience does online is key for establishing what is going to be your role in the web 2.0.

5. Create your story – What is remarkable about your brand?

Web 2.0 users will expect a different way to communicate compared with the traditional institutional messages that we are used to hear from traditional media.

You need to create your own story. What is going to be that unique thing about you in social media?  What is the Wow factor, what makes you interesting?  What is the value you are bringing? Try to find those answers and keep consistency across channels. If you are a wine expert, who gives great tips about how to enjoy wine, probably you want to write about tips on how to enjoy wine with different types of food, how to taste wine for amateurs, etc. Build a Digital personality that makes an impact.

6. Define your audience

You need to understand where your customers are on internet. Is your main audience part of Facebook and Twitter or your customers are based in Social networks like Friendster or Orkut?

Because the vast number of social networks you need to focus your efforts. I recommend you to go to Alexa, a great source of information about the top websites around the globe, but also for each country.

Try to choose communities that are in the top 10 list. Probably Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, Twitter will be there, but there may be some local sites as well. Start small; choose 2 or 3 sites to start your plan.

7. Define you message and rules of engagement

Your message will be a consequence of your objectives and your story.

Messages need to be consistent over time, honest and personal. Remember that you are in a conversation.

An important factor is not only to define what to post but also what to respond. This is a two ways communication strategy so you need respond to people with links to your resources, to other people’s resources. Your role in social media is to listen, to help and to get your message out only when appropriate. For every 10 messages where you help someone else, you get to include one that promotes yourself. Social media is not about your brand but customers connected with you as part of their social graph. You should be actively responding and interacting; joining Facebook groups that are relevant and become part of the conversation, leaving comments on blogs, tweet people, leave wall comments, answering questions on Linkedin. You need to be an enthusiastic player who wants to engage with their audience authentically; Social media is not so different than real life.    

8. Measure your results

Now is time to look at your objectives and key success indicators and determine whether or not your social media efforts have been successful, and if not, what you can do to improve them.

Social Media is not instantaneous; therefore you need to wait 3-4 months before you decide if things are working for your brand.