Five Keys to Launching a New Social Media Program

Social media has evolved into a mature and widely disseminate channel, but the question now is how to integrate social media effectively into your marketing program, while generating results.

Here are five keys to launching a new social media program for your company:

1.  Plan your strategy. The first step is to define your marketing strategy.  In order to know where you are going you must develop a strategic marketing plan to get there.  Focus on situation analysis, marketing strategy, marketing tactics, along with marketing budget and timeline.

2.  Content is king.  Social media is not about the latest tweet or the most current post, but the best content.  Tweets, posts, likes and follows come from quality content whether it's written, visual, audio or video.  Focus on developing high quality content that reflects your business ideas, solutions, and industry news.  Then use the social media avenues and promotional tools offline to deploy it to your audience.

3. Integrate through Inbound.  Inbound marketing takes organic search, social media, and content marketing to draw prospects in to a point of conversion. A highly effective method that takes content and online marketing to new heights. This integrated approach takes content strategy that ties together keywords, search engine optimization, content research, business blogging, and social media and deploys the content in ways that resonate with your target audience.  Read more; 5 tactics for developing an optimized architecture.

4. Start the conversation.  If you reliably inform your audiences, your social media strategy will grow and you will be well ahead of most competitors. But to gain the biggest benefit from your efforts, engage in two-way conversations online through LinkedIn Groups, Twitter conversations and Facebook discussions as well as blog comments and online forums. By creating conversations, you effectively move past the traditional line between buyer and seller, and instead develop a dynamic relationship.  The idea is to become the expert in your area of business.  The goto place that people come for information about news related to your industry not just about your products.  This method pulls your customers to you and they gain a sense of trust before actually buying or using your services.  Also, it helps people to feel important, where their opinions matter and that they are being heard.  An excellent way to resolve issues for customer support teams, and learn ways to improve or create solutions for customer issues.

5. Set the Stage for Social Selling.  Social media has the unique advantage of setting the stage for effective social selling. Qualified prospects are online and often accessible through social channels. By engaging your social audiences in two-way dialogues you begin to move some of these contacts into the active sales lead column, thus pulling your sales team into the social space as well.  In the future, more and more selling will be performed through social channels, so you are setting the stage for ongoing sales success.

By following these five steps, you will set your company's social media program on a path to sustainability and long-term results in lead generation, brand awareness, market positioning and customer loyalty.