The planning process
Step 4: Develop a plan utilizing the 2MCE process
To get started on your social media marketing and optimization program, develop a strategic plan. The first step is to conduct an audit of your current presence (as compared with your top competitors) on search engines and social media sites. Determine where you are and where you need to be.
Ideally, develop a crisis management plan in advance that will address any negative ratings, reviews, or comments. Once you have an idea of where you are, develop a cheat sheet to expedite outreach to the social media sites on which you do not have a presence. There are three critical steps to developing a social media marketing plan (otherwise known as 2MCE): monitor and measure, create and communicate, and empower and engage. Details are provided below.
Monitor and measure. The first step in the 2MCE process is to monitor and measure. As with any marketing or communications strategy, it is always best to get a feel for your audience and the tools before developing an overall campaign strategy. For starters, create Google Alerts for your branded terms so you can be notified the moment something on the internet related to your business is published. Also track inbound site traffic via (Google) Analytics filters. You can also use search engines to conduct real-time research (i.e., Google, BlogPulse, and Technorati). More advanced marketers may opt to customize Yahoo Pipes RSS feeds or free (SM2, SiteVolume, Trendrr, YackTrack) or paid social media monitoring services (i.e., BuzzMetrics, Cymfony, Radian6, Techrigy, Trackur).
The bottom line is that you need to build your overall strategies based on where your customers live online, and agree on a set of metrics and benchmarks to measure volume and sentiment of conversations, as well as engagement (comments, ratings, etc.) over time.
Create and communicate. Once you've developed an overall social media strategy and set up monitoring and measurement (i.e., web analytics), it's time to reach out. When creating content for social media profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flicker, Twitter, etc.) try to ensure the content is timely, relevant, unique, and valuable. Once content is published, make sure that it is properly optimized, syndicated, and promoted to your target audiences within those communities and beyond.
- When creating a fan page on Facebook, be sure to utilize Facebook markup language (FBML) and the API to create interesting custom fan pages and applications that get shared virally.
- On LinkedIn, create and manage your own group.
- On Google and Yahoo, create gadgets and widgets respectively.
- Tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck improve profile management for Twitter, while Ping.fm helps syndicate profile "updates" across multiple profiles (including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
- If you've created a blog, make sure to promote posts (via search engine optimization, tagging, and RSS syndication) to social profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Engage and empower. Lastly, but most importantly, now that you have a foundation including monitoring, measurement, optimized profiles, and valuable content, it's time to engage with your constituents and empower them to become evangelists for your brand.
One of the most powerful forms of generating awareness and credibility within your industry is to engage in knowledge expert communities like Yahoo Answers or LinkedIn Q&A and Groups. Similarly, participating actively in related online communities and threaded forums can create a level of connectivity with customers and prospects that ad dollars can't buy. Furthermore, Twitter and blogs can be more than one-way communications vehicles. By monitoring the blogosphere and Twittersphere for relevant conversations, you can comment, reply, and generally engage your audience members on their terms, and bring them back to your site or profiles to continue the conversation and nurture the relationship.
