What is the single most important action you can take to improve your chances of success in implementing a social media campaign? Create a well-researched and carefully thought out social media marketing plan,
which lays the foundation for executing a winning social media campaign. Although there is no concrete roadmap to crafting an effective social media marketing plan, there are guideposts that can direct you along the way. The following 5 Steps provide the guidance you will need to develop a successful social media marketing plan.
Step 1: Establish Definitive and Measurable Goals. Social media marketing goals include, improving brand awareness, search engine rankings, relevant site traffic, and conversions performance (e.g., sales for a product or service), as well as reputation management and engaging with consumers.
The challenge for some of these goals, such as engaging with consumers, is to make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART). In addition, objectives must be established for each type of social media platform in order to maximize results. The following are examples of SMART goals for four popular social media platforms: blogs, microblogs (Twitter), social networking sites, as well as image and video sharing sites:
Blogs:
- 20% improvement in the ratio of posts to comments (i.e., visitor’s comments/posts=conversions) within six months
- 30% increase in total number of unique visitors within six months
- 20% increase in average number of unique visitors within six months
- 40% growth in total number of views within six months
- 10% growth of RSS subscribers within six months
- 5% growth of RSS feed requests within six months
Microblogs (Twitter):
- 20% growth in number of followers within 30 days
- 30% growth in the number of retweets (message amplification) within 30 days
- 10% increase in click-through-rate (CTR) of the links posted in tweets within 30 days (Hint: Observing which types of links garner the highest CTRs can help you tune your tweets to provide what your consumers with links they are interested in and, hence, further improve your CTR.
- 15% increase in visits to Web site from tweet links within 30 days
- 10% growth in time on Web site from tweet links within 30 days
- 5% increase in Web site conversions (e.g., sales) from tweet links within 30 days
Social Networking Sites:
- 20% growth in the number of friends within five months
- 30% growth in the number of comments within five months
- 40% growth in the number of posts and comments in discussion groups within five months
- 20% increase in the ratio of comments on uploaded videos to number of videos uploaded within five months
- 20% increase in the ratio of comments on photos uploaded to number of photos uploaded within five months
- 30% growth in the number of comments left on profiles within five months
- 50% growth in the number of questions answered or asked within five months