Lack of a Social Media Business Plan is the FASTEST Way to FAIL in Social Media!

When looking at social media as a way to grow your business you have to follow a few rule to make sure that you will be successful at leveraging your time and effort and provide an ROI.

Too many people don’t think that you can measure social media and therefore they don’t. Big Mistake.

1. Start with the End in Mind
   What are you actually trying to achieve. More Fans, more visitors, more time on facebook, frustrating hours spent writing, arguing with follower? No probably not, if you are in business you want one of two things, to spread your message and/or to get more customers.
2. Choose the right Social Media Sites
   Don’t look East hoping to see a sunset! The only reason you should be using one site over another is because your customers are there. Facebook is great for companies targeting a broad range of consumers, LinkedIn is perfect for businesses targeting other businesses. Pinterest has women who like fashion, fitness, cooking and lifestyle categories. If you don’t know where your target market is…survey your existing customer base to find out what sites they are on.
   
3. Develop Your Social Media Business Plan
   Now that you have a clear idea of where you are going and what sites you are going to be on, you can finalize your social media plan. This will be a rough content calendar of what you are going to post about and when, this should have time constraints on the amount of time you will commit and spend there. It should also me a minimum amount of time that you will be spending there. Your plan should also have a clear funnel of how you are going to reach your target market, gain their attention, get them interested in learning more about you and your company and a way for them to take action. This could be getting on your email list, watching a video of you targeting their problems or interests with a call to action at the end… “For more information on… visit my website at www…” Here is where many people fail beyond trying too many things. They believe you can’t sell in social media so they don’t even give people enough information to move forward. People understand that you are not giving away everything for free and that you have more information on your website. Your website is the center of your marketing universe, move interested people in social media to you website, that is where leads live and die. Make sure they live on your site, get more information and become a lead for you.
   
4. Commit, Stay Consistent & Persistent
   If you are not ready to move forward with your social media business plan…DON’T! You need the time and/or resources to post and interact in social media on a consistent and persistent basis. Dead social media profiles are surging everyday, businesses say social media doesn’t work…more likely because the business didn’t commit and have a clear understanding of where it was going and what it was going to take to get there.
5. Measure Your Social Media Progress
   This more than just seeing how many fans, followers and comments you have. But understanding that if this is to drive business down the road, measure each part of the marketing funnel. From Fans to email subscribers to contact form requests, calls and ultimately sales. Without this part of measurement of the complete funnel your social media plan is destroyed.

Here are some additional resources to carve out your Social Media Business Plan:

1. SocialMediaExaminer.com – 7 Tips for Creating a Social Media Plan for Your Business
   In this article Jim Belosic, the CEO of ShortStack, a self-service custom app design tool used to create Facebook apps for Facebook Pages, shares with us how to create a solid social media plan and why it is crucial to stay committed in social media.
2. SBA.gov – How to Make a Social Media Plan for Your Business
   Here Tim Berry, Founder and Chairman of bplans.com, focuses his ideas on one social media outlet, Twitter. The key here again is to FOCUS your efforts, spreading your time over to many social media sites is a failure.
3. Entrepreneur.com – 5 Fundamentals of a Social-Media Action Plan
   Also by Tim Berry – follows very much the advice in this article of having clear goals, taking consistent action, measuring progress, committing resources and following up.