Looking to integrate social media into your markeitng, PR and communications plans to help you achieve your strategic goals? Then you will find this social media workbook of benefit as it covers 9 practical steps you can take to successfully integrate social media in your business communications. If you have questions about integrating social media and social networking platforms in your business, please post your questions to my Facebook Page at http://www.Facebook.com/KrishnaDe If you are looking for in-house digital marketing and social media training programmes, you can contact me at http://www.BizGrowthSupportDesk.com

1. Let’s Get Social Workbook
9 Keys To Attract More Customers And Profits
Through Social Media Marketing
1. Your Purpose For Using Social Media
When considering using social media as part of your integrated marketing
programme, the first action you need to take is to determine what do you
want to achieve from your integration of social media marketing into your
business.
Some examples include:
 increasing brand awareness of your company, products and services
 positioning your company as thought leaders in your sector
 extending your geographic and even international reach
 lead generation and building your database of prospects
 client attraction, client retention and referrals
 enhancing your customer service processes and response time
 greater online visibility in the search engines
 creating a community of brand ambassadors
 increasing the traffic to your website
 increasing the time people spend on your website engaging your
your social content
 connecting with the reporters in the media and strategic business
contacts
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2.  and of course sales of your products and services.
Plan your investment in terms of the time and money you are prepared to
invest in your social media marketing programme. Remember that social
media is not free!
Notes and Action Plan:
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3. 2. Your Social Media Objectives
Once you have identified your strategic purpose for using social media in
your organisation, your next step is to define the specific objectives so
that you know what success will look like for your social media
communications programme.
When defining your objectives, it is critical to identify and prioritise your
target audiences. This will determine the platforms and content plan that
will be the most effective in achieving your strategic priorities. Additional
information on this is found in Section 3.
If you have already started to use social media in your marketing
programmes, you can also identify your benchmark data to evaluate your
on-going success in using social media, charting your progress and
learning from experience of your previous plans.
It is critical that you ensure that your goals are S.M.A.R.T - Specific,
Measurable, Achievable, Results orientated, and are Time-bound with a
date when they will be completed by.
Notes and Action Plan:
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4. 3. The Which, What And Who Of Social Media
A common mistake that many businesses make when looking to integrate
social media channels into their marketing plan is failing to identify the
reason that people will join their community and engage with them
online.
The risk of this happening for your social media plan can be reduced by
taking the time to research and evaluate the following three areas:
Which platform - Research which platforms your target market is using,
be that your customers, prospects or potential business partners – once
you identify this you can determine where you need to be present to
connect with them.
Just because you see other organisations using multiple social media
platforms it is important to realise there are new platforms being
launched every day, which can cause social media overwhelm.
By developing your initial social media plan publishing to just one or two
social media channels at first, you will be able to refine your approach,
and will be able to learn from and build upon your experiences.
For example, rather than starting your own business blog, you could
contribute to an industry or sector specific blog or social network
positioning your company as an authority in your area of expertise, just as
you would be selective in your use of traditional media.
What will you post - Identify the kinds of content that your community
will find interesting and relevant to them.
For example this might be tips, expert guidance, the latest news that
relates to your community, help with customer support and even fun
activities such as social games, competitions and quizzes.
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5. You can build a highly engaging social media content plan using
multimedia content to bring your brand to life and include photo’s, white
papers or special reports, slide presentations, webinars, online video and
audio podcasts.
Do remember to comply with copyright and industry guidelines.
Who will be involved – Determine who will be responsible for your
content calendar. Additional information about your content plan can be
found in the Section 4.
This includes who will be responsible for creating, editing and posting
content to your social media channels. You also need to consider who will
be your community manager to monitor and respond to comments made
by your community in the different social media channels that you chose
to actively participate in.
As part of this process you should also ensure that you develop and
implement a social media policy to help you manage the reputation of
your company and provide a framework and training for your employees,
contractors and business partners.
When developing your social media policy, a best practice tip is to create
a steering group with cross representatives from the relevant stakeholder
groups, for example your legal representative, your HR advisor, your
customer services team, your sales department, your logistics team, your
sales team and of course your marketing team.
Notes and Action Plan:
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6. 4. How To Engage And Educate Using Social Media
As you consider how you will engage your community online, it is
important that you ensure that you determine the tone of voice for your
content.
Create your ‘social brand guidelines’ detailing what you will and will not
share in your social media channels to align with your brand values.
The tone and style of content may differ from your corporate brand
guidelines to ensure that it is relevant to your audience and social media
content channel. For example, when posting news such as a formal press
release to your Facebook Page, you need to adapt your message and style
to ensure that it is an engaging story you share about your lasted
developments that will encourage your community to ‘Like’ or comment
about it.
Do not however make the common mistake that you need to be ‘chatty’
and ‘colloquial’. Your style of content still needs to be congruent with
your brand. Your content needs to be relevant for your audience –
evaluate your content against whether it is engaging, informative,
educational and inspiring.
Develop your content calendar to align with your overall marketing, PR
and business development plan.
Be conversational; respond to questions and comments; ask questions of
your community to encourage more interaction with you and when
joining conversations don’t be intrusive – instead, add value to the
discussion.
Notes and Action Plan:
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7. 5. Managing Your Online Reputation
A common apprehension of many organisations who are looking to get
started using social media marketing, is how will they manage online
feedback which is critical about their brand, products, services or even
their people.
It has never been easier for people to post their feedback online with the
advent of social networks, blogs, online video sites, forums and review
sites.
An important element of your social media marketing plan is to monitor
who is talking about you, your products, services and competitors online.
You can then use the insights you can glean from this information to
change your online marketing programme, enhance your customer
service processes, explore new opportunities for your business and of
course share the positive feedback with your team.
Even if you do not wish to actively publish content or participate to the
social web, establishing your online monitoring programme is essential
for your business if you want to access both competitive insights and
feedback about your business.
Establish searches for the key words related to your products and
services, for example using Google Alerts, and content shared on Twitter,
Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, online video sites, blogs, forums, discussion
boards and review sites. By listening to the online conversation you will
start to understand who the positive influencers and key detractors are
about your business, the sentiment about your brand and your
competitor’s brand.
If you want to hyper-target content from specific geographies, you will
need to invest in paid social media monitoring platforms to assist you.
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8. Many of these premium platforms also enable you to create and export
reports to track your performance.
As part of your community guidelines, you will also need to develop a
process in relation to how you will respond to negative comments and
incorrect information. A best practice tip is to ensure that your
community guidelines are made easily accessible – for example publish
your comment policy on your blog and on your Facebook Page.
With the increased expectation from consumers that publishing a
comment onto a social media platform will mean that companies will
respond quickly and increasingly in ‘real time’ it is also important to
review your customer and client services processes. This in turn, may
result in a change of your internal businesses processes.
A best practice tip is to also create a service level agreement for response
times and to incorporate social media communications into your risk
management and crisis management processes.
If you are outsourcing the management of your social media channels to
your PR firm, digital agency or social media agency, it is critical for your
online reputation that they understand their responsibilities, including
when and to whom they should escalate an issue.
Notes and Action Plan:
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9. 6. Ten Social Media Content Creation Ideas
Now you have decided you are going to publish content to your social
media channels, you need to avoid is a catalogue of digital debris across
the web – for example creating a Facebook Page which is abandoned at
the end of a campaign or because your community manager moves onto
another role.
Developing your content plan and editorial guidelines will assist you in
avoiding this mistake. Here are ten content creation ideas for you
publishing calendar:
 The 10 most frequently asked questions about your products or
services
 Publish a survey or poll to engage your community and access
insights
 Interview an expert or authority that your community would value
hearing from
 Re-purpose your articles that you published in past ezines and
newsletters
 Comment on relevant and topical issues
 Review a book, special report or research relevant to your
community
 Turn customer questions into content that can be accessed by your
whole community
 Answer the top 10 questions that your prospects and customers
should ask you before investing your products and services
 Host a competition
 Create a list of relevant resources.
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10. Notes and Action Plan:
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11. 7. Eleven Popular Social Media Platforms
As you explore the opportunities that social media communications
presents to your business to enhance your online visibility, reputation and
profits, you will need to consider which social media platforms are
relevant to your social marketing objectives.
As detailed in Section 3, the platforms you choose to use will depend on
your goals and where your target market is already connecting. Here are
ten ideas to consider for your social presence:
 Bring inbound traffic to your website using social advertising
including placing adverts on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and
relevant forums
 Share your knowledge and expertise by publishing a business blog
or wiki
 Participate in or create your own online discussion groups or
forums, for example creating a Facebook Business Page
 Build and nurture a strategic network through micro blogs such as
Twitter
 Engage prospects and clients through multimedia channels, for
example publishing photographs on Flickr, online video on YouTube,
online audio on Audioboo.fm, and presentations or live events on
SlideShare.net.
Notes and Action Plan:
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12. 8. Three Commonly Overlooked Social Media Tips
Social Sharing: In the event that you are not yet ready to post content to
social media channels, one of the areas many businesses forget to review
is their website and enabling visitors accessing your articles, resources
and even sales pages to share your great content to their online social
network connections.
Review your website and explore where you could add buttons to your
site to encourage your visitors to share content to Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, social bookmarking sites and even email their friends.
Blogger Outreach: Perhaps you are not yet ready to author your own
business blog. If this is the case, you can engage with authors of blogs
that are read by your target audience.
It is important that you build a relationship with bloggers, just as you
would with journalists in traditional media. However, done well, a blogger
outreach programme can accelerate your online visibility and sales.
Turn Your Content into Profit: If you are publishing to the social web,
consider how you could repurpose your content into new streams of
revenue. For example, re-purpose your articles into a book or ebook or
re-publish your articles and reports as audio or video content that you
can use for lead generation or even sell in the form of a on online
download or a physical CD or DVD.
Notes and Action Plan:
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13. 9. Ten Ways To Promote Your Social Presence
Once you have decided to publish content to the social web, it’s
important to ensure you market your social presence – you don’t want to
be the web’s best kept secret! Here are ten actions you can take to
promote your social presence:
1. Add your social media profiles to your email footer
2. Mention your social media profile URL’s in your voicemail
3. Reference your social media profiles in your TV, radio and print
advertisements
4. Refer to your social media content in your online and offline
newsletters
5. Add links to your social media profiles on your website
6. Reference your social media profiles across your other social
networks
7. Publicise your social media profiles on your business cards
8. Add your social media profiles to your corporate letterhead and
compliment slips
9. Include your social media profiles in your brochures and offline
marketing
10. Use online adverts to drive traffic to your social profiles.
Notes and Action Plan:
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14. Additional Resources
If you have found this social media workbook of assistance and are looking for
additional resources, please do connect with me:
Remember to ‘Like’ the www.Facebook.com/KrishnaDe Page : where you can
access free audio tutorials to help you with your social media marketing and ask me
your questions.
Keep up to date with marketing best practice and get access to our monthly FREE
marketing and social media webinars by subscribing to our ezine at:
www.BizGrowthExpress.com
Find helpful marketing tips and news on www.Twitter.com/KrishnaDe
Watch free digital marketing tutorials at www.YouTube.com/BizGrowthTV
Discover marketing and social media resources www.BizGrowthResources.com
Read in-depth marketing tutorials and case studies at www.BizGrowthNews.com
Find tips for using Facebook to market your business at
www.Facebook.com/BizGrowthMedia
Access the latest social media tips and research at www.Krishna.me and
www.RecommendedResearch.com
Digital Marketing And Social Media Education
If you are ready to invest in your own development in digital and social media
marketing, you are invited to access my monthly mentoring programme receiving a
tutorial each week to help you build your visibility, reputation and attract more
clients online by joining our low cost “Online Visibility Mastermind”.
Do also contact me if you are looking for a key note speaker, a conference MC,
assistance to integrate your digital marketing strategy, educate your executive team
or access one to one marketing mentoring please do contact us to access more
details at:
>>>www.BizGrowthSupportDesk.com<<<
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