Six Steps To Running A Social Media Initiative

August 12, 2010

@Spredfast

Social Media is Not a Fad

• Social media sucks up 23% of our online time, email is third at 8.3%

• In May, Twitter users posted 2 billion posts in the month

• In June, Facebook added its 500 millionth user

• According to an August, 2010 Nielsen survey, once dominant email now the third most popular internet activity, trailing social networks and online gaming among American Internet users

Email

Online Gam

ing

Socia

l Media

0

5

10

15

20

25

8.3 10

23

US Internet Activity

Does this sound familiar?

We blog. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page but we have no focus. We also don’t have the resources to manage it all. We don’t know if it’s effective. But we know we have to do it.

Isaac Barchas, former McKinsey & Co. consultant & Director of the Austin Technology Incubator

Steps to Running a Social Media Initiative

Determine Initiative’s Objective

• Define objectives

• Set goals, benchmarks & KPIs

• Establish social media guidelines

The most effective social media initiatives are tied together by a common business objective. The key performance indicators (KPIs) are determined by business objective.

Examples of Social Media Policieshttp://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php

OBJECTIVE KEY PERFORMANCE METRICS

Create brand awareness # of Followers, # of Mentions, Mention Audience, Retweet Audience, # of Fans/Likes, # of Video Views, # of Channel Views, # of Subscribers

Customer care # of Replies , # of Direct Messages, # of Twitter Click-thrus, # of Comments, # of Likes, # of FB Click-thrus, # of Ratings, # of Comments

Demand generation Email addresses, username, Real name, Location, # of Followers, Engagements, Click-to-Conversion

Are You Ready?

Build People Base

• Listen to the conversation

• Learn the etiquette

• Engage in the conversation

• Give more than you take

• Build Trust

Your social media team should monitor and engage in the conversations what is being said about your product, brand, company, competitors and or industry.

Engaging is all about

TrustSharingListening

Flickr photos by niclindh, samshad473, notsogoodphotography

Conversing Well

Be human, be polite, and be present

Tips for being a good conversationalist

• You have to be present to win.

• Take some time to learn the etiquette of the community you want to enter.

• Give a little first before asking for anything.

• Be responsive to people who react to you.

• Forward along content you find interesting, providing ample credit to the creator. No shy robots

Develop Content & Plan

Great content is social media gold. Content effectiveness can be measured by the number of user engagements such as click-thrus, retweets, replies or comments.

• Keyword searches & RSS feeds

• Use of multiple voices & personas depending on demographic/psychographic targets

• Content templates

• Channel selection

• Identify key influencers

Channel Strategy Selection

Channel Customer Care Brand Awareness Traffic to Your Site SEO

Use keyword search monitoing through a program as Spredfast or Radian 6 to track what people are saying about you and your competitors

Offers unique opportunities for Web site integration and to engage with customers in a viral way helping your company stand out from the masses

Potential can be large but promotion is an art form- promote your brand too heavily and turn off followers, yet don’t promot enough and receive little attention

Value in your site is limited, but tweets will rank high in search results – good for ranking your profile name and breaking news. Although shortened URL are of little benefit

Great for engaging people who like your brand, want to share your opinions and participate in giveaways and contests.

Facebook brand pages are great for brand exposure jump-start your brand exposure through the ad platform or hire a Facebook consultant to help you grow your brand presence.

Traffic is decent and on the rise thanks to share buttons and counters, but don’t expect massive numbers of unique visitors to go to your site

Little to no value, aside from blogs picking up and featuring your posted links. Not worth the time expenditure.

Unnecessary to spend too much time on this, though properly tagged photosets of company events can help customers put a face on the team behind your brand

Participation in industry-related groups might get your photos, and thus your brand, viewed by people with similar interests but numbers will be small.

Even if you get tens of thousands of visits to a photo hyperlinked with your URL, click-through rates are among the lowest around

Heavily indexed in search engines, passing links and page ranks. Also helps images rank higher in Google Images and in building inbound links.

Not the primary focus, but customer engagement opportunities are possible by answering industry-related questions establishing yourself as an expert in the field.

Effective for personal branding and demonstrating your organizations professional prowess. Encouraging employees to maintain complete profiles to strengthen your team’s reputation as advisable.

Unlikely to drive any significant traffic to your site, though you never know who those few visits might be from – perhaps a potential client or customer.

Very high page rank – almost guaranteed on the first page of search results – especially for your company name or individual employees’ names but that’s about it.

Whether you seek to entertain, inform or both, video is a powerful channel for quickly engaging your customers responding to complaints and demonstrating your social media savvy.

One of the most powerful brand topics on the Web when you build your channel, promote via high-traffic sites and brand your videos.

Traffic goes to the videos. If the goal is to drive traffic back to your site, then add a hyperlink in the video description but don’t expect traffic to correlate closely with video views.

Very good for building links back to your site because videos rank high. Also a tried-and-true way for your brand to gain exposure.

Not the site’s primary strength though occasionally an objective third-party write-up as a PR effort, perhaps to counteract bad press or customer sentiment, can be promoted.

Opportunities are huge, especially for promoting objective press/blog coverage of your brand. Make sure content doesn’t read like an ad, or your site might be banned for being overly commercial.

The grandfather of the traffic spikes become active in the community or hire someone who is. If your site is corporate then consider launching an industry blog on a noncommercial web domain to establish

Very good because even if your story doesn’t become popular then your page will still be indexed quickly. If your story does become popular, this is likely the best site in terms of getting linked to by bloggers.

Identify & Engage Influencers

1. The number of times they talk about you

2. The number of times other people repurpose or share their content that is about you

3. The size of their network

Publish Content

• Schedule content

• Team & user roles

The publishing of content should be viewed holistically and establish a cadence that does not border on “spew” or social media spam. Use roles and access controls to help with governance.

Gather Analytics

• Measure the effectiveness of each message

• Gather metrics by channel, voice, account and initiative

• Measure the sentiment of your product, brand or company

• Calculate both “hard” & “soft” ROI on the initiative

With an objective in mind, and goals in hand, measurement is imperative to know if you’ve succeeded or failed. Failure is OK, and to be expected at first, as long as you fail informatively.

Refine Campaign & Content

• Revise content strategy: Add, edit, delete scheduled messages according to historical performance

Sharpen the initiative: Leveraging the gathered analytics, assess the effectiveness of the content and refine the messaging if necessary.

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@Spredfast