Are you on top of your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2011?

You’re never too late to start your 2011 Social Media Marketing Strategy - This year has gone so fast and I missed starting my Marketing Strategy on 1/1/11.  For many marketing people and businesses, developing your strategy is something usually done in the first 3 months of your financial year or calendar year.

If this is the approach your business currently takes, then realise that you’re leaving just 75% of the year to deliver 100% of what you set out to achieve.

What can you do to get started with a social media strategy today?

There is a lot you can do and today is always the best day to start.

The 3 most important steps to get your Social Media Strategy & practice off to a a good start are to watch, listen and learn.

Watch what others are doing with Social Media

• Look at what people are doing with Twitter, Facebook, coTweet,  LinkedIn, Foursquare
• Watch what your competition is doing with social media
• Watch how you & others integrate social media marketing into existing e-mail, web, radio, press, outdoor marketing activities

Listen to what your customers are doing with Social Media

• Listen to how your customers use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
• Identify industry specific social networks that you need to get involved in
• Join these networks and listen to what customers and non customers say
• Listen out for bad customer experiences (for your brand and your competitors)

Learn the tools of the trade

• Learn from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb (or contact me) to find out what tools you need to be using today.
• Get up to speed with how you’re using Google Adwords
• Learn good SEO practices - avoid the black arts of SEO and squeeze pages
• Track how you’re ranked in Google for your keywords
• Learn to tag your campaigns better in Google Analytics
• Use coTweet or similar to integrate with your customers on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere
• Monitor and Report on Analytics

Spend 30 minutes a day and review the numbers

So get started today - spend 30 minutes dusting off your Google Analytics charts, find out what tools your company uses for social media - and if you can’t find any historical numbers, start tracking them.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.