Jennifer Laycock recently wrote a great piece about how to use Social Media in an attempt to accomplish specific goals, not just because everyone and their brother has a social media campaign. We thought it was informative, so here’s a quick summary.
The three basic social media goals are: To build and strengthen your brand, to increase conversion, or to increase your presence. Beginning so high level then working down is a good way to hone in on specific, accomplishable goals.
Goal One: Building the Brand
Social media is one of the best marketing tools available for emerging brands, particularly if your product is not exclusive or if you don’t wish to compete solely on price alone. Social media allows you to both introduce your product to specific audiences while at the same time engaging them in a focused conversation.
When you begin your social media campaign, consider what unique value proposition you have to offer your clients, then play on that. Target specific niches to gain customers in the field you’re aiming for. Tweet to them and begin a conversation among their group around your product or service.
Goal Two: Driving Conversion
One of the great abilities of social media is that it can drive goals and interactions with your product. The first step is to write down all the possible options customers have when engaging with your site such as buying the product, signing up for the newsletter, or even subscribing to your RSS feed. Decide which of these interactions you can drive by specifically marketing your social media efforts and aim for that goal. This is often the best and easiest way to get your social media campaign off the ground.
Goal Three: Increase Your Brand Presence
Here’s the biggest and vaguest of all social media goals, and it centers around increasing conversation about your brand. Social media is ripe for the picking by PR minded companies who desire to know what customers are saying about their brand, so use it to your advantage.
The best thing about social media is that it makes all these conversations trackable. You’ve got metrics at hand to measure how much buzz has been built about a new product release and you can really get specific on what you’re measuring, which will help you drive your future goals. The questions to ask yourself are who do you want to find talking about your brand? What do you want them saying? Who do you want them to be saying it to?
If you’re just getting off the ground, these three goals are a good way to start defining your social media campaign. Use them as a baseline to help determine what you need to do to build your brand, increase conversion, and up your presence and exactly how to get there.
Heather Hendrick, summary
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