Social media has been seen lately as modern marketing tool that is less costly and yet having wider impact that traditional marketing channel like newspaper, TV or printed magazine.
However, social media marketing without proper strategy placed at the top of execution will cost you a lot of time. Without plan, many small businesses can't keep up with sheer volume of marketing activities using social medium since there are always new tools, techniques and disruptions along the way.
So, what should be considered in planning-phase of social marketing? First, you will need to decide -- with limited resources you have -- which channels you are going to focus on. There are social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace as well as online forums. Or, you may take advantage of the use of company blog and blogging as your primary weapon to reach potential and existing customers and business partners. Second, you need to decide how much effort you will need to put on each channel.
One common problem shared by small business entrepreneurs is that tremendous amount of background research required. Channels used for your social media marketing will be highly based on where your targeted audiences spend most of their time. Your audience will be company stakeholders and element social media eco-system such as customers, bloggers, Internet directory and website owners, your "friends on the Internet" and millions of anonymous Internet users need to be maintained on a regular basis.
Forget about one way communication, your social media campaign is nothing without meaningful feedback from them. Your products or services need to be put in front of as many people as possible and as often as possible without being labeled as "spam". It's about how you engaging your audience to help you to build your brand which result in continuous sales flow in long term. Thus, it requires a lots of time and serious commitment once you take off from planning phase.
Unfortunately, there's no agreed formula to measure Return-On-Investment of the social media marketing. While online visitors traffic to your website or number of sales generated could be one way to measure your campaign, the real impact (which is about branding and relationship building with public) is hard to measure.
So are you ready to start your social media campaign? You have to be ready anyway.
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