Getting to grips with social media

It seems that everyone is talking about Social Media these days. The fastest growing group on Facebook is 55-65 year old women, so if your mother isn’t using it yet, she will be soon!
From business favourite LinkedIn to new kid Pinterest and everything in between, there are now so many networks out there it is difficult to know what you should be using when.
Target market
Like all marketing problems, this one is easy to solve if you take it back to basics. The basic rule of marketing is “understand your customer”.
If you know who your customer or target customer is, then you can start getting to know what their interests are, their demographics, and therefore which social medium they are most likely to use.
However much you adore Facebook for keeping up with distant family or arranging to meet up with friends, if you are targeting senior managers in oil companies, it’s probably not going to be right for you. If, however, your main group of customers is 20 something females, and your products and services are fun, then what on earth are you waiting for. Get yourself a Facebook page and don’t look back.
Objectives
The next step is to work out what your objectives for using social media are. Remember that this is just part of your marketing – how big a part will be different for everyone. Your objectives could be:
to generate awareness of your brand, raising your profile and making your overall marketing campaigns work harder
to drive direct sales or bring in leads for you to follow up offline
to retain existing customers, encouraging them to buy more/more often, build a community, or turn them into advocates
Message
Once you know who you are targeting and why, you can decide what the key messages are that you want to get across. Along with the message you need to decide on the tone and style you want to use – this will be appropriate for your target market and might be different on different channels.
Content Plan
To make your life easier, and to make sure you are focused and active regularly on the important social media, it helps to create a content plan for each key message. Gather tips, answers, questions, photos, articles, infographics, videos… on the topic and decide when and where you are going to use them.
Measurement
And finally, once you have done all that, remember to check what’s working best. There are numerous tools to help you, many of them are free. Don’t just look at the number of friends/followers, also review the levels of engagement you are generating.
One more thing
Remember this is *social* media. It’s supposed to be fun, so enjoy it!