Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps

Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps:

1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay.

2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on organizing and energizing your evangelists.

3. Start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talkworthy touchpoints.

4. Then, ask: How can we create a compelling social object (that is unique to us) that will inspire our evangelists to talk about us? Will they talk about our uniquely designed products? Will they talk about our personalized support? Will they talk about our new mind-blowing TVC? Usually, a lifestyle, interest or cause is a better social object than your organization, brand or campaign.

5. Then, ask: How can we organize our evangelists around our chosen social object using one of the 5 social dynamics: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence? Can we ask them to create our next TVC? Can we proactively search for mentions of our brand on the social web and respond to them? Can we create a support forum, where they can answer each others’ questions? Can we create a community to help them connect with similar others? Can we ask them for ideas to improve our product or service?

6. Only then, ask: How can we use social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to help our evangelists share their passion? Each social network appeals to a different type of users for a different purpose. Each social network has a different soul and, therefore, a different role. So, the content and conversations for each social network should be customized for its users the specific purpose for which they use the social network.

7. The real value lies in asking and answering the questions in steps 3-4-5. Step 6, without steps 3-4-5, will end up looking like spam. Step 7, then, is to remind yourself that you don’t want to be in the spam business.

So, that was everything you needed to know about social media marketing in seven short steps.

If seven steps were too much for you, here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in three simpler (and shorter) steps –

- Step 1: Identify Passion — Select a BIG lifestyle, interest, or cause.
- Step 2: Ignite Passion — Build a focused community around it.
- Step 3: Scale Passion — Build scale by leveraging existing social platforms.

From the Gauravonomics Blog