5 Components of a BAD Social Media Marketing Strategy

Neal Schaffer: 0:00

take take take take enjoyment, welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings everybody, and welcome to another edition of social business unplug. This is Neal Schaffer. And today I want to talk a little bit about social media strategy. You know, when I created a blog post earlier in the year, I realized that I haven't really blogged a lot about what I do for a living, which is social media strategy consulting. And in fact, that's going to be the subject of my next book. But in the meantime, I enjoy this podcast for a way to actually preview and brainstorm on content that I roll out in a blog post later. So if you listening to the podcast, you actually get to hear things before they get blocked. So hopefully, that's your time to market advantage for investing a little bit of time into my podcast. But anyway, I want to talk a little bit about social media strategy, what makes a good strategy? And more importantly, what makes a bad strategy? It actually came from a client. And it's a difficult question to answer because there really is no way to write a social media strategy. There's no single way to write a social media strategy. By doing Googling, you will find out that there's a lot of conflicting ways of doing it. I've created my own proprietary framework, which I will be revealing in this upcoming book. And companies really don't showcase their social media strategies because their proprietary information they don't want their competitors to have. So it's really hard to gauge. If you look out in the market, who has a good social media strategy, and who has a bad social media strategy, I would take that one step further. We can evaluate brands and say, wow, they have about social media strategy, when in fact that strategy that they have is doing exactly what they intended it to do. So with that in mind, though, I wanted to come up with five concepts, five ways of looking at Do you have a good, decent or a bad in my eyes strategy, just based on a few very simple concepts, which hopefully will give you some revealing information as to what you should have in a social media strategy. So I guess, the first bad aspect of a bad social media strategy would be the lack of objective. And when I talk about an objective, obviously, strategy or planning starts with an objective, the objective should be a business objective. Social media does not exist in a silo. What is your business objective for having a Facebook page for having a Twitter account for having a blog, and the worst thing you can do is do social media because everybody else is doing it, there is no objective. Well, keeping up with the Joneses is an objective fine. But like I said, social media must map into everything else you do as a business that really starts with your objective in your social media strategy. So obviously, on the flip side of about social media strategy, a good social media strategy will have an absolutely clearly defined objective, or group of objectives. And as social media permeates every single department in a company or large enterprise, I expect that the use of social media is going to have multiple objectives. And some of these objectives are going to be overlapping and how they're implemented across multiple departments. I digress a little bit into my upcoming social business definition blog post. The second component of a bad social media strategy is a short term or a campaign based approach, coming out with a new product, launch a campaign launch a Facebook page, the campaign is over. And the engagement stops. It's almost as if the company literally pulled the plug on their engagement because the campaign was over a lot of large enterprises still work with agencies to handle campaigns, agencies are now saying, well, we can do your social media as well. And therefore, as an extension of this short term campaign, they do for whatever promotional effort they have, they create a social media presence, which after the contract with the agency is over for the campaign. Well, there's just no more engagement coming from that channel. And that is absolutely the worst thing you can do. We all know that social media is a long term objective. It's like having a website, it becomes part of your infrastructure. So if you're only thinking the short term, there was a great quote, social media is a commitment, not a campaign, and I think in 2013, we all know that, but it just bears reminding. So let's move on to the third component of a bad social media strategy, engagement. Social media was made for people, right, it wasn't made for companies. So as a company as a brand, you are at a distinct disadvantage. You are on people's turf, trying to figure out a way to communicate with them without promoting to them and in fact, the big differentiator between social media and traditional forms of media it is true really a two way communication channel. The problem is there are some companies that still use it only as a one way channel, they are still broadcasting, or only promoting themselves without listening. And it's as easy as looking at a company's Twitter feed. And only seeing that they're tweeting out links, they could be tweeting out questions, and they're just not responding to anybody's responding to them, or answering questions or any sign of engagement out of their own proactive content planning. You know, in a social media strategy, obviously, you want to proactively plan out the content that you plan to publish on a regular basis, or, you know, engagement that you plan to do. But part of a daily workflow as part of a social media strategy is this notion of reactive engagement, you're gonna get app mentions, you're gonna get Facebook comments, you're gonna get blog comments, and it's critical that you respond to those. And in fact, it's beneficial to respond in the case of like Facebook EdgeRank, you actually get benefits by engaging with others and responding to them and mentioning their name and getting additional comments from that, it's going to actually increase your EdgeRank. So engagement has to be two way, once again, it's a no brainer, but I still see some companies not doing it that way, and only promoting themselves and not really listening. Or if they are listening, they're not taking any note and engaging back with people that engage with them, which obviously makes no sense. The next aspect of a bad social media strategy is the wrong choice of channel, I guess the easiest way to look at it is b2b companies that bypass LinkedIn, and go straight to Facebook to create a page and establish their presence. Because Facebook has more users. It's not a matter of what site has more users. It's about engaging where your target audience is, it's been where your market is, I've worked with an E commerce company, where we concentrated solely on Facebook and Pinterest. And in fact, I'd say that Pinterest had about an equal weight in the strategy to Facebook, believe it or not, I do feel you have the right targeted product, and you're an E commerce site, Pinterest is going to be in many ways more strategic for you then certain aspects of Facebook. So it has to be appropriate with your target audience. If you're, you know, a niche b2b company, Slideshare which LinkedIn now owns may become a very, very important site to you as well. So that's aspect number four. The fifth aspect of a bad social media strategy is the ROI the metrics, what companies that have really bad social media strategies have is they either have no metric to determine their ROI. They don't know if there's any ROI, or they use a metric that's not business related, the number of Facebook likes, is a metric that's for the most part is not related to your business. There's nothing in your business that says you increase sales, or decrease expenses, because you have a lot of Facebook likes, it is what I would consider a secondary metric. And I'm going to go into a lot of details about this in my upcoming book, like I said, that alone, you know, number of Facebook likes number of followers is not a metric. And the problem is that a lot of the social media dashboards that exist out there will just throw data and graphs out you that may not have any meaning to your business, but they look good. And people print them out and show them to their bosses or agencies, you know, create PDFs out of them and send them to you. This is how we're doing this month, and they really have no meaning. There is a need for meaningful metrics, a meaningful analytics, and that's the only way you're gonna be able to gauge how well you're doing in social media, what can you be doing better? And what's your ROI and I'm very passionate about the subject to the point that I've actually been creating my own application, which I hope over the next few months to reveal to all of you as well, to really give you further insight into how you can be better in your social media. So that's about it. You know, I try to limit myself to eight minutes and this went a little bit over my apologies. Thank you for your time. Appreciate your subscribing to this podcast and iTunes, appreciate comments and rating on iTunes. And once again, if there's anything you want me to cover, please feel free to ping me comment, engage. Follow me, let me know I want this to be not as much of me wanting to share information with you, but me sharing information with you that you want to hear. So please do let me know. Thanks again for listening to social business unplugged and make it a great day. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.