Three Primary Goals of Social Media

To build a social media strategy around specific goals instead of simply launching a presence because "everyone else is doing it." Today, I'm going to map out the three primary goals most social media outreach campaigns fall into. If you're still trying to figure out how and why to get involved in social media outreach, consider these three categories and ask yourself how they might apply to your business.

Three Primary Social Media Goals


When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at:

1. Building/Strengthening the Brand
2. Driving Conversions
3. Increasing/Monitoring the Presence

Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals.

Let's take a closer look at these three areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts.

Goal #1: Build the Brand


When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them.

These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you're forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping.

Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors; your Unique Value Propostion. This is the thing you want to use social media to built awareness of.


If you're a service professional, target a specific niche and build a blogging and Twitter strategy around that. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks.

Goal #2: Drive Conversions


One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you're looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media.

Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company's web site or while interacting online.

Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don't forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, retweeting a blog post or downloading a white paper.

Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts.

Goal #3: Increase Presence

Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts; increasing the conversation about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It's about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them.

Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you're launching new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it's all trackable.

When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions.

• Who do you want to hear talking?
• What do you want them to be saying?
• Who do you want them to say it to?

These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence.

You've Set the Stage, Now Start Building a Plan


Looking at your business with each of the above goals in mind helps you set the stage for your social media efforts. This post isn't aimed at telling you what to do, I'm simply trying to get you to figure out why you want (and need) to do it.

If you're small business looking to take your social media efforts up a notch (or maybe even just get started,) take the time to define at least two goals from the categories above. Once you've identified your desired outcome, you'll be a lot more ready to start mapping out the path to get there.

Understanding the Three Primary Goals of Social Media

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) may appear like child’s play. After all, what is there to it? Create a bunch of profiles, Digg a little, Stumble a bit and you are set, right? Wrong! That is the exact attitude that can kill your social media campaign (and dreams) before it can begin.

I don’t mean to suggest that it is beyond a social media novice to successfully carry out a marketing campaign. Armed with enough knowledge, I am fairly certain, even a novice will be able to pull it off. Nor am I making it out to be more complex than rocket science. However, approaching it with a complacent attitude definitely won’t be helpful. Social media, as much ‘fun’ as it is, is not without rules. And successful social media marketing is possible only if one, pro or novice, follows these rules.

DO’S!

1. Build a strong social network. So, you have a profile on Twitter, so, it has over thousands followers. You pat yourself on your back for building such a strong social network. Boy, are you ever so wrong? Have you taken care to ascertain how many of these thousands of followers are legit? And how often do you interact with your followers, respond to the tweets you receive? Less than positive answers to either of these questions mean that despite the impressive number of followers, your social network is as weak as it can get. Interact with your network, only that can ensure your network is as true to you as you want it to be and that your message is conveyed successfully.
2. Expend your effort building the trust quotient of your site. If yours is not a trusted site, set about working on improving the areas it is found lacking in. When you engage in SMM, you are inviting the entire world to scrutinize your site, if you think it won’t be able to stand up it, wait until you are ready to launch you campaign. You can start by ensuring your site is clean of harmful viruses and spammy links.
3. It’s simple, it may sound a little hackneyed, but it is also true – pretty impossible to drive a social media campaign without a blog. Bloggers pioneered and now sustain social media, without them, there would be nothing to Digg, or Like or Stumble. Social media would be reduced to a couple of social networks and unending streams of status updates. (All right, maybe a little more than that, but you get the picture). Integrate a blog (pretty easy to do with Word press) into your site and update it regularly with ‘good’ content!
4. This is a classic tip, works every time. You may remember a time when ‘List’ posts were all the rage (as a matter of fact, they are still very popular), how they could draw traffic to a blog like nothing else could. Well, now with the immense popularity that video sharing sites seem to enjoy, creating a video in the vein of a List post (for example, a ‘How To’ or an ‘x Best Tips’ video) and uploading it on sites like YouTube and Tubemogul is something that can really benefit your SMM efforts. Sure, you wouldn’t say no to instant exposure and the possibility of reaching millions of viewers. Apart from YouTube, you can promote the links to the videos on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and effortlessly double the exposure your brand stands to receive.
5. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your finger on the pulse. Bad anatomical idioms aside, being aware of all the changes happening around you on the web is important not just in social media marketing, but any kind of marketing on line. Subscribe to feeds from relevant sites, use an RSS reader (like, Zune or Feedreader) and be among the first to comment on posts you like or find particularly relevant. Commenting on posts is great way to get in to the thick of the social activity on a site, but being the first commenter will give you the opportunity to initiate a discussion and channel it in the direction you wish to.
6. Social media marketing can hardly be possible unless you are willing to be, you know, social. It’s a given that you should make your presence felt on all the major social sites, but what is equally important, but is often overlooked is being part of micro-communities – that are relevant to your business. While your message may get lost in the irrelevant ‘noise’ on established social sites, it has more probability of reaching the intended audience in a smaller, but niche, micro-community. If you have a site about pet grooming, joining a niche community for dog lovers like Dogster will greatly help your business.
7. Stick to your brand philosophy! Just because you are depending on a (relatively) modern approach to marketing doesn’t mean you have to abandon your brand’s basic ideology, which has hitherto guided you. Let your brand philosophy guide your SMM strategy, it will stop you from over-promising and help sustain your brand identity.
8. Be familiar with the social culture of the communities you frequent – very important, lest you commit a social faux pas and the other members banish you from the community. If you have ever participated in a forum discussion, you know what I mean. Like forums, social communities have a certain culture – certain jargons they favor, certain topics that are preferred. If you wish to be accepted as part of a community, be sure you are well-versed with its ways and are prepared to adapt. Though essentially they do the same thing, Digg and Reddit has different and distinct cultures; if you are found to be pro-Reddit on Digg, you’ll be buried even before you can say social!

DON’Ts!

1. Don’t ‘spam’ on social sites. A no-brainer, really. Everyone on the Internet knows that Spam = Evil, so if you are engaging in social spamming, you are clearly prepared to see your SMM campaign die an extremely quick death. But to those of you, who are yet to commit this cardinal of sins, let me say this: DON’T DO IT! Not only you lose your credibility, social or otherwise, but all your efforts will go to naught as well. Social spamming isn’t limited to offering unsolicited irrelevant links on social sites; posting promotional comments (with or without links), Digging or Stumbling posts on popular topics that are in no way related to your site, even sending automated Direct Messages on twitter are considered spammy practices.
2. Avoid blatant marketing tactics, be subtle. I know what you are thinking, “what’s the point of having a ‘subtle’ marketing campaign?” I am afraid that’s the way things work in social media. The ‘social’ element (a.k.a user/follower/fan) in social media apparently has little patience for overtly promotional and gimmicky marketing tactics. Give then fun contests, quizzes and games that don’t ‘corrupt’ the social space too much, and they’ll love you!
3. Don’t forget to keep your social profiles live and updated. One would think, this goes without saying, but there are enough ‘dead’ profiles out there to change one’s thinking. I don’t like following, friending or even ‘fanning’ inactive profiles, I can only imagine it is true of other social media users too. Freshness is of the essence in social media, if all a profile can provide is stale information, it is of little use to anyone.
4. Don’t forget about Online Reputation Management. A significant amount of signals monitored in ORM come from social sites. So, while you are engaged in SMM, it is of vital importance to gauge user reaction to your product and to take appropriate measures to counter any less-than favorable signal. If these negative signals point to an actual problem with your product, take them to heart and address the issue immediately. If they aren’t, work to rectify the wrong perception.
5. Don’t drop search in favor of social. You SMM efforts should complement your SEO efforts. Choosing one over the other will turn out to be nothing so much as a mistake. Continue building links and optimizing your site while you build your presence in social media.
6. Don’t try to do too much too fast. Let your SMM take a natural course. Natural being the keyword here; just because you figured you got into the game a little too late, don’t try to make up for it by working over time. So, tweeting updates every half an hour – bad idea. Your followers want to receive useful tweets from you, even one tweet a day will very likely keep them happy. Try not to flood their streams with less-then-useful, overtly promotional tweets, this holds true for your activity on other social sites as well.
7. You social media activities should be primed to bring exposure to your site. They certainly should not be used to go on the offence and slander your competition. Battling it out with a competition can do more harm than good to your SMM efforts.
8. Don’t engage in social climbing – you can’t have a successful SMM campaign if you have only people with big, established profiles on your network. While seeking to climb the social ladder, arguably in an effort to boost the importance of your profile, you may lose out on many a potential customer.

Consider these rules while you are chalking out your SMM marketing plan and you can stop worrying about your efforts backfiring on you.

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing