3 Steps to Creating the Right Social Media Strategies for Your Small Business

By Debra Zimmer,The Expert Marketing Coach and CWCC Member

As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you have access to one of the most amazing marketing tools in decades: the Internet. With the Internet, the ability to develop low cost social media strategies is at your fingertips. However, you need to be sure you take the right steps to develop the right strategies.   

• Put a Marketing Expert in Charge of Your Social Media Strategies

As Annie Mueller suggests in her OPEN Forum post, “7 Steps to Simple Social Media Strategy,”

a good social media strategy… can provide the leverage to move a company from floundering to flourishing, but it can also take over your life. Figuring out exactly what to do is where it’s easy to get lost—which is why you need a social media strategy. 

Part of your social media strategy should be to find the right social media strategist as well. If that’s you, great. If not, the role should be entrusted to an expert who actually understands how to monitor content and create engagement to achieve marketing goals. 

• Create a Social Media Policy Along with Your Strategy 

When we talk about social media, we’re talking about a broad term that has many facets. Beyond Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, there is an array of unique and specialized social media outlets that may benefit your organization. Therefore, having a strategy will help you to pinpoint the most useful platforms for you. For some social media strategies created by other companies, check out this blog by Jeremiah Owyang. 

Additionally, when you create your social media strategy, you’ll want to develop and communicate company guidelines on the appropriate and inappropriate uses of social media. Have it drafted by your human resources and marketing experts and be sure to run it by your legal team before implementation. 

• Collect Data and Measure Your Success 

Finally, no social media campaign is worth your time if you don’t monitor activities, collect data, and measure your success. Posting an occasional tweet or Facebook post or updating your company blog once a month will not garner the attention you desire or generate new customers. You must be diligent in implementing your strategies. For some interesting social media ROI equations, check out Bart Byl’s blog, “7 Essential Equations for Measuring Social Media Success.” 

Creating the right social media strategies for your small business requires time, patience, and follow-through. You’ll need to outline your social media strategies and then you’ll need to allocate 30 minutes a day either yourself or to someone to whom you delegate these tasks.

Let us know what’s working for you.

1. Who do you have planning your social media and who does the implementation?
2. Have you created a policy for your company?
3. Who is tracking your success?

Now that you know the three steps to creating the right social media strategies for your small business, you’re likely ready to pull your social media into a comprehensive plan that generates measurable results.  If you want to create more awareness, generate more leads and achieve a greater ROI, sign up now for Debra’s information packed seminar, “5 Steps to Your Social Media Success” held on June 28th at the Chamber.

After 15 years of growing entrepreneurial businesses at companies such as Microsoft, where she attracted 700,000 customers into an online community in 18 months and then launched a second online community, growing it to 250,000 members in 10 months, Debra Zimmer then struck out on her own growing an online retail store to 6-figures of income and put it on AUTOPILOT for 3 years.

With an engineering degree and an MBA from Columbia Business School, Debra is the undisputed expert in the application of business strategy to social media and internet technologies, helping experts, entrepreneurs and executives to focus their brilliance, magnify their impact, and make the world a better place. She now teaches her proprietary marketing systems to private clients and groups worldwide.

Debra is a Certified Executive Mastermind Coach, a Certified Inbound Marketer and the coauthor of “Lessons from the Recession” where she is one of 60 global business executives who provide valuable advice on starting or running a business from the trenches.