Social media strategy - just do it!
Assessing what and how to go about a social media strategy should be a burning question for all business owners right now, given the economic conditions and the fact that communities are self-evolving around brands and businesses, whether you are aware of it or not.
So ultimately a good way to go is to chart a course and open up your business to participation by the people who count - your customers.
A few questions
But how do you go about measuring what sort of community to build and what options exist that make sense for your business type and size? Here are a few questions to start with and broad possibilities available.
- Do you currently have two- way communications with your customers? Can you measure what your customers think of your product? Would you welcome pre-product launch feedback from your customers? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, you need a social media strategy.
- What is the size of your company and do you already have an existing consumer base? Is your product a high involvement product? If yes, then you need a social media strategy that includes building your own community site and provides a platform for existing customers to interact with your brand/products in an engaging way. Common user-interests and emotional engagement are the basis of good social media platforms and allow customers to interact about what they feel the current and future directions of your brand/products/services are.
- Have you got a medium or small company who seeks to reach new customers? Then the answer is you still need a social media strategy. Your strategy would be to piggy back on existing community sites and make your brand/products visible to large number of possible future customers.
- Do you have challenges in HR, where employees lack suitable access to training information, HR news and company policy, where communication between employees is a problem or the company culture is not filtering down? Well, a social media strategy is necessary and can be the most powerful HR tool ever! Connecting employees not only with management but with each other, making communication, loyalty and co-operation fluid and engaging.
To be dead honest about it, there are not many situations that a social media strategy can not address. Whether budgets are large or small there are creative and effective solutions to consider.
Scalable and dynamic
Social media strategies can also address multi-level challenges simultaneously, making it as scalable and dynamic as a social community itself.
The bottom-line is that social media can offer solutions that consolidate both abstract and substantive strategic goals for companies, brands or products.
It's happening as we speak...
