Chapter 11 Notes:

Tailoring your Social Media Strategy

Social Media:

Definition: Social media is defined as any website or application that enables users to create and
share content, or to participate in social networking.

Most commonly used social media networks include: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and
YouTube.

Social media & Mobile: Social media is ideally suited to mobile and, of course, mobile is on a
similar upward trajectory. It is also important to recognize that the vast majority of social media
users are engaging through apps, not through desktops or laptops. Mobile and social media are
intrinsically linked with each other.

“Your goals on social media must align with your overall strategy”

Specific Considerations for Social Media

 What are your high level goals for the channel?

 What should be your tone of voice?
 How will you participate?
 How will you respond?
 In what language?
 On what time zone?

One most important thing while setting social media strategy is “LISTENING”

Social Listening

Analyzing the social conversations & trends around your brands and industry and using these
insights to make better marketing decisions.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

 Brandwatch
It is a social media analytic tool that tracks billions of conversations happening online
every day, including blogs, news, forums, videos, twitter, reviews, image, Facebook…
etc., and allow brands and companies to understand consumer insights, trends,
influencers, and brand perception.
  Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform that has capabilities to support many
facets of marketing including multi-channel campaign execution, dynamic customer
journeys, pre- and post-campaign analytics including audience building and
segmentation, social media engagement and advertising, and data

 Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that covers almost every aspect of a
social media manager's role. With just one platform users are able to do the simple stuff
like curate cool content and schedule posts all the way up to managing team members
and measuring ROI

Social Personality:

Social personality is a term used to define how you represent yourself on the social networks

Your social personality should be consistent with your brand personality.

Many businesses try to fit into the channel rather than fitting the channel to their business &
THIS IS THE MISTAKE!!!!

10 point Checklist for preparing “Social Media Strategy”

i. What are your Goals?

Growth, awareness, sales, reputation management, customer service, thought leadership,
reaching new audiences….

ii. Who is your audience?

Young or Old? Male or Female? Professional or Personal? Fun or Serious?

iii. Where is your audience?

Instagram, Twitter, Forums, Facebook, Snap chat, Pinterest? Mobile or desktop? Office,
home or out?

iv. When is your audience online?

During work hours? Evenings? Commuter times? When they have down time? When
they work? When they are with friends or alone?

v. What are your competitors doing?

As with any strategy you must understand the landscape. Get a view of your
competition’s presence and strategy. What channels are they on? What are they talking
about? Where are they achieving engagement? Use listening tools to understand their
plans better
 vi. What is your content strategy?
What is your overall content strategy and how does social media fit in? How do you
differ content for each network?

vii. What about curation?

As well as creation you can become an engaging hub by sharing others’ content that is
relevant to your audience. This also builds relationships with those other companies or
individuals. What will you share, how often, from whom? Do you have existing
partnerships you can leverage?

viii. How will you produce this content?

Do you have the necessary resource? Do you have the skill set for design and written
content that is optimized for social.

ix. How will you manage the channels?

You should consider moderation and administration. You will need to manage profile
photos, cover art, contact details, messages that arrive, complaints, and questions. If
operating at scale this means people and processes must be robust.

x. Establish your success metrics

You have set your goals but now you must know what success looks like. What are the
measures you will use and what is the target?

Types of Social Media:

1. Social Networking

When most people think social they think of sites such as Facebook, which allows users
to post most forms of media and share with a close group of friends or, if they prefer, the
whole world. Typically these sorts of sites are categorized as true ‘social networks’ but
the term should be used in a much broader sense.

Some social networks in fact encourage face-to-face interaction, Meetup

(www.meetup.com) being one example, and numerous ‘friend finder’/dating applications
being others. If your business operates within these markets then you could investigate
potential opportunities such as advertising or even sponsoring events, which could be
online or even offline.

For your digital strategy these networks can offer significant brand awareness
opportunities and direct conversion campaign opportunities. Facebook, for example,
offers paid campaigns, company pages and insights to provide analytics on performance.
These networks are probably the broadest in terms of opportunity.
2. Blogs and micro-blogging

Blogging is hugely popular. Some bloggers have hundreds of thousands of followers; the
other majority uses it as small hobby sites for close family and friends. Blogging
platforms such as Blogger and Word press are hugely popular and the majority of domain
registration companies will happily bundle in a blog with your domain purchase.

While some blogs are global phenomena, for example the Huffington Post despite having
some significant drops in traffic, still receives tens of millions of monthly visitors, even
these pale into insignificance compared to the largest micro-blogging platform, Twitter,
which at the time of writing had 330 million active users who continue to send hundreds
of millions of tweets a month.

Both types, of course, have different purposes and need to be considered differently by
marketers. Twitter is great to push out pithy messages and indeed to receive them from
your customers. Blogs allow for more detailed consideration and can therefore wield
quite considerable power over potential customers.

Micro-blogs such as Twitter and Sina Weibo can offer a great deal of advertising
potential to an audience that is limited on time and looking for interesting content to
share and absorb. You can of course also share your blogs on Twitter – this doesn’t have
to be an either/or choice.

3. Media Sharing

A number of social platforms have been developed that focus on visual media, the most
ubiquitous being video-sharing site YouTube. Also here we can include photo or image-
sharing sites such as Flickr.

Pinterest and Instagram could also fall into this category but Instagram has, however,
evolved into much more of a social network in its own right and Pinterest is sometimes
classified as a bookmarking site.

Being able to create adverts that fit with the visual medium is highly relevant for some
businesses in areas such as media and fashion. Visual appeal is, however, not limited to
these specific platforms. Visual content across social media is universally more engaging.
Images, info graphics and videos all see higher engagement levels on all platforms than
pure text and so this must feature as part of your strategy.

4. Professional Networking
 Professional networking sites are, as the name suggests, largely for the business or
academic world.

LinkedIn is the most widely known and has replaced the rolodex of business cards, the
huge benefit being that LinkedIn contacts remain up to date regardless of the number of
job switches a person may have.

With 350 million registered users it is also a recruiter’s dream and has, perhaps
inadvertently, helped mobilize the workforce. This can therefore be useful for building
your digital team or even sourcing your agency. It is a very powerful space for
positioning your brand as a thought leader and enabling your employees to promote your
brand and gain their own benefits from this.

Slideshare is a document-sharing site, which is useful for publishing more formal

content and researching an opportunity. This can play a part in your content strategy.
Here the opportunity is not only to attract new employees but also to disseminate content
to other professionals. This can be particularly advantageous in the B2B space, where
being a thought leader and gaining trust are vital to success.

5. Reviews & Ratings

Reviews and ratings sites answer a very basic human need – Peer Approval.

We don’t like to make mistakes when purchasing goods and services and, in this, peer
reviews have always been important. The internet has allowed us to expand our ‘peer set’
on a global scale, thanks to the plethora of review sites and platforms.

One of the best-known review sites is TripAdvisor, which covers over 7.3 million
accommodations, places and attractions and operates in 49 markets with over 570 million
reviews. The power of consumer reviews has encouraged brands to offer customers the
ability to review their products/services on-site.

Third-party platforms such as Trustpilot and Reevoo have been created to fill this
demand. In fact almost every industry now has several review sites and most major
players have entered this area. You can rate everything from movies to plumbers and
televisions to hotels.

6. Forums
 Forums are often considered a little outdated and some of the younger social media
professionals might question their inclusion here. Two great examples are Netmums and
Piston Heads.
These forums provide an opportunity for your business to engage directly with customers
and prospects alike, if you can add genuine value to the conversation. Cynically stepping
into the middle of conversations with advertising messages, however, will result in
negative brand sentiment as well as potentially resulting in being banned from the forum
and even receiving negative PR. If nothing else, forums can be a great way to monitor
overall brand sentiment and understand any concerns or complaints.

7. The Sharing Economy

This is much more of a shift in consumer behavior than simply a new type of social
media site. Sites such as AirBnB, Uber and Taskrabbit are well known and there are
many more to enable you to rent out your unused parking spaces, find dog walkers and
even swap clothes. These sites operate through connecting people with needs to those
who can supply them, without the need for an intermediary: the power of the internet at
its finest.
If there is no direct opportunity for your business here then it is at least an inspiration for
what we can create in the social space in our own businesses.

The Social Networks

■ Facebook – 2.1 billion users

■ YouTube - 1.5 billion users

■ Twitter – 330 million users

■ Sina Weibo – 376 million users

■ Linkedin – 260 million users

■ Snapchat – 255 million users