This has been a very busy couple of months for me helping a variety of clients implement social media marketing campaigns on top of the copywriting and guest lecturing I’ve been doing.
As it’s Friday and I’m feeling a bit more contemplative about things, I wanted to share a few thoughts about the reality of running a social media campaign.
Energy, Commitment & Resources
First and foremost, it takes an enormous amount of energy and concerted action to do social media properly. One person is rarely enough to manage a blog, Twitter account, PR initiatives like reaching out to journalists, and community building on a daily basis. Particularly as communities don’t sleep! A lot of work takes place in the evenings when customers are surfing the Net, looking to engage online. Can your business commit to that?
Be Prepared
If you’re about to jump into new waters and implement a social media campaign make sure you or your team have sufficient resources. Creating content, tracking conversations on social networks, generating new dialogues, all takes time and effort on a daily basis. Downtime or neglecting your community for a day or two because of other priorities can really affect the momentum you’re building.
One client noticed that a week away from social media resulted in a downturn in traffic to their website by over 38% percent. It then took over three weeks to get traffic back up to the same amount as before.
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that communities get used to a certain kind of online behaviour and expect it. If you’re engaging daily and then go quiet, people go elsewhere very quickly.
Collect Data, Analyse it, then Implement Changes
One way to avoid missing a downturn in traffic is to track the data your social media activities are generating. For example, after two months another of my clients realised that there’s much more activity on their Facebook Fan Page than their Twitter account. So more effort was put into building that digital outpost than Twitter. The data enabled them to pinpoint where to concentrate their efforts.
If you’re not gathering and following user data you can miss out on significant changes. For example, a community can migrate from one platform to another as we saw with the shift from MySpace to Facebook. Therefore it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket. I use and recommend to keep up to date with what’s happening
There’s No Right Strategy
I don’t think there’s a perfect strategy right now when it comes to implementing and maintaing a social media campaign. But what I do know that works is that you have to spread your efforts across a variety of platforms. The key, also, is to aim to keep driving your community back to your website. Facebook and Twitter are great for building communities and sharing information, but those platforms can disappear at the flick of a button.
Therefore I believe it’s important to ensure there’s something each day that sends visitors to those sites to the company website or blog. Tie that in with building an email subscription list and you’ve got the channels in place to get a message out to your community whenever the need arises.
No matter what, the social media space is gathering momentum and more and more businesses are exploring what social media means for marketing, PR and communications. I, for one, think these are exciting times.
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