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Ensuring our New Year's social media resolution bears fruit
18 January 2010
As 2009 turned to 2010, many of us were busy putting the final touches on our New Year’s resolutions, including some to strengthen our businesses and organisations in this tough economic climate. We might have even said to ourselves ‘Right, 2010, the year I finally take advantage of all that social media can do for me.’ Resolution made and commitment confirmed, we now face the daunting task of trying to figure out which social networking websites are right for us.
Finding the right mix
When considering promotional opportunities in social media, a well-thought out and organised strategy is key. In many ways, the goals of online marketing are very similar to more traditional offline efforts. The target is to build brand recognition, develop community and create a loyal customer base.
When looking to do that online, paying attention to social media demographics makes sense as it can help ensure that we reach our intended audience. We should appreciate that Twitter is being driven forward by adult users whilst younger audiences have not taken to Twitter the way they flocked to Facebook.
Setting a realistic schedule
As we spoke of in a recent presentation on social media, an important element of online marketing is consistency of effort. When thinking about implementing that New Year’s resolution, we must be realistic in committing to a schedule of blogging and the like. Is a weekly blog possible given all of our tasks of running a business? Do we have time to send four tweets a day? Will spending two hours a week on Facebook be sustainable? The answer to these questions might be ‘yes’, but we will want to know that for sure before we embark on any online marketing campaign.
As with any marketing campaign, we cannot produce an initial push of online marketing and expect that single effort to continue to deliver over time. We must consider online marketing as an on-going process, one that requires regular love and attention to ensure that we reap dividends from our efforts.
Measure, measure, measure
A real advantage of online marketing is the ability to collect and study the value of our efforts. Google Analytics, an amazingly powerful web-traffic monitoring tool, can give valuable insight into what is happening on our website. We can count the number of legitimate Twitter followers that we have, along with the number of replies and direct messages we receive (as a metric of sorts of our online community building efforts). Using Feedburner, another Google tool, we can count the number of subscribers to our RSS feeds.
Of course, a key measurement is always sales. If we’re operating an e-commerce site, we can do that online. If we’re more service oriented, we will need to study where our increased sales (or donations, for charitable organisations) are coming from.
Persisting in our efforts
Any New Year’s resolution requires a full twelve months of commitment to be able to really tell whether we have succeeded. So, we need to stay focussed on our online marketing efforts for the entire year, regularly revisiting our strategy plans to keep to our plans and schedules.
We can help
Over the past few years, lbdesign has helped clients in the UK and the US get their heads around social media, designing and developing blogs, offering coaching on how to blog and creating online marketing strategies. We’d love to help you in 2010, so please get in touch if you think we could help.