SOCIAL MEDIA

SESSION THREE: STRATEGY

BY: Dickens OOKO

MAIL: ookoguma@gmail.com TEL: 0707200880

SM: Dickens Kasami

A business goal gives you a REASON to build a SM plan.

Creating a SM strategy starts with understanding your business objectives: defining your objectives will help create an appropriate SM strategy with tangible results & trackable metrics

There are various channels that make it difficult to make a choice on which channel to go to and get confused of what even to say.

Think of SM with business goals in mind.

First challenge is to stop focusing on subscriber numbers; they will count but not now. Concentrate on the long term goals:

- It’s an investment: building up a base of followers & analyzing them.

- Takes a lot of planning: test run ideas on small groups as you grow, keep track of what works.

- The realism to understand: It takes time to make SM viable; it will never be viable without concrete goals

Numbers only matter if they get you somewhere; if a face book fan reads your article on site. For this, we need a strategy.

Second challenge is to figure out what message you want to pass to the people and how you are going to do it.

Think about your biz and the ability of SM to: drive conversations; increase presence; and build brand

Strategy Framework:I: OBJECTIVES/GOALS

- Inform

- Engage

- Presence

II: TACTICS

Platforms

- Numbers

- Most appropriate for content

Content

-Source/Type - 5:3:2

-Frequency

Engagement-Frequency-Weekly Chats

III: MONITORING/ANALYTICS-Sentiments/Response-Reach: Organic/Paid-Tools: Tweetdeck, Twitter and Facebook Analytics,

Trendsmap

IV: BUDGET-80/20: Tools and staff

SETTTING GOALS Presence Related Goals:

SM can serve as introduction: to build awareness and drive traffic

Expansion: mentions in new markets, reach new target audience

Conversation: number of contacts and links

Brand Related Goals:

Sentiments: ratio of positive to negative over time

Evangelism: do consumers promote your offering?

Mentions: do you get unprompted mentions?

Conversion Related Goals:

Sales and leads: viewing product, buying, increase orders

Social activity: are they to submit reviews, send to friend, social share, comment

Subscription: are they to subscribe to RSS, like Facebook page, follow on Twitter, Youtube

SOCIAL MEDIA TACTICSTactics help to define channels, for example:

Offer Discounts: blog, twitter, facebook, linkedin Incorporate Reviews: Blog, yelp, linkedin, facebook, twitter Generate Links: twitter, blog, pinterest, social news, Youtube Social Sharing: blog, twitter, facebook, pinterest, social news Pitch Bloggers: blog, twitter, linkedin Offer Samples: facebook, pinterest, blog, forums

From this, find a strategic overlap. Which channels are showing across the board for all the micro-goals? The highest overlap is going to represent your ideal starter channels.

Choosing ChannelThere are thousand of Social Media Channels available. I order

to decide which platforms are more appropriate, consider:

- Are your customers on the network?

- Does the network fit your demographic?

- Does your industry have a presence?

- Does it make sense for my content?

- Determine Your Bandwidth and Social Media Resources

4 “Universal” Social Media Channels:

Google Plus – Every business that has or wants a web presence needs an active Google+ page. Why? More than a social networking site, Google Plus carries significant SEO weight. +1 indicates popularity to Google and contributes to its algorithm.

Twitter – Twitter can work for any business. However, Twitter is an extremely active channel and proper resources are required to take advantage of it.

Facebook is right for you if you are building a community presence or want to reach as broad a network as possible. With more than 70% of online adults actively participating in Facebook, it remains the most popular social media site by far.

YouTube – YouTube is another channel that can absolutely work for any business. People love to consume videos, and there are many advantages to video including allowing your companies' personality to shine through. The negative to YouTube is professional video marketing is not cheap.

CONTENT STRATEGY:

Content Type: Curation Vs Aggregation

Both content curation and content aggregation are strategic elements of content marketing.

Content curators scour the internet for valuable content, which they then share with their social communities.

Content aggregation can be confusing, because there are two forms of it. The first is the aggregation of content, which simply means syndicating someone else’s content that you found from their feed. The second is creating and publishing content that you’ve written yourself, then aggregating it.

There are the 3 key differences between content curation and aggregation: Automation(aggregation is largely automated via RSS feeds), Targeting and Value (aggregation lack editorial touch)

Social Media Content Ratio

5-3-2: (5) curated content/ (3) your content/ (2) personal status updates

4-1-1: (4) curated content /(1) promotional /(1) retweet

555+: (5) curated content /(5) updates from you / (5) responses & replies/ (+) miscellaneous

Rule of Thirds: (1/3) curated content/ (1/3) your content / (1/3) responses & replies

30/60/10: (30%) your content / (60%) curated content /(10%) promotional

20/1: (20) “relational posts“—or, content that helps your followers in some way /(1) promotional post

Content Structure: Key Words

Unique Value Proposition

Call-to-action: question, click here…, ask for a download,

Tweets in timelines with an ask to retweet increased Retweets by an average of 311%

Pictures and Infograhs:

Posting pictures to Facebook only works well, if the pictures are self-explanatory

Length is debatable

Give numbers

The bigger a number in a post, the farther it spreads.

Make lists : “8 reasons to…”, “15 tips to…”

Use digits rather than words – “10 ways to…” works better than “Ten ways to

Place the number at the head of the sentence. “5 ways social networks are changing the world” will work better than “How social networks change the world in 5 ways

Everyone wants to be taught: Use “Introduction”, “The beginners guide”, “In 5 minutes”

We all want to get smarter; a common way to think about it is to make a lot of “How to” articles. The bad news is, that whilst they do teach people something, they don’t spread as far.

Posting Frequency

Social media frequency is all about predict, measure and repeat. Without testing your posts on social media at different times of the day, you won’t find what works.

General Frequency Guidelines:- Schedule your posts when your audience is online

- It takes 18 minutes for half of a tweet’s retweets to occur i.e once a tweet has been live for 18 minutes, it has reached the peak of its engagement.

- 42% of customers expect a support request to be answered on Twitter within 60 minutes.

- Facebook posts reach their half-life at the 90-minute mark, nearly four times longer than Twitter.

- The median engagement point for Twitter is 24 minutes and 90 minutes for Facebook.

- For Facebook, a post reaches 75 percent of its potential in the first 5 hours (vs. three hours for Twitter).