The Year Ahead: Five Goals for Social Media Marketing

It is natural to look at all the parts of your business operations at this time of year and make plans for where you want to go. So where should your Social Media efforts point in 2011? Most likely a ton of places, but there are some ideas and themes that you should make part of the discussion. If you do you will be among the leaders in your industry, and most importantly you will know you are making decisions about where your business is going and not waiting to see what happens to you before you do.

So Here are five bullet points to consider:

Understand your key themes. Work with your staff to define key messages that communicate the guest experience to attract the right audience. Define your organizations goals for the new year, and assign marketing and PR goals for your social media efforts that align with the organizations targets. Work to create the messages that communicate the experience tied to those goals to your guests and their networks. Those messages are the foot soldiers of your Key Themes. Example of Theme Development Here.

Involve your non marketing staff in the social media campaign. Encourage involvement within your staff, the power of social media is relinquishing total control, and even better total responsibility for the marketing efforts. We often run contests amongst the staff of businesses that GuestFeed works for, to encourage and reward those that make the social media promotion of the business part of their daily routine.

Make the Management of your Social Campaign Professional. Whether you decide to hire a company to help or to have an inside employee manage it, remember, it’s still PR and marketing and it requires professionalism. Look at your goals for the year, the consistency/experience/technical knowledge needed to accomplish them, and for many of you hiring a professional to get you started on the right track, or to continually manage the campaign is worth the investment.

Make metrics the judge of the campaign. Use the various analytics tools available to follow the effectiveness of various messages, the traffic to the key pages of your website that you are promoting, the commenting on your social profiles, and the sharing of your photo/video and other marketing posts. The information you gleam from these sources will help you fine tune your efforts to your particular audience on the fly.

Nurture your social following. It’s what the guests talk about that matters! Being consistently present to provide answers, offer thanks, and suggest services you offer is important. Just as important is being human and saying happy birthday, commenting and participating is being part of the community you want to support your business; it is part of the deal now. Many businesses recognize that means it is a good idea to investigate a professional that can help with management, PR plans, and tactics to ensure your message stays intact.

I hope this helps you as you take the next step in your marketing efforts for the coming year. thank you for reading and your comments are welcome here, got questions or answers for me? I would love to hear. You can find me on twitter @spirocks too.

More thoughts on the year ahead: 2011: What Social Will Do For Youpoint

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

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