SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN - GUIDE/STEPS

STAGE ONE: SETTING UP AND LAUNCH

Offer authentic value co-creation

As social media is highly accessible and scalable way of communication; co-creation of value has never been so powerful. Successful social media strategies are based on engaging social audiences to co-create value.

Clear understanding on why people buy your brand will help co-create of value.

Let’s see a example in action:

Lets say your brand sells “outdoor furniture”.

People buy your brand, you have a website, but you have not done any social media.

People might buy your outdoor furniture brand for different reasons…(cheap, unique, great quality/design, convenience, as a present to someone…etc) but at the end that piece of furniture is just a handy tool to have great time with family/friends, outdoor relaxation or outdoor entertainment.

Once your brand understand that real insight, then your brand can start a plan to co-create value related to those experiences “great time with family/friends”, outdoor relaxation, outdoor entertainment”

On this example, options to co-create value could be:

- Offer great ideas on how to spend amazing time with family and friends in their gardens/backyards.

- Offer ways to have better outdoor relaxation activities.

- Offer different ways to use your furniture piece for entertainment activities.

- Allowing people to decide the color/size/material/ of your next furniture piece/collection

- Allow people to customized part of the product/service. See Lakta Campaign that brought it to be the most facebook followed brand in Greece.

Your brand could run polls, surveys, open questions to find the most engaging ways to co-create value.

Do not get distracted by so many brands just having blame conversations for the sake of being social.

Effective social conversations have to create value and by value co-creation you will see more people following you and recommending your brand.

STAGE 2: MANAGEMENT

Once your top value co-creation insight is clear and you have set up your social media channels you will have start managing conversations related to your BIG value co-creation. Treat them as campaigns and give them so end time.

As an example, lets keep the outdoor furniture business and that the brand found out the most optimal value co-creation is to offer consumers the opportunity to showcast, rank and select the most stressful jobs and their people that deserve a relaxing outdoor time.

Your brand might start engaging users to vote for the most stressful jobs, nominate their people and finally select the top winners.

If you have resources to do it in house it is always advisable as you will control the tone and form of the campaign. You can always outsource the management to a social media agency but i prefer to do it in-house if you have the resources (or make a business case to allocate resources by showcasting ROI as per below).

STAGE 3: OPTIMIZATION

Brand at this stage will start tracking inbound traffic from social media channels and analyzing how these traffic turn into new customers, either on e-commerce landing pages or through B2B lead generation programs.

It might also means as in search engine marketing, your brand will have to test different landing pages and see which one drives more sales. Or it can be as complex as multi-variable testing for landing pages.

To finally measure the success of your social media investment you can used your Customer Lifetime Value (the total revenue the average customers generates for your business during the lifetime of  their engagement with your brand) and comparing it with the results generated with your social media campaign.

For example, if your average customer spends $1.000 a year with your brand and your social media campaign cost $10.000 to run and it generates 100 new customers.. your revenue from social media will be $100.000. This result means a ROI is 9.

Then you can compare other marketing channels ROI against your social media ROI.

If you need advice or help to set up, launch, manage, track and ROI optimize your social media spend, give me a buzz :)

eDigital

0423 388 930