March 29, 2010, 6:05 pm The Chaffey Column - Planning Your Social Media Strategy

© The National B2B Centre 2010 Page 1 of 2 www.nb2bc.co.uk

The Chaffey Column - Planning Your Social Media Strategy

As you will have noticed, there has been a surge of interest in using social media for marketing over the last two or three years. Posts on social media are often the most popular on my blog and on general digital marketing sites like Econsultancy. To plan for social media, I think it’s a good idea to have a framework for the different opportunities for reaching and building relationships with customers online. A useful framework for types of social media presence are to review your options for these site types: 

1. Social Networking – the emphasis here should be on sharing with the emphasis on Facebook for consumer audiences and Linked In for business audiences. 2. Social Knowledge – these are informational social networks Yahoo! Answers and similar plus Wikipedia where you can engage an audience by solving their problems and subtly showing how your products have helped others 3. Social Sharing – these are the bookmarking sites like Delicious ( www.delicious.com ) which are relatively unimportant in the UK except if you are engaging technical audiences. 4. Social News - Twitter is one example of this which we have covered before in these columns. 5. Social Streaming - Rich and streaming media social sites - photos, video and podcasting 6. Company blogs and communities – last, but not least your own blog can form the hub of your social media strategy.

 Social media strategy. Ask Why? Not What? As Mitch Joel noted in his book Six Pixels of Separation , to develop a strategy for each, your first question shouldn’t be ‘What?’, but ‘Why?’ i.e. not... “What are we doing on Facebook? ”“What’s our gameplan for YouTube? ”“What’s our blog going to be about? ”“What can we do with Twitter? ” but...  “Why should we be on Facebook? ”“Why should we make Video’s for YouTube?”“Why should we blog and why would anyone care? ”“Why should we try Twitter? ” Through asking why, you can prioritise based on the benefits you discuss for each option. The right types of content will then follow. Integrating different forms of social presence through a blog I personally, don’t see these different forms of presence as exclusive choices. Oftentimes, if you can justify the business benefits of a blog, this will give you sufficient impetus and content to repurpose for the other social options. I see the company blog as a key way of keeping audiences (and search engines) engaged with fresh content. Many companies will say, but “but we don’t have anything to say in a blog” or “we don’t have the resource to create a blog” and that’s understandable. But, if you are creating an enewsletter or press-releases these can be used within the blog – you don’t need to post 5 posts a day – 5 posts a month could be sufficient if they are engaging enough. I see blog posts as part of a virtuous circle of syndicating social content in these steps: 

1. Blog. Publish blog posts using a free open source blogging platform like Wordpress or blogger. You may also want to repurpose some blog content for press releases.  2. RSS feed. Syndicate via RSS to those who prefer their content this way – these are a minority – this is easily configured to be automatic from your blogging software.  

March 29, 2010, 6:05 pm The Chaffey Column - Planning Your Social Media Strategy

© The National B2B Centre 2010 Page 2 of 2 www.nb2bc.co.uk

 3. Twitter. Again this can be automated, but for a personal touch it is best to how craft some commentary about your post.  4. Facebook. Likewise you can add social comments to your blog posts manually or automatically. The personal touch is best. I have recently update my blog with lot’s of “great examples of companies using Facebook”: http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/online-pr/using-facebook-for-marketing-10-company-examples/ and recommendations from Chris Brand, Facebook Head of Brand Solutions.   5. Email newsletter . Content that you have published on your blog earlier in the day, week, month or quarter – depending on the frequency of your enewsletter can then be compiled into your newsletter.

 The beauty of this approach is that publishing a newsletter becomes more interactive – you can see from the popularity of your blog posts, social distribution and the comments you get which posts are most popular and change the editorial or sequence of newsletter features accordingly. Although I have suggested one sequence, publishing can be in another order, for example you could ask Facebook followers or Twitter fans what they would like to hear about or take a poll on a subject using a tool such as Polldaddy as shown in this “business blogging example”: http://www.engagingtimes.com/category/customer-engagement-strategy/   It’s also important to think about the unique benefits of each social channel for subscribers – offering exclusive Facebook or Twitter offers, for example, can encourage more “subscribers on these channels”. This post is based on a book review of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web by Tamar Weinberg published at http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/online-pr/best-social-media-book . The post also shows some of the other most popular books on social media and other aspects of developing a social media strategy. In next month's column I will drill down into more depth on one of these options when I write about the best method to use Linked In, which is particularly useful for reaching professional audiences. About the author Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for Marketing Insights Ltd , an independent digital marketing consultancy.  Dave is also the CEO and co-founder of the "Smart Insights Digital Marketing Portal": http://www.smartinsights.com  which advises companies on how to succeed online through smarter use of web analytics tools like Google Analytics.  He is the best selling author of several Internet Marketing books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, now in its 4th edition,was published in January 2009.

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