There are a lot of people that want to develop a social media strategy, but have no idea where to begin. This article provides a Six Step guide to developing a social media strategy. Of course, a fully developed social media marketing plan would be much more in depth, but this guide will get you off the ground and provide a solid foundation for future social media campaign expansion.

Challenge

Supplement an existing PR campaign and lead generation strategies with new social media tactics, and track the results.

The Campaign

This is a six step guide to entering the world of social media to drive visitors, increase lead conversions, and expand your company’s brand awareness. The results will be analyzed in correlation with traditional metrics, such as uniques visitors, bounce rates, leads, sales, and pipeline results.

Step 1 – Create a Blog and Join the Community

Before you can really get into the world of social media, your company will need a corporate blog. Your blogging strategy can grow and develop over time, that is okay. You can also take some time to really hammer out the details of your blogging strategy, but this article will not get into that (read The Secret Behind Good Content Strategy for more on developing a blogging strategy).

In addition to posting regularly on your company blog, you also need to join the conversation online. This includes scanning the web for conversations and posts that relate to your company and industry.

There are a number of tools available to help automate this process, these scanning tools include:

• TweetScan, for following Twitter posts
• Google Alerts, for following industry related news and articles
• Boardtracker, for following technology forums and message boards

When articles, Tweets or forum posts match for your industry related keywords or company name/products, you should visit the sites and join the conversation. Notice, I am suggesting that you “join the conversation.” This is far different from posting SPAM links to your site or in anyway posting links that do not contribute to the conversation. You must be careful here, as you do not want to annoy webmasters. Rather you want to help them contribute to their audience by providing supporting facts and expanding on the topic.

Step 2 – Create a Twitter Profile

There is no avoiding it, Twitter is currently the hot thing in social media. Twitter allows you to supplement your company blog by posting more frequent updates that may be of interest to your consumer base.

Your company Tweets could include:

• Notices of new blog posts
• Webinar announcements
• Trivia questions
• Prize giveaways
• Focus group questions
• Poll of Twitter followers
• Etc…

In general, Twitter users do a lot more complaining than traditional bloggers. So it might be a good idea to keep an eye on what people are saying about your competition. If people are talking your competitors products negatively, this may be a great opportunity to chime in and let them know how your product differs.

Step 3 – Create a LinkedIn and FaceBook Group

Create a group to discuss topics related to your products, services, and industry – not your company directly. If you design websites, don’t create a group centered on your company – instead create a group to discuss best uses of CSS in web design.

Get your staff involved. Have staff members join the group and help start conversations. Encourage your staff to post industry news, interesting articles, and links to other articles on the web.

Step 4 – Modify Your PR Campaign

Try shortening the length of your press releases and include more links. The blogosphere is far different from typical media and off-line journalism – in general, it is lazier! If you want your PR to get syndicated and published on blogs, you need to make it easier for bloggers to re-publish your news.

Depending on your industry, you may also want to experiment with different release times and different distribution sites (check out my list of online PR distribution sites in my Top 100+ List). You may find that bloggers in your industry are night owls. If this is the case, try releasing your most controversial news later in the evening.

Step 5 – Promote Your Network in Company Touch Points

Work your social media involvement into as many company touch points as possible – no touch point is too small! Add social networking badges to your website, blog, email signatures, on hold messages, press releases, direct mail, everything. Encourage your audience to follow your company everywhere!

Consider adding your company’s Twitter feeds to your website and encourage your readers to discuss your company online.

Step 5 – Track Your Results

Track everything you can! Monitor your blog readership, RSS suscribers, Twitter followers, LinkedIn and FaceBook friends and group membership, etc.

Keep tracking your typical metrics, such as web visitors, conversions from AdWords, leads from search traffic, etc. Then compare your traditional metrics along side your new social media metrics. Look for correlation between the campaigns. If you have an article on your blog that gained a lot of viral attention, and see a spike in sales that same week, this may indicate a correlation. One example is obviously not enough to prove cause and effect, but if you continue to track your results over time, you will begin to see real results.

Your turn… Join me in conversation below!