In order to implement an effective social media management strategy one must think about what resources they have available to them in terms of people, processes and technology and of course the almighty dollar that pays for advertising. Advertising that helps increase your presence much more quickly than by word-of-mouth and individual one-on-one engagements. This blog will walk you through the process of managing Facebook like a business process.
First off Facebook can be used as a standalone engagement, marketing, and communication platform or it can be integrated with Twitter and HootSuite or other distribution tools that help make the process easier.
The type of technology your organization uses will likely depend upon the amount of capital you have to spend towards growing your business using virtual marketing channels. The more you can invest, the faster you can grow your community and always on audience for your advertising.
Tools like Saepio enable the control and management of large amounts of content and allow for improved control across geographically distributed organizations. The aggregated content can then be analyzed to determine the true return on investment (ROI) of their content marketing assets. For most new online businesses, this would be overkill.
Let's assume for the purpose of this exercise you are only using Facebook as the platform for your virtual marketing. (First you should never use only Facebook, even If you don't have time to manage both Facebook and Twitter now you can use Facebook to push your messages out to Twitter so that you can begin to develop a presence in the Twitter community - it helps with search engine optimization as well.)1. Either daily or weekly create some sort of promotion, campaign or event for your Facebook page. Change your Facebook cover to match the promotion. Topics we use include motivation Monday, tips and tricks Tuesday, words of wisdom Wednesday, and throwback Thursday, and as a new business you should never forget the ever famous fan page Friday.
2. Create various types of content - educational, informational, entertaining or promoting your products or services that are aligned with the topic of the day. You must provide a variety of content across multiple categories or you will lose the interest of your audience and they will likely unfriend or unlike your Page. Make sure that you are categorizing your content in a way that you can analyze the impact of the content in terms of the audience, demographics, time of day, and type of content. This allows you to continuously improve your content development and distribution strategies.
3. Next, manage messages - always respond. Comments, always acknowledge through a LIKE or a comment or both. Create text only posts that ask for a response from the reader. Text only posts get higher Facebook priority and as a result are seen more often by your fans than your posts with images, videos and links. (Posts being pushed from Twitter to Facebook seem to have low priority and a much smaller reach of the same fan base.)
4. Then take time to ENGAGE! Visit the Pages of others. Like them, let them know you stopped by, and invite them to come by your page. Give them a link or embed the name of your business into the post. Share something from their public posts if appropriate.
5. Content curation is a topic in and of itself but I will touch briefly on the fact that whoever is managing your content curation should have an established set of rules for reposting / sharing the content of others. Doing this will offer future "exchange" opportunities where they will share something that your business has shared with their fans, following or friends.
6. Finally, make sure you're monitoring your results. Watch your advertisements and make sure that they are targeting the appropriate audiences. Watch the cost per click and the impressions that you're getting on your ads and also pay attention to the reach of your various categories of content. Use this information to continuously improve your strategy.
If used properly Facebook can become a powerful communication platform for your business. In order to build the platform and to grow the audience it requires a certain amount of dedication and discipline toward the development and distribution of the content. The content required to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more.
If you're serious about your business get serious about Facebook and go LIKE something!
