Fundamentals of a Social-Media Action Plan

As I get more involved in social media for business I'm doing a lot of that lately I can see more each day that the new business landscape social media creates is a significant change, social media marketing definition a good thing for a lot of businesses, but still something that depends on fundamentals. Whether it's for marketing, sales, customer service, fulfillment, or some other business purpose, when social media is part of what a business is doing, it should be managed by planning and follow-up.What's the problem? What are you trying to achieve? Start by stating that out loud, defining it, and writing it down. It may seem like too obvious but real business happens over time, with actions, not just in meetings. Setting the context correctly matters.For example, social media for your business might be a matter of generating and publishing content to attract visitors to your website, where they buy services. It might also be about publishing information, like the whereabouts of the taco truck. Or it might be to deal with complaints, like bad reviews. Maybe it's like sales collateral, helping to close sales by positioning the business and its expertise. Start your plan by stating the goal.But as the frequency gets high, you face ad fatigue. Even if the ad is excellent, your prospects stop clicking on it because they have grown tired of seeing it.LinkedIn is rolling out a major redesign for the 2 million Company Pages on the popular professional networking site. That means business owners will have additional ways to market their brands, and connect with clients and partners, LinkedIn says. "It's our goal to provide an environment where brands have the proper tools and platform to cultivate meaningful relationships with our members," social media marketing firm wrote Marc Bishop, LinkedIn's director of global product marketing, in a post announcing the changes.What can business owners expect? First, more prominent brand imagery. LinkedIn is allowing businesses to easily add an image that represents their company, similar to the photo on a member's profile.

New Tool Gauges Pinterest Mentions

Pinterest is now the third most popular social networking site (following Facebook and Twitter), social media marketing firms attracting millions of "pinners" who grab digital images from websites and add them to their bulletin boards. But many small-business owners are still on the sidelines, wondering if they should commit to signing on for yet another social platform that may not be worth the trouble. (Google+, anyone?) PinMe, a free online tool from Boston-based social media marketing dashboard MarketMeSuite, can eliminate that guesswork.Users go to MarketMeSuite.com/pinme, enter their company's URL and instantly see how many pinners are promoting that company on Pinterest. The very basic website bypasses the convoluted alternative: applying to join Pinterest and waiting up to 24 hours to receive an invitation; once inside, a company can conduct only a hit-or-miss search using keywords (not a specific URL) to see who has pinned a photo of one of its products."There wasn't a way for pinners to be thanked," says MarketMeSuite CEO Tammy Fennell, who developed PinMe after conducting an experiment with her father's e-commerce store, BakertowneCollectables. She created a Pinterest board for one of the store's products, Hummel figurines, and within 72 hours had 18 followers and five re-pins. But more telling was her discovery that other pinners had already been highlighting the figurines. It was a community Fennell's father never knew existed.MarketMeSuite released PinMe in April; more than 6,000 businesses tried it in the first two months. About 65 percent of PinMe users found that their site had already been pinned; Fennell says the next step for those companies is to create a Pinterest page and interact with those pinners. And for the 35 percent who discovered no pins to their URL,social media marketing books they can ignore the Pinterest hype and devote their resources elsewhere. Ads display on Facebook multiple times to the same user. The number of individual people who have seen your ad during a specific period is called reach. The average number of times each individual user has seen your ad is frequency.

Tracking and following up

Like everything in planning for business, the social-media action plan is only as good as the actions it causes. social media in marketing Goals, actions, tracking, and people lead to a review-and-revise session scheduled in advance on a regular basis, like once a month. Look at the plan, compare it to actual results, discuss the reasons for the difference between plan and actual, and revise the plan. This also includes reviewing performance of the individuals and specific tasks against their numeric measurement. At this point, it's called management. Technically, you are bidding on the ad space, against other unknown advertisers. Initially, the higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be displayed. After a few thousand impressions, additional factors affect the cost of your ad, including the click-through rate and whether users "like" or complain about your ad. The good new is that Facebook reserves the right to "lower the price" you pay per click, and usually does.You may also select to bid on impressions instead of clicks. In the Facebook interface, pay per view is labeled CPM, short for cost per thousand impressions. (Mille means 1,000 in Latin.) You can pay to have your ad displayed 1,000 times whether or not anyone clicks on it. So, instead of a simple logo, companies can now upload pictures or images that measure 646 x 220 pixels.New, streamlined navigation allows companies to more easily showcase their products, services and career opportunities, LinkedIn says. Businesses can target specific followers when posting company status updates.The redesign also features an augmented follower button and more visible company status updates.Another new feature to Company Pages is called the "Featured Update." small business social media marketing This allows brands to highlight important news by promoting it to the top of their company update stream for up to 48 hours.The new Company Pages are available on the web as well as LinkedIn's iPhone, Android and iPad apps.