Don’t drop the ball on your social media strategy!
Companies should focus more on how to BE social, and less on how to DO social media.
SEO and Social Media has certainly grown together, in which both practices are able to benefit businesses worldwide to be more visible to their target audience by simply applying and merging these two marketing strategies into a single powerful approach.
How to implement a successful social media strategy:
Launching a successful social media presence should not require significant investment in capital, people or technology. There are cost effective ways to leverage social media regardless of the size of your marketing or technology budget. To successfully execute the strategy, make sure your organization has the operational processes in place to manage your ongoing communications efforts.
Social media should be intentions based. You want to have social interactions that drive the audience and participants to your product or website so you can covert them into a customer. To be successful, you will need a hub and spoke strategy. Leverage the social media channels to carry out the message and have your hub clearly communicate your message when they arrive.
First, use the social media channels as “spokes” to engage discussions:
1. Google Business is by far the best social media website to strengthen a website’s Search Engine Optimization. Be easy to find on Google! Claim and verify your Google Business page immediately.
2. Use your personal Facebook account to create a Facebook Page for your product or business. Begin inviting your friends to “like” the page and begin the discussion. Setup the Facebook Page to be enabled to import your blog posts.
3. Create a Twitter account for your company or product if you have not already done so. Review Twitter discussions and identify trends related to your product or service offering. Begin to interact with other Twitter users and earn the community’s trust.
3. Create your professional LinkedIn profile. Link to co-workers and peers in your network and join local groups and meetups that are relevant to your company.
4. If your product involves multimedia, setup a You Tube channel. Always upload your media to increase awareness and to be found via organic search.
5. Visit Instagram and Pinterest to evaluate if these sites could be beneficial to your business. If your social media strategy includes posting alluring photos of places and/or products these sites could be successful tools.
Now that the social media channels “spokes” are active, set up a website as a “hub” to communicate your messages:
1. For your brand/business/product: register a domain if you have not done so already. Setup a website built on WordPress to serve as your communications hub. Here are the following reasons why WordPress is a great tool for this: WordPress is search engine friendly; easy to setup; has thousands of social media plugins meaning minimal programming to connect to Facebook, Twitter, etc.; out of the box syndication capabilities with RSS; built in SEO; and extremely easy to use from a business user perspective.
2. Configure WordPress to have the following plugins: Facebook Page, Twitter feeds and mentions, Flickr, YouTube, and whatever channel you wish to engage your discussions.
3. Use your website built on WordPress as a tool to create valuable content communicating directly to your prospective and existing customers. Properly categorize and apply appropriate tags to the content you’re publishing on the website/hub. Creating valuable content on a search engine friendly tool like WordPress will increase your page rank if you follow search engine marketing (SEM) best practices.
To complete the hub and spoke strategy, you will also want to make sure your content is syndicated to the proper social media channels and related websites. There are free tools that allows you to send your WordPress post content to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and email subscribers.
The simple steps described above can be easily implemented at a cost effective way. Developing a strategy and the plan is the easy part. Executing the plan and providing ongoing management of the message is the art to success.
