Repeat after me, setting up a Twitter account is not a social media strategy. Neither is setting up a Facebook page. Rather, both of these are pieces of a larger strategy that doesn’t focus on or revolve around one specific tool or technology.
I have spent the last couple of months researching and exploring the world of social media from a professional standpoint in search of finding ways to employ social media tools in my job. I have been using them for personal uses for quite some time and have realized their benefits and was excited to start to explore their benefits as a business tool.
As I researched and started to sketch out the proposed strategy, I was very careful to not fall into the trap of focusing on one specific tool or technology that could disappear and be replaced by the next greatest thing at any point. Rather, my focus was to frame the strategy in such a way that would draw attention to the activities or behaviors that social media is all about.
The result is the five components in the image above, all happening simultaneously and none more important than the other. The five components are:
Listening – Found out what is being said about you and your industry by using free tools such as Google Alerts or paying for a more sophisticated tool such as Radian6 which will give you insight into not only what is being said but also who is saying it and how much attention you should heed them.
Publishing – I also call this broadcasting. This is setting up accounts in Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. and start publishing content that spreads your message and supports your brand.
Equipping – This is one gets the most quizzical looks when I reveal it. The underlying theme make it easy for others to tell your story for you and spread your message. Some examples of this are enabling videos that you post on YouTube or other video sites to be embedded by others onto their websites. Another example is placing links to social bookmarking sites on the bottom of your website pages thus making it easy and also enticing people to click on them and tag your content in their accounts.
Engaging – This is really the meat of social media and where the rubber meets the road. You have to engage with others and not just broadcast. Some ways to do this are following selected accounts on Twitter and exchanging @ replies or direct messages with them, establish accounts on social bookmarking sites and tag items related to your industry but not always about you and following up with prospective customers/job recruits via social media sites.
Measuring – This perhaps the hardest of all of the components, especially in companies that do not engage in ecommerce and can’t track a path to a sale. However, there are ways to at least get insight into what is happening with your social media efforts. For example, run all RSS feeds through FeedBurner which can tell you the number of subscribers to your feed and provide geographic data on them. You can also utilize tools such as HootSuite to manage Twitter accounts that will allow you to track the number of clicks on links you place in your tweets. You could tie those together with campaign tracking features of analytics software like WebTrends to get a picture of how much and what kind of traffic you are driving to your website.
I know I may be simplifying things but I think simple is good at times and based on the reactions and feedback I am getting so far, my approach is hitting the mark and resounding with people who just didn’t get social media. Time will tell how successful the strategies that are developed using these five components will be, but I have a good feeling about them.
