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.
