In the past, I’ve often emphasized upon the importance of building and adopting a social media strategy that works. Last year, I wrote several posts to uncover why businesses must formulate and practice a social media strategy that works. Whether it’s measuring the ROI on your social media efforts or saving a dying business with social media, building a social media strategy is one of the basic building blocks to leveraging social media for your business.
However, having a stale social media strategy won’t help in most cases. You need to adopt a dynamic outlook and be prepared to adopt a Plan-B if the chosen strategy isn’t fetching the desired results. As a business, how do you know if it’s time to change your social media strategy? In this post, I present 7 parameters which should help you decide if it’s time for a change.
ROI
Measuring the ROI of your social media efforts isn’t a trivial task, but it’s crucial to do this exercise to know the true worth of your social media strategy. Most business follow a simple rule when it comes to adopting new technologies or paradigms – If it boosts my business’ ROI, it’s worth the investment. Last October, I wrote a detailed post on how you can measure the ROI of your social media strategy.
If the ROI has dipped or doesn’t justify your social media spending, it’s time to change.
Competition
If your competitors have outdone you in social media circles, it’s time for introspection. Whether it’s tapping new social media avenues such as Google+ or the numbers (Facebook fans, Twitter followers), it’s always good to keep an eye on what your customers are doing.
If they’re doing things differently and enjoying success, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t modify your existing strategy to beat them at their own game.
Losing Steam
It’s relatively common for businesses to have followers unfollow them on Twitter and fans leave their Facebook page. However, if this becomes a routine phenomenon, it indicates that you aren’t doing enough to retain your social media followers. For a business, it’s crucial to turn your social media followers and friends into paying evangelists. If you can’t convert your followers into customers, your social media strategy needs to be re-evaluated. You must make a conscious effort to transform these social media connections into business revenues.
Customer Feedback
As a business, it’s important to take into account the customer feedback coming from your social media circles. Social media provides a wonderful medium to get up close and personal with your customers. It provides a business with an opportunity to get valuable feedback and act accordingly.
Technology
The best thing about technology is that it makes things easy to do and social media is no exception to that rule. Businesses should make it a point to learn new things about social media on a regular basis rather than develop a one-time social media strategy and never look back at how things unfolded. A case in point is using geolocation services to be able to locate prospect customers and launch location-centric deals.
Consumer Preferences
It’s crucial for a business to understand changing consumer preferences in the social media segment. If consumers are hopping on to Google+ while your social media strategy revolves around MySpace, it is bound to be a disaster. Further, it’s important to understand your customer’s social media preferences and serve them in a timely yet non-intrusive manner.
Privacy
Last but not the least, businesses should ensure that their social media strategy respects their customer’s privacy. Most people have zero-tolerance to privacy violations and would be quick to distance themselves from a business which does so. Follow the golden rule of never ask what you don’t need to ask and never tell anyone what they don’t need to know.
If your social media strategy compromises user’s privacy, it’s better to fix it right away rather than lose valuable customers.
Have you ever looked back at your social media strategy and determined if it needs to be changed? Please share your experience by leaving a comment.
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