Any business, group or organisation that is using social media to reach out to stake holders and target audiences will know the dilema of choosing what social media services they are going to utilise.
As social media services have matured and become a recognised communication strategy for businesses in recent years, new social media sites and apps have sprouted up as everyone aspires to be the new “Facebook”.
This explosion of new social media and web 2.0 sites has meant that audiences are not “locked” to one service with different sites attracting different users for different purposes (e.g. LinkedIn for business professionals). The list of social media services is substantial and growing at a rapid rate, showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Having an active presence on most social media platforms is not impossible but can prove to be expensive, time consuming and can easily backfire if you don’t execute your use of them with finesse and tact.
The choices you make for what social media you engage in should be clearly defined in a social media strategy/plan before you go out and sign up for every site or service under the sun.
So before you’re tweeting away and liking like made, sit back and think about:
- Who is our audience? Will we find them on this service?
- How does this service fit into our marketing/social media plan?
- Do we have the resources/budget to have an active presence on this site? (posting content/links, responding to comments, link-backs, moderating comments etc)
- How will this service generate traffic or help us achieve our goals or KPI?
- Do we understand how to use this service? (e.g Do we know how to properly use #’s on twitter or how to setup pages on Facebook etc)
- What content will be posted on the site? Who will it be created by? What will the update schedule be?
- How will we build up our follower base?
- Will we use paid advertisements (Facebook ads, adsense etc) to drive traffic?
- Do we understand how social media SEO and other strategies?
These are just a few questions you should ask yourself before you go out and try and take on the world via social media. Asking yourself these questions now and sorting out a social media strategy will you save you a world of pain down the track.