Create an Economical Social Media Optimization Plan

Your Social Media Marketing campaign can be an economical component of your eMarketing strategy. As you develop and evaluate your social strategy, it’s worth noting that SEO remains a key component and including your targeted terms and phrases should be a big part of creating your content.

Social Media Campaign

The first step, should be to define your strategy by asking yourself, “what is it that my business needs?” Whether it’s brand awareness, more employees or more sales, it’s important to know what your goals are in order to develop an effective and Economical Social Media Marketing campaign.

Once you have your strategy defined, it’s then important to decide how you will evaluate your Return on Investment (ROI). A lot of people starting out, don’t really understand what the ROI is in social media, and really it’s a metric that is very much a reflection of what your goals are.

You can begin to measure your ROI by looking at what you have now, and then as you implement your social media plan, you can determine if certain aspects are improving. For example, you can look at how many twitter followers you have, and how many Facebook fans you have, how many mentions and clicks you receive, etc.

One of the first things you should start doing with your campaign, is to start listening. It seems that most people who get started with social media, see it as a way to broadcast a message in a similar way that they would through other traditional outbound marketing strategies (which are interruption based). With social media, we have an opportunity to start listening to those people who are already talking about your brand and engage in conversation.

The easiest way to listen for your brand is to set up real-time search, with a Customer Relations Management tool like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or Sprout Social. There are other tools available, and a quick search will reveal a suitable one for your needs.

Social Media Guidelines

Once you begin to engage in conversation, its important to know how, and this can be decided by the goals you’ve set for your campaign. What you say, will set a tone for the conversation and be a reflection of your company image, so you may want to establish a policy that outlines limitations, and the tone of messages (especially if your campaign involves a team working on your behalf).

Track Your Results

Determine which social media marketing channels are delivering website traffic. You can do this by setting up Google Analytics, or using some of the available Social CRM tools. You can also set up alerts with Google, and get notified when your brand is mentioned.

Now you’ll be able to quantify your campaign goals and collect data, like which tweets were clicked on, how many visits came from social media, which channels are performing the best/least, and so on. With Alerts, you will be able to review how and where your company is mentioned online and where possible (ie. Blogs) you can leave a comment.