Tuesday Tips: How to Create a Social Media Plan

Do you know the things you need to do to start creating your social media plan? If you don't, or are unsure of what you should be looking at, let's look at these four steps to create a solid social media plan.

1. Define your goals.
   Understand exactly what you want to accomplish with your social media plan. Are you looking to drive sales? Are you looking to drive hits to your website? Are you looking to gain more followers? Knowing your goals is an important first step in creating any plan of action.
2. Define your metrics.
   Once you have your goals in place, you have to be able to measure them. What will you be looking at to know if your plan was successful? Will you be looking at conversions, click-throughs, increase in purchases/followers? Know what you will be looking at to define your metrics.
3. Decide your tactics.
   Know what actions you will take on a regular basis that will help you achieve your goals. Have a plan in place if those actions don't help you.
4. Execute your plan.
   Keep an eye on your metrics and redefine your plan as necessary to achieve your goals.

The basics of this blog post came from this infographic on Pinterest. For more details on how to create a social media plan/strategy, check it out here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/161214861638319635/

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Friday Facts: How Much Time You Should be Spending on Social Media

How much time do you spend on your brand's social media creating posts, images, etc., engaging users, sharing content and more? How much time do you spend creating blog posts? How about how much time are you spending dedicated to researching and content strategy as well as content curation?

Each brand is different, but if you're a full time employee focused on Social Media, then Mark Smiciklas, digital strategist at intersectionconsulting.com, has a useful infographic for you showing how your 40-hour work week could be broken up. If you aren't spending 40 hours on social media, reduce accordingly.

I came across this nifty infographic on Pinterest. Check it out here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/147422587779933692/

Friday Facts: The 3 S's of Social Media Maintenance

Do you know what the three S's of Social Media Maintenance are?  Well the S's are easy:

1. Setup
2. Strategize
3. Schedule

Obviously, there's going to be more to that than just those words, but it's a great thing to remember - you have to set up your social media before you can began strategizing. Once you have your strategizing down, schedule posts.

The infographic, found here https://www.pinterest.com/pin/165296248800925370/ , outlines exactly what you need to do with steps for each S to follow.  It also includes some interesting facts, such as "Blog posts shared on twitter and Facebook receive 149% inbound links than those not shared."

If you're still working on your social media strategy, check this article out.

Friday Facts: Why Business Owners Don't Embrace Social Media

This article came across my Twitter feed yesterday and I shared it there, but I thought it would be good to share it here too.

Have you been having problems getting your boss (and business owner) to embrace the need for social media? Has he/she been pushing back against it? If so, the reasons why, and how to combat them, may be found in this article.

The biggest hold back (and I've seen this with several companies) is that the people who want to help out with social media don't have a plan. Create the plan first, then talk with the business owner.

Check out the whole article here: http://www.onlinesuperninja.com/why-business-owners-dont-embrace-social-media/

Saturday Sharing: 10 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy

This is another interesting one I found on Pinterest (and stole the graphic for this article - if you are the original article author and don't want it being used to promote your article, please let me know and I will remove it) and it talks about ten steps to take when you're creating a social media strategy.

As we've discussed several times on this blog, having a social media plan, or strategy, in place is important to furthering the goals of your brand/company.  A lot of the tips she discusses are things we've discussed here, in our Tuesday tips, but she provides a little different insight on each one.  She also talks about a 70-30 mix, which is something I guess I didn't really think about, but sorta do for several sites I run social media for.

Either way, the article is very well written.  Check it out by clicking either of the links below.

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/159526011774773372/
Full article: http://rebekahradice.com/creating-winning-social-media-strategy/

Wednesday Words: Social Lead Generation

Today's word, Social Lead Generation, is about generating sales prospects through social media.

The concept is the same as Lead Generation, or traditional prospecting, where people make cold calls to potential clients or customers in order to generate a sales lead which they follow up on down the road. The difference is, it takes place on social media instead.

Many Kickstarter projects use social media to garner social lead generation.  It allows them to market their project and get potential funding through social media.  In fact, most Kickstarters are so successful due to promoting and sharing on Facebook.  Of course, that's what Kickstarter was intended for - to generate funds and leads for people through their platform and social media.

Beevolve has a great article on how to generate leads via social media.  Check it out here:  http://www.beevolve.com/social-media-lead-generation/

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media.  These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media.   You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.