Ready to Engage With Social Media? Ask a Few Simple Questions.
I had a phone meeting with a dear friend yesterday and we are planning a mutually beneficial business relationship. We are discussing the launch of her new website project and how I might support them through my business SHARE. Their need is to create and implement social media marketing and community into their current website infrastructure.
My anwser to her and to everyone that I speak with is – ask yourself some key questions and create a strategy that takes into consideration your target markets want, need and benefit. What are your plans for the long term? You want to ensure that you build a community that can grow with your product or service by constantly engaging and connecting all of the like minded people searching for your offering. You want them buzzing with enthusiasm and motivated with the passion to share.
Smart Blog http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/ has a post written by Andy Sernovitz that is short and to the point. He provides 3 powerful and key questions to anwer before you dive in. The answers that you get will help shape “the blueprint” that will become the strategy and plan you put in place to ensure success and sales conversion. The benefit becomes: ROI, in addition to your short and long term goals exceeding expectations.
Let us know what kind of questions you are asking as you build your blue print. We will post them and SHARE them with everyone.
Best Nicole
Social media is showing no signs of slowing down in terms of growth of both users and places to hang out. By and large, this is a good thing — except when your marketing department is always jumping on the latest and greatest new platform at the expense of building something that supports your brand and your word of mouth in a consistent, scalable way. You can avoid the shiny-new-object disease with a few simple questions.
What to ask:
- Are our fans there? If your fans aren’t there yet, odds are you probably don’t need to be either.
- Can we do it well? Success in a new social media space requires commitment, so always consider the resources required for a new community and how it may affect your relationship with fans elsewhere.
- Is it here to stay? Your job isn’t to pioneer new technologies, your job is to find places to do great marketing and build the best relationships.
Great post, thank you.
I would concur particularly with the second point: any social media presence needs to be proportional to the time a business will have available to keep it up-to-date and of value to customers and other stakeholders.
Dusty, out of date profiles and communities are worse than nothing at all.
I think you need to really evaluate why you are doing this…
1. Are you doing this just because it is the new rave?
2. If you do decide to get in the conversation, do you have a plan?
Many people I speak to do not get Social Media. They think it is a platform to solicit business, not a platform to “engage” (like you said above) their customers and prospects.
Add value information, create a community and invest in the relationships.
I have several articles to help you through this process.
Chad Rothschild
http://www.chadrothschild.com