5 Steps To Make An effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

By

Creating a social media marketing strategy - The power of social media – and especially sites like Twitter (especially, just twitter…) – that act like tools of communication is immense. People can interact with even those whom you don’t know or have ever known. Your prospective clients are out there and you can reach them without any hesitation.

But to be able to reach them and get that conversion, you need a strong marketing strategy. How do you do that?

Social media marketing strategy

As seen in the image, the interlinked efforts bring results. All these sites ultimately share the same arena on the web. That is, they are all a part of the web and hence, can be inter-related. In fact, they should be!

Twitter for instance, must share links to your Facebook or Google plus Page, the Business Pages must mention about your Twitter handle while your blog, should talk about everything!

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step 1: Make Profiles on All the Leading Sites.

Don’t worry. You don’t need to master them and nor do you need to spend hours on it. You just need to spend a well planned time on strategy.

To begin with, you must have profiles – at least on the sites where your target audience is. If you are for instance, working on recruitments, being on sites like LinkedIn is needed. You could make a profile and start a group. And gradually plan the activity.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for teenagers, Facebook should be a great zone; while for working professionals – it should be Twitter. It’s all about where your TG is.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step 2: Create a Time Line.

If you plan to tweet, it doesn’t mean you need to be on Twitter all day. You can spend about just an hour. When you log in, try to post content as well as interact. You can also schedule tweets using something like HootSuite.

If you are working on your Facebook page, then try putting in place the content that you intend to post and when you intend to do it. Build activities that can engage people.

Decide the time durations in the day or in the night, when you’ll be working on your SMM plan.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step 3: Develop Content.

You must make your content. Rough drafts are fine, but just before you launch or immediately after you launch, you need to have you content strategy in place.

What are you going to tweet? What are your status-updates going to be about? It might be a good idea to pre-plan your content. If possible, you should even pre-schedule your posts as mentioned earlier.

Also, if you are maintaining a blog, then keep the posts in the back-up. You don’t have to post them immediately, you can plan when to publish your content. But it’s better to keep them ready, content marketing should be an ongoing process.

Social Media Strategy Step 4: Plan Interconnections.

This is the important step, and this step may vary for various businesses. But it is important because of all the efforts that you are putting into your social media planning.

Hence, what you do on Facebook should influence Twitter; what you do on Twitter should get you more followers, getting more followers should mean more readers on your blog, and the more readers on your blog should mean a greater audience and stronger presence on social space with other sites like Reddit, and StumbleUpon. And again, a good presence on Facebook would mean great activity on sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo! So it’s all about interlinking; And so you need to plan them right.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step 5: Evaluate.

Evaluation doesn’t always mean just a Google rank or number of hits. It means checking on how much of your activity is actually doing well and what should be the plan ahead. Having million followers on twitter and none of them ACTUALLY interested in your work or business or event, is absolutely pointless.

Big numbers without relevance don’t count. And hence, evaluation is important.
Evaluation is also for the review of your work. The content that you have published and the videos or photographs that you are sharing.

  • Do people like your work?
  • What content is getting good reviews?

To find yourself in a win – win situation, you must cater to the demands.

Social media marketing strategy

Now that you have completed the 5 steps to make an effective social media marketing strategy plan, it doesn’t mean you can rest! Social media is something that’s completely alive and active. So, if you want to do well, you should now pick up an energy drink and totally rejuvenate for more hard work in the days and nights ahead. But hey! It’s all fun – the journey should be tiring, but certainly worth it!

About the Author

The author is an expert social media strategist working with iNetZeal.Com in areas of SEO, SMO, and SMM. She is a passionate blogger with many years of experience and expertise.

  • http://technicallyeasy.net Paul Salmon

    I think the final step – Evaluate – is probably one of the most important steps. It is important to evaluate the results of your social media marketing strategy to see what works and what doesn’t, and then make adjustments accordingly. Social media is always evolving, and without performing an evaluation yourself, you can’t evolve properly with social media.

    • http://www.magnet4marketing.net Fabrizio Van Marciano

      Hey Paul, thanks for your comment. I think it is important also because we all need to know how effective our efforts really are in social media. Google analytics and HootSuite these days does a much better job at monitoring social media marketing.

  • http://wpblogmagazine.com/ Bjorn

    I think social media profiles should try to drive traffic to the blog, but at the same time give your blog readers a chance to get something extra.
    It is hard for the regular blogger to find time to be active on multiple socail networks. A rss sydication like dlvr.it can make the updates easyer, but the profiles needs more than just rss to be interesting.

  • http://pat2009.com/bluehost/ Bluehost

    Step 4 is certainly the most important in my opinion. Having the right connections can really boost your marketing on social media.

  • http://travelwisconsin.us/ Liane Markus

    The steps that you have shown above is actually relevant and informative for me. I am sure that most of us will be putting this into action because this really is possible to do. Thank you for sharing to us this very interesting and useful blog of yours.

  • http://assignmentsbox.wordpress.com Pratik

    Really nice points, You should decide in advance that how much you should spend everyday on each social media platform, plus you should have strategy how to use them. Now a days twitter is quite easy to manage as you can schedule your tweets, for other networks you have to invest your time.

  • http://www.aspiredesigns.com.sg/search-engine-optimization/ Singapore Seo Services

    Hello,

    Another great post!

    I would like to know what you think about Pinterest? Do you think it should be included now in our SMM campaigns?

  • http://mymediamagnet.com/feed/ Troy Jaggard

    This is a really great post.

    We like to always tell our clients that their blog is their “hub”. With the right plugins on your blog your can really help coordinate all of your social media. It’s still very easy to get lost in your social media strategy and fall outside of the time allotted.

  • http://www.self-esteem-tips.com Jeriea

    My challenge is calculating influence. We are a word of mouth marketing company, so most of our new members come from personal invitations. But how many people are invited to a meeting, check out our facebook page and that influences their decision to attend? Or they visit, are engaged in online conversations afterward and that influences them? When asked how they heard about us, they are going to say the name of the person who invited them to a meeting. I’m going to add questions about whether or not they’ve visited our fb page and if they did, did it make a difference.

  • http://www.shoppingbags.com/ Danica

    This is a great marketing strategy. Every step that you have mentioned is crucial to the success of your marketing strategy.