Source: Setting Up Your Goals by Wax115 | MorgueFile
Many businesses launch a social media marketing program because they feel like it. They will just then be prompted to understand how it works and how it can be managed once there. Worse, some of them do social media marketing without a goal in mind.
Create a Business Overview
In order to know what you want your business to achieve through social media, you have to spell out your business’ overview first. That way, you’ll know why you need such campaign. Your business overview includes mission and history, revenue model, descriptions of products and services, definition of target audience, and an evaluation of your current marketing efforts.
Define Specific SMM Goals
While a goal helps you focus with what you want to achieve, it’s also difficult to attain if you won’t make it specific. Instead of saying you need to have “More Twitter Followers” or “More Facebook Fans,” you have to focus on engaging your target audience. Aside from being specific, it should also be actionable and reasonable.
One example of using social media as a research platform to validate a new product or service is engaging users to generate relevant and targeted traffic to your site, encouraging users to attend an event through social media.
Know Your Social Media Voice
One way for your social media marketing efforts to become successful is to create and implement your business voice. It should resonate with your brand, as well as your target audience. To do that, research your market’s demographic such as age, income, location, and possible reason for buying your products.
Choose the Right Platform
Choosing the right social media platform is also important for your online communication. Knowing what social network to use can be overwhelming, but you can break it down based on average age of its users, gender, and best use.
Plan and Execute Content Delivery
The hard part of the social media marketing is content delivery. Know how frequently you’d post content and respond to social engagement, the specific topics of content which you’ll create and share, how it can increase your social media engagement with your fans or followers, and social metrics. Your social metric should include the number of followers or fans, the volume of traffic that it generated to your site, how many times it was retweeted or shared.
Social media may be the answer to customer acquisition, but a short-sided definition of realistic results can only result to wasted time, customers, market share, and profitability. Therefore, it is important that you set up your social media marketing plan first before jumping in.