Planning Business Content for Social Sites

Every business should have a marketing plan in place.  Why?  No marketing = no customers.

Social media enables you to target your audience as well as grow your customer base at an extremely cheap price.  Just a little bit of your time.  If done correctly you will even be able to meet bad publicity about your business that's staged on social media platforms head-on and replace it with more positive feedback.

Before you begin posting on your social media sites, plan your developmental goals.  What do you want to accomplish with the help of social media aids?  Do you want to bring in more customers, target your current customers for further contact or increase traffic to your website?  Pick one or more and these goals and run with it, just make sure your goal is realistic, measurable, and timely.

Above you read where we discussed target audiences, but what are they?  A target audience is to who you are trying to reach with your product, service, etc.  For example McDonald's main target audiences are family and kids who want a fun, cheap meal fast.  The next step in developing the appropriate content is to determine what and who your target audience is.  For tips on narrowing down yours, check out this article from Inc. Magazine.

Decide on your overall content and your key message.  What does your audience want to hear?  How does your service/product differ from others like it?  The overall content can include long-form (large articles), short-form (statuses/tweets), and/or conversations (encourage conversation between yourself and followers/fans or between followers/fans).

Time to establish your audience!  Create relationships by not making it all about you, try to use the 80/20 rule.  80% of the content shouldn't be your own or pushing your product while 20% is just that.  Get your customers to have a conversation with you.  Ask how they are doing.  This shows your personable side and that you are not all about work.

That's about it but make sure to change your plan as needed.  If customers don't seem to be responding you might have to make them a complete a call to action like printing off a coupon from the social site and bringing it in for a free hot coco or whatnot.  Just make sure you are flexible and responding to the positive and negative comments that you might come across.  Don't try to hide them in a room or delete them.  Ask your customer why they are unhappy.  This will make your business ou not to be the bad guy.

Resource:  mashable.com

Social Media Analyst at DEPCO, LLC

Started a new job last month where I am working for an organization, DEPCO, LLC, that develops new ways of learning for the classroom.  They have programs/curriculums for pre-schoolers on up through secondary level institutions.

Currently I am working on developing different levels of social media for them.  So far they have presence on Twitter, Facbook, LinkedIn and Blogger.  By communicating with one of the techies I was able to get code imprinted on DEPCO's website so that I can check analytics on Google to find how many external people are visiting the page and where the traffic is coming from, etc.  Another job that I have is to stay informed about the 12 different salesmen for DEPCO, LLC all across the US and to stay in constant contact with them as well as update dealers.

A couple of weeks are down from when all of the social media pages have been set up with little traffic coming in.  Hopefully since they do not have a dominant presence as of yet it will pick up.