A social media campaign for business, whether large or small, is more than just posting photos, ideas, industry news or funny quips on your page. Save that for your personal Facebook page, although you still need to be conscientious here (more on this in another article). A business social media campaign needs to be carefully thought out, align with your business goals, and possess an authentic voice that is considered trustworthy by your readers, followers, and clients.
Planning your social media campaign should take the form of several steps to begin with, but of course you will probably need to adjust over time as your business goals change, your products change, and the business environment itself changes. As always, being agile and adaptable is an advantage when managing your social media accounts. Below are some steps to follow to get you started:
- Define your target audience – who are your readers, followers, and ultimately, your clients? Start with determining this so that you can formulate a voice that speaks to those people authentically.
- Set goals – do you want to drive more traffic to your site, a particular product or service page, or just raise general awareness of your business?
- Create a keyword list that defines your business and appeals to the audience you want to reach – this list will inform everything you write, post and say on all social media accounts.
- Create a timeline/calendar – how often do you want to publish blogs and post to social media? Create a calendar so that you always know when it’s time to post and the earlier you can define what it is you want to post, the better. This way you are not always scrambling to come up with something the day that you are supposed to post it.
This is the framework of your social media campaign. Once you have an understanding of all of these items and your calendar is in place, you can start gathering your content. Business social media is all about sharing content, stories, case studies, and ideas that are relevant, useful, and/or helpful to your audience. It’s not only about promoting your business. There is no better way to lose your audience’s interest than to constantly post about your products and why someone should purchase them, or even posting coupons or sales. People want information! We recommend a ratio of 10-15% business promotion and the rest is all content that the reader can actually use. In some cases that may even be giving away some of your business’ “secret sauce.”
A great example is this very blog and, in fact, most of the articles on our blog. We are experts in social media marketing and many of our clients hire us to do just what we describe in this article. Why would we give away these secrets? Because we sincerely want to help. If this information is useful to your company and can help you run your social media campaigns more efficiently, then we are happy to have impacted your business in a positive way. However, we also realize that taking the above steps can become time-consuming, and many business owners quickly realize they are in over their head. If that’s the case, we exist to help you in this way as well – to fill in the gap you have in social media marketing so you can work on your business. If that’s the case, please contact us and we can come up with a social media management plan that will fit your business and budget!
