Starting Your Social Media Campaign

When you start your social media campaign it is good to consider two things. First, how much time and resources are available for your social media efforts, and second how can you automate as much of it as possible in order to make it more efficient? Here are some tips to consider:

The amount of time and resources you need for a social media campaign will depend entirely on the following:
1. The level of interest in your company leadership in having a social media campaign. It is important to understand that the resources needs for a social media campaign are often not monetary, but rather that of time and support.
2. The level of support from colleagues and leadership within the organization is also very important. You will need guest posts, solid information, and more to be successful, and this requires the efforts of many.
3. Your current relationship with customers will impact how successful a social media campaign can be. It provides you with opportunities to improve poor relationships, but must be approached with care.
4. Your current level of customer service- If your customer satisfaction is low, a social media campaign could help you get to the root of the problems and solve them before they create lasting damage.
5. What staff you have, and how technologically savvy they are- You have to have someone who can set up the profiles, manage the analytics, and measure and track, use source codes, and more. If you do not have someone on staff that can do it, you may need to hire someone.

While it is important for certain parts of social media to be done with a live person, such as responding to questions and posts, there is more to social media then that. If you want to successfully use social media to build your business, look for ways to automate the monitoring process so that you more readily get data to interpret. This will help you tweak your plan until it is as efficient and productive as you could hope for, and will help you measure and track your social media success.

There are a number of ways to automate your monitoring process, but generally you will use a tool, such as Google Alerts and Google Analytics.

Google Alerts will allow you to set up an alert for when key phrases (such as your company name, or product or service title) is used. This will help you to keep a close eye on the information being shared about your company, industry, product, etc. This way you can stay on top of emerging trends, and keep an eye on both positive and negative chatter about what you have to offer. By setting up the alerts you get notifications via email once a day, which is simple, and allows you to use your resources for other things.

Google analytics helps you determine how successful your social media campaign is. You can provide coupon codes for your specific social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, so you can track where you are getting traffic. You can use the reports and information provided to look for what is working and what isn't, and thus improve and build your business.

When starting a social media campaign, create a plan that best utilizes your resources, and accounts for measuring and tracking progress.