6 Elements of Your Social Media Strategy: #6 – How Will You Reach Your Clients?

Lesson Updated November 2012.

Get Informed

How will you reach your clients?  What tactics will you use?  How will you incorporate the previous 5 W’s into your strategy?  Each social network has its own etiquette, and your own customers are unique. So what works for one brand won’t work for another.

So how do you know what works with your target audience?

Get Trained

The first step in any effective social media campaign is to listen. Before you jump into posting content, spend some time reading the posts of your colleagues, vendors, and clients. See how their conversations take shape. Which posts get a lot of comments? Which ones have tumbleweeds rolling across them?

Plus, what works in one social network doesn’t work in another. Facebook requires a high level of maintenance and engagement is a must to get results from your page. Pinterest, however, is quite low-maintenance and requires very little engagement.

Here are several best practices for how to reach your customers via social media:

• No amount of outstanding social media will overcome poor quality products and services.  Before you invest in online promotion, ensure you offer superior quality.  Social sharing makes it simple to spread the word, and you want positive news being shared about your company.
• Educate instead of resorting to the hard sell.  Once consumers feel you are competent, qualified, and trustworthy, they want to learn from you.  Teach them.
• Give people a sample of your company by offering something for free in exchange for their contact information.  This free Social Media Strategy class is a small sample of what I offer in my paid classes. By taking it, you’re getting an opportunity to check out what I offer and see if it works for you. Offer the same opportunity for your clients.
• Incorporate your social media into every aspect of your business.  Put your social network information on your receipts, invoices, and every printed marketing material you use.  Have salespeople in the store remind buyers they can find you online and encourage them to do so.
• Give people an incentive to join your social network.  Offer incentives, exclusives, or other special promotions exclusively for your email newsletter subscribers, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers. I offer my infographics to new Facebook fans whether they join my page or not. They do have to give their email, but that’s a small price to pay for the great content I’m offering.

Go Do It

The best way to figure out what works in social media for your business is to get in there and DO IT. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start small, be consistent, measure your results, and adapt your plan based on what you find. Here’s how:

1. Join the social network you identified as your primary target in Lesson 3 and build an account there. If you need help getting started, check out the classes I offer to give you a jumpstart.
2. Fill out your social media profile completely, and begin reaching out to your connections who are already on the social network. Go back to that strategic network you identified in Lesson 3 and connect with them.
3. Spend a few days reading over the posts from top influencers in your industry, your colleagues, and your clients. Watch what kind of content they post: are they text updates, links to articles, videos, podcasts, or infographics? What posts get the most responses? What resonates with you?
4. Refine your Content Development Schedule from Lesson 4 based on what you found in Step 3.
5. Set a schedule: what days do you plan to post? At what times? Will you need to schedule those posts?
6. Go Do It!

Congratulations! You’ve completed the 6-Day Social Media Strategy class. You’ve come a long way from Day 1 when you were feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. You now have a focused strategy and are ready to execute and refine it.

Special Offer

Get my 3-for-2 Deal:  any 3 classes for the price of 2!  Just use the coupon code BUNDLE at checkout.  But hurry:  this deal goes away at the end of your 6 days!

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