7 Ways to Make Social Media a Top Marketing Priority
Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, social media marketing should play a prominent role in your marketing plan. In fact, more and more businesses are recognizing that social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube should be a top marketing priority.
The reason is simple: Social media is where your customers and competitors are talking about your market and probably your business. You need to be an active participant in these conversations to influence the dialogue, represent your brand and products, engage customers and prospects, and keep competitors from gaining an advantage.
Here are seven ways to make social media marketing a top priority in your company’s smart marketing strategy:
- Make social media the official job responsibility of one or more staff members. Give them the task of monitoring social media, creating posts, curating and sharing content developed by others, and generating activity and conversations. They need to do this every day at multiple points during the day, not just a few times a week.
- Create a social media team in the marketing department that meets regularly to develop ideas, source content, review results, plan initiatives, and assess competitors’ activity.
- Create a blog for your company’s website. Blogging is the best way to make content creation a systematic process and consistently generate information to share on social media.
- Develop in-house training to help everyone in your business understand how social media works, how to use (and not use) social media, why social media is important to your organization, and how to contribute content and ideas.
- Ask for help from subject matter experts in your company to develop rough content for your blog that the marketing staff can edit.
- Be on the lookout for customer successes you can share on social media. Ask your customer service team to alert you to potential stories.
- Train your sales representatives to educate clients and prospects about your social media accounts and give them easy tools to connect with you on social media, such as a branded premium or a card-sized handout that lists your social media addresses.
Social Media: Now Part of Every Smart Marketing Strategy
Smart marketers know they need to be where their customers are – and for most organizations today, that place is social media.
Here are more tips from my experience as a marketing strategist and consultant for getting started with social media, getting your company excited about social media, becoming a great content curator, and getting better results from blogging.
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jeangianfagna
There’s an interesting research report out today that shows the growing value of social media marketing for business-to-business marketers, especially for lead generation. This supports many of the points in my blog about why social media needs to play a prominent role in your marketing strategy. Here’s the article:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1008920&R=1008920
Ryan
Very informative and interesting read. Our company runs an online webshop which sells packaging machines and materials, and marketing on social media is one of our priorities. Social networks are a big help with upstarting businesses and companies. Its very easy and low costs and powerful marketing medium.
jeangianfagna
Thanks for your comments, Ryan. It sounds like your company has embraced social media marketing, which is great. Your example is a good testimonial to the power and value of social media.
Shira L
I’m the marketing intern at my company. I post regularly on the company facebook page and twitter accounts https://www.facebook.com/pestaway and @pestawayinc but I don’t seem to be gaining a following. How can I motivate people to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter?
jeangianfagna
Hi, Shira: Thanks for your question. There are several things you can do: First, make sure your social media links are prominently featured in all your marketing so people know where to find you. Second, figure out what your clients and prospects care about and are talking about on social media. Then, create content that adds value to the conversation. Content is the key; give people a reason to care about what you say and to share it with others. Plus share links to other content you think your followers will find interesting (this is called content curation). Be visible with a few tweets a day but not too many and with regular Facebook posts. I also don’t think you should expect a big Facebook following; see my recent blog post on why Facebook seems to be falling flat for business-to-business marketers: http://bit.ly/12c14Qw
Let me know if that helps-thanks for reading my blog.