8 Steps to Creating Your Social Media Marketing Plan

8 Steps to Creating Your Social Media Marketing Plan

By Kathy Colaiacovo

Creating and online marketing strategy is vital when making the decision to add social media to your marketing campaigns/plans. A plan is needed to assess the viability, know what steps you will need to take and to aid you in staying focused on your goals.

Your plan can also help you save time by ensuring you follow a systematic approach to the tie you will invest in social marketing and network. The social networking part can easily take you off track and eat up your time if you do not pay attention to the overall picture of what you are trying to accomplish.

Here are the basics steps to any social media plan we setup for clients:

Assess

Look at what is available in your market, what competitors are doing and find out if your customers in fact using these social media channels. These answers may help you determine the goals

Purpose

Define your main purpose for using Social Media and identify the various social media channels to use.

Goals

Set at least 3 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals and create an action plan to help you reach these goals. What steps will you take to reach these goals.

Content

Create a plan for what content will be published - blog posts, tweets, facebook page updates, youtube videos. This plan should include the topic of content and also how often and via what channel it will be published

Keywords

Part of the content planning would be finding the keywords your customers use when searching for your service or product online. If your business has some technical jargon that customers rarely pick up on - it is unlikely that is how they will search online for the solution to their problem (your service or product). It is imperative to find keywords they are using and add these targeted key words into your content..

Optimize

Look at all the platforms available and link them together as much as possible to help you save time. ie. Link your blog to twitter and your facebook page so when a blog post is published it will automatically feed an update to the other networks. Be certain to make a flowchart so you understand what automatically goes to what network in order to avoid any cross posting.

Track

As much as you can track your results do it. Keep a record of your contacts/ facebook friends/page likes/twitter followers/linked in contact /newsletter subscribers and results on Google for your name, business and keywords. Check the results every month and see how it changes. Read your analytics on your website and adjust keywords/tactics to fit with what is working well or not form these reports. With social media marketing, businesses may set goals related to brand identity and levels of engagement.

Schedule

Take time to schedule in all the aspects of your plan and work at it to keep on top of it and following the plan. Stay focused and use your time wisely.

Following these steps will help you network much more effectively and in a way that does not find you looking up from your computer wondering where the last hour went. Stay focused!

Kathy Colaiacovo, is a Virtual Assistant whose firm specializes in Social Media Services but also assist their clients with many other business support needs; websites and maintenance, blogs, newsletters, ezines to name a few. Clients value this support in order to create the time needed to grow their own business.
Kathy invites you to learn more about working with a Virtual Assistant by inviting you to sign up for their monthly eNewsletter, you will also receive a complimentary copy of their Social Media Guide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathy_Colaiacovo

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The Power of Newsletters by Joel Comm

The Power of Newsletters
By Joel Comm

A top-earning AdSense website will have a number of different elements: it will have high quality content filled with valuable keywords; it will have the right ad units in the right place well blended into the page; and it will have a steady stream of traffic flowing in from various sources to click the ads that the feed the funds.

Gathering that traffic can be hard work. You can take the easy route and simply pay for ads on AdWords. That works fine as long as you’re paying less per click than your ads receive per click. Swapping links will certainly be a part of your traffic acquisition strategy, as will search engine optimization. But all that takes effort... so you want to make the most of it.

You’ve probably heard that old business maxim about new clients costing ten times more to pick up than holding on to old ones.

The principle is exactly the same for websites.

If you’ve attracted a user to your site, you want to make sure he comes back. If he didn’t click on ad during his last visit, he might click next time. And if he did click on an ad during his last visit, then that’s definitely the sort of user you want returning.

Satisfying your users with valuable content will help, but even the most satisfied user can still forget to check your site regularly. That’s why a newsletter is such an important tool.

You should always be trying to capture your users’ email addresses. You’ll be able to remind them that you’re out there, tell them that you have good information and suggest that they come back to your site. You can’t put ads in the newsletter itself yet (although Google say that’s on the way) but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using a newsletter.

One way to create a newsletter and use it to generate ad clicks is to fill it with original content and make sure that your URL is well displayed. If people feel that they’re getting good content from your newsletter, they’ll come to the site to find out more.

The other method is even easier. Every time you create a new blog post or write a new article simply take the first paragraph or two and paste it into your newsletter template. When the template is full, mail it off to your list. To read the rest of the article, those old users will have to visit your site.

If you’re not sending a newsletter to your users, then not only will you be unprepared when Google wheels out ads in newsletters, you’re also missing a valuable traffic opportunity now.

Joel Comm is The Internet Revenue Expert.

Online for over 20 years, Joel teaches people how to make money in the digital age. The recognized authority on Google AdSense, Joel teaches how to multiply your AdSense income at theadsensecode.com To ask Joel Comm a question about making money online, visit http://www.AskJoelComm.com Joel invites you visit his AdSense Forums at http://www.adsensechat.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joel_Comm
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