When considering using social media for marketing and communications there is one key rule: don’t start with the tools. Just because millions of people are using Facebook today, doesn’t mean that your customers are amongst them, and the same goes for Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn. Every audience will have a different social media landscape, and the key to planning your communications is to start by plotting it.
Plotting your landscape
Plotting your social media landscape involves asking – and finding the answers to – the following questions:
1. Who are you targeting?
Hopefully, if you know your brand and your market well, this question should not be too hard to answer. It is, however, worth remembering that different types of people use different types of social media, and therefore it is important to split your potential audience into several small groups, rather than sticking with ‘everyone who is interested in and talks about my brand’. The more targeted you can be, the more relevant your communications will be. Who are the decision makers, and who are the influencers? Both groups are relevant, but you may not find them in the same places.
To help, it may well be worth setting up social media monitoring (see the parallel article on how to monitor a brands social media presence) in order to track relevant keywords. This will help you discover who is talking about subjects relevant to you – and others – and also who they are.
2. What are they talking about?
Once you have defined your target groups, you need to define the subjects that you believe they are interested in and then confirm whether they are talking about these subjects. Again, common sense and knowledge of your market will come into play, but you should not be afraid to take advantage of monitoring tools to learn more – you may be surprised! As with search engine optimisation, it is easy to have a general idea of what terms are being used to search for your products, but the exact terms can often be surprising.
The ideal approach is to define a core list of search phrases related to the topics you believe are relevant and then to search for conversations on these topics using social media search and monitoring tools. Particularly useful at this point are the aggregators such as SocialMention – http://www.socialmention.com/ , which will search across different platforms in one fell swoop (blogs, forums, microblogs, video sites, etc). Your search will confirm not only whether you have identified the right topics, but which of these topics are generating the most interest.
It is also, however, worth conducting targeted searches on platforms that you believe will be relevant. With tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slideshare, nothing is more accurate than a search using their own dedicated search engines, especially as many potentially relevant conversations are taking place behind closed walls.
3. Where are they talking about it?
Your conversation search will also start to give you an idea of where your chosen topics are being discussed, and also where they are not being discussed. You now have a target list of tools to monitor.
4. Who are the influencers?
Once you have your target list of tools, the next step is to identify the influencers – the users of these tools or the publications that are the most active and relevant to your brand. The level of influence depends on the tool / publication and your marketing needs, but some guide criteria would be:
– For a publication, how many readers? This information is often available via advertising figures, Nielsen or ABC figures.
– For a blog, how many articles per month and how many comments per article?
– For a Twitterer, how many tweets per day and how many followers?
– For a LinkedIn account, how many members?
– For a Facebook group, how many members and how many comments?
– In all cases, are the majority of participants from your target country?
The nature of an ongoing successful social media campaign means that you will continue to discover more influencers as you progress – and they will discover you too. It is however crucial to start your campaign with a solid group of influencers across the relevant tools you have identified.
5. What are they actually talking about?
As you work on identifying your influencers, you have the opportunity to conduct a sanity check: you have found them based on a certain type of conversation that you believe relevant to your brand and products. Are these the conversations that are taking place, or are they actually different, and are they still relevant to you? If so, you can move on to the final step.
How can you get involved in the conversation?
Once you have fully plotted your landscape, you should have a list of websites and tools with which you wish to engage and an idea of the topics you want to address. Two final steps remain:
1. Start Monitoring
Fortunately, as our companion piece, ‘How to monitor a brands social media presence’ shows, the tools exist so you won’t need to visit every one of your sites and tools on an hourly basis to ensure that you don’t miss anything. The important point is to split your monitoring as you might split your communicating, for instance:
– Mentions / comments that I can deal with when I want to
– Mentions / comments that I need to react to immediately
It is therefore key to select the right tools for the right type of monitoring.
2. Listen and react / interact
Once you are comfortably following the different conversations that concern you and your brand, it is simply a matter of time and opportunity to interact. As with monitoring, be prepared for two types of interaction:
– Commenting on other people’s blogs, comments or questions. This is all about conversation and establishing a relationship and can take place at a reasonable pace, over time.
– Reacting to specific comments about your brand. This should be dealt with immediately, however awkward it may be. For more detail on reputation monitoring, see the piece on ‘How to manage your brand’.
Summary
Planning your social media marketing is crucial to the success of the resulting campaign. As with any form of networking, if you don’t go to the right party and talk about the right things, your campaign will be a waste of time.
