By now, the important role social media plays in your marketing campaign has probably been drilled into your head, most likely multiple times per day. There is a wealth of information available on how to use social media to your advantage—articles, books, seminars, trainings, blogs, and so on.

With all of these resources quite literally at your fingertips, effectively integrating social media into your marketing campaign should be easy, right? Or…maybe not.

If all these “helpful hints” and surefire methods for making social media magic have you spinning your wheels, you are not alone.

At Johnson Direct, we have found that when a client is having difficulties integrating social media into their marketing campaign, it’s not that they aren’t using social media; it’s that they don’t have a social media strategy in place.

Before you jump onto YouTube or fire up your Facebook, review our 8 easy steps for implementing a social media plan.

1. Determine what you want to accomplish with social media. Are you looking to increase your customer conversion rate? Or is your goal to simply raise awareness about your brand, products and/or services?
2. Identify your target audience. Are they more likely to visit you on Facebook or Twitter? Or do your customers and prospects frequent LinkedIn when looking for your type of product or service? Find out, then spend your time on building up your online presence where they will be.

   

3. Institute a social media calendar. If you are going to post on Facebook, tweet on twitter or write on your blog, do it consistently. Use a social media calendar template as a starting point or create your own to ensure fresh content is being populated on a consistent basis.
4. Find your posting rhythm. There is no definite number of times per day/week you need to post, tweet or blog. Feel out your followers. While you want to stay top-of-mind, you don’t want to become white noise. Start at two value-added posts on Facebook per day, one to three tweets per day and three blogs per week.  Ask your followers how much they’d like to hear from you!
5. Blogs should only be about 300-500 words and a value add for your followers. Ask yourself why they are coming to your site, what they would like to know and how you can help. Try not to write over or under their heads; a good rule of thumb is to write at a sixth grade level. If you write your blog in Microsoft Word first, you can test the post’s readability (go to File, Options then Proofing. Under Proofing check the box that says “show readability statistics”). This will give you the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
6. Add  social media widgets to your blog to let people share your content.
7. Retweet every day. If you read an interesting article, or saw someone else with an interesting tweet that would be helpful to your followers, share it!
8. Use a Facebook page for your business. Facebook is an increasingly important tool for businesses to get found by and engage with potential customers online. Hubspot has a helpful step-by-step guide to setting your business up on Facebook.

Social Media is a great resource for increasing brand recognition and customer conversion rates. Feel free to jump into the social media world – just make sure you have a  social media strategy to help you along the way.

Do you have any more social media tips or resources you’d like to share? Or burning questions that need answering? Feel free to leave us a comment!