Social Media Marketing Success Starts with Content

I'm often asked the question about how to implement a corporate social media marketing plan and how to make it a success.  My answer, based on experience, is always that it must start with your blog.  The blog is today's corporate voice where a company can establish itself as an expert and freely express its opinions.  It's this information that can be socialized and targeted to your social network.  Think of your blog as your social media launching pad and all the other parts (Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, etc.) are your communications vehicles for spreading the word.

Additionally, I tell my clients that they must create compelling content, such as white papers, videos, and webinars, that will be of interest to each specific targeted audiences.  If you create content that can help people figure out how to do things better, faster, cheaper, you will rapidly increase your social media following.  The trick is to not be too self-serving while still developing content that gets your message across and sparks actions.

So how do you know what's working and what's not?  You must not only measure traffic to your corporate website and blog site, but you also need to analyze what content your visitors are viewing the most.  From there, you can optimize that content and build more targeted campaigns.  Also, by monitoring your web and blog traffic and what referral sites visitors are coming in from, you can quickly see what social efforts are yielding the best results.  If you're getting a lot of web hits from Facebook postings but not a lot from twitter, you may need to change your content or the way you are messaging to that audience.

Social media marketing is a lot of try this or that and see what works.  This is what makes it so fun and interesting.  You must put the time in to make social media marketing successful.  However, with very little marketing dollars other than time, you try many different things on the fly and continually test your messaging.  Talk to me if you'd like to learn more.