It is becoming increasingly evident that social media marketing is an important component of a small business’s online portfolio. It is accessible to customers around the globe, affordable when implemented properly and quickly becoming mainstream as an effective way to reach your target audience.
Facebook’s Best Practices But it is also relatively new and as a result, not everyone agrees on how it should be done.Especially for businesses that attempt to develop a social media marketing campaign in-house, the need for best practices is greater than ever before. Here are some things to consider before committing any resources to social media.
In Spring, 2011, Facebook published a short guide to best practices for small businesses marketing on its platform. This offers a glimpse into the methodologies that one of the large social media companies recommends. While there are some adjustments you may make to match the particular needs of your company, many of the guiding principles offered by Facebook hold true for a variety of businesses.
First, let’s look at Facebook’s five guiding principles:
- Build a Strategy that is Social By Design
- Create an Authentic Brand Voice
- Make it Interactive
- Nurture Your Relationships
- Keep Learning
The common thread between these five things is that you must treat Facebook as the social network that it is and not just another marketing channel. People are more than a demographic on Facebook. They are individuals and must be interacted with accordingly. As a result, you must generate a social strategy that involves as many interactive opportunities as possible. This is done by asking questions, generating content that people can contribute to and talking to people on an individual basis - whether in public or in private.
The same strategies hold true for all social media, including twitter which can seem at times like a broadcast channel (but should never be treated as such).
Objective Planning
While the overriding principles are useful in developing best practices, they aren’t sufficient to create a full plan. You must analyze the specific objectives your business has and cater your plans accordingly.
Every company has different goals when using Facebook. Some want to develop new products and ideas for products. Others want to generate awareness of a brand or create relationships with prospective customers. Other still want to drive direct traffic to their brand website to create new sales.
Your exact use of social media will depend on which of these objectives you decide is most important. When starting, ask yourself the following questions before starting.
- What Is Your Primary Objective in Using Social Media?
- Do You Have a Secondary Objective?
- What Resources Do You Currently Have at Your Disposal?
- What is Your Targeted ROI for the Use of Social Media and What Metric will You Use?
- Do Your Resources Match the Projected ROI?
At the same time, while it is possible to carefully estimate the possible ROI of your social media actions in advance, you must constantly adjust and assess results to determine if those goals are being met.
Because traditional advertising campaigns rarely work on social media sites, you must effectively start from scratch. This means fresh testing, fresh audience feedback and fresh measurements. If it doesn’t work, you want to know quickly. This will help you from falling into the cash sink that some social media marketing campaigns experience.
Social media marketing can be very effective, but it needs to be treated much differently than other marketing campaigns. Use the best practices outlined above and you will successfully cater your campaigns to match those needs.
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