I was thinking about the television show “Sports Night” when I read an article about the results of a new survey dealing with social media marketing. In one of the episodes, Casey McCall was explaining to Dan Rydell about how he was planning to break up the engagement of Casey’s love interest and her sleazy lawyer fiancé. He says he was employing Napoleon’s Plan.
“First we show up. Then we see what happens.”
Did it work out for Casey? Not the way that he had hoped it would.
Sadly, according to The Social Times, half of the companies that have a social media presence are using Napoleon’s Plan as their tactic. First they show up. Then they see what happens.
Napoleon’s Plan is not the way to create your social media marketing strategy. There needs to be an end goal in place before you even sign up for a profile page. Here is a quick checklist before you get started on this plan.
1. Determine the goal. It seems simple, but remember, half of the companies that start social media marketing plans don’t get this. The number one goal isn’t always lead generation. Some companies may want to focus on customer retention, public relations, pushing blog posts or HR recruitment.
2. Assign responsibilities. Social media marketing is not a one-person job. You may have someone who is in charge of the content and another person who will analyze the statistics. Perhaps you have someone who is gifted at video editing and wants to head up the YouTube arm of your efforts.
Your main goal is not the only way to use your Facebook page or Twitter feed. Have other departments (HR, IT, R&D) help collaborate with some of the messaging to give your feeds more content.
3. Create an evaluation system. How are you going to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy? One of the tools that you can utilize is the Facebook Insight tool which gives you stats on certain actions taken on your Facebook page. If you use Twitter for linking content, you can run your feed through HootSuite. This free web-based service offers data about how many people click on a link. You could also ask your customers about how they heard about a particular promotion.
4. Grab a Snickers, it’s going to be awhile. Realize that a satisfactory ROI on social media isn’t going to happen overnight. The strength of any social network effort is going to be the size of your network. You start at zero and build from there. Just because you’re on Facebook doesn’t mean that people will flock to your site automatically. Don’t scrap your efforts after a few months because people aren’t lining to get into your store front or you phone isn’t ringing off the hook. Patience is a virtue.
