The Essentials of Social Media

This is part four of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three: How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: How to Remain Current

Part Four: Social Media Essentials

With more than half of the Australian population using Social Media on a regular basis, a Social Media strategy is essential to remaining competitive.

Social Media has become a special tool to connect with customers and to network with others. It is important, therefore to strategise the way you undertake your Social Media activities, plan out the actions you intend to take and develop goals and objectives to work towards in order to effectively manage your time and resources to produce the best outcome.

Goals and Objectives

Have you developed a list of goals to accomplish or considered a strategy on how to approach this goal?

The terms of objectives will of course depend on your business, but you need to also make sure these approaches are right for you and your target audience.

There is no one-size-fits-all goal. Your goals should be tailored to your business. However they ought to integrate the following principles:

• Raise brand awareness
• Engage customers
• Build a community

Target Audience

Take some time to research into your target audience. Listen to your customers’ feedback. Take care to develop an understanding of your customers and let them know that your business is engaging with them. Disregarding customer feedback and satisfaction can have significant, often long-term consequences. Thankfully, tools such as social media make it easy to listen to the voice and pain points of your customer and their clients.

Here are some easy social listening tips that you can employ today:

• Twitter: Create a Twitter account. Start following people, organisations and competitors and monitor their interactions. This is a good way to observe your competitors are leveraging Twitter professionally.

• Facebook: Follow a company and listen to the tone of their voice. See how they deploy marketing activities, and what their followers have to say.

• Company Blogs: Search around for blogs published by industry-related businesses. Trends and developments are often mentioned, further strengthening the information you’ve been accumulating.

And never forget: we have two ears, two eyes and one mouth. Look and listen first and foremost, and you will always understand your customers better.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next week for tips on Keeping Current. Have a Spicy day!