So you want to play in the social media space? Great. Get in line. Too many companies today are doing just that – playing in the space.
So your boss wants your company involved in social media, and you, being the great employee you are build a fan page on Facebook, you design and construct a beautiful blog and you set up a Twitter account. The problem is, no one fans your Facebook page, no one blogs at your company (or at least not often enough) and your Tweets, well, they don’t happen enough either.
Social media is hard work. But its even harder when you don’t have a strategy or a STATEGERY.
Building a strategy should be relatively easy, but its one of the first things people fail to do when starting a social media initiative. To form your strategy, ask yourself a couple of questions.
1. What’s the point?
2. What’s the most important thing we want people to learn or take away from their experience with us?
3. Can we provide consistent value through content?
If you can’t answer these three questions confidently, you should probably sit on your hands and buy more print ads. That’s supposed to be funny. The answers to the questions should be easy to answer.
Let’s take Lessing-Flynn for example. We blog, we tweet, we don’t Facebook – not yet anyway. And our choice to not use Facebook is because we can’t find a reason to exist there – but we are working on it. Here are those questions and how they apply to Lessing-Flynn.
1. What’s the point?
Well, we blog because we think we have something our clients and the community would be interested in reading. There are things that we can accomplish on a blog format that will never make it to a client meeting. I’ll go ahead and apologize ahead of time to our PR staff when I say that the local news media does a poor job of covering anything you probably care about in regards to advertising, marketing and social media. So, we try to fill that void. With the exception of a slim few, there are very few Iowa marketing firms blogging. Fine by us.
2. What’s the most important thing we want people to learn or take away from their experience with us?
Lessing-Flynn has a point of view – always. There is no gray area here, and for better or worse, we push out content for our clients, our competitors, people considering us as their next agency and the everyday man or woman who has interest. We are straight shooters, you get that on our blog, our Web site and even more so when you meet us in person.
3. Can we provide consistent value through content?
I think we can answer a resounding YES to this. Traffic trends and analytics don’t lie. Our AdMavericks site reaches hundreds daily, most of them in our own backyard – which doesn’t hurt new business efforts. We try to put together 2-3 posts per week minimum and all of us wish we had the time for more.
In a nutshell, that’s it. It doesn’t have to be this huge daunting task, but it does need to be thought out before you begin. I mean, you wouldn’t run a print ad without thinking what your core message was going to be, so why would you do the same with social media?
Author: Josh Fleming
