If your customers want to communicate through LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook who are you to stop them? Make sure you market through all platforms your costumers might use.

To effectively market to your customers on social media, you need to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

But more importantly you need to be patient and allow for sufficient time for your strategy to yield results. Here are a few steps to help you create your own social media strategy for 2013.

 Define Your Goals

What are you trying to accomplish on social media? Decide whether you are seeking fame, brand recognition, prospecting for leads, interested in generating sales or customer service. You need to be clear on your goals for your social media presence as this will help to form a strong foundation for upon which you shall build your social media strategy.

Define Your Metrics

Once you have defined your goals you need to decide on how you are going to measure your efforts in reaching your goals. Measuring your ROI in social media is difficult as there is no universal benchmark and it various from one business to another. So you have to define the metrics that are useful for your own business. Are you seeking for fame? Then track such metrics as retweets, likes, comments, shares or pins. Are you seeking brand recognition? Then track such metrics as Facebook engagements, email click through rates, YouTube viewership, Pinterest pins and repins. Are you interested in generating leads or sales? Then track conversations with your target audience.  Are you interested in using social media as a customer service tool? Then you need to be tracking your rate of answers, tips or suggestions that your brand loyalists are providing and whether their comments are positive, negative or neutral.

Decide On Your Tactics

Decide on which social media channels you will be using to interact with your audience. If your business is a B2B (Business-to-Business), then you should be looking at such social media channels as LinkedIn. If your business is a B2C (Business-to-Consumer), then you should be looking at such social media channels as Facebook. Do your own research to determine the best times to post and interact with your audience on your chosen social media channels.

Execute Your Strategy:

Generate and regularly posts great content to your social media channels. For best results you should have a social media calendar detailing all that you want to post and the ideal times to post for the day, week, month, or even the whole year! The more detailed your social media calendar, the better.

In conclusion, remember that as the name implies with social media you ought to be social and not ‘selly selly’. No one on social media is interested in whatever crap you are selling. You rather have to show interests in them and how you can help to meet their needs.

Do you have any advice on creating your own social media strategy? Feel free to share in the comment box below.

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