Social Media 101: Tips and Steps to Developing your Social Media Strategy
Everyone has heard over and over again how important social media is in this day in age, but utilizing social media can actually hurt you unless you have a clear and concise strategy. Jumping into the business of social media requires planning and strategy and most important commitment from all parties involved. If you are missing one of these three key elements your plan will fail miserably!
There is nothing more annoying than clicking on a company’s social media links to find they are outdated, under-utilized, and inconsistent. I am writing about this because I want people to learn from the mistakes that I made when implementing my social media strategy.
I have included some steps to implementing social media that I think are extremely useful.
Step 1: Plan, plan, plan! Establish a clear direction and purpose for your strategy and get buy-in and commitment from anyone that is going to be involved.
Step 1: Start with a blog and ONLY a blog. Forget about using LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, etc., until you have a solid corporate or individual blog. Only once you have a couple dozen blog posts that are again clear, concise, and with purpose, should you move onto other social media platforms.
Step 2: Pick ONE other social media platform to conquer. I suggest Twitter, because once you have a few blog posts you can promote them by using Twitter and direct links to your site. After you have a good following on Twitter you can move to the next step.
Step 3: Add ONE more social media platform. For us we chose Facebook. (We are still mastering this one!) Facebook can also be promoted using your Twitter account.
Social media is all about mastering one platform at a time and no more than that. Keeping social media up to date with fresh ideas takes time, and for small businesses you may only have one person controlling it. If this is your case, stick to a number of social media platforms that can be managed correctly, opposed to overloading yourself with multiple social media platforms that may only be mediocre at best.
If this is all new to you, I suggest buying a book or watching webinars to get some ideas that have worked for other businesses like yours, the better educated you are, the more success you should achieve!
-Andrea Leonhardt, PEI
