Having a strategy is the first step to navigating social media successfully.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here\u2019s a simple step-by-step plan of attack to get your social media strategy in place:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Strategically, what remarkable content will you publish? Keep in mind your ideal customer and create strategic content that is specifically aimed at solving their problems. This way you\u2019ll earn your readers\u2019 trust and they\u2019ll be more likely to share your content and recommend you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tactically, you must decide which social networks you want to use. It will depend on who your ideal customer is, but the popular ones are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, and the new, fast growing ones are Pinterest and Instagram.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Social media operates in real-time, so you need an internal \u2018champion\u2019 who watches and listens to what is being said about your organisation on the web. There are good free monitoring tools like Google Alerts and Hootsuite and you can access these from a smartphone, so your finger can always be on the pulse.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n What happens in the case of an emergency? There are usually two types: a negative comment and a crisis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Unless a negative comment is malicious or offensive, I strongly advise you don\u2019t delete it. Certainly respond to the comment and give your side of the story but deleting a negative will simply throw fuel on the fire. Remember having a few negative comments with sincere replies shows you are human and you are seen as more trustworthy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a crisis situation, like a scandal in the press, you need to know who will respond and represent the company. This person should be decided upon before any crisis hits. Hopefully it never happens but just so you\u2019re prepared, here\u2019s a free social media guidelines template<\/span> that you may find useful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Decide who in your organisation and which suppliers will have access to your social media accounts and who is allowed to comment on your behalf.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve decided which social media platforms you\u2019re planning to use, I suggest setting up a profile in each, even if it\u2019s just to reserve your page and URL. There may be a company overseas with the same name as yours, so you want to be first in to reserve your name!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s important to define why you\u2019re getting involved in social media in the first place. I urge you to keep your business objectives in mind and not to get obsessed with vanity metrics like followers, fans or likes. It\u2019s better to have a small audience of interested, potential buyers than it is to have a huge disinterested following.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Track who in your social media community go on to become paying customers because, since you\u2019re running a business, it\u2019s great to know that you\u2019re getting an actual return on your time and money.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s worth getting your social media strategy right before you start, because it will help provide your framework moving forward. And it allows you to keep your focus for content publishing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The people who get the best results with social media plan out what they\u2019ll be publishing and how frequently. And then have a system for holding themselves accountable to producing and sharing their content.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The only secret for being successful in social media is practice and discipline. Keep practising creating content and the quality will improve over time. Then just keep the discipline going to do it regularly. Most people who say social media doesn\u2019t work give up way too soon.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The opportunities are huge, and I wish you every success with social media!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you\u2019ve found this article useful, I\u2019ve released a Social Media Planning Template<\/span> which is free download on my website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having a strategy is the first step to navigating social media successfully. Here\u2019s a simple step-by-step plan of attack<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,1,26,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. Tactics and Strategy<\/h3>\n
2. Watching<\/h3>\n
3. Emergency<\/h3>\n
4. Employees<\/h3>\n
5. Technology<\/h3>\n
6. Success<\/h3>\n
7. Content publishing schedule<\/h3>\n