Social Media isn’t merely about creating Twitter profiles and Facebook pages. In fact, developing profiles and pages is only one of the many tasks in your business’ quest for social media success. I often say that social media isn’t a short cut to success for businesses. It was never meant to be. And attempts to make it work as a short cut are liable to result in catastrophic effects for any business.
So, now that your business has taken the first step in the right direction by deciding to embrace social media, what next? How do you script a social media success story for your business? In this post, I present to you the 7 pillars of social media success for your business.
1) Do your homework and get started
The first and perhaps the most important step to ensuring social media success for your business is “getting started”. It’s crucial to shed any inhibitions and overcome the mental block of uncertainty associated with adopting a new paradigm such as social media. It’s equally important to know what you want from your social media efforts and establish well-defined goals in a realistic timeframe. Analyze your competition; know what they are doing well in the social media circles and their weaknesses. I’m sure there’s a gap in their social media strategy which you can exploit for your business gains.
A good start is half the job done and social media adoption for your business is no exception to that rule.
2) Your social media profile – First impression is the last impression
Your social media profile represents the online identity for your business, and that’s not something you’d like to risk with half-measures. Building an impressive and informational profile is a must for any business aiming to leverage social media to boost its revenues. Your profile is also the primary avenue of engaging with customers; therefore it deserves a lot of serious thought process and equally well-planned execution.
Develop an impressive persona for your business; it’s worth the investment.
3) Engagement and Participation
Social networks are all about engagement and participation. Creating a positive impression amongst the social media fraternity is crucial and it’s equally important to maintain those vibes by actively engaging with users and participating in discussions.
Whether it’s your marketing, advertising or customer service, active participation is must to attain success in any avenue in social media circles.
4) Recognize and Reward your audience
Social Media offers a fantastic platform to build relationships with online audiences. Acknowledge, recognize and reward your audience – it pays in the long run. Launching loyalty promotions, discounts and special offers on Facebook and Twitter is a great way to re-ignite the buzz about your business amongst your social media target base.
5) Follow social media as your religion
Perseverance pays, and that’s true in the social media world as well. If you want your business to be the next big social media success story, be prepared to spend the time and effort required. I love reaching out to people telling that I’m a religious person and social media is by far my secondary religion.
Customers love to get associated with businesses that are active over long periods of time. If you start off your social media efforts with a bang and then start losing interest, it’s a matter of time before your followers start losing interest in your business.
6) Measure your ROI
It’s important to quantify the social media gains for your business. If you are not getting the expected results, something’s wrong and needs to be fixed. Implementing metrics and analytics to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts is of paramount importance.
7) Keep an eye on the competition
Social media is such a vast phenomenon that it’s easy to loose track of yourself and your competitors. In today’s tech-savvy age, it’s important that you keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing to leverage social media for business gains. I won’t advice copying them. Instead, I’d advocate that you go one step better and beat them at their own game!
Does your business have an active social media presence? In your opinion, what are the pillars to social media success? Please share your social media experience by leaving a comment below this post.
Great points … Yes, we may know many of these points, but as we finalize our 2011 plans, this is always a good time to reinforce such “pillars” of our plans. Nicely done.
The most important thing about social media is consistency. It’s not something you can do for one month and see how it goes. And it’s not something you can do for 1 year and then stop all of sudden, ’cause it will not just stop benefitting your business, but even damage it.
If you’re serious about it, go for it.
If not, you’re better off investing your time and money elsewhere.
this is a great article, thank you! will be sharing with all of our clients at @inkprgroup!
These are all great points Douglas.
I often hear people comment “I’m on social media, however it’s not working for me”, but what they don’t realise is that they are lacking these very important pillars you write about.
They don’t take the time to engage and participate in conversations but rather continuously broadcast information about their products and services – something that will soon see their followers unfriending them in droves!!
In fact, after being sent the tenth spammy message in a morning on Facebook & Twitter by my recent ‘friends’ I was inspired to write the article ‘Social Media Etiquette: Are you developing or destroying your online reputation & relationships’.
Hope you don’t mind me adding the link here Douglas, just in case some of your readers find it useful.
http://annemariecross.com/social-media-etiquette-are-you-developing-or-destroying-your-online-reputation-and-relationships
Thanks again for a great article! I’m off to strengthen some of my pillars 🙂
Best, Annemarie Cross
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