Treat your approach to Social Media like you would any PR effort
Here is a nice article I received from Jeff Lulla.
1. Don’t go running off without a plan. Meet with your marketing folks/committee and decide what kind of presence you want to project and how much information you want to share.
2. Decide if/how you will measure your effectiveness. If you just want to know if your website visits jump, be sure to benchmark your hits before you start any new web activity.
3. Remember that anything you do or say WILL get read by “someone” and that “someone” could be that person’s best friend or be “connected” to them through their social network.
4. Put someone in charge. You wouldn’t put multiple people in charge of updating your website, so don’t put more than one person in charge of the same social media sites. Make sure you all agree on what you want out there … perhaps the lead marketer emails your Social Media Team (SMT) to ask them to post “the attached” and that they do it within X number of days. That way the news breaks evenly across the board and it’s a consistent message.
5. In addition to putting yourself or business out there, use the RSS feeds, groups, and searching areas of the sites to see what’s going on around you. Maybe your competition is posting info that you’ve missed. Maybe you missed a really great article that someone is touting. Maybe there’s an event you want to join. Plugging in words to a Twitter account bring up untold numbers of “tweets” that include the word in their posts. These searches are global and go outside your own ring of influence.
6. Does your website include the ability to create a Blog? If so, put someone in charge of posting news and information on it. Be sure to use key words that will help search engines find you.
7. Monitor how it’s working. Get feedback from your web administrator (are hits going up?), from your registrar (do people check “found you on the internet” when they sign up?), and from those charged with each of the sites you’ve chosen to involve yourself in (does anyone ever comment? When you search your name, does it appear anywhere new?). Make judgments about continued use and time against that. The services are free, but you don’t want to overdo the amount of time (it’s easy to get sucked into these sites.
The message here is this: if your customers have several choices in your expertise, you NEED to stay current and be the business that everyone is talking about. You need to be the business that communicates with those interested in your product or service. Using social media helps get you there.
Tags: article, Blog, Burbank, Down to Business, internet, networking, PR, public relations, social media, social networking
