How to organize your online presence with an effective Social Media strategy
Once you have defined your goals for using social media you can begin by determining what your strategy should look like. If you think of your online social media strategy as an actual place, what would you want to have in it? What tools or people would have to exist there to help you organize your online presence, engage your customers, encourage openness and boost organic SEO?
The answers to these questions will form the basis of your digital media strategy and form your social media newsroom, whether it be an actual or purely digital place. Flowery narratives aside, the nuts and bolts of this strategy create the platform from which you can identify the game changers in your niche, bring them in, and get them to spread the word.
A verifiable online presence has become indispensable for every company. Any company or person with a message that needs to be spread must have a social media newsroom. It is the place that the people and organizations that want to engage with you go to. Here is what your newsroom needs to have:
File Cabinets (Organize)
Once you’ve figured out the platforms you’re going to utilize, you need to create the profiles/content/personas to engage. Keeping track of all of this information can get confusing if you’re not careful. Social media aggregators can help with that.
Great Décor (Engage)
So you’ve got people into this room of yours. How do you get them to stay? How do you get them to talk to you, and each other? What’s the common denominator? You can engage with the people in your room by giving them what they want. The common denominator is the enticement of what you have to offer. If you are in the healthcare industry, become the forefront of ideas and information about healthcare.
To establish yourself as an entity that has the information you need, listen to your audience and answer the questions that they have. This can be anything from a post on your blog about acupuncture to a tweet to a link to a video about meditation. It’s the art and décor that adorn the walls. It is the people that speak to you in that room.
Collective Seating Areas (Encourage)
The main point of any marketing strategy should be to get people to talk to each other. The way to do this digitally is by giving people the ability to comment on your blogs, posts, tweets and whatever else. This can be a hard step to take if you’re afraid of negative feedback. Many a company falls prey to this folly, when in actuality negative feedback is the best opportunity you can have. When responded to correctly, it creates an image of a human on the other end of the pipe. Recognize negative feedback and cherish it as the opportunity to let your customers know that you care.
Good Conversations (Boosting SEO)
There are two schools of thought about boosting SEO ratings. The first (and often thought to be the more ineffective) is what is commonly referred to as artificial SEO boosting. This includes a variety of SEO “tricks,” generally utilizing back end coding to bring in traffic to your business. These include keyword stuffing, excessive tagging and the like.
Organic SEO is a practice by which you bring more traffic by becoming a reputable source of information about your particular industry. This means quality content, which leads to quality conversations. There is some serious weight in the new buzzphrase “content is the new marketing.”
Be sure to add fresh, informative, thought provoking content to your online presence on a very regular basis. This will create a room full of lively conversation. Aldo- be sure to make it subscribable by RSS feed.
An assemblage of all of these components in your digital room will create a welcoming atmosphere. A welcoming atmosphere will encourage people to pull up a chair, stay for a while, have a chat, make a friend or two and (in the end) convert into loyal customers. It takes a proper balance and possible occasional reconfiguration, but in that challenge lays the key.
Connect: