Diving into the Social Media Waters – Part 5

This is it, the last part of our 5-step process and best practices for social media. As you implement these final techniques, you’ll begin to feel stronger and more confident for the swim ahead. By this point your strategy is in place, you’ve established your presence and expanded your reach, and have begun nurturing online relationships. Now it’s time to build a schedule that will keep you fit and healthy every time you make a splash in the social media waters.


Practice, Practice, Practice...Every Day! - Step 5: Maintain Presence
Maintaining your presence is all about consistency. Here are several strategies for success:

– Work in time blocks: Carve out time in your daily schedule for social media. Maybe 15 minutes first thing in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening. Whatever schedule you set for yourself, make it doable and be consistent. At first, you may spend more time than you thought you would. No worries, over time you’ll get proficient and spend less time making quality social media connections.

– Utilize social media tools: Some social media tools, like ping.fm and SocialOomph, help you with time management. Others help you manage multiple social media accounts and their feeds, like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

– Have an accountability partner: This is one of our favorite consistency strategies. Team up with a friend or colleague who is also working on their social media marketing. Plan to talk for 20 minutes every Friday. Give each other 10 minutes to talk about what you accomplished (or didn’t accomplish) this week and set goals for the week ahead. Share tips and tricks and lessons learned. Believe me, this works! Telling someone else you're going to do something and knowing that you have to check back in with them forces you to be more accountable and complete your tasks.

– Consider outsourcing: You can still maintain your voice and the content, but other people (either in-house or out) can help you do the grunt work, like refining your target audience, identifying and following those people, sending invitations and thank-you notes, etc. All of these little efforts pay big dividends because so many people don't do them. So if time is tight, these are the ideal tasks to hire somebody to help you with or to outsource.

Train Your Audience to Talk About You
Lastly you need to find a way to get your audience to talk about you. That is your end goal and how you win in social media.

When you get your customers talking about you, several components come into play. First of all, their network of friends see and respect their recommendations. There's that level of trust you’ve been waiting for. You're essentially getting your audience (fans, friends, connects and followers) to do your marketing for you, which means you don't have to put in so much time.

The other reason you want this is because it's social validation of your merits. More than ever, people are searching social media outlets to see what's being said about organizations and companies. If people search for you or your organization and they see nothing, or just you talking about yourself, that won’t make a very good impression.

Here are two simple strategies you can use to train your audience to talk about you:

– Over-deliver on expectations: Every customer has a voice, and with social media, that voice is amplified. If you treat them badly, they can tell the world about it. But if you give them an experience to talk about and fulfill their needs like no other, they’ll praise you and want to share it with others.

– Reciprocity: Reciprocity can be a little time-consuming, but once you get it going, it can really work well. It means you promote my organization/services/product and I'll promote yours. So go out there and start re-tweeting, sharing and talking about other people’s stuff. If you help them expand their reach, they'll return the favor.


Share Your Social Media Stories with Us
As you finish implementing this 5-step process and build a schedule to help you maintain your presence in social media, we invite you to share your social media experiences with us over e-mail, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.